Mutant for Hire

Ooh! I want to see that.

What sort of PRE attack would you give this weapon: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20030315.html

Feel free to do the Mutant for Hire. The handle originated due to the fact that I've always been the strange one in my family, not to mention considerably taller than anyone else by a fair margin, making me the mutant of the family. The "for Hire" was picked almost at random, but refined the concept as a somewhat bizarre mercenary who gets jobs out of the Twilight Zone.

I'm not missing the roleplaying versus rollplaying, but there is also the fact that the GM need not want to roleplay for every NPC that comes along. And there are times when a GM might want the dice to govern. There are times when the objectivity of dice and mechanics are as useful as the subjectivity of roleplaying. What I want is for the roleplaying and the rollplaying to have some consistancy to them. If the GM roleplays that attractive people do better in social situations, then I'd like to see something of that reflected in the mechanics. If you're going to talk about drama and roleplaying over dice rolling, there's a question of why we even bother to have dice and mechanics at all. Go with a diceless system for combat, so the GM can make it all dramatic. And numbers can be a guide to the GM, or at least a good starting point. If we come up with a formula for making reaction rolls to COM, the number that results can be the basis. The GM can tweak it up or down as they see fit, but sometimes it really helps to have the number as a starting point. It's also good for the players as well. People want to know what characteristic = x means. What impact it has on the game. If you're spending character points on a stat, its nice to have game mechanics impacts for that number so the players have a rough guidline as to what their characters can do. Even if a GM roleplays out their encounters, it still helps to know that one character has a base PRE roll of 11-, another 14- and yet another has one of 17-. Even if you roleplay things out, you know that the first is fairly ordinary while the second makes a powerful impression and the last makes an overwhelming one. So I'd like to come up with a good system for quantifying COM effects in social situations as a good starting rule of thumb for players and GM to go by. A benchmark that both sides can agree on. That's the whole point to dice and mechanics, to give a reference for everyone to play against.

Re: Batman Which to my mind was always a total cop-out. It reeked of hypocracy that Batman's hands were clean when there were all these people conveniently dying. What if fate hadn't done it, would Batman still be in a clear position? Writers tend to be somewhat divided on the Cap and killing issue. Some cling to the traditional Silver Age code vs. killing and some more realistically recognize that Captain America was originally a soldier, and soldiers are professional killers. You can try to pretty it up but in the end that is what they are. Now my stance on the whole issue is one of legal sanction. If you're not acting with full legal sanction, you'd better be damn careful not to do anything irreversable. Police officers are given legal sanction, under certain circumstances, to use lethal force. This is because there are rules about when lethal force is considered justifiable and that helps keep them in line. Not perfectly so, there are tragedies of cops shooting innocent victims. But on the whole there are times when the best way to protect innocent lives is to drop the other side fast. Personally, as I grow older I have growing reservations about the vigilante aspects of superheroing. Sueprheroes who go outside of the law are ultimately undermining the law, even if their intentions are to uphold it. There is a certain degree of inherent hypocracy in going outside of the law to uphold it. Not that there are not times when it is necessary to go outside of the law for the greater good, but the question is whether the average unsanctioned superhero is acting from necessity or expedience. As a result, I favor a system where superheroes are in fact sanctioned and this includes authorization to use lethal force under certain circumstances, and generally only as a last resort. But when it comes time for the last resort, I want the superheroes to do what has to be done. The code versus killing pushes one to an impossible standard of conduct, especially when faced with realistic or even semi-realstic issues. And writers get around that by cheating horribly, letting fate kill off those who deserve death, or simply ignoring the fact that a lot of supervillains are repeat mass murderers and that their continued existance leads to the death of countless many innocents.

Yes, the roleplaying aspect is important, but that leaves the question of why HERO has fourteen stats and is very number heavy. Think of the numbers and mechanics as the skeleton of the game, the framework to hang things off of. It's good to have some quanitifiable mechanics to work with COM, namely in the area of PRE rolls. If players want to go with a PRE roll, then there should be some mechanics for how much of an impact COM has.

On the flip side, we've been coming up with some fairly compelling arguments as to why NY and LA are the primary foci for superhero activity. Of course yes, Chicago, Dallas and Miami would also be places of significance and Marvel does tend to neglect those places. On the flip flip side, there's nothing that says that those cities don't get a lot of activity off-camera, so to speak.

