Mimic Power Abuses

[arentol]

I would say that anyone stealing 9 refresh worth of powers and skills from others better be prepared to get a serious beatdown.

[Deadmanwalking]

From the typo thread:

Non-Typo potentially major issues that have come up in various threads:

2. Can a character with Mimic Abilities come into play with someone (likely a dead someone) already mimicked? Because that can result in badness like the character with 11 Superb skills (he ate Doc Savage's brain), and never using Mimic for anything else. He just has 11 Superb Skills.

3. Can a character with Mimic Abilities mimic more than one person at a time (say, a single skill from each of nine people)? Everything about the ability screams at me that you can't, but others disagree and it's somewhat unclear.

I think some of these questions come from a willful misinterpretation of the obvious spirit of the rules. As such I'm gonna get a bit snarky about it. Fair warning.

#2 - If an NPC, yes. NPCs do things off camera all the time. If a PC, no.

Mimicking someone should come off a lot like the process of prepping a Thaumaturgical ritual does: you gotta build the story. No story*, no mimic.

* By which I mean a story which everyone agrees is a good one, passes the sniff test, and sounds like a good fun thing to include in the game.

I could see maybe someone asserting it through a combination of aspects and backstory from character creation, but even then the 11 Superb skills is clearly someone trying to game the system in a way that destroys fun and fair play. (Also, if someone has 11 Superb skills, we're talking about someone who very likely had enough going on that they should have trounced the mimic. Have you done the fucking math on that? This person had 55 skills out of 25, so that's a trick, totaling 165 skill points. Rule of thumb -- if a skill comes from pre-game "eating", the best it can be is two lower than the skill cap for the game. In a Superb-cap game that limits you to Good.)

At my table, people who do that should be shown the exit; they are a committed abuser, interested in aggrandizing their own power fantasy, not in playing a game with other people. I am uncompromising on this perspective, and draconian when someone tries to pull that kind of a rude and disruptive fast one on the game.

#3 - I might bend the rules for a Big Bad NPC, but on a PC I'd say it absolutely is only one victim at a time.

Oh, I might be upset about the line of thinking, but I'm definitely aiming some ICBMs at 'em and nuking it from orbit. For example:

HARRY: For Mimic Abilities, can a PC mimic more than one person at a time? Or someone from before the first session?

BILLY: I’d say no. It’s a bit of an “evil people eater” power, so it should be treated very strictly when in PC hands.

[Tharios]

I'm not going to quote the book here, but page 176 where Mimic Abilities is...in the last paragraph of the first effect of the power.  That holds the only answer I'll ever need.

That paragraph SHOULD be tacked on to the end of both of the other effects.  It strikes me as ridiculously obvious that was the intent, but just didn't happen.  Silly them, thinking they wouldn't have to repeat themselves for each of the effects.

To me, it says you can't cherry-pick powers like you can with Modular Abilities, they come and go in a group.  At best, it can be a set of POWERS from one target, a set of STUNTS from another target, and a set of SKILLS from yet another target.  Even if each "set" is only a single power, stunt, or skill...if you swipe off of someone else, it's gone...replaced by the new batch.

But hey, admittedly, that's merely my interpretation alone.  I think it works well and makes the power still worthwhile.

I agree that someone who tries to start with 11 superb skills is just being a prick, no matter how "justified" their story is.  And frankly, NO pre-game story could ever reasonably justify that, period.  As stated before, such a story would have to be agreed upon by all players and the GM as both interesting and fun for all.  That just isn't possible with that kind of crap.

That said...it should totally be fair game for NPCs to cherry-pick hardcore.  Bad-ass NPCs are the bread and butter of good gaming...again, in my opinion.