Godlike- Clarification on Aces and Jinx

[antaine]

Hey Group,
Quick Miracle question- In the Jinx entry, it says that this Miracle and Aces do not affect Talent Powers.
Does that mean Jinx cannot be used against a power with the Attack quality of hyperstats/hyperskills?
Or does it mean that the bad luck is a type of coincidental magic against talent Powers (as opposed to Zed)?

Finally, does Jinx trigger a contest of Wills?
What about Aces?

Thanks for the help in advance
Anthony

[Allan Goodall]

Jinx can't be used against a Talent at all, not just a Talent with an Attack Quality.

Aces adds dice to dice pools, while Jinx gobbles dice from an opponent's set. An enemy shoots at you with an SMG. You roll your Jinx power and gobble dice out of the set he uses to attack you, spoiling his attack. 

Using Jinx to attack an opponent is a less obvious. How do you hurt a guy directly when your power eats dice out of his dice pool. You can't attack directly, you have to attack indirectly. The enemy with the SMG is firing at your squad leader while your squad leader fires back. The SMG gets a wider set, so your squad leader is going to get shot first. You use your Jinx power to reduce the SMG's set, allowing the squad leader to kill the enemy first. The SMG wasn't firing at you, so you couldn't stop him attacking your squad leader if your power only had the Defense quality. You can affect the enemy because it has the Attacks quality.

You can't apply the Jinx's gobble dice to a Talent. If the enemy with the SMG had the Submachine Gun skill as a hyperskill, you couldn't apply the Jinx's gobble dice to that attack, just like you couldn't apply the gobble dice to a Talent firing a heat ray from his eyes. Jinx will simply not work on hyperskills, skills with hyperstats, or miracles. Similarly, you can't add dice to another miracle with the Aces power.

Jinx does trigger a Contest of Wills. Someone throws a grenade at the enemy Talent with Submachine Gun as a hyperskill. The enemy Talent dives for cover using his Dodge skill, which is not a hyperskill and he does not have Hypercoordination. That means you can apply your Jinx to the enemy Talent's Dodge skill. Since this is directly affecting the enemy Talent, they enemy can try to stop you from interfering through a Contest of Wills.

Aces also triggers a Contest of Wills. If you shoot at an enemy Talent with a regular Rifle skill and add the Aces dice to the dice pool, the Rifle skill is now enhanced, and the shot now triggers a Contest of Wills. This is similar to a character with a Rifle hyperskill losing all his Will but still firing at an enemy. He is no longer using his Talent, but that doesn't stop his natural Rifle ability from working. It does, in fact, mean that the enemy can no longer use a Contest of Wills to stop the shot, which is why most of the hypersnipers I've seen built have naturally high levels of Coordination and/or Rifle.

Aside: Can you choose to only roll your normal dice if you have a hyperskill? I don't think it's mentioned in the rules. Hyperstats are more explicit: they are always on. It's only applied with hyperskills. Given that hyperskills are cheap, I decided they were always on when you used it. If you have Coordination 2d, Rifle 2d, and Rifle Hyperskill of 1wd, when you fire your rifle you roll 4d + 1wd all the time. You can't choose to not use the wiggle die (and, therefore, can't choose not to start a Contest of Wills). This distinction is particularly important in a game where you act as spies, since you don't always want to use your hyperskill and broadcast to every other Talent looking at you that you have a power.

If you want to be able to just use your natural dice sometimes (so that you can shoot a guy without triggering Contest of Wills), you would either have to add that ability as an Extra (I think a +1 extra is fair) or you have to buy something like a nervous habit that you must do every time to make the power work. For example, if you have to say a short prayer before shooting someone in order for your Rifle hyperskill to work (and this is an extraordinarily common flaw; I suspect it's because everyone has seen Saving Private Ryan), simply don't say a prayer or mutter something else ("Eat hot lead, Nazi!") so that the hyperskill doesn't kick in.

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Allan Goodall            http://www.hyperbear.com
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[antaine]

Amazing Alan, thanks for the clear cut clarification. I suppose my confusion/cunning attempt to circumvent the rules came from the fact that Aces mentioned Powers in the description. One for the errata?

So while I have your benevolent wisdom working for me, can I ask one more question?
Could you please explain to me which Powers Zed works on? I got confused as technically both examples (flight and lifting a truck) are self affecting and are by the Zed’s definition immune to influence. Are they referring to when those Powers are used as Attacks?

Thanks again for your brilliant reply on Aces

[antaine]

And really sorry for spelling your name incorrectly Allan, ignorant move on my part.

[Allan Goodall]

Okay, let me clarify, because there is a contradiction. 

The description of Aces definitely says you can apply it to "powers" (which means hyperstats, hyperskills, and miracles). But Jinx says, "Jinx, like Aces, does not affect Talent powers." Well, except that Aces does affect Talent powers.