Well, remember what I said in a previous post about counterforces. The question is whether there's enough loot in the city to support ~279 supervillains (assuming a 50/50 split and that's actually conservative). Most likely there are going to be wars of sort weeding out the weaker supervillains. I'd use 558x as the base character point 'pool' for the superhero population of the city, and then I'd divide it by the hard cap of supers per capita period to give the mean point base for characters in the city. I'm not sure what power curve scale I'd draw around it. What that means is that past a certain point, percentage boosts do not increase the numbers of supers in a city, they just increase the average power level of the supers in the city. Actually there's some feedback effect because the more powerful the villain, the more greater the chunk of the city they're going to want to themselves. A supervillain X times as powerful as the average is going to want X times the take of an average supervillain. It's really even more complicated when you factor in minions and supervillain teams. But the short of it is that there might well be fewer superheroes than you might expect on average in New York City but when you look at the gross power level, it's where its predicted by your formulae.

Somehow I am convinced that if there isn't a collegiate superhero league that someone is going to invent one. The only main obstacles are safety/liability issues involved. Given the profits that can be made from a staged superhero battle, I think that someone is going to find a way around it. Call it my unswering faith in human nature.

Actually, it was the alumni that made me most think about the student superhero teams. All it takes is for one school to have their own college superhero team and pretty soon all the other schools are going to be getting phone calls from their alumni asking why their school doesn't have a superhero team. As you said, common senses and fiscal efficiency often take a back seat to other issues. Even if this is some podunk school that even a two bit supervillain wouldn't bother with, they're going to need their own superhero team just because.

For those of us who don't know Wake Forest or Bradley get some explanation?

I abstracted/generalized a few. I took Academia and made it into Information Resource, to cover things like any place that has valuable databases, like the nation's capital. Universities on average are both research centers and information resources. And of course there's more to a superhero world than toxic waste or radioactive waste, so I generalized that as well. As for Monetary Foucs instead of wealthy? I wanted to cover places like Las Vegas, banking areas, and Wall Street which could be called wealthy but that's not the best word to use. Information Resource (modifier) Exotic/Mutagenic Resource (modifier) Monetary Focus (modifier) And here are some new ones: Gateway/Port City (modifier) Cultural/Media Center (modifier) Political Center (modifier) Military/Law Enforcement Center (modifier) Crime Center (modifier) Exotic Population (modifier) Let me explain the last one. It was something I talked about in a couple of other posts. Houston, for example, could get a bunch of aliens living there because in a superhero universe it turns into a space port. The fact of the matter is that aliens crashing anywhere else could migrate to Houston because that's where other aliens live. A powerful mutant might establish a civilian mutant community somewhere, where mutants could live and work and have their own lives. That place will start accumilating mutants simply because other mutants are living there and often people feel more comfortable among their own kind. Crime center is those places that see a lot of crime. Usually, its the effect of some other cause. Miami is a port city and so a lot of drug traffic flows through there, for example. But if a city develops an organized crime problem, it can magnify matters considerably. And again, I would not get too hung up on base population. In fact I would prefer to ignore it. In general, I just go down the list and ask myself "what are the top cities for category X" and assume that by virtue of that they'll attract attention from certain types. New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC all hit the list more than once. Few villains are truly nomadic. At best they might have a wide rangeof operations, but few villains don't want/need a base they can rest and relax and prepare for the next mission from. Few supervillain teams will want to travel especially far unless they have a global range teleporter available. Even then there are advantages to working a set area.

Re: U of M "Ah Kaeto, welcome to the University of Michigan Superhero team. I'd just like to familiarize you with a few of the ground rules. All of this is covered in detail in the packet here." *thud as five hundred page book is dropped on the table* "You will be expected to know about all of this." "Our public relations department is trying to think of what adjective associated with 'wolverine' will be most compatible with your powers while at the same time putting the university in the most favorable light. Of course in the field you will be required to use the team number assigned to you and prominently displayed on your uniform." "Here is your standard issue wolverine costume. You'll be happy to note under the layer of fur is kevlar armor. Please take care not to damage the nose, that's where the tape recorder and frontal speaker for broadcasting the school anthem goes. The ears of course are the side speakers. Be careful to protect the tail, that contains the antennae that broadcasts the telemetry information for our scientists, tactical advisors and lawyers to manage all of your activites as one of the Wolverines. Remember that deliberately breaking the tail is a violation of the terms of your scholarship."

