In Wolfman and Perez’s run on Teen Titans, there’s a moment that always stayed with me. The Titans are being overrun in their base by the Brotherhood of Evil, and Plasmus, a Nazi experiment human-turned-bright-pink-corrosive-jelly blob, is terrorising Fran, Kid Flash’s magnetic girlfriend.
Speedy stops him dead in his tracks with a trick arrow he jury-rigged from their fridge’s cooling unit, freezing him solid.
It’s classic superhero science. You stop and think about it – can your fridge instantly freeze 100kg or more of water? Probably not, but it’s a pretty cool moment, in the way that Boxing Glove Arrows are cool.
Can you pull this off in a game?
I call this “runtime-socketing”. When you’re performing character maintenance in your base you can slot enhancements in your powers to make them stronger in various ways or add new effects. What if you had powers with one or more free sockets that you could slot at run-time on a mission?
This also works a little like Champions HERO system’s idea of “Power Pools” where you could buy a number of points that could be changed at any time within whatever parameters you set to simulate nebulous magical powers or shape-changing or whatever.
You can imagine Doctor Strange putting together a custom spell on the spot to defeat a specific enemy.
Or imagine Rocket Raccoon of Guardians of the Galaxy, taking cover, fiddling with his guns to clip together a new “supergun” designed to take out the specific target they’re fighting.
And here we are:
I’ve set up three powerset to make use of a prototype socketing system with powers.
Archery will have 5 Trick Arrow powers with 1 socket, and a power to give you access to some basic warheads.
Spellcasting will have three different “Cantrips”, a beam, a projectile and a direct power, each with two sockets. It will also pack a basic set of spell modifiers as a separate power.
It additionally gets a couple of light self-and-ally buffs (Blessing and Ward) which have 2 sockets, and there’ll be a component-based power to give you some basics to lot in there.
Finally, Munitions gets the “Franken-Gun” power with 5 sockets (pending testing… this could get hairy!), allowing you to build your own mega-weapons at runtime.
You can take these powersets and get by with the versatility of the powers and the basic components offered as powers.
But you can also do more complicated tricks, such as slotting a temporary use device on your trick arrows e.g. a Stun Grenade device power.
And you can craft your own superior or custom components to do whatever you like. Do you really want a shrinking arrow? There’ll be a chance to pick up some components that do just that in the game.
I need to think of a way to salvage components from props, so you can create your own fridge arrow!
And also get the Vulnerabilities set working, so I can make a jelly villain who freezes solid when they take cold damage.
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