[OSSR] Aberrant

[Longes]

All the bad memories of playing Exalted are flooding back. Oh no. If only anyone in WW knew how to learn from mistakes. So many lives could have been saved.

[Username17]

Scion is very much a new edition of Aberrant. You have super stat dots in addition to regular stat dots. Now they don't form a separate pool, but they do give a non-linear amount of automatic successes. And since the game has no difficulty chart at all to tell you what getting different numbers of successes means, it's actually more broken on first principles than Aberrant is, surprising as that is. You have one player who always gets 2 successes and another player who always gets 4 successes, and there is nothing in the rules to tell you what the difference is between getting 1 success and getting any other number of successes.

There are powers related to super attributes and there are powers related to portfolios and there is no attempt to balance those in any way. The portfolio powers come in levels with each higher tier one costing more than the ones before it (and you don't have to take them in order, even though some of the higher ones supercede the lower ones), and not all of the higher tier powers are better than the lower tier powers. Meanwhile, the super attribute add-ons are a disordered list where you can take whatever you want at the same cost regardless and some of them are just better than others.

It's a complete trainwreck. But more importantly, it's a complete trainwreck that looks exactly like someone was writing down half-remembered Aberrant mechanics.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Aberrant's Mega-Attributes were an interesting attempt to head off the "piles and piles and piles of dice" to roll issues that Exalted ran into. It's a shame nobody realized that they really can't be made to work and the only viable answer would have been to ditch Storyteller core assumptions and rework dicepools from the ground up.

[Occluded Sun]

Having Mega-Attributes act as an additional dice pool is a pretty bad idea. What's your opinion about their alternate effect - reducing the difficulty of actions?

[hyzmarca]

The simple solution is just to make mega-attributes worth more. Say, 1 mega-attribute is worth 10 regular ones. You roll as normal, but 1 mega-attribute success is equal to 10 normal successes.

So mega attributes let you do things that require oodles of successes, but you can still fail at normal tasks.

[Tannhäuser]

Why is having attributes that go over 5 inherently worse in a Storyteller game than having large pools is in Shadowrun, for example? Stretching a dice pool size can definitely break a game, but for a superhero game I assumed you'd have challenges that required staggering amounts of successes. Just straight up adding extra dice beyond the means of mortal kin seems more workable for super strength or whatever than making super strength not interact with normal strength.

Unless I'm really missing something.

[Whipstitch]

It's actually not inherently worse, it just seems that way because White Wolf keeps handling the "bucket of dice" problem by proposing "solutions" that are even worse than rolling 14+ dice and learning to make peace with the extra variance.

[name_here]

Doesn't Storyteller have some things that go weird and are more complicated than just counting hits? Also botch fuckery and the weird way that impacts things.

[Whipstitch]

There's the shifting target number bull crap but Shadowrun had that issue too at various points in its life cycle. Really, the most uniquely Storyteller problem related to dice pool sizes was probably the bit where dramatic success was determined by total hits rather than hits over threshold. That's a stupid problem to have, but it's not a problem that's fundamentally caused by having large dice pools. It's a problem caused by the fact that "dramatic success" doesn't care if you're hopping the turnstile or jumping the Grand Canyon.

[Mechalich]

Chapter 5: Quantum Powers

Quantum powers, the thing that makes Aberrant superficially a superhero game. This chapter begins with a bunch of material about how all Nova powers are actually the manipulation of quantum energies and only actually appear to be fire or ice or whatever. This doesn’t change the effects, so it really doesn’t matter. However, this excuse serves to justify the generalized power system that is used in Aberrant. Essentially almost all forms of energy are treated the same. The obvious example is Quantum Bolt – a power that covers essentially all non-elemental energy blasts.



this is a quantum bolt power


so is this

It's not an unreasonable approach, and it does keep the sheer number of powers in the book at least somewhat manageable. It does create the weird incentive to make your power something nonsensical and obscure like ‘Probabilistic Dark Force Blast’ so that no one could possibly have a resistance that interacts with it.

As might be expected by now, the system used for powers is unnecessarily complicated. All powers have a rating in dots, that goes from 1 to 5, but the powers are organized into 3 different levels of power (in the corebook anyway, the player's guide includes higher level powers). The higher level powers cost more points to buy, and they cost more quantum points to use. This has the paradoxical effect of actually making several of the lower-level powers better from a quantum economy perspective, especially some of the always-on powers that have no activation cost at all, like Claws.

You can also buy level 1 or level 2 powers with 'extras' attached. These are special add-ons that alter how powers work. They range from generic effects, like making a one-to-one attack an area attack, to various power-specific extras. Adding an extra to your power increases its level by 1, which means you cannot apply extras to any of the level 3 powers using this book.

