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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMScott" data-source="post: 1648902" data-attributes="member: 11734">And to repeat, any hero worthy of the name is going to eventually draw such an arch-nemesis just by acting like a hero. The vast majority of 4-colour type comic book heroes have at least one, that implies it's a convention of the genre. So why then would anybody NOT take this "weakness"? It's going to happen to them anyway, might as well get points for it.Some story elements are well suited to driving the plot. All the ones I listed are effects that in the comics (a) are rarely presented consistently even when applied to the same character, and (b) tend to interfere with a hero's life at dramatic moments, not just at random times. As such, their timing IMHO works better if it's under GM control. If you find you prefer to roll on random tables for these and other aspects of character lives, then fair enough.Fair enough. You might want to change the name to something more appropriate then, like "Interfering Dependent", just to ensure that players don't think the only way to have a family or social life is to make them a weakness.The description of your "Hunted" disadvantage does not in fact make this distinction. It just says you've made an enemy and they're responding. As with arch-nemesis, I can't imagine any hero PC who won't be in this situation a few sessions into the campaign. So again, we've got a weakness that you might as well take, because it's about 99% likely you're going to play as if you've got it.Everybody who knows of the weakness - or even suspects it, once it's introduced into the campaign - will be asking to make disbelief saves every time they interact with the character. It doesn't get a lot clunkier than that.So you object to the term used in the rulebook and made up a new weakness just because of that? The Quirk weakness is clearly a lot more than a lisp or nervous twitch - it includes irrational hatred, irrational fear, irrational attraction, etc. Yes, I know. As I said, for a weakness I'd restrict them to super-dependencies of various types, IE those that directly impact on a character's powers. Merely being a gambler, for example, is not really a weakness (unless it rises to the level of making the character irrational like Two-Face's coin, in which case it's covered by Quirk). The super-dependent type of weakness, where you have to do something to maintain your powers, has clearly been missing from M&M. For other types, refer back to plot devices - reducing them to a die roll is a good crutch for a dice-dependent GM, I guess, but not really satisfying IMHO. Or they just don't want to get screwed into being assigned a weakness without getting the points for it, which is pretty much inevitable under your system. I can't off-hand think of a Marvel or DC character that doesn't have at least three of your weaknesses, which means that if you're running a game vaguely like mainstream comic books you're basically giving PCs an extra 20 points. Which is fine really, but I think it'd be more efficient to just say "OK, you all get an extra 20 points" rather than adding a big list of pseudo-weaknesses.</blockquote>

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