A player in my superhero rpg has a 'Power Mimicry' ability; copying the powers of the superbeings around her.
What fuckery can I pull without being too blatant?
eg I'm tempted to see if she'll chase after a flying hero and find herself powerless 80ft in the air.
I'm not playing with the Champions system: I just needed
Woops, posted with a fucked up last line.
I'm not playing with the Champions system: I just needed an image and start arguments is what I wanted to say.
The main one I can think of is pitting her against enemies with the power to change or alter their bodies in uniquely unusual ways, and then allowing those enemies to die while she is similarly altered. Without their power to mimic, she's effectively stuck like that, at least for a while.
>>47822255
Are there any limits on what types of powers can be mimicked? Like, she thinks someone can fly but it's really magnetoboots or something.
>>47822255
Not all peoples powers are positive. Rogue is an ideal example of this. Even people with seemingly positime effects might have hidden downsides and weaknesses.
Mimic Powers are kind of annoying, especially if the guy didn't include some limitations. Try playing into them, but only after they guy has had a couple of adventures or encounters where he got full use of his powers (About a third of the time).
You know how in some versions of Puss in Boots the cat challenges the shape-shifting ogre to assume a difficult shape, something small, like a mouse, for instance... and then eats him.
Batman beat Prometheus a tech-based skill mimic by studying the tech and then uploading all the fighting abilities of Stephen Hawking into his head.
Say a bad guy starts causing a ruckus, using cool powers in the Mimic's territory and wiping the floor with everyone out there. When the Mimic steals his powers, reveal that the Supervillain was being hunted by something dangerous and alien, now the Supervillain doesn't need to out run the Predator, he just needs to sneak away while it's dealing with the Mimic.
>>47822426
I've implied to her that it will mimic technology to a limited extent, because I didn't want it to seem unfair if I threw robots at her, and so that she could try and mimic the powers of a teammate with a super-suit.
>>47822584
In that case, go straight for illusions. She thought Dr. Phantogram could fly, but it turns out it was just prestigitation involving a pulley and a rope!
I'll add that I'm somewhat bitter because she keeps on dealing with her problems by punching the first person that gets in her way and not worrying about the consequences.
I know that all I need to do is to show her the consequences of her actions, but it's just added an extra level of planning.
She's committed an unprompted violent assault on some minor gang members and I need to show the consequences without turning the entire campaign into one where the team is on the run from the police because of her actions.
>>47822255
Wasn't there a DC heroine whose power was being able to rapidly get pregnant and give birth to a bunch of short lived minions on command?
Do that power.
Powers that secretly suck like the enemy brick who's super strength comes with a side order of super roid rage. Or powers the need tech or special training to control like Cyclops eye beams.
Obviously you don't want to pull that every time but every now and then should keep them on guard
Dude has telekinesis, she mimics, turns out it only works when he has an erection. She can't get an erection cuz no penis.
>>47822255
Have her get the shit beat out of her by a gang of non-super powered thugs. They're normal people so she can't mimic them in anyway and even if she does alter her strength to match that of the largest one they'll just mob her. If she's ever by herself she's fucked.
>>47822255
Does the mimicry come in levels? She can copy people, but not as well as their actual powers.
Or lots of tech/magic item related enemies.
What about a burrowing power?
Or some odd teleportation that arrives at an exact set of coordinates, and she ends up fused with the one she was copying?
Does she copy any drawbacks of the power? Like say this enemy has the power to go intona Hulk-like battle frenzy, but at the cost of sleeping for three days afterwards.
>>47822255
that perfectly normal power the bad guy has?
he trained his god dammed ass off to get to the level it's at. in your players hands it's pretty much useless.
>>47822255
Thought of a good one:
Throw another mimic at them and have it cause painful feedback that hurts only the PC mimic - a good way to handle this is to give the villainous mimic a really conditional way of effecting the mimcry, like there was a mutant in one of the x-men spinoffs who had this multi-colored cloud that he had to drop on people before he could mimic their powers.
Bonus points if the condition for activating the villain's mimic powers looks like a weapon e.g. they have to shoot people with a beam out of their eyes or something.
Double bonus points if you can have the first person to fight the villainous mimic be the heroic mimic, so there's a degree of confusion about whether the villain just has an unmimicable feedback beam on the part of the players.
>>47822619
Wouldn't she gain the proportional powers of a pulley and a rope though?
>>47822430
ding ding ding ding!
Yeah often bad guys and even good guys will not be aware of or not willing to disclose that their abilities have hidden downsides. You may spring that on her later.
I forgot the movie, but there was one where one of the supers was a "queen of the dark realms" or some such. She was a normal human with the title foisted upon her and didn't like it. Her powers were pretty scary.
One was teleportation-- but it actually was that she traveled through her realm where time moved differently.