Powers also have a quantum minimum, ranging from 1 to 5 (in this book anyway, later supplements added certain super-high quantum powers). That again makes certain powers paradoxically weaker at char gen because you have to spend a lot of points on quantum explicitly to be able to buy them and not on other things that might help your character - having high-quantum is generally useful, of course, but this restriction makes it essentially impossible to play a starting character with more than one high-quantum power. Powers with a minimum quantum of 5 are also simply unavailable for anyone who wants to play a character with a taint of 0.

Powers are used by rolling the appropriate attribute plus the dots in the power plus dots in the appropriate mega-attribute. This further suggests characters specialize in a single power that they can augment massively. However the effect of a power doesn't involved mega-attributes at all, but is instead dependent upon the dots in the power and the nova's total dots in quantum, often involving different multipliers. It's a mess, and can lead to absurd dice pool numbers.

Aberrant Core runs ~70 powers. It's an acceptable list that covers pretty much everything you need for most archetypes and concepts. As Novas are essentially mutants, all powers are personal in nature. There's no way to play Iron Man or any other sort of equipment based hero. While that does leave Mega-Intelligent characters somewhat screwed over in that they can't leverage their power effectively, it's probably a defensible choice.

I initially considered doing a power-by-power breakdown, but that's way too sloggy, so I'm just going to highlight some of the powers and how insane they are. These abilities aren't balanced against each other at all. The best damage builds can pretty much overwhelm the best defensive builds, but those glass cannons will have essentially no defenses beyond normal humans. Mental powers gank anything without specific defenses against mental attacks, which means a competent defense has to be able to handle vast amounts of physical damage and really powerful mind control. It's messy.

A few samples of the madness:

Armor: Plus 3 to bashing and lethal soak per dot, combine with mega-stamina to be able to ignore all but the most powerful attacks available. Always on. Tankage is easy in Aberrant, and cheap, and efficient in quantum. Armor 5, Mega Stamina 5 and Resiliency gives you a lethal soak of 23. Such a character laughs in the face of damage from any but the most dedicated attack builds.

Density Control: A totally broken power. Properly twinked out, density control allows you to simply ignore all non-mental attacks and also hulk out for massive strength, damage, and soak bonuses. With the right extra you can do both at the same time. Oh, and you can also walk through walls and stuff.


I bring you a vision of an utterly broken ability

Domination: The mind control you know and love, or hate, depending on personal preference. Anyway, it exists, and it is ridiculously powerful. See, you roll Manipulation+Domination resisted by Willpower. As expected, Willpower caps at 10. With Mega-Manipulation you can easily have an effective dice pool of close to double that, and therefore can easily achieve the four successes necessary to have ‘total control’ and make a person kill themselves. Your victim can roll willpower and spend willpower to reduce effects briefly, but unless someone helps them out of domination, it’s just a matter of time until you’re hosed. On the other hand, a character with a bunch of dots in psychic shield has a really good chance to resist your attempts to mind control them, and psychic shield is much cheaper than mind control to buy. However, since mortals can't have psychic shield, and most novas won't, domination serves as an 'I win' power against most enemies.


'You would like to leave my powers incredibly unbalanced, thank you'

Quantum Bolt: this power is the catch-all power used to describe pretty much any form of superpowered energy blast, physical blast, or other power. This power represents the general balance point around the kind of damage you want to be able to do in terms of normal, soakable attacks that require quantum to activate – anything less is inefficient by comparison. Of course, its damage is a complex mix of automatic levels of damage based on overall quantum rating, and dice of damage based on dots in the power. Characters with high quantum make this power devastating (with quantum five you deal 10 lethal levels flat just to start) and utterly annihilate characters without high soak. This power also clearly illustrates aberrant’s giant dicepool problem. A character with quantum bolt of 5 and the supercharge extra rolls 30 dice of lethal damage (plus 10 levels of lethal flat) – and this is totally possible at chargen (albeit with a modest taint cost). So the starting glass cannon blaster character can attack and deal an average of 22 levels of lethal damage on a single attack (not counting any potential bonus to hit successes). There are absolutely starting builds that can soak that, but they require a heavy investment in defensive powers.


yes, you can hit people, really, really, hard

Elemental Mastery: this is one of the many level 3 powers that includes multiple ‘techniques’ and you get one technique per dot. Most of these techniques have attack, defense, or utility purposes, so most characters who take such a power will have it as their only power but they won’t need anything else. Elemental mastery includes an attack power almost as good as Quantum bolt, a movement enhancer, a defensive shield, an area attack, a save or such confinement power, and a knockdown attack. So yeah, you can build the human torch if you want, but considering the high cost of these powers and the fact that their attacks and defenses are slightly less efficient than the cheaper level 2 powers that deal with them specifically, these abilities can be outclassed, especially since they trigger based on different attributes.


