Power Talk: Discussing the Effectiveness of Effects

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Jabroniville
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Re: Power Talk: Concealment

Post by Jabroniville »

ahhhh CONCEALMENT. Arguably the most notorious "Wait, they didn't fix THAT?" effect in 3rd Edition. 8 points to be completely invisible to everything, giving you a PL 2.5 bonus defensively. Pretty insane.

It's pretty rare in comics for a reason- it's very undynamic as a power and looks dishonorable. The Invisible Woman & Violet Parr both have it, but both specialize in "Force Fields" and stuff like that, and don't even use invisibility to its full effect (Sue can and has made her teammates invisible before- this should make every battle a cakewalk, but she never uses it- I presume it's just tiring or hard to pull off).

It's actually used best by characters who can ONLY be invisible- there's a Batman: The Animated Series episode where a normal man puts on an invisible suit and he completely ANNIHILATES Batman when they fight- Batman can't do a single thing to hit him and the guy can strike with impunity. This is a more realistic take on what someone who's invisible could actually accomplish- their only weak point would be grappling (as it's much easier to feel what you're doing). Kuroko of the forgotten villain team the Pacific Overlords has a similar advantage- she could just sneak up on people and KO them in one hit.

I definitely recall seeing Concealment on the list of "Powers to watch out for"- amateur GMs accidentally letting guys with these abilities into games and watching them roll up their foes. I think "Concealment (All Senses)" was one of the top 2-3 "This is a Powergaming Munchkin" warning signs for that reason.

A solid way to handle it might be allowing it and letting the players use it... but making sure they're lower-powered overall. A PL 10 roster of powerful superheroes and the "Accurate Martial Artist" who is invisible- that's not quite so bad as "My power is that I am invisible and also do +12 unarmed and am super-durable". Let one balance the other.

And yeah, "fixing" it mechanically or price-wise isn't easy. Immunity (Scent) is fine at 2 points probably, but Immunity (Visuals) could be 20 points and still be "worth it" and just as gamebreaking, as you said. Offering the players ways around it with DC checks is a good way to handle it.
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Woodclaw
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Re: Power Talk: Discussing the Effectiveness of Effects

Post by Woodclaw »

One of the big issues with concealment and, in general, sensory powers is how effective the corresponding sense is.
Going by the book, sight is the most complete sense, being Acute, Accurate and Ranged, and these extras are applied to any sight-based sense (like Infravision). Given that I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more effective to price Concealment based on how many extras the initial sense has.
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squirrelly-sama
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Re: Power Talk: Discussing the Effectiveness of Effects

Post by squirrelly-sama »

Woodclaw wrote: Sun Mar 07, 2021 5:30 pm One of the big issues with concealment and, in general, sensory powers is how effective the corresponding sense is.
Going by the book, sight is the most complete sense, being Acute, Accurate and Ranged, and these extras are applied to any sight-based sense (like Infravision). Given that I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more effective to price Concealment based on how many extras the initial sense has.
There's quite a few issues with how Senses are handled in the game. In all honestly you can just whittle it down to Vision and Hearing while lumping everything else together and they'd still be not as effective as the others. Vision has the obvious immediate benefits which let you have advantages to combat, Hearing has the more general out of combat benefits since as I said you don't generally use Sight to detect something trying to hide from you.

The value could probably be boiled down to: Vision x3 cost, Hearing x2 cost, Literally all other senses combined 1x cost.

On a similar note is how little attention is paid to mental senses, they tend to be the most annoyingly beneficial to get sense related powers for but using Concealment on them just seems like a waste. However there's a few "Mental Sense" aspects that really should be universal. I didn't include this in the main post, since it's mostly just a houserule, but one of my favorite ways to play with Concealment is to use it on weird types of limited senses. For example I had a limited Mental Concealment on a character that permanently masked them in Memories so others could not recall them being in a particular location after the fact. Full Mental Concealment was something I did to simulate an "Out of sight out of mind" power where the character was just completely forgotten about after a bit just by hiding for a while.

Honestly if you get really creative you can get some really interesting and otherwise hard to build powers out of it. Concealment limited to the Defense Bonuses could be done for spamming a bunch of decoys in an area. You can place it over an area like much better version of the Dazzle example Power. If you really want to bend the rules you could make it an attack that doesn't make the target invisible but just robs them of the specific sense as they treat everything else as Concealed.
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Jack of Spades
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Re: Power Talk: Discussing the Effectiveness of Effects

Post by Jack of Spades »

My biggest problem with Concealment is really with Senses; my players love to take Senses, to the point that Concealment is basically useless for NPCs. Everybody has some non-sight targeting sense, whether it's radar, telepathy, or tremorsense.

On the other hand, I've never felt like PL-limited active defenses really caught the feel of super-speedsters, so most of my speedsters are:

Faster than the Eye Can Follow: Concealment 4 (Visual; Only While Moving, Partial at Close range) • 3 points
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