Aberrant RPG - Density decrease

[Asche]

Recently it has come to my attention that this power is broke at level 5.

I wont explain further to possibly bias any views, so please, all of you that are part of the collective consciousness that is N!, post here what you think might affect someone with 5 dots of this. ie time stop, strobe, gas attacks, spatial distortion powers, etc.

I look forward to your posts.

[Asche]

..

[Walker]

Well the rule book says psychic attacks only. It's a difficult one to call as I guess it depends slightly on how the density decrese works for the character. If they change into a being composed of magentic fields for their density decrease then it would make sense that magnetic powers/fields would affect them. If they 'just' faded into ghost like insubstantiality then a magnetic power wouldn't have any affect.

I'd say the following would have an effect:-

disrupt, empathic manipulation, metal blast, telepathy, stun attack and temporal manipulation.

Presumably the character has senses so you could rule that holo, shroud, mirage, hypnosis, domination, strobe and mega-socials have an effect but IMHO they'd have a much reduced effect on the density decreased character.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Disorient would probably work, it either goes to the senses or the mind.

However, the real draw back of this power is; having made yourself immune to most if not all offensive powers, what do you do in combat?

Let's look at DD5 + Q-bolt.

Yes, Joe nova can make a hand solid and fire off Q-Bolt. However, while that hand is solid it is subject to attack. The targeting diff for a hand is only -2.

So let's look at DD + Mind Blast.

As according to the book, while DD is up the nova with it can't use Mind Blast on the real world. Yes, that doesn't make much sense, but there you go.

[Sandy Davis]

Doc, accoding to the rules that hand is at a -7 diff.. as each level of DD makes harder, by one to be hit.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Very true, -7 being the total of -2 and -5.

On the other hand, several powers (most notedly area affect abilities, which includes certain aspects of Mega-Strength) would bypass that.

I feel that one of the holes in the system is the lack of a "affects DD" extra. If we assume the existance of such a thing, then a successful Power-Max'ed q-bolt might work as well.

[Sphere]

Hi there people, finally logged onto the site. Been visiting for a while now.

I would have thought that Entropy Manipulation would affect you no matter how intangible you are. Just slap a bio-entropic storm on the area.

[Asche]

we had a rather in depth discussion of this very topic in out of ashes. You should go there and check it out Sphere, if your interested in seeing tempers flare.

Density Decrease discussion

[Sphere]

Very entertaining. Cheers Asche.

[David Kincaid]

Yeah. DD is one area where I really liked the Hero/Champion rules better. There you got to define how your 'desolidification' (their name for Density Decrease) worked. You had to define at least one special effect like cold, electricity, magic, etc. that you would still be vulnerable to when desolid. Most desolid folks were also vulnerable to mental effects in addition to their defined vulnerability.

Here in Aberrant land it's a bit trickier.

In general I side with the folks who think that the sensory attacks should affect DD characters ... but I can think of a reasonable counterargument. More than likely the DD character is not using his nose, eyes, or whatever to sense with at DD5. They are simply too insubstantial to work as nature intended. Instead he or she is probably subconsciously using his node to interpret quantum phenomena around him in a way that his brain interprets as normal sensory input. That might provide significant protection vs. some of those sensory attacks. While this is a nice argument, were I running a game I would just make them buy sensory shield with a weakness linking it to the DD.

On the flip side I think that DD5 would provide significant protection against gravity based effects. There is simply not much for gravity to interact with. While I wouldn’t allow ‘walking on air’ I wouldn’t have the DD nova sinking into the earth either. The DD5 nova could walk on solids & dense liquids but not gas. Being in a DD state doesn’t negate momentum so a PC wouldn’t ‘fly through the Earth and into space’ (not without some sort of Hypermovement) instead they would be moving with the save velocity relative to the Earth, Sun, Galaxy, and Universe as they were before activating DD.

Vulnerability to special & temporal effects is a given.

Aberrant is also missing the Champions equivalent to an extra that allows for powers to be used on the real world when the DD. In Champs it is expensive … easily worth two levels of extras in Aberrant terms. With that sort of thing a high Q character could use Q-Bolt while in DD5 state but it would be at least a level 4 power after the extras.

[Asche]

Quote:

On the flip side I think that DD5 would provide significant protection against gravity based effects. There is simply not much for gravity to interact with. While I wouldn’t allow ‘walking on air’ I wouldn’t have the DD nova sinking into the earth either. The DD5 nova could walk on solids & dense liquids but not gas. Being in a DD state doesn’t negate momentum so a PC wouldn’t ‘fly through the Earth and into space’ (not without some sort of Hypermovement) instead they would be moving with the save velocity relative to the Earth, Sun, Galaxy, and Universe as they were before activating DD.

So saying that, if gravity has no effect on them or very little effect on them, and they keep their universal momentum, as soon as they activate DD5 they will leave the earth at about 22,000 mph as the path the earth moves is eliptical right? the whole gravity immunity thing was too difficult and logical to overlook so I decreed that an extra could be bought to allow "walking on gasses" and such. and quantum phenomena would keep them from zinging off into space. :-)

[David Kincaid]

Who says it is gravity keeping them on the ground? Reading my quote I didn't do a very good job explaining my thoughts about momentum very well.