Magnetic Mastery is indeed badass, but mechanically inefficient in this system

Ultimately the powers system is a huge mess that creates all kinds of hideous mismatches. Since the system channels characters into specific builds around one power or perhaps two closely related powers, aberrant’s power match-ups degenerate into rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock, with certain builds obliterating some builds and dying miserably when faced with counterparts. Building a character who can survive most attacks while also still dealing out reasonable damage is doable, but that character will then get ganked by mind control or sensory overload.


for all practical purposes, you might as well model power interactions in this fashion

There are undoubtedly builds out there that totally gank everything – people talk about Density control as doing so, and Momentum Control (from the player’s guide) in the hands of the physicist allows you to break the universe in half, but most people aren’t going to sink enough effort into this system to find them and the result is the sort of impossibly swingy powers system familiar to anyone who played Exalted (without turtle combos) or Scion.

[Username17]

Since the system channels characters into specific builds around one power or perhaps two closely related powers, aberrant’s power match-ups degenerate into rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock, with certain builds obliterating some builds and dying miserably when faced with counterparts.

Yet still better than Scion, which has one true build something fierce. Super Dexterity is both attack and defense in melee and ranged and a bow of speed shoots five times for every one time you can get off a spell of any kind. Everyone is equipped with a limited pool of perfect defenses against all forms of mind magic (willpower), and it is inconceivable that you can't take out the caster with your bow before they run you out of it because of the aforementioned acting five times as often thing.

Yes, Aberrant was clunky and stupid, but their later offers devolved into "Archer Speedsters win everything forever." Which is at least five times shittier than Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock.

-Username17

[Longes]

And then we got Exalted, where everything devolved to "Make basic melee attacks every turn while keeping a perfect defense active. Trying to do anything fancy means you don't have a PD active, and get splattered."

[Koumei]

The Scion review really traumatised you with it's half-written badness, didn't it? Now even other bad games by WW give flashbacks.

Interestingly (I lied, it isn't interesting), anyone who runs Scion just sort of assumes it actually works just like Exalted. Including "No you cannot reduce the attack speed lower than 3, get fucked". Also including "having a fucking system at all where you roll dice and those dice vaguely mean anything", for that matter.

[vagrant]

The Scion review really traumatised you with it's half-written badness, didn't it? Now even other bad games by WW give flashbacks.

Interestingly (I lied, it isn't interesting), anyone who runs Scion just sort of assumes it actually works just like Exalted. Including "No you cannot reduce the attack speed lower than 3, get fucked". Also including "having a fucking system at all where you roll dice and those dice vaguely mean anything", for that matter.

Koumei, are you implying that rolling dice has a purpose other than 'impart a vague sense of agency for the player characters'? Because that's like, triple heresy. If dice meant something, that means WW would have had to put actual thought and imagination into their shitty Anne Rice fapfests! Like all White Wolf games, the dice are just a smokescreen so the players think they can 'do stuff' and that 'stuff' impacts their gaming experience. Which is quite clearly bollocks.

[Milkmaid79]

I had to laugh at Clone. One clone will have your Attributes, but lowered by one. Two clones have your Attributes lowered by two, etc to a minimum of one. So even the character with 5 Appearance will have four hideous clones, which makes me wonder if the writer knew what clone meant, at least in superhero terms. No Multiple Man types in this game!

Mega-Attributes work the same way, so those Appearance 1 clones could also have Mega-Appearance. I have no idea what those clones would look like.

Even better, each clone gets quantum points equal to half the characters. Take an attack power with the Explosive or Area bonus and let your otherwise worthless clones soften up the target with their free quantum points.

Or Quantum Construct- play Green Lantern with the admonition from the writers that just because a character can summon an army of constructs does not mean they should be allowed to do so. Effectively you get to play the character creation game every time you use the power. Do you want 'demons' with Mega-Strength, Claws, and Armor? On a good roll you could create hundreds of them.

[Mechalich]

Or Quantum Construct- play Green Lantern with the admonition from the writers that just because a character can summon an army of constructs does not mean they should be allowed to do so. Effectively you get to play the character creation game every time you use the power. Do you want 'demons' with Mega-Strength, Claws, and Armor? On a good roll you could create hundreds of them.

GMs hate quantum construct because every time its used it presents the player with an algebra problem as to how to optimize their summons, and because there's not MM to pull summoned beings out of, you have to pre-stat all the potential summoned variants for usage. Attempting to adjudicate Green Lantern in real time sucks.

[talozin]

Once you get done with the core book, be sure to go into detail on the Chrysalis mechanics from Aberrant: Teragen, which allow you to convert Taint into XP and thus reward you both coming and going for getting it in the first place.

[Berkserker]

I'm kind of reminded of Worm a bit. Don't get me wrong, it sounds like Worm is rather more coherent and better-written, but some of the setting ideas are somewhat familiar, as is the tone.