Well, the difference between football and superheroing is that a hundred and twenty pound guy is allowed to build a suit of powered armor that weighs over a quarter ton to compensate in the latter. Not to mention they're going to average more scientific accidents that endow people with great powers. And for that matter the scientific nerds that accidentally endowed themselves with power in high school (the Peter Parker type) are more likely to accept a scholarship from MIT than from Notre Dame.

On the cities thread I stumbled across an idea I thought I'd toss out for those who might be skipping that thread. Universities and their impact on the superhero community. Obviously, universities are a major breeding ground for superheroes, or have the potential to be that. EEs who have too much coffee and not enough common sense building high tech nightmares. All these archeology students sorting through mystic relics. And of course the inevitable accidents in the physics, chemistry and biology departments. Sometimes these folks can have very destructive origins. Likewise, these places are attractive targets for supervillains for the same reasons that they are breeding grounds for origins. Plus when superheroes take some impounded device to be studied, guess who is going to go and reclaim it? And of course the resultings uperhero/supervillain battles are another source for origins, when you get down to it, sometimes producing further collateral damage as well. A side effect of this is that likely as not any superhero could *not* just walk into a university with a strange glowing meteor or device impounded from a supervillain but would have to go through a special department and possibly sign a form assuming all liability and damages occured to any potential supervillain attack that might occur as a result. Very few places are going to want to even touch anything Doctor Destroyer has been near. Some places might even file restraining orders just in case. The top universities are naturally going to have standing superhero teams as a matter of course, and with a good cross-mix of powers to deal with a wide range of situations. Likely as not, this will be supplemented by 'college-league' superhero teams. The fact of the matter is that sooner or later university officials are going to bite the bullet and deal with college-age metahumans and inventors and magicians by coopting them into the system. Give them scholarships and put together a superhero team, in the more prestigious and expensive universities as the backup team to the professionals but in many lesser colleges they might well be the primary team. A few schools might even manage an A roster and a B roster. And of course it is going to occur to people that there's money to be made by having college superhero teams battle it out and sell the television rights. At that point you start having high school age supers being scouted by all the major schools and given attractive scholarship offers. Things like eligbility requirements and so on will also start to crop up. After this gets entrenched, pretty soon cities and superhero teams looking for fresh recruits are going to start paying attention to the young talent on the college circuit. And in time that might even be one of the prefered routes for joining a real superhero team. The alternative would have to be one of the 'minor league' superteams that don't require any previous history. An interesting possibility is the 'ineligable' teams that form, composed of students who couldn't or wouldn't qualify for the main team, operating against school regulations and so having to use secret identities (and having underground popularity with certain elements of the school). Now this raises the questions: what schools are likely to have the best teams and for that matter, what sort of teams would various schools favor?

Okay, let me go over a few places that don't tend to make everyone's top ten lists but probably should be. Hermit has done a magnificent job with Texas, so let me cover a few other places: Las Vegas: Minor league in name and perception only. Technically most supers who've been there or study the place conclude that it is major league in terms of threat level to any super passing through. The place is a very attractive target due to all the gambling money there. The casino owners know it and so have hired the very best mercenary supers that money can get (sometimes from Miami) and then back them up with a squadron of lawyers that are very good at getting 'excessive force' charges dropped. Supervillains who try to knock over a casino have a very high fatality rate and most of the rest end up crippled for life. Of course this is done with a view towards minimizing the violence in the eyes of the tourists, so as not to scare them. That is the major reason the casino owners object to outside superheroes in Las Vegas. They are too soft on criminals and often do more property dmaage and scare tourists more. Unsactioned superhero activity in Vegas tends to be strongly discouraged, though usually its more through restraining orders than force. Oh yes, supervillains who think their telepathy, clairvoyance, precogntion or cyber/telekinesis will win them a fortune in Vegas are in for a very bad surprise. Whether its magical, technological, psionic or whatever, most government agencies consider the Vegas casinos to be some of the most secure areas on the planet. In general, supers are not allowed to gamble at those places unless they have been cleaeed with the owners and in general only famous or rich (or preferably both) supers are allowed in to do that, as tourist draws. Atlantic City and most other famous gambling centers around the planet more or less operate along similar principles. These places are in some ways not good places to set up campaigns but they are great places to send heros through, if only to give them a taste of going up against a high power, highly trained squad of supers that can scare the crap out of all but the most powerful teams elsewhere. Universities: Univerisities are breeding grounds for supers. They also tend to have a lot of resources that are very attractive to various sorts of supers on both sides of the law. The more prestigious universities probably have standing superhero teams, and not composed of undergraduates but rather a regular roster that sticks around and is paid out of university funds to deal with supervillain attacks and any disruptive origins. Of course these days universities all have college superhero teams composed of undergraduates with complicated eligbility rules. Being a high school metahuman, brilliant inventor or mystic type, is a good way to get a college scholarship these days. These teams usually act as backup to the standing superhero teams, working crowd control, making sure that a disruptive event in one spot isn't a distraction for the main team. These teams also compete against other college superhero teams as well. In fact increasingly a lot of the professional superhero teams (or the cities that back them) are paying a lot of attention to would be superheroes on the college circuit. A few supervillains as well. Universities tend to be very annoyed about outside supers coming in uninvited. It isn't too difficult to get clearance to go in to one of these places, especially if its just a scientific consultation, though due to obvious potential complications superheroes have to clear things through the appropriate office first and have their need evaluated against potential liability. Not too many universities are willing to examine a Doctor Destroyer creation. Obviously, university sports are getting increasingly good at detecting genetic/chemical alterations, cybernetic enhancements, and mystic power. Certain advanced forms of 'chi' training are currently being debated on the college and professional level. The results could have a profound impact on college and professional sports. Universities would be a great place to base a superhero team, especially the college team. Origins all over the place, but what brings them together? Their scholarship money. Or they can be the anti-team that didn't make the official team and has to use secret IDs because they're operating in violation of university regulations,

