Civilian Rescue Power?

[Sentack]

I'm playing in a game where the GM likes to routinely have our heroes run into a villain surrounded by civilians. Hence, they frequently need rescuing. Usually they aren't directly threatened by the villain, he's just in an area that has civilians around. A city street, a bank, a club once even.

 

Now I'm playing a speedster. So it makes sense that I would be the one zipping around, grabbing all the pedestrians and whisking them off to safety.

 

Problem is, the Gm isn't going to just hand wave this effect so I need to build a power to do it.

 

Question is, how?

 

I was thinking of some kind of selective Area of Effect Teleport. But I'm not sure that's going to work as well.

 

Any ideas or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[Ethernaut]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

Grab by Maneuver might work. Character point wise it is very cheap; the maneuver is free to everyone, but if you want to be effective at it, you might want to buy some penalty skill levels to negate/reduce multiple target penalty. It isn't a power you asked for, but it does the same in my opinion.

[Guest steamteck]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

Grab by is how the speedsters do it in my game. Bear in mind you shouldn't be able to do more than you normally can in actions just because you're saving civilians as opposed to punching bad guys IMO.

[rentauri]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

The Champions Powers book has (pg 288) a power called Hostage Rescue built as a Teleport / Usable as an Attack. The idea being that the speeder zooms in grabs the target, run to a second spot to drop them off and then return to the starting point.

[CrosshairCollie]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

I'd take a different tack ... buy a Force Wall or Entangle or TK Grab (your option) based on running circles around the villain so he can't threaten the civilians (at least, not as effectively) and let them haul out on their own. Or maybe a bunch of extra strength, only to throw (defined as a kind of Olympic hammer throw; you spin around a whole bunch, then fling him). It may be easier to get the villain away from the civilians than the other way around.

[Ice9]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

I usually use Grab-By / Flying Grab for this purpose. With typical Speedster OCV, you can easily multi-grab as many people as you can carry. Which does raise one problem - carrying people. Even with super-strength (which not all speedsters have), it's hard to hold more than 2-3 people with a normal arm-span. So this works fine if you're trying to rescue a few civilians, but not great against a crowd.

 

If you have a "Speedster Tricks" MP (or are willing to spend a lot), there's always the power option:

Crowd Dispersal - Teleport #m, Usable as Attack (defense is enough casual strength / clinging to resist grab), Area of Effect (#m radius, Selective), Crosses Intervening Space, Limited Power: Takes effect from touching targets.

 

Good against enemy mooks as well.

[gojira]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

If I was going to allow this, I'd probably require some levels of strength as well. Probably at least STR 20, and I'd probably base this on something like casual STR rather than full STR.

 

Think about that in terms of a normal human. You're running about as fast as you can, and you're going to grab and pick up an object as you run past. Ignoring the difficulty of grabbing any given object (that the OCV roll to grab), what kind weight could you reasonably pick up and run with? I'd guess somewhere around 20-25 lbs max. Yet according to Hero your max lift should be around 220 lbs.

 

So what happened? Well, you can use both hands to grab, you're running, there's inertia of your object to overcome, you probably can run at full speed while carrying much more than 25 lbs. or so anyway, etc.Theoretically, you can grab and run with about 10% of your STR (which is what, light to no encumbrance?) This being superheroes, I might give you a break, but certainly I think 20 STR to carry one person would be the absolute minimum.

 

So you could spend 10 point for 20 STR, or spend some points on something else that seems better suited. I'd let you carry more with more than 20 STR, of course. For powers, "Only to rescue civilians" is probably -1 1/2 to -2, because it seems to happen frequently in your games.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Civilian Rescue Power?

 

The Champions Powers book has (pg 288) a power called Hostage Rescue built as a Teleport / Usable as an Attack. The idea being that the speeder zooms in grabs the target' date=' run to a second spot to drop them off and then return to the starting point.[/quote']

 

I often use variations of Teleportation for superspeed sfx builds as well. It's a perfect example of Teleportation the HERO Power being used for a sfx other than teleportation.