Last time we looked at Telepathic communications. Let’s call that the basics. It’s time to talk mind bullets, psychic shotguns , psionic blades, AKA the telepathic attacks. Last week we developed a basic Telepathic power.
Power: Telepathy
- Support: Expression/Parent Attribute: Intelligence
New Communications: Telepathy (Cost: Typical 1 AP)
Secondary Role: Offense (Cost: Major 2 AP)
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Defended By Psyche (Cost: Major 2 AP)
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Devastating (Cost: Major 2 AP)
This power establishes that Telepathy, as a means of communication and a means to attack that can only be Defended by the target’s psyche. Let’s continue to use the Professor’s Attribute’s and Power Value. That’s Intelligence 20 and Telepathy 15. This gives him a basic Attack Roll of 35 + 3d6.
An attack’s base Damage is determined as 2 Wounds for each Characteristic. However, our sample power has two Offensive Boons, Devastating and Defended By Psyche. Devastating adds 1 Wound for each 3 Levels of the Power, in this case +5 Damage. While Defended by Psyche reduces the Damage by half. This gives a starting Damage of 9, once adding in Defended By Psyche the Base Damage becomes 4.5, which we will round off to 4.
Up front that 4 might not seem like a lot of Damage. However, most heroes are more concerned with swords, bullets, and lasers, not mind blasts and lack strong Mental Defenses. Typically, unless a foe is prepared for Mental attacks, their Defense against them will be relatively low. On average a character, at this power level, without some kind of mental training will have a defense between 8 and 15 with only 1 or 2 points of Armor. That means good old Chuck is always going to be able to blast someone with his mind doing that 4 Damage.
Now let’s ramp that up.
Maneuvers allow characters to make trade offs to do different things in combat, such as grappling or tripping an opponent. Heavy Blow allows you to trade accuracy for damage. For each 10 point penalty on an Attack the character gains +3 Damage. This allows the Prof to drop his Base Attack from 35 to 15 and increase his damage from 4 to 10 Damage. Due to their limited defense against this type of Attack most Mooks would likely be knocked out after only a single mental attack, while full super villains may only be able to withstand two or three mental blasts if they were not prepared to handle the Professor.
This makes Chuck deceptively dangerous combatant. There’s probably a reason why the writers created such a host of baddies immune to his powers.
