An observation on the nature of evil, pt. 1

I have a few observations that I'd like to share, but I don't think I have the energy to share them all right now. I'll start off with this one, and we'll see where it goes.

In my nightmares, evil is never represented as Voorhez-ian character or a Meyers-ish monstrosity. Evil simply never acts that way. Instead, my nightmares are always filled with evil characters who owe much of their behavior to Peppy LePew. I'm not sure what that means. But regardless, the evil denizens of my dreams are never lurking in wait, they're never using chainsaws to bust through the walls. They just bound along happilly and unstoppable. Are they innocent? Do they know the horrors that they hope to inflict, that they will, in fact, inflict if they get their hands on me? This I cannot say for sure, but one thing is for certain: never do my nightmare villains ever let on that they think of themselves as evil.

There's something about Peppy LePew. He wants to have sex with a cat, and the cat could probably drive Peppy away if she could only talk. She could explain that they are not of the same speicies. But she can't talk. So Peppy just bounds along as if she were a female skunk. The hillarity is that, if Peppy only knew, he too would see his act as ludicrous, but what if that simply weren't the case? What if one of the things that Peppy gets off on is the fact that the situation is ridiculous and awkward, and the cat is unfortunately powerless to make an explanation that would prevent her being a skunk's plaything? What if that's what he enjoys?

And that's what the villains in my dreams are like. They consider sticking a knife in me a game that I too will enjoy, but I don't speak their language. I can't express myself in any way that they will not take as sarcasm. When I plead for mercy, they think I'm joking. If they only knew that I didn't think it fun to have a knife stuck in me, they probably wouldn't do it, but there's no way to tell them. So, the question must be asked, are they evil, or have they simply mis-read the situation?

Playing Eric

In a recent post...well, the last post really. Avram attempted to get around what can now only be a mental exercise. A game I used to illustrate the difference between my thinking and that of the Drivler. The game might be called, "Getting a flying character past Eric," but aside from this moderate level of explanation, I don't think that I fully fleshed out the rules of the game. Avram, not fully understanding the rules, postulated a simple solution to this Gordion knot: name the character Flying Guy and say, "that's what he does." What possible recourse would our hypothetical "Eric" have to deny such a character.

Okay, so first of all, you're main problem Avram is that you've defined the character in terms of his power. That's a no-no. After all, you've essentially said that the character is defined as having the power that we are attempting to define a character in order to get. Let me try this another way.

In Champions, or at least in this Eric-esque version of Champions, we do not make characters based on their powers. No. We define the character based on their conception. What is the conception of this character? How do these powers work? Then we buy all the appropriate powers.

This brings us immediately to Eric's most powerful weapon against his players--point totals. You see, in Champions, powers, skills, super-heroic characteristics, cost points, and you only have so many points to spend (220 for those who want to know). Now, if you suggest your concept, it naturally implies the powers that your character should have, and once I've suggested my concept, it only remains to purchase those powers--all those powers--in order to bring into the game the character which my concept has implied.

Now, here may be seen the basis for the difference between the way of thinking of the Drivler and myself. I am always trying to curb these definitions so that I don't have to buy too many powers, or more precisely, so that I do not find it impossible to create the character within the 220 point limit.

From another standpoint, concept limits power. I might say, for instance, that I want a 2d6 killing attack with the advantage "penetrating." Well, what's the concept? Well, my character is covered by mono-filament spikes. Now, some villain comes along and he has armor which is "hardened" (nullifies penetrating attacks) because it is sealed even to deficiencies at the atomic level--that's his concept. Neat! Well, now I have real trouble buying a killing attack that is double penetrating because well...how do I say that it can find chinks in the armor smaller than an atom. I know, I have a tacion field of relative danger! But then, what does triple penetrating look like? And what other powers must I imply by being surrounded by Tacyons?

