Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Steel Drivin' Man - Strength Knack

The name of this knack is derived from the tale of John Henry, Steel Drivin' Man, who raced the bosses' steam hammer and won. Despite the name, the knack is open to female characters as well as male, and no sexism is intended.

Steel Drivin' Man - Strength Knack - Prerequisite: Holy Rampage
Your strength is such that you may rip through walls and solid rock with your bare hands. By rolling Strength + Craft: Mining (or Science: Geology) vs the difficulties below, you may travel at 1/2 your Move rate through solid objects, walls, and debris. Burrowing is a 3 tick, DV-2, rolled action, similar to Dash except slower.
  • Solid rock: 40
  • Mortared Rock Walls: 30
  • Brick Walls: 20
  • Packed Earth: 10
  • Loose Surface Soil: 5
(Should the GM need to improvise for a material, a good starting point is 3 time the objects soak, rounded up to the nearest multiple of 5).

Activating this power costs 1 Legend per die roll. You must roll once per minute, and roll again any time the substance being burrowed through switches to a denser / more resiliant (thus higher on the chart) material. Failure on a roll not only stops you from moving, it also causes 1 level of unsoakable bashing damage as you flail your hands too hard.

Your tunnels remain open and stable for a number of hours equal to your dots in Epic Strength, then slowly collapse and fill in. Poured concrete, support beams, or other methods may be later used to make the tunnels permanent. Possession of this knack in no way prevents you from digging a tunnel the good ol' fashioned way, with lots of backbreaking effort and a good stout shovel.

2 comments:

rbbergstrom said...

Edit: Toned down radically. My rough draft was somewhere on par with Psychopomp 3, and actually better than Earth 5 in many ways. It was silly.

This version solves that, by lowering the speed and increasing the difficulties significantly. Consequent to that second part, it's of extremely limited use to a character with less than 3 dots of Epic Strength.

rbbergstrom said...

Revised again. Took some off the top of the difficulty chart. Was 50/40/25/10/5, changed to 40/30/20/10/5. Difficulties for rock were so high, even Gods of Strength would have trouble with it, and would probably rely on Ultimate Strength instead of the knack. Knocking some off the top made it more useful to Demigods and Gods without breaking the knack at Hero level.

Also gave it actual rules for how often you should roll. Prior to that, it vaguely implied you roll every action, which would get annoying quick. Since I was theoretically reducing the number of die rolls, I added a minimal Legend cost.