I just came up with another reason supervillains get involved here: guess where a lot of supervillains get their experimental lab subjects from? I expect to see a lot of origins stories, heroic and villanous here. No doubt those who are willing to become superheroes have an easier time getting their green cards. I don't exactly see the US trying to deport superpowered immigrants who are willing to work for the side of law and order. They might not be put on border patrol due to sympathies but they would probably be put to dealing with supervillains who deal in illegal immigrants in a bad way.

As I said in another thread, we really need to get someone to do Foxbat. Maybe Steve Long can demonstrate his true commitment to promoting Champions. Anyone got a ping pong ball gun for him?

My apologies. I was just trying to counter the focus on population in some fo the other posts. Not sure about the unlawful immigration stance. Not a huge amount of money there, I'd think. Drugs certainly. It would also be the corridor for Central/South American supervillains heading into the United States illegally or working the drug trade. Yes, but you can't quite rob an oil well or a mine the way you would a bank. This is better, though we end up getting dangerously close to the stereotyping thread elsewhere. But yes, a lot of non-Native American magicians can enter this area as well seeking to exploit the resources here or deal with older powers buried here accidentally unearthed by developers. I would say that gives it a fairly cosmopolitan superhero/supervillain community. It probably needs a range of types to deal with mystic threats and technological threats as well as those just looking for the money or raiding the museum. So Houston naturally becomes the place to find heroes and villains with scientific origins, especially ones concerning space. If you have alien supers, they might even tend to congregate here and by the network effect it becomes the place for aliens to live on Earth or at least in North America. And given the more advanced technology you find, the space program in this world probably gives Houston a lot more to do as well. As the coordinating center for American Earth to orbit traffic that makes it a target to hit, especially by those who have ambitious plans for space. I can see Houston actually getting more activity than Dallas. At first it is, until you hit the equilibrium point. Then you have a steady stream of heroes and villains coming to Texas expecting to find easy pickings and all of a sudden discovering the entrenched superhero and supervillain community does not consider Texas a ripe plum for picking. As a result, in the superhero/villain community, at least those with any time in it, Texas is likely to develop a reputation as the major focus for major league supers activity in the south. In the public eye, it is viewed as minor league and view the Texans claim to major league status as just typical Texan boasting. PRIMUS and those in the know, know that Texas is major league and warn any superheroes going into the area to clear things first with a local team before they get a nasty surprise. I keep wondering when cities looking to increase their budgets start sponsoring friendly 'superhero showdowns' between different cities.

