Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

[SSgt Baloo]

I was reviewing The Tick vs Season One a few days ago and realized that most of the supers were either poseurs or wanna-bes. This got me thinking. Have any of you had PC or NPC characters who weren't particularly super but were in it for the fame, glory and/or groupies?

 

The only one I can recall in any of my campaigns was The Mechanic, another player's low-powered DNPC. He was Lightning's beer buddy. Whenever he heard that Lightning was in action, he'd don a ski mask, hop on his Honda 305 Dream and help out as The Mechanic. He was only about a 75-point character while the players were 250+ points.

 

How about you?

[Clonus]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

There was a magazine article which featured a group of Inferior Five influenced wannabes like the Weasel (who had a gimmicked Ferrari that was mostly notable for crashing every time he kicked in the afterburner) and Poefellow (Who had a "trained" raven that would randomly poop on any participants in a fight). I used them once.

[wylodmayer]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

Well, a couple of my PCs have had questionable motives. Ace was a decent guy, but other heroes sometimes looked askance at the way he parleyed his heroic success into a career as, basically, a celebrity. Mainly, his goal was to score with hot actresses. Mind you, he cared about catching bad guys and all that, too... just, you know, not so much that he'd break a date with Halle Berry to patrol for crime. Maybe if the world were ending, yeah.

 

Terminaxx was a cipher to his teammates. I played him close to the chest on purpose, and they never did really figure out if he was actually a deeply moral person with a lot of aggression issues, or a sociopath who was high-functioning enough to realize that the moral rhetoric of superheroing was a good cover for his love of injuring people. He always pushed it right to the limit of what he could get away with, in terms of violence, against villains, and he was also a womanizing jerk with no manners to boot.

 

There have been tons of NPCs in my games like that. For instance, in my long running Four Color game, a group was started to rival the PC heroes, mainly as a publicity exercise. Some of the people in the group were down with that, while others were genuine heroes who went along with it to get a chance to fight crime, and others walked a line somewhere in between.

 

Also, as I noted in another thread, in my Champions Universe based game, I played Nighthawk as a character with a deep sense of moral arrogance, so that while he held strongly to certain very "right" ideas, he was unshakeably convinced that he was pretty much always right in the ways he went about championing these ideas, much to the annoyance of the PCs. He was an a**hole who eventually got the beat-down from a PC. On the one hand, he had it coming, because his failure to recognize he might be wrong made him dangerous, and indeed he had nearly screwed up big time on a number of occasions in a way that could have cost innocent lives. One the other, it was amusing to have a game where some of the villains were better liked by the PCs than at least one of the "heroes."

[Doctor Agenda]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

I rented a movie called The Specials in which seemingly most supers were in it for questionable motives...as I recall, The Weevil slept with the pompous team leader's mostly invulnerable wife and went on to sell out, joining a team with a better action-figure deal. Amok and Deadly Girl had both apparently killed people with their powers accidentally before and didn't seem too bothered by it. If you want ideas for sleazy super heroes, look no further, although they're not ALL that bad.

[Doc Samson]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

As above, The Tick and The Specials are good fodder for this type of concept. Other places to look would be The Mystery Men (movie), The Legion of Substitute Heroes (DC Comics), and The Great Lakes Avengers (Marvel Comics). I am actually planning an upcoming storyline in my game where a group of rejected heroes with seemingly useless powers attack the players. They have since trained both in creative uses for their "useless" powers and how to work as team to cover eachother's weaknesses.

[Hermit]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

Not quite what you're looking for but...

In one game I run online, the heroes have encountered "Captain Awesome!" a guy in garish yellow who's origin story changes each time he's asked, and who claims powers he doesn't possesses. Delusional, he hallucinates that he is fighting crime even when all he does is point his hands in a direction and make 'bam zap' sounds.

 

However, one PC has already discovered that he DOES have powers... including the ability to erase any data UNTIL or the Police collect on him, and walk totally unnoticed by any technology. Captain Awesome is insane (In a chummy way), but might just be the most powerful instinctive Cyberpath on the planet.

[Markdoc]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

In the first champions game we played in the Gm had "Dr Evil" who had a flashy costume and a lttle zap gun. He was just a standard crook who had worked out that people would freak out far more and do what he said if they thought he had super-powers,than if he was just some guy with a gat. Alas, one day he encountered Shadowfist, our team's overly violent and totally humourless martial artist, who *also* throught he was a supervillian and promptly smeared him in one hit. My character got Dr. Evil to hospital in time to save his life, but it was a near run thing.

 

In the same game, there was a pair of low-powered villians who would take credit for any crime where the perpetrators were not clearly identified, as a way of building up their street cred. They were called "Milli Villainy"

 

cheers, Mark

[Metaphysician]

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs...

 

One the other' date=' it was amusing to have a game where some of the villains were better liked by the PCs than at least one of the "heroes."[/quote']

 

*thinks of Ancient Aberrant*