[hyzmarca]

I'm kind of reminded of Worm a bit. Don't get me wrong, it sounds like Worm is rather more coherent and better-written, but some of the setting ideas are somewhat familiar, as is the tone.

Worm never really hit the Magneto threshold.

There were never any parahuman supremecist groups, and there were never any anti-parahuman groups. Instead, existing racist groups co-opted parahumans.

So where, in the X-Men, or Aberant, the KKK and the Black Panthers join together to beat up the guy who can shoot lasers from his nose, in Worm, the KKK recruits White Laser Nose Man and the Black Panthers recruit Black Laser Nose Man, and they fight each other with laser boogers.

I find this more reasonable, because in any sane world there is no way a war between normals and godlike superhumans ends without the godlike superhumans ruling everything.

On the other hand, if you treat superhumans just like everyone else, they'll naturally rise to he top of various organizations, but they won't topple the entire system and declare themselves kings.

[Mechalich]

I find this more reasonable, because in any sane world there is no way a war between normals and godlike superhumans ends without the godlike superhumans ruling everything.

If the humans have a sufficient numerical advantage and act early enough, there's also the possibility of the complete extermination of the superhumans, for suitably low values of 'godlike.' Aberrant, at the beginning of its timeline (not the beginning of gameplay ten years later) mostly starts in this scenario. With, of course, the gigantic exception of Divis Mal.

The whole blasted setting is built around a giant Mary Sue NPC who is batshit crazy.

Once you get done with the core book, be sure to go into detail on the Chrysalis mechanics from Aberrant: Teragen, which allow you to convert Taint into XP and thus reward you both coming and going for getting it in the first place.

There's more than enough weirdness in that book to make it a subject of its own OSSR. For this review/rant its enough to say that Aberrant is not completely playable with just the Core or even the Core + Player's Guide, the Teragen book, despite being nominally a faction splat, is absolutely required.

[name_here]

There's a hell of a lot going on in Worm, but basically none of the unstoppable badasses are actively in favor of parahuman takeover in general. Scion spends literally all his time fighting monsters or providing humanitarian relief. The Endbringers attack cities on a regular schedule for inscrutable reasons. Getting into people who actually communicate, the Triumvirate work for the US government, Dragon works for the Canadian government, Glastig Ulaine is voluntarily hanging out in superjail stealing souls and ranting about how she's Queen of the Summer Court, Nilbog is perfectly content with annexing his hometown, the Slaughterhouse Nine are just roving serial killers, Sleeper is just kind of hanging out, and the rest are either with the nebulous conspiracy or nonfactors due to assorted mental issues.

There is a glimpse into an alternate reality ruled over by parahumans under a particularly kickass woman who wears blue, and a list of Endbringer attacks that has one by the Simurrgh annotated with

Target/Consequence: See file The Woman in Blue. See file United Capes.

which presumably explains what happened to everyone with a serious possibility of trying it in the last 13 years, because fucking no one beats the Simurrgh for bullshit superpowers.

[Ancient History]

I'm a little late on this, but isn't the Super-Strength nonsense just Potence redubbed?

[Whipstitch]

The Scion review really traumatised you with it's half-written badness, didn't it? Now even other bad games by WW give flashbacks.

Scion really is like a bad Aberrant flashback though. Both are high powered settings where you're expected to build your own special snowflake out of spare parts. If you visualize the evolution of White Wolf's secondary products as a trip down the highway then Aberrant is where they started fishtailing, Exalted is when the driver overcompensates and Scion is the part when the car spins right into the ditch.

[Berkserker]

Cauldron.

Now I don't recall whether it was an external author reveal, or actually stated, but if I recall right Brockton Bay was supposed to be an experiment in Parahuman-led feudalism. Cauldron was determining whether that, or the Protectorate, was a better model. Granted, saving the world from Scion was their main thing, but they had side things going on, and figuring out how to take over the world was one of them.

And don't forget the Protectorate was a Cauldron thing too. Alexandria led the PRT as Rebecca Costa-Brown, and the entire Triumvirate were Cauldron members. By no means is the Triumvirate's primary loyalty to the US government.

[Mechalich]

I'm a little late on this, but isn't the Super-Strength nonsense just Potence redubbed?

In a sense, yes, though it provides 5 automatic successes per dot - which means that you get 25 automatic damage successes with Mega-Strength 5. Now, normally that's bashing damage, because Aberrant came up with the idea that if you swing a weapon too hard you destroy it, or simply can't properly leverage it for the full enhanced damage value - which makes sense - so you end up just punching things out like the Hulk. However, that limit doesn't apply to other powers. That means you can spend a single nova point to have one dot in Claws, a level one power. The extra die of lethal the power gives you is negligible, but you've just converted 25 automatic successes of bashing damage into lethal damage. Anything you hit with a lethal soak of less than ~15 (adjusting for possible purchases of extra health levels) is now red mist.