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Old 11-28-2014, 05:14 PM   #1
Shuckster
 
Join Date: Nov 2014
Location: Near Chicago
Default Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

((Disclaimer: this is my first post, I did a few searches and didn't find anything too similar, my apologies if Im making a new thread thats similar to an old one or something))

Rat-hoard as a PC

So Ive done two campaigns so far and was looking to make a player character that manifests itself as a sentient hoard of plague rats given a collective consciousness, with the ability to integrate other rats in to the swarm body, making them one with the hive-mind, the character would not be the rats themselves but rather an intelligent plague which takes control of rats upon infection.

Treating the swarm as the character's body and the plague as the character's mind these I have some traits in mind but am unsure on others:

Traits for the rat's themselves:
Night-vision level 5 [5] (common on rats)
Resistant, Metabolic Hazards [15] (as rats have naturally strong immune systems from creating a supply of vitamin c in their bodies)
Universal Digestion [5] (Rats can subsist on spoiled foods and poor nutrition)
Super climbing [3/level] (Rats can scamper across surfaces climbing nearly as fast as they can on the ground due to their exelent balance from their tails and ability to gain footholds easily with their claws)
Blunt Claws [3]
Sharp teeth [1]
No fine manipulators [-30] (rats have only paws, not opposable digits or prehensile tails)
Semi-Upright [-5] (pretty obvious)

Traits for the swarm as a whole:
Clinging [20] (the swarm body as a whole makes use of rat's natural ability to scale and climb most any surface and would effectively have some form of clinging)
Injury tolerance, Diffuse (Swarm enhancement +160% Powers page 53) [260]
Increased consumption [-10/level] (Swarms of rats have been known to consume huge amounts or food and organic mater very quickly)
Bad Smell [-10] (a hoard of plagued rats exudes a powerful odor of filth, death and disease)
Fragile, Unnatural [-50] (The plauge-mind dies if there are no living rats with the pathogen left alive, meaning that the character could not survive with 0 HP)

Potential traits for the swarm:

Duplication (no sympathetic injury +20%; Shared resources -40%) [28/copy] (this would entail the swarm being able to separate in to smaller groups while still remaining under the PC's control but dose not cover that group rejoining the main body and setting a limit for the duplicates is difficult as the pc could theoretically control each rat individually if no limit is put in place)
-this trait may have to be coupled with-
Permeation (other groups of rats, rare) [5] (the idea behind this trait is the ability to meld back in to duplicates, allowing the separated rats to rejoin the swarm, otherwise the swarm modifier on the diffuse injury tolerance would cover infiltration of other bodies, but this seems messy and Id like to have another way to work around it)

Independent Body Parts (Instant re-attachment +50%, Powers page 52) (the idea that if separated by obstacles or hazards that the rats could act independently and rejoin the main swarm, the separated group would in this case act as a detached body part rather than a duplicate)

Growth (accessibility: only if other rats are available, limited by the number of available rats -20%) [8/level] (the idea behind this would be that by absorbing other nearby rats the swarm's area would increase in size, effectively resulting in a size modifier increase for the character along with the possible increase in HP and ST, again the problem would be figuring the cost since the character could theoretically absorb extremely large numbers of rats if no other limit is put in place)

Regeneration/Regrowth (accessibility: only if other rats are available, limited by the number of available rats -20%) [Varies] (the idea behind this is that the number of rats in the swarm would constitute the amount of HP, replacing dead rats with new ones would allow the character to effectively regrow or regenerate damage, the problem with this trait is deciding a fair rate of regeneration and weather or not a body of rats can have regrowth as an advantage, also setting a limit as the character could potentially absorb a limitless number of rats)

Shrinking (Uncontrollable: occurs automatically upon losing a set amount of hp -??%) [Varies] (just as the rat swarm gains size, HP and ST when rats are added to it (growth) the swarm would also lose HP, ST and SM when rats are removed from it (shrinking) the issue with this is setting a rule for how much HP would constitute losing 1 SM and limiting it as otherwise the only logical limit would be to the size of a single rat)

Dominance (accessibility: limited to rats only -??) [Varies] (This would be the only way I could think of for the rat swarm to amass more rats for its body, but I have no idea how many points to charge for each rat, I know of a template in dungeon fantasy 5 that says a rat is a 35 point character but that seems off base for the type of character I want to build, Id like another potential work around for this ability but have no ideas)
-This trait would have to be coupled with-
Modular abilities (accessibility: only available to buy new rats with the dominance advantage) [Unknown] (this trait would be the swarm's potential to infect new rats, but again thats theoretically limitless)

