Puck’s Blog

I went to Toren’s last night to make up Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition characters for his new campaign.  Well, that was the plan, but I was so excited about actually playing that I’d made up three possible characters the day before using Simpson’s M&M2 Excel Character Builder (with a few modifications to fix some errors — I’ll submit a fixed sheet to him soon).  I created:

• The Humanitarian — a M&M copy of my main City of Heroes character — a “flying tanker”.  He’s super strong (133 tons max lift), nigh-invulnerable and can fly 1000 mph.
• Flinger — a teleporter with several abilities based on teleportation and the side-powers you’d need to make it work.  If you could teleport things to the other side of the planet you must be able to alter their velocity or they’d skid along the ground at twice the Earth’s rotational velocity.  So Flinger can impart and remove object velocities and he uses this to “fling” small objects (like pennies) at enemies at super-high velocities.  His maximum extended-teleport range is “nearby star systems”, and he can teleport others (rife for abuse, so he’d only do long-range on inanimate objects — teleporting Doctor Evil into the Sun would be a downer for the campaign).
• Omen — Omen was a character I made to point out how broken Toren’s old Power Enterprise system was.  The character creation involved telling Toren the powers you wanted and then working with him to make the character.  After that you could do whatever you wanted and if you had the money, buy whatever you wanted, including supertech alien technology to build battlesuits, etc.  It was very expensive, of course.  So I made Omen, who was a near-peak physical/mental human with one power: Precognition.  And after character creation, I played the stock market, became a multi-billionaire, and created the most powerful power suit anyone in the game had.  After one adventure, he became an NPC.  I wanted to see if I could build a balanced version that worked with M&M 2E.  And I did.  He was quite cool, actually.

Because I had these characters complete before the character-creation session I spent my time helping out those who didn’t know the rules very well making theirs and helping out with character concepts.

Mostly I helped out Mike Jackson, who turned out to be the director of Dial A For Alphaman, which stars my old friend Andy Thompson.  Andy & I were in both high school and college together, and performed in both Garrison’s Garage and Hamlet.  He played Hamlet and I was Horatio (though to be honest it was one of my worst performances).  Andy has gone on to quite a few performances including “Scalp Taker” in the mediocre The Chronicles of Riddick.  Mike confirmed my suspicion that Andy had several bigger scenes in the movie that got cut, including a dialogue scene with Dame Judy Dench.

Anyway, Mike wanted a gadgeteer and after he leafed through the powers and talked about a unifying concept we came up with a machine-spirit-talker who has clouds of nanobots doing his bidding.  It’s a good build that can do a lot of cool stuff, including a very good “Create Object” power much like the Green Lantern except his are probably metal coloured rather than glowy and green.  I suggested the character name “Deus Ex” and it’s stuck.

Here’s The Humanitarian Character Sheet (149kb PDF)  (updated 11pm with some more tweaks)