High TL in Supers Games... what does it mean?

[Phantasm]

I have one player in my usual group who, when asked to make a supers character, always takes High TL, even though the character is a native of "modern day" Earth. He does not take Inventor!, or even Engineer or Gadgeteer, but he takes several Mechanic specialties (arguing the whole time that the skill should not be broken down into specializations) or the Mechanic! wildcard skill I came up with for cinematic repairmen, claiming he's "reverse-engineering tech from tinkers". (He also gets upset when I ask him for Engineer rolls to reverse-engineer the stuff, but that's another issue altogether.)

The character he always comes up with is not Tony Stark, Reed Richards, or Lex Luthor, able to make bleeding edge or even cutting edge technology, nor does he really have a source of high TL gear (except for stuff that I work into the setting, like advanced ballistic fabrics).

He's taking High TL because he sees his character as working on tech taken from the super-inventors. I tell him that he'd be better off taking the Cutting-Edge Training Perk for Mechanic! (cheaper and does what he wants), but he is also the poster boy for the Stubbornness disadvantage.

I see High TL for those folks who come from areas where the TL is more advanced than the game world (say, an alien or human raised among aliens but stranded on Earth) or for those who have the facilities to live at the higher TL on a small scale that he's helping create (like the aforementioned Stark, Richards, and Luthor).

So... there's the assumption clash over what the High TL advantage means, apparently. Whose assumptions are more correct, mine or his?

[Culture20]

Marvel is filled with high tech level people who aren't inventors of high tech level stuff, from the future, or alien worlds. It's a weird world where most of the populace lives with standard TL7-8, but Maggia thugs can buy plasma rifles from AIM (I don't need to tell you this). And there are the reverse-engineers of these high TL wonders too, but they're generally background characters: almost all the AIM research assistants, Hydra technicians, competitors of FF Inc. or Stark Inc., ordinary engineers at Stark Inc., etc.
Then there are major characters like Magneto who don't really seem to have Inventor! as a trait, but nevertheless build some superscience from scratch (but he has to steal nuclear weapons).
Cable when he first appears is kind of like your player's character; he would buy weaponry from AIM and tinker with it, but he was revealed to be from the future.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

So... there's the assumption clash over what the High TL advantage means, apparently. Whose assumptions are more correct, mine or his?

Since you haven't really described what he assumes High TL will allow for his character....



Off the cuff it sounds like he wants what High TL gives; not to have to deal with the problems of encountering Higher Tech:

1 - Having to roll to "reverse engineer" stuff (since he has the TL skill that gear was 'designed at' he wouldn't have to 'reverse engineer it', he'd already understand the principles)
2 - Dealing with skill penalties for 'Higher Tech' (his tech level)
3 - Not intuiting a tech device's functions upon first encountering it (most of us can figure out a universal 'tv' remote even if we've never seen that brand before)
4 - Etc

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

He's taking High TL because he sees his character as working on tech taken from the super-inventors. I tell him that he'd be better off taking the Cutting-Edge Training Perk for Mechanic! (cheaper and does what he wants), but he is also the poster boy for the Stubbornness disadvantage.

I've never felt GMs should pressure players to optimise their characters a particular way. Pointing out opportunities that seem to have been missed is fair enough, but if he doesn't want to do it, that's his decision.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Off the cuff it sounds like he wants what High TL gives; not to have to deal with the problems of encountering Higher Tech:

1 - Having to roll to "reverse engineer" stuff (since he has the TL skill that gear was 'designed at' he wouldn't have to 'reverse engineer it', he'd already understand the principles)
2 - Dealing with skill penalties for 'Higher Tech' (his tech level)
3 - Not intuiting a tech device's functions upon first encountering it (most of us can figure out a universal 'tv' remote even if we've never seen that brand before)
4 - Etc

The issue stems from him not justifying it in any manner, shape, or form; he just has it. His background for the character in question is "city electrical worker". I'd be willing to let him have it... if he would justify it in some manner rather than just taking it and expecting it to go unquestioned.

Even Magneto has a justification for his High TL: he's a high-IQ character (IQ 14-ish with decent defaults) who spent several months a prisoner on the Stranger's world (in the '60s, pre-Claremont era), a TL11^+ prison planet. Cable had background justification which became clearer as time went on. This guy ... has none of that.

He took this trait for a game which was an emerging supers game; no alien contact, no time travel, no known enclaves of supertech.

So, to justify or not to justify, that is the question. 'Is it better to justify it in the background, even in a background only the GM will see, or perchance to take stuff 'cause the rules support it without the need for matching the background....? (apologies to Sir William Shakespeare)

[LemmingLord]

It sounds like he has already given you a justification for the advantage, suggesting his character has actively been interacting with cutting edge inventors. What cutting edge inventors means in your game world is up to you.. It might just be that cutting edge familiarity means tl 8+ rather than 9.

It would not be out of the question for you to discuss who these cutting edge inventors were/are and what kind of prototypes they've been working on.

What I hear you saying is there really isn't higher tl knowledge yet discovered in this game world which would seem to make the high tech advantage off limits.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

1 - Having to roll to "reverse engineer" stuff (since he has the TL skill that gear was 'designed at' he wouldn't have to 'reverse engineer it', he'd already understand the principles)

This doesn't work, reverse engineering is applicable to things of your own TL or lower. The point of reverse engineering isn't normally to discover new scientific principles, it's to figure out how exactly the thing works so that you can use that information.

[whswhs]

My view as a GM tends to be (especially in supers campaigns) "You can have what you want, if you tell me a good story to justify it." The story is part of the player's job.

For example, in my last GURPS Supers campaign, the PCs were a former rugby player whose brain tumor gave him force manipulation powers; an ancient Greek woman granted brick powers and immortality by Ares as part of a bet with Athena; a guilt-ridden telepath who had served in the German armed forces in World War II; an unfallen angel with six arms and two different sets of weird powers; and a shapeshifting magical dragon. I worked with each of them on how to describe the abilities their story implied. But they needed to provide the story.