Super Powers

This is an overview of powers from a character creation standpoint. Note that by this system, you will not be able to create the powerful characters from your favorite comics. We are creating students, not powerful heroes and villains.

Power Set

Simply, this is the core of your abilities. It is what fuels your super abilities, possibly how you gained your powers. This should be something that gives it flavor and makes your character unique. In one or two simple words, describe the basis of your power.

Examples:

Radioactive Spider-bite
Meteor Radiation
Volcano
Thermal Kinesis
Starlight
Super Genius
Tech Gadgetry

Abilities

Based on this power set, you may then define the next four abilities you gain from this. You should be creative with this. The hard limits are imposed by the FS3 system itself.

Action Skills

There are four types of action skills associated with super powers and they are: Energy, Mystic, Physical and Psychic. Each skill represents both your attack and defense against this type of super power. Fighting, weapons and strength all fall under physical. A character may only choose two of these.

Example: Red Tremor's power set is seismic tremors, they are terran based as he pulls seismic energy from the ground and converts it into wave lengths he attacks with. So he could have one attack that is energy in nature, sending out energy ripples that damage opponents, and his other could be psychic, attacking the mind and stunning enemies enough for him to give compulsions to.

Background Skills

These are all other abilities that do not have a specific combat focus. This could change manipulation scale or duration of one of your other powers. Want an attack to affect more targets, this is your other. Want to teleport multiple people, heal people, increase duration of an ability, this falls into other. Any utility ability outside the other three, this is where it goes. Communicate with animals, don't need sleep, memorize lots of stuff, read super fast. This includes water breathing, survive in a vacuum, locate objects, transform, etc.

Other includes movement. This is some form of movement you gain from your power. Flight, teleporting, swimming, burrowing, web slinging. Floating discs, body swapping, anything that gives you mobility beyond your own two feet. If you have wings or flippers, you still need to dedicate your movement to flying and swimming respectively. This does not grant you survivability in said elements, you will need to refer to other for this.

A minor one time, non-scaling ability requires two points in the background skill. Such as water breathing, only changing into one shape, photographic memory, etc. when in doubt work with staff to determine an appropriate cost. This is not champions, point spends are not detailed to the minute.

There will be ways to gain more powers.

Example of a tricky character's skills using the system:

Young Nightcrawler:

Action Skills:
Physical (5): He is a master of swords, this represents his sword attack and his amazing agility when fighting, also he can teleport quickly away before even being touched. This can by direct physical damage or stunning effect.
Energy (5): While he has no energy attack, he can easily escape energy based attack by teleporting away from the source.

Background Skills
Teleport (5): He can teleport up to a couple miles, beyond this he becomes disoriented.
Teleport Others (2): He can teleport up to 3 others alongside himself, they are disoriented unless they have a psychic defense.
Wall Crawl (1): He can wall crawl at normal speed, including walking on the ceiling.
Prehensile Tail (2): Acts as a third hand

Wall crawl is 1 because they could scale the movement with a point or two.

Thus is only one potential build, depends on the flavor of play one is after.

Young Tony Stark

Action Skills:
Physical (6): The suit is designed to withstand a lot of damage while having multiple options for him to physically hurt his opponents. From punches to missiles and anything in between.
Energy (4): The suit is also designed to withstand harmful environments including radiation and other dangerous energies. He can also fire off high energy beam like weapons if needed.

Background Skills:
Suit Flight (4): Mach 3-4 range.
Survivability (4): The suit can withstand high and low temperatures, allowing Tony breath/survive underwater and in the vacuum of space. (For points for multiple environs that are close to earth, thus wouldn't include weird chaos dimensions or like Limbo)
Suit Utility (3): The suit has a number if utility functions that simulate other typical tools one might have in a mechanics garage. From arc welding fingertips to a computer jack to access a terminal. An extinguisher if needed, a torch, garrote wire, socket wrenches, the like. (This is only three as it represents a jack of all trades on typical equipment most humans could have access to)
Engineering (5): He is a genius on the rise, he designed his own power suit and had many more inventions ready to roll out.

Working with Actions Skills and a Utility skill (magic and psychics should definitely read)

Some skills, specifically magic and psychics, will need points in your action skills and then a utility or utilities purchased with bg skills. No matter what you put in the action skill, or how you describe it, you will still need the background skill to represent anything outside of combat.

There is a choice here between 2 point abilities and tricks to do something (fly, breath water, teleport) and using a catch all utility skill. Two considerations to make; first if you only have one ability and one ability is somehow negated you've lost your bag of tricks and, second, the 2 point non-scaling abilities are just that non scaling. 2 point flying is flying around at the speed of a normal person (up to running speed of 20-25 mph) …. 4 point flying is super speed flying.

Utility is hard to define with the variety it can have. The best way to imagine this is that 2 point utility (magic, psychics, voodoo, water elementalist, dream weaver, whatever) is a bag of tricks that represents normal things humans can do with assisted tools and such. Magic can create a flame (a lighter), break a window (hammer), type slowly on a keyboard with ghost fingers, lift a glass of water, tickle someone. The more points that go in the stronger the abilities one will have. 2-3 would be the equivalent of a low level super (1 point abilities), floating friends with you, untying knots, sending that flame to start remove fires, lifting water and splashing it on a flame as a sprinkler, freezing water, etc. 4-6 points is where its getting more impressive. Just consider the affect you're able to produce as about 2 points lower in scale than what a super of equivalent power can do; i.e. speedster with 6 speed versus magic 6 guy in a race, speedster wins assuming the magic guy only affects himself to go faster (he can get up to about a 4 speed person). Secondly, the bag of tricks isn't wholly endless, if you're doing 3-4 tricks at 2 levels less than you, this is about the limit. There is no hard fast rule for this, all the background skills are just that, they are your versatility in situations. If you want to open portals to other dimensions, you're going to need something higher 6+, as teleporting like that I imagine is in the 4-6 range to begin with. But its all utility and we're not trying to limit, we're just asking not to take advantage to get better then everyone else with one trick abilities like this, they can be awesome and versatile, but the better person has the one trick versus bag of tricks.

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