I have been thinking about this concept in the back of my head for a long time, It was put back sharply into the forefront of my thoughts this afternoon after finishing Calamity, the final book in Brandon Sanderson’s Reckoners series of young adult novels.
The three book series looks at a world where superpowers were introduced into the world just over a decade ago when a red star suddenly appeared in the sky. People called it Calamity. Normal men and women began turning into Epics – people with amazing abilities. It was like something out of comic books, with one not-so-small exception.
These men and women were not heroes. The more they used their newfound powers, the more twisted their moral compasses became. In the end, they all fell to the darkness caused by their powers. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
To make it worse, many Epics could not be killed through conventional means. These individuals known as High Epics had one or more forms of invincibility, making them invulnerable to attack in some form or another. They had unbreakable skin, or they had strong danger senses that allowed them to move out of the way of danger or were protected with forcefields or they were surrounded with fire that melted bullets and burned attackers. They could not be fought. They could not be controlled. They were like a force of nature. So the government passed the Capitulation Act, which allowed Epics to operate outside of the law. The government continued to rule as much as it was able to, but most of the world fell to chaos and lawlessness. The most powerful High Epics took entire cities to rule as their own like Kings and Emperors of old – ruling with absolute power and absolute certainty.
But Epics were not completely invincible – not even the most powerful ones. They all had a single weakness, individual to them, that negated their powers. Obviously these were closely guarded secrets, but it allowed some people to fight back. The story follows one cell of The Reckoners as they work to free the world from the rule of Epics.
Story aside, it got me thinking about superhero roleplaying games, and since I’ve been writing so much about them lately, exploring this idea seemed like a natural fit. So often in comics and movies we see the heroes being heroic and the villains being villainous. There is not always a lot of gray. Sure, sometimes the methods the heroes use are questionable or put them at odds with law enforcement, but at the end of the day they are simply trying to do the right thing and stop the bad guys from doing the wrong thing. What if that wasn’t the case? What if using your powers to help others put you at risk of falling to the same villainy you were fighting against? Your powers suddenly become powerful tools to help you solve problems, but it turns them into a double edged sword. They can help you, but they can ruin you and take away your humanity. It forces you to consider them as a last resort and places a lot of emphasis on your other skills and abilities that you possess outside of your array of powers, completely changing the feel of the game.
So I want to start toying with a Morality mechanic for Wild Talents, similar to what you see in the various World of Darkness games to represent humanity or the various ways that Star Wars games choose to emulate the call of the Dark Side – with a sliding scale that shows just how close to falling outside of human morality a character is. The nature of the One Roll Engine makes this kind of game seem a natural fit – you can play it a lot less “four color” than some other supers RPGs on the market without sacrificing much. It also seems quite easy to tie it into the game’s existing Willpower mechanic by simply introducing another derived Stat called Morality that starts equal to to your Base Will score. The stronger you are in that capacity, the stronger your grip on humanity is.
This rule does mean that characters and creatures without Base Will (such as robots and constructs) do not have Morality scores. This makes sense – they are not human and they are not governed by human morality. I would also say that these rules would not affect heroes that derive their powers from outside devices such as supersuits or weapons. But then again, I probably wouldn’t implement this rule in a game where the characters didn’t draw their powers from the same internal source.
When your character uses his powers, have him roll a Stability check alongside it. For simple applications of the power or non-dramatic uses, a simple match allows the character to shrug off the darkness. For more demanding or awesome uses of the power, you could give a minimum Difficulty to the roll making it harder to resist the effects. If you want to make it really interesting, you could make the Difficulty of the Stability check equal to the height of the activation roll that triggered the power. This continues to make powers with larger dice pools and Hard Dice more effective and reliable, but more dangerous to use. Wiggle Dice are the wild card here, as always, and in fact might become more useful as you can set the Difficulty of the Stability check as you see fit. Either way, if the roll fails, the character loses a point of Morality.
At first glance, this rule makes special dice in either the Command Stat or the Stability skill incredibly useful. Why wouldn’t every character simply buy two Hard Dice in Stability to pass any check you need to make? But – if used in a setting like this, tapping into that power to resist the effects of the darkness is something that would not work. It’s literally fighting fire with fire. You can still use those kinds of dice in conscious actions – such as using your Hard Dice in your Command Stat to issue orders to troops under your command, but not to resist the effects of using that power.
You can also utilize the game’s Mental Trauma rules with the Morality score, giving a third option for a character who fails one – instead of losing all of your current Willpower for standing your ground and facing down whatever caused you to make the Trauma check, you can instead lose a point of Morality as you harden yourself to the horrors of what you just witnessed. If a character’s Morality ever drops to 0 they effectively become an NPC, gripped fully in the throes of the darkness and reveling in their powers. Morality only returns as the characters abstain from using their abilities and their powers. Every day that the character does not use their powers allows them to gain one point of Morality back as they shake the darkness that their powers cause within them.
You can also give characters the option to spend their Morality, making it an attractive option when the chips are down and they need to make an action succeed. A player can, instead of rolling his dice pool for an action that utilizes one of his powers, spend a point of Morality to say he rolled a 2×10. He can spend more points to increase the Width of the roll by an equal amount. On top of that, they still need to make the Stability check to avoid losing another point of Morality on top of it. This is obviously a much more seductive option when the characters are on the ropes and out of Willpower and running low on Base Will, but its potency is something that cannot be ignored and may be utilized as an easy out from a particularly difficult situation, albeit at a potentially dangerous cost.
I have yet to implement this in a game and see how it works. I’m sure there are plenty of refinements that can be made to it over the course of some playtesting, but I’m very intrigued to see how the idea works.
Ben Erickson