What this all means. In the end, you have to look at the hot spots that will attract supervillain types. Money, political power, technology to loot, mystic power are the basic ones. There may be others but offhand I can't think of any. The most powerful spots of these types will attract the most powerful supervillains and supervillain teams, who will then weed the weaker villains out until they can't drive anyone else out, not without risking being hit by a third party. The population roster will be stable until a stronger outside supervillain or team can muscle in and displace a weaker one. The local population will bring in superheroes until they have enough power to deal with the local supervillain problem, and have superhero teams that are capable of taking on these local threats and coming out alive. Weaker superheroes will be strongly discouraged from coming to the city, for their own survival. Given that the cities the weaker villains driven out of these cities will be in demand of heroes, those heroes are more likely to go to those places instead. The type of supervillain that you find in a region depends heavily on what there is to attract a supervillain to that place in the first place. New York has Wall Street and the NYSE. Washington DC has our nation's capital. Miami has drugs/drug money flowing through it. Silicon Valley has technology. And of course there are whatever areas you deem to have mystic significance. LA will get those supervillains who want to see their names and faces in the media more than anything. Naturally, you tend to get superheroes of a matching type as well in these places. Incidentally, the presence of high tech teams in a high tech region only adds to the high tech attraction factor of the place. Ditto for magic. The more mystic heroes and villains and the artifacts/spellbooks they bring, the more mystic attraction a place tends to have. For that matter, if you're playing the mutant card in your universe, the larger the mutant community in an area, the more attractive it is for mutant superheroes and supervillains. Mutant supervillains can find a civilian mutant population to blend into and the mutant superhero population has greater support from the mutant community. The social factor also affects high tech and mystic heroes and villains, who will find it easier to work together and socialize with each other in their off hours. So to address Hermit's last point in my last point: what the heck are supervillain teams doing down in Texas? What's the attraction down there for them? So to answer Hermit's original question, a GM has to map out where the greatest amount of money, legal or illegal is flowing around, where are the high tech centers that attract the tech types, and where are the mystic sites of power that will attract those interested in the occult. As well as oddball places like LA/Hollywood and sites where civilian mutant communities will form. Not that the straight population distribution is totally useless. People tend to go where the money is and move away from financially impovrished areas. It's a good starting point but in the end you have to start looking at all the other factors to really come up with a good idea of where heroes and villains are going to be found. And in some ways I see the thing being a more granular echo of the baseball system. There are the major leagues and the minor leagues. There are the cities where the heavy hitters live and protect (or loot) and there are the small fry that either work for the heavy hitters or decide to be big fish in small ponds. And due to feedback effect you're going to find a non-even distribution of origin types. So let me posit a question Hermit: what are three or four supervillain teams going to be finding it worth going after in Texas to bring down three or four superhero teams to go after them?

Ecological look at metahumans. I'm not a biologist, so take this with a grain of salt. But my basic view of superheroes and supervillains is that of two species of predator. The non-super population can be viewed as a strictly prey species. The supervillain community exists feeding off of the prey species. As I observed in a last post, this species will migrate to where the feeding is best. The superhero community is a predator species that preys strictly on the supervillain predator species. As a result, the superhero population migrates to match the supervillain population distribution. Now there isn't an infinite prey population for the supervillain community to feed on. The more supervillains in an area, the less there is to go around. As a result, there is going to be pressure against supervillain migration to attractive areas by the supervillain population already in place, which has nothing to gain and much to lose by the inclusion of additional supervillains. As a result, there is going to be a weeding effect among the established supervillain population in the attractive areas. There are tactics to counter this, such as the formation of supervillain teams or the additions of superpowered minions for a powerful supervillain. Some supervillains may take hit and run tactics, hoping to get in and out before the local supervillain population notices they've been through there. But on average there is not just going to be a supervillain population distribution showing the attractiveness of the areas to supervillains but there will also be a supervillain power distribution that also echoes the attractiveness of an area. Places like Miami are on average going to have more powerful villains than less attractive places. Incidentally this power spike can work against the population distribution. The more powerful the individual elements are, the more they are going to want to grab and the larger their 'territory' is likely to be. Think of it as the attractiveness of a region forming a sort of character point pool to be divded up among all the supervillains of the region and their minions. The fewer the villains the more powerful they are and the larger the turf they will claim so the more money comes in to them. Now what about our superhero population? The most powerful superheroes will migrate to the areas with the most powerful villains, and they are going to exert pressure on the less powerful heroes to keep out of town as a result. Those that don't may well end up getting themselves annihilated by a supervillain team they end up crossing by accident. The natural place for them to migrate to are the areas where all the weaker supervillains were shoved out to, who are more on their own level. In the end, the superhero population migrates to match the distribution of the supervillain population. Now a lot of supervillains may adopt a nomadic strategy rather than a stationary strategy. That is, find a town where there are no superheroes (or at least known ones) and hit it for all its worth and then move on. This is a strategy favored by low power types that can't even make minion grade for a more established supervillain team. I'm not exactly sure how the superhero community will evolve to deal with this phenomena but someone will come up with something to deal with transient supervillains. In my last post, I'm going to put everything together for a discussion of results.

