Building a non-powered vigilante; Questions and Tips

[Lex_BR]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

This is why you use the one in HT rather than the one in UT.:)

Personal Lifting Device. P.56.

actually, the personal lifting device is nothing like a grapple gun.

Personal Lifting Device (TL8)
This is a portable, one-man climbing hoist. It clips onto
a climber’s harness. At the touch of a button, it can ascend
or descend a rope at 3 yards per second.

you attach it to a rope already secured for it to work, it doesnt shoot it's own and it doesnt suit the required purposes. but thanks for trying to help.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Lex_BR

but thanks for trying to help.

Alright, then give the character one or two levels of High Tech. Batman certainly has at least one. This is by far the simplest solution.

[Kromm]

I think that anything available off the shelf at the campaign TL should be bought as gear, using its dollar value. Take lots of Wealth, trade points for money, or (best, for superhero types) use Signature Gear. There's no reason to inflict complex, headachy gadget builds on your campaign when the items in question are available off a factory floor or a rack at some store.

If one or two items of gear are just a little advanced, I'd do it the same way but require one Better (Gear) perk (Power-Ups 2, p. 8) per narrow class of items. This is what to do for things like lightweight night-vision goggles that allow peripheral vision. Certainly, modern technology can build them; it's just that armies don't feel like paying for and maintaining something that has many times the replacement cost of the gear they currently support.

If a lot of the PC's gear is significantly advanced, that's cause for him to shop off the list for a higher TL. First, he should take enough High TL to cover the gear he wants. Then he should buy the gear at the inflated prices explained in Tech Level and Equipment (p. B27). For instance, if he wants goods deemed TL10 in Ultra-Tech in a modern-day campaign, he must buy High TL 2 [10] and then purchase TL10 gear at four times normal cost. This cost multiplier will mean that he needs lots of Wealth or four times the usual points in Signature Gear.

All of this assumes the gear isn't superscience, but generic off-the-shelf equipment that currently exists or will plausibly exist. Superscience gear is cause to get fancy. For things in Ultra-Tech, I'd suggest buying Unusual Background (Invention) (p. B477) once per item instead of doing what I suggested above. The hero may still need High TL and Signature Gear for his plausible gear; the Unusual Background covers strictly the crazy stuff, an item at a time.

Only if all of the above fails – there's nothing appropriate in High-Tech or Ultra-Tech, at any TL, even accounting for superscience – would I get into building things with gadget limitations. At that stage, you have to look at the actual effects . . . The player needs to define the exact bonuses and benefits in terms of advantages.

There's nothing wrong with avoiding the gadgets rules altogether and using High TL, Signature Gear, and Unusual Background (Invention). All of these are social advantages of sorts, and fit the unpowered hero better than focusing powers through objects and pretending that they aren't powers because they're in gadgets. They also use items that have been well playtested and documented in the books, with clear costs and weights that you can use as limits should the player decide that he wants to engage in modifications via the Gadgeteer advantage. Point costs aren't nearly as good for that, because they can be arbitrarily adjusted using goofy limitations that may well not be there for any other reason but to keep costs down.

[giant.robot]

Originally Posted by Lex_BR

However, ninja-style tiny plastic balls that instantly create a flashbang or a smoke cloud in a large area like we see batman or movie ninjas dont exist.
If something doesnt exist for purchase anywhere in the world it should cost points and not money (maybe even both), at least that's how i see it.

Off the shelf smoke and flash grenades (or at least military ones) are bulky because it's expensive to make them smaller and their size works well enough for the task at hand. They're not bulky because the technology doesn't exist to make them smaller. This guy's character already has a bunch of custom equipment, building custom smoke grenades doesn't seem like it's out of the question.

Powdered sugar and saltpeter will make a smoke bomb. Something the size of a small pill/medicine bottle would easily hold enough to obscure a doorway or fill a small room with smoke. A couple thrown in a room (like you often see Batman do) and it will completely fill with smoke.

Originally Posted by Lex_BR

Night vision goggles as they are today are still preety heavy and clunky,
If i not only add the requested abilities to a regular night vision goggle but also make it the same weight and size of a pair of goggles with virtually unlimited power supply, then it's no longer a regular NVG, it's an entirely new superior object and it seems to me that it should cost some points.

Back in college I made a decent and lightweight night vision monocular very similar to this one for a project. The key to something like this over military NVGs is they're just IR cameras and you're lighting up the scene with IR LEDs.

Military NVGs do near IR and visible light amplification so you don't need external IR lights to see, you don't want to be visible to an enemy also equipped with NVGs. However for a caped crime fighter it's a reasonable assumption that the bad guys don't have NVGs and you can make custom ones with TL8 technology that meet the player's requirements. If I could make one for less than $100 in college a wealthy crime fighter guy could easily make one.

[Lex_BR]

Originally Posted by Kromm

There's nothing wrong with avoiding the gadgets rules altogether and using High TL, Signature Gear, and Unusual Background (Invention). All of these are social advantages of sorts, and fit the unpowered hero better than focusing powers through objects and pretending that they aren't powers because they're in gadgets. They also use items that have been well playtested and documented in the books, with clear costs and weights that you can use as limits should the player decide that he wants to engage in modifications via the Gadgeteer advantage. Point costs aren't nearly as good for that, because they can be arbitrarily adjusted using goofy limitations that may well not be there for any other reason but to keep costs down.

I was afraid that allowing the player to purchase everything through signature gear and wealth would mess up the balance of the game, it just seems to be a much more cost effective way to get abilities than buying super-powers of the mutant kind, for example.. But since more than one member of the forums seems to be suggesting this i'll give it a go and see how it plays out, thank you all for the tips and help !

[giant.robot]

With a little creativity this will work well for your grappling hook gun.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Lex_BR

I was afraid that allowing the player to purchase everything through signature gear and wealth would mess up the balance of the game, it just seems to be a much more cost effective way to get abilities than buying super-powers of the mutant kind.

Don't worry about it at all this kind of thing is exactly what signature gear is for (at least as long as you have the skills or contacts to make plausible) and in any case powers from gear are relatively easy to balance against innate powers.

If nothing else gear has innate disadvantages you can't carry most of it around at all times, it can be stolen, it can be disabled and gear like the line gun can run out of ammunition at inconvenient moments. As a rule none of these things apply to innate powers (at least not in the same way).

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Lex_BR

I was afraid that allowing the player to purchase everything through signature gear and wealth would mess up the balance of the game, it just seems to be a much more cost effective way to get abilities than buying super-powers of the mutant kind, for example.. But since more than one member of the forums seems to be suggesting this i'll give it a go and see how it plays out, thank you all for the tips and help !

Now that you mention balance, I would add one caution to my earlier advice -- don't let the player shop freely from the UT lists. Limit the available items to those that won't wreck the aesthetic or power levels of your campaign.