So, which is it? Aces can't affect Talent powers, or Jinx is not like Aces and can't affect Talent powers while Aces can, or should Jinx be just like Aces and affect Talent powers?

To try and answer that, I went to the 1st edition Wild Talents book. It doesn't mention Jinx or Aces not working with Talent powers. It does specifically say that neither of them work on level based powers. If I had to guess, I would say that there is a sentence missing from Aces that says it doesn't work on level-based powers, and that the sentence in Jinx should have said "level-based Talent powers" instead of "Talent powers".

Therefore, I'd say that, sure, let Aces and Jinx both apply to Talent powers. Both are expensive in terms of Will, and there are already enough restrictions in stopping enemy Talents. In that case, if you used Jinx against any dice pool of an enemy Talent, including their power, it would trigger a Contest of Wills (as only the Zed power does not trigger a Contest of Wills).

For Zed, the term "self-affecting" is pretty vague, for the reasons you noted. The rules specifically mention "psychic", "non-physical" and "non-visible" powers as immune. The description of the Zed power states that it works by taking the Talent's power and negating that power's effect on the environment. The best analogy is sound-cancelling headphones. The headphones pick up the outside sound in a microphone and project that sound with the opposite amplitude. They don't stop the outside sound from being formed, and they don't block the sound from coming in (though, in reality, they do some of that, too, with padding). Zed takes the power as it affects the environment, and reflects back the inverse of that power.

When I think "self-affecting" I think something like hyperbrains. Just like psychic abilities, they happen inside the Talent's head, so they can't be affected by a Zed. 

Hypercoordination and hyperbody are noticeable, or directly affect other people, or affect the environment. While you could argue that it's impossible to tell the difference between a Rifle skill rolling 2x10 on 4 dice versus rolling it on 2d with 2wd, elsewhere it is stated that you can use a Contest of Wills on someone shooting at you. The effect of the power on the environment is noticeable to the Talent in a metaphysical way if not a mental way. Hypercommand is all about projecting an effect onto other people, so it can be negated by Zed. 

Hypersense: is the Talent's body suddenly changed, physically, or is it the environment that is somehow altered? I can see the argument either way. I went back and forth on this one, but decided that the Talent is picking up things that are already there (faint sounds, rays of light too few to normally focus with your eyes, chemicals that can't normally be tasted or discerned). Therefore, hypersense cannot be negated by Zed. 

Hypercool... hmm. Hyper Bluff and Hyper Lie affect others, so Zeds can cancel out those powers. Hyper Mental Stability, though, is self affecting and cannot be cancelled.

As you can see, these explanations make it impossible to simply say that hyperstats and/or hyperskills are unaffected or always affected.

Going through the miracle cafeteria, I would say the following powers are immune to the Zed power:

• Alert: This is psychic danger sense. It's not physically noticing something but receiving a psychic message that something bad is about to happen.
  
• Detection: This is like psychic sensing, You aren't physically noticing something. Your body is psychically noticing something for you.
• Precognition: It's a psychic snippet of the future, which might not even happen. Besides, it solves a thorny time paradox revolving around how a Zed who isn't present yet can stop a power in the past. Just don't go there, Zeds don't stop precognition. 

I left out a few that might be considered "self-affecting". Here's my reasoning why these "self-affecting" miracles can be negated by a Zed:

• Perception: It requires a physical change to the environment or the character's body in order to perceive things that humans can't normally perceive. We don't have senses that pick up x-rays, so it's not just enhancing what is already there but creating new senses. It helps differentiate Detection from Perception, too.
• Rapport: I was tempted to make this one immune, but Talents can see a Rapport link as soon as they view the target, so there must be something in the environment that is detectable. 
• Thought Control - Projected Hallucination: Though this seems like a psychic power, it involves changing a target, so it can be stopped by a Zed.

And no problem with the spelling of my name! There's a guy I've been working with for almost 15 years and he still can't spell my name right. :-)

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[antaine]

Allan,
I’ve been in love with Godlike since it was first published in the early noughties (to the point where my brother still says “We go first” whenever I act particularly wimpy- squealing when tiny flecks of grease land on my arm from the frying pan etc.) and I have NEVER understood how Zed worked up until this moment. Now I get how Talents cancelled each other out so effectively during the War! Thanks for the further clarifications on using Aces and Jinx. Going to use your suggestions to model an ultra-competent “super soldier serum” effect a la Ultimates Cap.

Have you been reading Über by Kieran Gillen? It’s inspired me to go back to the well using your Elder Godlike alongside Godlike and Progenitor to create a multi-generational campaign of the Secret War. The Talents being the Primogenitors to the 60’s appearance of Progenitor Wild Talents. Initially thought to be humanities immune response to the terrors beyond time and space, investigations will unravel the Faustian pact at the heart of this psychic disease...

Anyway, thanks again for your clarity Allan!