32 replies to this topic

[metaphysician]

While I don't mind Taint as such, I would prefer more formal rules for allowing mutations that aren't aberrations, and thus don't carry intrinsic social alienation and growing insanity.  That way, you can build novas that are physically non-human, or that have weird limits on their powers, without them *also* being monsters.

[Rorx]

The comment someone made about the use of biotech is a telling one.

The obvious example being Transportal with and without a WEAR.
Without a Psi 8 can take an 80m dia to anywhere they are Vaguely familiar with, although preferably in space to get around the problems with bulk movements of atmosphre
The same Psi 8 using a WEAR can now move a 1.28km dia, big enough for a Freighter and a number of other ships,. Even a Psi 6, the minimum to be an Teleporter at all, with a WEAR can generate the 320m dia required to move most Frigates, giving an interstellar combat movement capability.
If you go to something closer to a Proxy, a Psi 10 with a Natural Mode in Warping, giving the equivalent of Psi 11, with a WEAR they can move a 10.24 km dia! If you packed them fairly close you could probably get a substantial part of all the Earth's fleets into a sphere that big.

It might not be up in the affect/ranges that Q6+ with Mastery X could achieve on a power, but it is no slouch either.

A Technokinetic 5 using Transmission and Interface can duplicate pretty much anything a normal Nova can do with Cyberkinesis, and gets the quite nasty attack power of Microwave as well.

Added to which the proposed changes/addition of the 2nd/3rd dunking tanks due to come in BC and/or 2nd Ed would open up things for the Psions/Psiads in a big way. Then you could get a single Psion who could both use Clairsentience to find other suitable star systems and jump there himself.

Or a combat psion able to take both BK and EK or PK up to 5 dots and the other plus VK upto 4 dots, so if their psi points could hold out (helped by biotech perhaps) they could generate a couple of effects to shield themselves from damage, be boosted to fight as well as possible and heal themselves up as they went along!

[Sprocket]

This is one of those areas that I would have to modify if I was trying to come up with a unified theory of everything that fits what I wrote in the opening paragraphs. For you see in that theory their must always be a disadvantage to the Nova form, and Taint is that.

Having their be a type of nova that is pretty much completely immune to Taint removes the issue and thus any reason for the fourth grouping which is essential to the entire theory, and one of the areas that I personally like.

In the normal Aberrant game, yeah, I agree completely with how A Breed Apart does things. A True 2ndGen does not have to worry about Tainted Powers, Node Taint, Quantum Taint. Its gaining of Taint from using to much power is also reduced to pretty much nothing. It is a perfect example of what it means to be a real nova.

And it is also pretty much what I would consider to be a really fun nova-type to play. I dislike such things as Taint in a game, but that is just me. :)

Actually, we *did* give True 2ndGens what I consider a disadvantage to their version of the nova form: the social penalties for interacting with baselines (minor) and interacting with Tainted & Chrysalis-using novas (major, w/ potential for serious fireworks). Basically, stuff that supports the classic themes of alienation such as used in Philip Wylie's The Gladiator (for example).

If anything, ramping up those social penalties would seem to be the best option instead of making True 2ndGens vulnerable to Taint, but it's your metaphysics & your game.

While I don't mind Taint as such, I would prefer more formal rules for allowing mutations that aren't aberrations, and thus don't carry intrinsic social alienation and growing insanity. That way, you can build novas that are physically non-human, or that have weird limits on their powers, without them *also* being monsters.

Easy answer for this: allow the players to take aberrations as additional Flaws, and they can create novas that look abnormal w/out having to deal with Taint. I've called such Flaws "false aberrations" in my works to point out that they wouldn't provoke the negative reactions caused by real Taint-derived aberrations.

AFA applying that to chatacters, perhaps it could be done in a similar manner as Exalted's 1st. Ed God-Blooded could take extra Flaws as part of being "somewhat more that human". The APG's section on Flaws gives point conversion rates for aberrations.