Binding level 1 (Rat stampede; Engulfing +60%; Area of Effect 2 Yards +50%; Melee reach C-1, Cannot Parry -25%) [4] (an innate ability where the rat-pile over-runs the target the trouble here is I having the area of effect scale with the growth/shrinking of the rat swarm)

Toxic attack level 1 (Rat bites; 1 pt of damage; contact agent -30%; Cyclic 10 seconds , 6 cycles +300%; Area of effect 2 yards +50%; Melee attack, reach C-1, Cannot parry -25%; Resistible at HT-5 -0%) [4] (the diseased rats saliva carrying a toxic quality as they bite anything that comes within range, again the area of effect might change with the growth/shrinking of the swarm)

Unkillable (Sentient pathogen, Achilles heel: cure disease) [varies] (basically if all the rats in the swarm were killed the pathogen could still theoretically live inside their bodies and still infect new rats, but if the pathogen was cured via medical science, healing magic, purging flames or another sterilization method the character would die permanently, the issue here is deciding how much to have this cost and also if its appropriate)

In summation

I feel like this character has real potential to be really unique but I need help getting the traits in working condition and choosing which traits to take and which to go without, as well as maybe simplifying the character as a whole. What do you think?
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Old 11-28-2014, 05:56 PM   #2
Purple Haze
 
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

Interesting as an antagonist, but I am having difficulty imagining the other players wanting to play with such a PC.
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Old 11-28-2014, 06:14 PM   #3
LemmingLord
 
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

I love the concept!
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Old 11-28-2014, 07:43 PM   #4
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

Duplication includes the ability to merge Dupes back together. The limit on the number of splits will be the number of Dupes paid for, which would be independent of the number of individual rats.

The Shared Resources limitation could be logical here.

You'd probably want to require some in-game accumulation of additional rats along with the CP expenditure to add a Dupe. I'd probably just handwave something simple, like giving the rats a Toxic Innate Attack to represent the plague and just asserting that any rat that dies of the IA joins the swarm -- which has zero effect on game stats until you also spend the CP to increase the stats. You can just track the number of rats if you want to require that in-game accumulation. (Compare with the $ versus CP issues in Cyberpunk or Supers; here, the "dollar" for the "equipment" is the number of rats, and I'm suggesting either the buy-with-CP-only or buy-with-both strategies.)

If you want to use Dominance instead, you'll need to define your rat template. (The DF one is a giant monster rat.) Work out with your GM exactly what the stats for a normal rat would be, so you have a price. I don't think I'd go this way, though, even though the Dominance mechanism is similar to what you want.
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Old 11-28-2014, 10:19 PM   #5
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

As a small reminder, that's a good write up of proverbial rats, not real ones.
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Old 11-28-2014, 10:20 PM   #6
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

Unhealing with the limitation: can only heal by (re)gaining rat hosts might be an idea.
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Old 11-28-2014, 10:29 PM   #7
simply Nathan
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

Quote:
Originally Posted by Purple Haze View Post
Interesting as an antagonist, but I am having difficulty imagining the other players wanting to play with such a PC.
I've considered playing something similar, but as I would want to play a swarm of something more anthropomorphic I had trouble thinking about how to give it stats for using all those numerous SM-6 weapons.
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Old 11-29-2014, 01:08 AM   #8
Nereidalbel
 
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

I'd stat up the plague itself as being something with very low SM, respectable HT/IQ, Dominance, and Toxic Attack 1: Non-Wounding (-50%), Accessibility: Only on Rats (-?%).

The Toxic Attack is just there to determine what penalty rats are rolling against to resist becoming part of the hive mind.
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Old 11-29-2014, 01:58 AM   #9
spacemonkey
 
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

The thing that kills me about this kind of build is that the rules are perfect for doing it... as a robot. Digital mind/digital possession/digital duplication is super cheap for what you can do with it, but it's a package deal, you can't get digital duping without the rest. I guess you could take digital mind (cosmic: microbial hivemind) and possession (cosmic: parasitic counts as digital).

If you could get a gm to approve a homebrew limitation on duplication that was nearly equivalent to digital, you could buy minion ally rats, puppet, flesh permeation, chronic parasitic possession (rats only), racial telesend/mindlink, pay for most of it with -9 str, and still have points left over for several ranks of duplication and IT: diffuse. You could get more points by putting no fine manipulators on your dex, as well. If your gm counts low strength as a part of a plague's racial makeup, it wouldn't count against any disad limit, either.
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Old 11-29-2014, 04:39 PM   #10
Shuckster
 
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Default Re: Sentient plague controlling a hoard of rats

Thanks! this has been some great help so far, handling the idea of the swarm separating and amassing new rats, this could all build in to a "living plague swarm" meta-trait
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