First off classic momentum involves both mass and velocity as does kinetic energy. Conservation of momentum would normally indicate that as mass decreased the velocity would increase. What I assume is that though nova powered quantum shenanigans the nova with DD converts this differential over time into a ‘force’ that keeps him ‘relative to his original frame of motion’ much in the way gravity does.

That make more sense to me than having gravity affect a DD5 nova … but I do understand where you are coming from.

IMO an extra for air walking is too much. It would be cheaper to buy flight in most cases. I would make 'walking on air' a level 1 or maybe 2 strength at most. Or I might make some sort of level 1 “Air walking” power or even create an Enhancement for Dex that allowed this & had a prerequisite of DD3 or better. As a player I would balk at paying the sort of cost an extra would add to DD just for ‘air walking.’

[David Kincaid]

Fun question -

Seems pretty clear that Q-Bolt with the Agg extra will not affect a DD5 character.

What about disintegrate?

[Kirby1024]

About the Gravity thing, I should point out that Aberrant generally works better when you assume that powers are allowed to be mildly inconsistent. Sydney Holland is a prime example. He weighs literally nothing - he's a mass of photons. He can walk through walls, he effectively has DD4 - and yet his feet stay on the ground, he doesn't fly, and he walks up stairs just the same as everyone else.

The reason? It makes life easier for me, as a Player, to have the ground and gravity to work as normal on him. I mean, sure, if he really wanted to, he could go through the ground at will, but that would require him to actually think about it. There has been speculation that his mind is the only limit here - were he to actually start thinking about it, maybe he would fly away from the earth. But that's irrelevant - the point is he stays on earth until I say he leaves.

In general, you should let storytelling demands rule how, precisely, the power affects the real world. Sydney is not affected much by gravity (him having no mass to affect with it...), but I decree that when he stands still, he moves with the earth. It's just simpler that way. Simply - Novas are not entirely restricted by physical laws. Mega-Strong Novas can lift Ocean Liners, and the Ocean Liner doesn't break. I recommend the same approach be taken here. It doesn't make the character more inherantly powerful, it simply makes account-keeping by ST and Player much easier.

Of course, Your Milage May Vary. But there is such a thing as too consistent...

[Meridian]

Not to flog a dead horse ... but it occured to me to wonder the other day what the effect of mastery would be on Density Decrease.

Also what about dots above 5?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[Lemmy Chillmeister]

Remember one of the very very important concepts of Aberrant. Nova powers ignore physical laws. This is how somone is able to lift up a battleship and it doesn't snap in half. This is how energy is created from nothing. This is how they get to have powers. Trying to bring up Universal Momentum is trying to apply real world physics to a situation that ignores real world physics.

I dealt with a DD5 for an entire game. She was never a problem. Did she get hurt? No. Was she pretty ineffective? Yes, she had spent 15 Nova Points on a defensive power, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot left to be a badass. Also stuff like Disorient, Psychic Blast, Domination and Disrupt showed up just often enough for her to still have to be very careful.

[Alex Craft]

glancing back, i notice the discussion of gravity and DD. a very simple and workable answer is this: novas do what they do because they believe they can do it. a nova with DD believes he can walk through walls. however, he learned as a human that people stay on the ground - therefore, he does. if he believed that he could fly, he would have Flight, too

as for dots above 5, who knows? i guess you could start granting other powers (like invisibility), but that would be tricky - it would make more sense to just buy invisibility. higher dot rating could possibly confer resistence to mental attacks (the nova's brain is so tenuous that its signals are hard to lock down on)

mastery would present similar issues. since mastery tends to affect dice pools, and DD has no dice pool, it wouldn't have much application. all possible applications of mastery could be taken by another enhancement (for instance: affect others)

[Charlie]

I keep thinking of how Quantum tunneling works in the real world and a Nova is able to make the effect work on his/her whole body.

When Quantum tunneling occurs in nature, 2 atoms pass close to each other and then a tunneling effect occurs where the remaining distance is warped so that in effect the 2 could be light years apart. A bullet or Q-blast that has to travel light years would lose so much energy that it would never harm someone.

I also think of that as an Extra for Warp. A Warp Shield. You are able to create a Warp between an attacker and you so that their ranged attacks run out of steam as it were. Even if you did the range as the normal combat range, the warp could come out behind the attacker

[Elrick]

I think that for one you should have the player define their DD manifestation. Especially if it is DD gained from Morphing. A person that is a "Ghost" may not be affected by anything special other than the listed psychic attacks but they could be dealt with in other ways. Why not have actual "undead" that haunt the "ethereal" plane the character semi enters when they go incorp... not saying that they be pestered all the time but if them be insubstantial is an issue have em effected. You could come up with similar methods for other forms of DD. Like a play in the game I am playing in body morphs into living electricity and has DD of 5 with that. I figure things that effect electricity would affect em and if I had to fight em (which IC we are on the same side so its not likely) I would look for things that affect electricity to affect him.