Re: [ORE] [Godlike] (Courtyard of Hell spoilers) When NPCs don't follow the rules

​No, meant to simulate a few seconds. The question is what does "a few seconds" mean when you string combat rounds together. In the combat section, "There is no given measurement for how long a combat round lasts: It's an abstraction. It's 'however long it takes the slowest person in the fight to try one thing.'"

A combat round could be 2 seconds, it could be 8 seconds. When you string them together, they seem longer than 2 to 3 second, particularly since that all important "time you take thinking and hesitating" is often nonexistent in RPGs (between the player arguing "my character would know what to do immediately, even though it took me 10 minutes to decide what to do" and players deciding what to do next round while the other members of their party are finishing this round's action, etc). If you play through 10 combat rounds in a row — which could easily take up an hour of game play — and review the action afterward you will see that you typically accomplished way more than 20 seconds worth of stuff.

When stringing together combat rounds (such as when trying to figure out elapsed time after the fact, or coordinating separate groups) I find an easy conversion is 10 seconds per combat round seems to work fine. That's not written down anywhere, though. I'd like to hear what others think. 

With that in mind, Der Magier could hold a time fugue for a couple of minutes: 2 rounds minimum on his roll, 10 Will expenditure to boost it. He'd be really low on Will, though. Of course, if he killed a couple of PCs he'd get a Will boost in return...

I seem to remember a broad category breakdown in some of he background material Dennis wrote as to the percentage of Talents who were offensive, defensive, etc. That's kind of irrelevant to what players choose for their own characters, though.

In my personal experience, players seem to take two paths to building Talents: they either pick a simple, iconic Talent ("I want to fly," "I want a brick," ​"my guy teleports," "can I have a shield?") or they have a very specific, often unique Talent in mind ("he's a garage mechanic who suddenly can figure out what anything in the world looks like, so he's a Hyperbrain when it comes to deciding what machine we need, and then he can just whip it up with whatever tools and scraps he has lying around; did I mention that he has Tourette's and when he's building his devices he physically glows?"). I suspect a lot depends on their exposure to comics versus movie superheroes. 

My wife didn't grow up with superheroes, so hers tend to be iconic Talents based on movies or broad concepts. I have a couple of friends who mostly come at superheroes from movies. I have a couple of others who know comics better, and one who is just plain imaginative and enjoys tearing apart the Talent build system.

How common is a Sue Storm/Violet Parr style force field creator? Not sure, though in playing at cons that kind of character was one of the first to get taken, largely I suspect because it's an easy character concept to understand how to use. It's also a good choice for players who prefer to react rather than act.

​The intention is not for him to gain Will from blowing up NPCs in general. I could have been clearer in the explanation. The idea is that his drawings gain him Will the same way as other Talent usage gains will. If he kills an enemy Talent, he gains their Command stat in Will. Also, his skill is 7d so if he rolls a width of 10 he gains a Will. If he did something spectacular with his power, like thwarting a company's advance or saving the life of a fellow ubermensch with a well placed bomb, he could gain a Will that way. He wouldn't just gain Will from blowing up NPCs, just as the PCs don't normally gain Will from taking down mundane troops.

​Those are really good questions. 

Since the character is an NPC, it's up to the GM how his power would work. The drawing creates a psychic artifact. From the first example used in the adventure,the artifact is an actual explosive that the Ubermensch is familiar with. It's invisible to mundane troops, but Talents see it as a German s-mine ​with standard wire fuses. Other than looking like all of the components were made of black glass, the booby trap is a standard mine.

With that in mind, the drawing would have to be placed in a position where a real booby trap would work. He could tack a drawing up to the back of a door; anyone bursting through the door would trigger the bomb. He could put a drawing inside the reservoir of a toilet and anyone flushing the toilet would set it off (and if that seems like a particularly odd suggestion, the Germans actually booby trapped a toilet in Ortona). 

He could put a drawing on the inside wall of a house, but how would that get triggered by someone outside the house? He'd have to figure out a way to do that. If the wall has a hole to the outside, a real explosive could have a trip wire fuse running out that hole to the other side of the street. Therefore, this psychic artifact could do the same thing. The "trip wire" would be invisible to mundanes, but appear as a black glassy line across the street. 

​Sure, that could work. It would take hours for the paint to dry in the humidity of Ortona, but I doubt it would be much harder to apply than, say, grease. ​