My take on Hermit's question Going by straight population distribution is a bad idea. It's predicated on two assumptions that when closely examined a case can easily be made that neither one is true. 1. The distribution of metahuman origins precisely matches the general population distribution. 2. Metahumans after having their origins will remain in their community. Let's take each of them in turn. First off, origins tend to happen in the presence of violence or weird phenomena, or require some sort of technological, magical or martial arts background. These phenomena tend to favor some areas over others. Take Florida as an example. Due to the drug trade, one expects the rate of origins to be considerably higher there than many much more populated states that don't have the crime problem that Flordia has. You are likely to see a lot of powers woken in a near-death experience or the grim avengers type as a result. Likewise, areas with a low population but a lot of high tech or mystic phenomena are likely to have a much higher rate of origins as well. Sliicon Valley is likely to have a fairly high incidence of technology-based heroes simply because of all the technology there. As for mystic areas, look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Hellmouth for inspiration. Now of course this depends a lot on the origin story for powers in the world, but I tend to think in most cases the origins are going to have an uneven distribution, centering on problem spots of various sorts. Now there are exceptions of course, but that gets us to the second point. Assume for a second there is a town where statistics indicate there will be two supers. Assume for argument's sake one is a superhero and the other one is a supervillain. Now the question is, will the supervillain remain in town? Compare the money to be made in one of those population million towns with the money to be made in the much larger cities. Likely as not, as soon as the villain has mastered their powers and practiced a bit on the local population honing their skills (assuming they are smart) they're going to head off for where the real money is to be made. If they're not so smart, they'll head off direct. So what is our superhero to do? Even assuming he's not the fame and fortune type, will the superhero really feel needed in a town with no supervillain crime? Their powers are to some extent going to be wasted there. Their powers are best used combatting supervillains. Which means when the supervillain leaves town, so does the superhero. And of course superheroes wanting to be famous are going to go where the action is. Again, the areas of Florida that see a lot of the drug trade are really going to see a rise in supervillains as everyone hires superpowered muscle to deal with rivals and with all the superheroes that are going to be attracted to the area. These two forces more or less feed into each other. Supervillains and by reaction superheroes are going to tend to drift to certain areas and as a result those places are going to have higher-than-normal origin rates. In my next post, I'm going to look at the counterforce acting on the two forces mentioned here.

Actually, sometimes I think I would have prefered to have an 'old guard/premier' team for the signature team of the Champions Universe. The mega-point monsters as sort of the archetypes of various character types. Heck, I would have been happy for the 4th Ed Champions with some mods fill that role in fifth edition. Even if it meant having Seeker around. Which is not to say the Champions book couldn't have had some starting 350 pt character examples, but I would have liked all CU references out of the Champions book and had some generic characters with disad space left in for psych lims and hunteds so that players could fill in the backgrounds of the characters themselves. Generic example brick, blaster, martial artist, mentalist, magician and speedster.

Re: Comliness? Probably a reason for a COM roll then, I suppose. To allow for the individual variation based on personal taste.

Figured characteristics can be bought up, remember. That's like saying that someone with a low STR can never have a high PD so PD can't be a figured characteristic of STR. Perhaps. Even probably. Tracking individual SIMs for every individual is probably too tedious. General rule of thumb modifiers in some table somewhere will handle those cases. A simple table of sympathy/antipathy levels and the modifier it gives. But I like the idea of a default difficulty modifer being given to 1. People who meet the character but may not know of their reputation 2. People who know the character by reputation. So Mucous Man may have a -3 modifier to everyone who doesn't know that he is the beloved champion of Slimeville. To the people of Slimeville he has a +1 modifier on his positive PRE rolls with the good citizens because of his positive reputation there. To villains he has a +3 bonus to his rolls (the negative SIM value flipped for a hostile situation). The GM only has to write down two numbers per character. That seems to me to be fairly trackable.