If your PC copied that power, she'd enter that realm... and then be stuck there, unable to return, and not recognized by the denizens as their queen. From the normal world's perspective, she'd have simply vanished while trying to teleport.
If you're lucky, the Queen is a good guy and immediately (months or years later by that realm's clock) enters the realm to grant her friend safe passage.
>>47822255
Half the fun of mimicry is in the deconstruction, I think. It's very easy to look at the powers in a way that bungles their user. For instance:
>Copied powers have a cap, dumping the oldest copied power. If the oldest copied power is flight and they copy someone in midair...
>Copying a separate mimic causing mind-bending psychic feedback and power juggling
>Copying a flying brick, but only copying one ability and not the Required Secondary Powers™
>Copying things TOO WELL, like punching a building and having their flesh turn to bricks or hitting someone and turning into a temporary powerless clone
>Having their powers get screwy depending on their mindset
>Copying "fake" powers like illusions or superpowered robots causes their powers to short-circuit and 'copy' the blank space, shutting down the power bank
![magfield2d[1].gif](https://i.imgur.com/r0KyXoK.gif "magfield2d[1].gif")
>>47823957
>he trained his god dammed ass off to get to the level it's at. in your players hands it's pretty much useless.
Electromagnetism is great for this. There a lot of variables involved, and plentey of interactions that aren't quite intuitive, or visually obvious.
If you have a fairly realistic electromagnetic power that you just got twelve seconds ago, you probably don't need any help in kicking your own ass.
>dot product force vectors
>everything you can do is a field rather than a vector
>conductivity and magnetic response of everything matter
>>47822255
Have a villain who's power kills him as he uses it.
>>47825485
There was a comic featuring Professor X's kid Legion who has multiple personality disorder; each personality had a different power. The personalities managed to escape Legion's psyche, and into the real world. One of them stole souls via touch. The X-men disguised Rogue as Legion; whom the personality sought to absorb into it's self. They booth got stuck in a infinite absorption loop.
>>47825598
>>47822430
Really all supers games should hand out "it's always stuck on" as the default drawback, but things like "the longer he uses the mimicry, the more he gets mixed up with the person he's mimicking (which would be especially bad for a hero mimicking villains) would also work.
Maybe even make it a slow burner thing, like I think rogue had troubles with seperating out herself from all the people she'd touched.
>>47822255
Send a couple of ordinary human thugs at her. Can she "Mimic" numbers?
>>47822255
Golems and Undead are usually mimicry proof
>>47822255
powers that are extremly weak / extremly powerful that takes a lot of experience to master
Also, the obvious, weakness mimicry as an implied power of power mimicry
>>47822255
If I had to say, assuming based on the image her power works like Rogue, there are a few ideas that come to mind.
A- Have them mimic a power that takes years to adapt to and their body will break from the sudden power increase
B- Have them try to draw the power from something that steals energy so they'll either overdraw or get countered.
C- Have a person with a lot of powers and they get overwhelmed from not knowing how to use them together
...I just realized all of these are "get fucked up by mimicking too hard"
>>47822584
A bunch of capes who don't actually have 'powers'. Just Batman/Bruce-Lee level physical abilities that to most observers, would appear superhuman. Catch a fly with chopsticks? Punch through cinderblock walls? No actual super powers needed, just extensive training and conditioning.
>>47823563
Better: It works as long as he has an erection.
>>47823563
That... isn't... entirely correct.
>>47822671
Have a villain who knows about their power(s) face them down.
>Oh, you copy powers?
>I'll send all my autistic minions to deal with you. Enjoy being a retard for the next few hours.
Or for a more serious/less offensive answer
>I'll go send my minion whose power will kill him if he doesn't wear his special suit I made him. Touch him and you'll start dying! Hahahahahahahahahah
A Mastermind villain might send other villains up against the Mimic, but only after having studied the minions to discover the fatal flaw endemic to each of the villains' powersets.
It's like an old master training a fatal flaw into their student's technique, so they can always defeat them.
>>47822744
That's Mother of Champions from the Chinese superhero team Great Ten.
>>47822255
A mysterioous thief is using a strange and exotic power to commit nigh-inexplicable crimes. When they manage to track him down, he tries to bait the power mimic into copying his powers, and showing them in public or on camera at just the wrong time, thereby making it look like she's the one with his strange power and the only one who could have committed those crimes.
Actually, this plot wouldn't work very well in most situations. In all likelihood, it's well-known that her thing is power mimicry, so the populace will probably assume she copied the power from the real thief. He'd have to do a lot of circumstance manipulation to make it convincing. For example, he could establish a seemingly ironclad alibi, to prove that he couldn't have committed his crimes even with his powers, meaning it could only have been someone with mimicry copying them.
>character trains body for years to be able to handle the strain of using his power
>mimic man copies it and blows his own limbs off trying to use it
>>47822255
Make an adversary that has a psionic version of the same power. Then, make her permanently steal hername.
