Continuing from yesterday's post, more villain Approaches:
Dampening
This Approach has average Power and Quality dice, above-average base Health, and the usual two choices of abilities of its list. Its six abilities are:
Capitalize on their Failure - Reaction that lets you Hinder a nearby hero who invokes a twist for any reason. The timing on this is slightly complex, since the resulting penalty would (for ex) apply to a Risky action or an action ability used early in the GYRO scale (since the twists are paid to even attempt them) but not the result of an Overcome where they twisted for a success. So the hero might immediately use up the penalty, or might have it lingering for their next turn.
Curse of Weakness - Solid Hinder with a persistent penalty that also reduces one of the target's Power dice by one size, all bundled with a Mid die Attack.
Field of Woe - Multi-target Hinder that reduces one of each target's Power dice by one size while they have the penalty.
Nullifying Backlash - Strong but limited defensive reaction that cancels all damage from an Attack made by a hero with at least one penalty, at the cost of removing a penalty from them.
Scrambling Strike - Mediocre Attack that also reduces all of the target's Quality dice by one size until your next turn. Potentially very powerful, especially since initiative could result in this punishing the victim for two of their turns.
Terror of Inadequacy - Decent Attack that also applies a small Hinder to every opponent that can see or hear the target.
With three of their six abilities reducing the size of Power or Quality dice that's really the Dampening villain's signature schtick. There's also loads of strong Hinder effects including two with multi-target and a reactive one. Their other reaction is fueled by penalties, which is a nice synergy with their other options. Not a lot of ways to deal raw damage and no Boost, Defend or Recover abilities at all so a pretty narrow but effective Approach. Their dice-reduction effects can be a minor record-keeping hassle though.
With only two choices to make and no real duds or clear stand-outs on their list I think this Approach can do without any homebrew abilities.
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Disruptive
Disruptive villains have above-average Power dice, average Quality dice and base Health, and two ability choices off this list:
Beneficial Chaos - Efficient Hinder and Recovery ability that uses all three of your dice.
Covering Fire - Multi-target Hinder that Defends you and all nearby allies using Max. Great with minions and lieutenants.
Enraging Touch - Solid Attack that gets a lot more damage by forcing the target to then Attack an ally with their single largest Power die.
Heedless Explosion - Multi-target Attack with a strong Hinder bundled with it. Has the potential to do more damage on the targets' turns if they roll doubles, which could be avoided by just moving instead of rolling to take action.
Painful Disruption - Reaction that deals some damage to an Attacker with a penalty on them. Quite low effect most of the time and sometimes hard to use even with all the Hinders this Approach has access to.
Taste the Madness - Reaction that Hinders a foe trying to Hinder you, with your penalty happening before they calculate their effect. This usually results in downgrading the size of the penalty you take by one, which isn't really all that impressive, but if they were using an ability that Hinders and does something else with different effect dice there's nothing preventing you from applying your reactive penalty to one of the other effects. Reducing damage or healing might be more useful, for ex. It's still weak and narrow enough that it might be worth making a homebrew change and adding "The penalty you create is persistent and exclusive." to the ability text.
The abilities include a good mix of Hinder options bundled with Attack, Defend and Recovery riders, as well as one very good Attack that annoys players by turning their powers against one another. Another Hinder-centered Approach but quite versatile about it. Both the reactions are fairly lackluster as written, which makes choosing either harder to do. Taste the Madness has suggested fix included above, but Painful Disruption takes a bit more work to homebrew a patch:
Painful Disruption (I) When you are Attacked by a hero with one or more penalties, that hero takes damage equal to total value of all their penalties.
That makes Attacking the villain while you have any penalties at all a painful prospect that gets worse if they have multiple penalties (even multiple exclusive ones), and can apply multiple times in a round without burning a reaction.
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