So, for instance, your flying guy. How does his power work? He avoids things Arthur Dent-esque. You've already suggested the million or so other powers that go along with this concept, and thus have already implied that your character will not fit inside the 220 point limit. If we say that the character has a philosophical aversion to the Earth, then we must be able to account for all the other powers that are implied for a character who can tanscend natural laws by the sheer force of his philosophical posturing, and in doing so, we have ceased to create a superhero, and are now working on a god.

Another concept might be that the character read the Hitchhiker's trilogy and was so moved by it that he incorporated this particular feature into his very being. So, the character can make real aspects of the novel? What's to stop him from moving faster than light after reading Asimov or seeing the future after reading Stephen King? I hope you see the difficulty.

Now, we must also consider as rules to this game another difficulty that is likely to come up, and these might be said as repercussive problems within the Ganthian universe. Let us assume that the hypothetical Eric is really really good at making his characters (the villains of the story) and that in many ways his concepts are dictated by yours. Wolverine implies Sabertooth. Green Lantern implies Sinestro. Except Eric isn't just kind of good at this, he's wicked, and a little bit malevolent. Green Lantern wouldn't simply have Sinestro in Eric's universe, he'd have a whole army of Green Lantern forces hunting down the renegade Green Lantern character attempting to shirk his galactic responsibility by hanging out on Earth and stopping bank robberies. Meanwhile there would be an entire faction of evil super creatures from another dimension that are the natural and sworn enemies of the Lanterns (and who are more than a match for their nemesis) and they're hunting down our Green Lantern hero as well. Eric enjoyed villains who could suck your soul from a thousand miles away.

So, for instance, if you said that Flying Guy came from another dimension where people could all fly--and thereby, stopped any counter-argument that Eric might have posed concerning "laws of nature"--you could expect to be hunted by a serious group of galactic bad asses sworn to keep creatures from alternate dimensions out of this one. I'm talking an organization with psykers and dropships and mecha and mind-slave supercharacters who are above the feeble law enforcement of Ganth and who are all ready to spirit you away to some hell hole of a prison in a forgotten section of the galaxy where you will rot for all eternity to pay for your crimes against this dimension.

In other words, when coming up with this concept, you have to be able to:
1- define the nature of your power so that it actually gives you something useful to do in a world where people have anti-tank weaponry for arms and computerized targeting systems for brains. 2- limit your concept so that the character can be created within the limited point value that your are allotted.
3- avoid concepts that suggest environmental repercussions equal to nuclear annihilation.

Now, to give you an example of how this works, I would like to use an actual character from our group known as The Puppeteer. The Puppeteer grew up as a lonely orphan after his powers manifested and killed off his parents, and presumbably his sister--who was never found. His concept was that he had access to a Tune Town-esque place where all inanimate objects were alive and could talk. He had the power to overlay that reality with this, and so, he could bring inanimate objects to life. He could, for instance, animate a house.

Except that a house doesn't have legs or arms. It can flick on and off various light switches and air conditioning/heating units. But it really can't punch a guy. More often than not, Puppeteer could only make various things talk...but then who really wants to talk to a soda can? Every once in a while, he'd animate something interesting, but most of the crap you find on super-heroic battlefield is not worth mentioning, and more importantly, the objects that he animated could only use the points they already had, so there was no, "give the pencils flight," or anything like that. The pencils would simply come to life, happy to see the Puppeteer and generally not smart enough to keep quiet while we attempted to sneak up on whatever bad ass was threatening the peace of Ganth that day.

But what were the repercussions of the Puppeteer's power. Well, he'd blasted his sister into that other dimension where she was now a tyrant queen (which is why all the stuff that the Puppeteer animated was so happy to be on this side of the barrier--they'd escaped), and unlike her brother, she had access to the big bad M.F.'s in her dimension which she routinely sent at our boy to mess him up. So, he was hounded by giant living teddybears with razor sharp claws and various other goodies from the toy chest turned dangerous. Evidently, she had never grown up enough to animate space battle stations, or maybe galactic patrol was taking those down without our noticing them, but when she put her mind to it, rock 'em sock 'em robots could get a little rough...and that's what you get for being able to talk to soda cans in the Eric-verse.