The natural systemic representation for this would be a 2d6 system, wherein one die represents signal strength and the other signal clarity. “6″ results would be special cases, representing some kind of critical-something-or-other.

I woke up with further thoughts on how to express this as a superpower. Of course, these re-tread some other ideas I’ve used in Do and Happy Birthday Robot, but I beg indulgence one more time.

My one dread of designing supers games is writing a list of powers and balancing them all together in a cohesive whole infrastructure. I kind of like the wild free-wheeling nature of old-school Mage: the Ascension a bit, so that’s where my head’s at right now. Basically, I’m imagining Receivers as radio-powered analogues to the Marauders. Swirling balls of reality-bending chaos that must be contained or destroyed for the sake of universal coherence.

So here’s my idea for how to handle radio-powers:

Step 1: Roll

On your turn, if you choose to use a radio power, first roll two six-sided dice. One die represents signal strength. One die represents signal clarity. Those designations are decided at the beginning of the game.

Step 2: Strength

You may describe some amazing feat of radio-powered reality-bending, but your description is limited. You may only describe this event in a number of words equal to your Strength die result, to a maximum of 5. (Results of “6″ are discussed after these steps.)

You always have the word “I” as a free word, though. Saying “I,” in your description does not count against this word limit.

For example: You rolled a “3″ on your strength die. That means you could say something like the following sentences:

“I turn into fire.”
“I blow freezing wind.”
“I jam the signal.”

Step 3: Clarity

Here’s where things get tricky. Now your description will be modified based on the result on your Clarity die.

—-

Oh wait, I just realized a problem here. My original idea was to make each player take turns changing one word in the description. The number of turns would be determined by the Clarity die. So if you rolled a 4, then four players would each take a turn changing one word of your description.

The idea was that radio powers are unpredictable and dangerous, sometimes causing unintended events.

But that doesn’t fit the “5 by 5″ theme if a higher number is supposed to be a clearer signal. Oh well, you see where I was going with it.

As far as the Education, maybe only children have powers, whether because they lose the magic as they age, or because they inevitably die. Like Monsters and Other Childish Things, or maybe Alien 9.

I can’t come up with an Education department justification. But, suppose that superpowers really did come from nuclear accidents. Suppose that we had a distribution closer to “Wild Cards,” with most people just dying from radiation exposure, a few people manifesting either neutral (e.g., “I can change the color of my hair at will!”) or deleterious (e.g., “I bleed constantly from every pore in my skin!”) powers, and a few real outliers who get more typical superpowers. Now, suppose that the vast majority of these people are really just collecting disability and/or death benefits under OSHA-style regulations. But, the government can’t cleanly separate radiation sickness from harmful mutation from harmless mutation from superpower. So, it lumps them all together.

It might just create a special office under the Dept of Labor. Say, an Ombudsman for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program (http://www.dol.gov/eeombd/). This guy mostly just investigates disability claims and pays out on them. But, he’s also responsible for the various duties surrounding tracking, evaluating, and controlling supers.

Yup, being a super is classified as a disability by our government.

A constraint on the exercise I didn’t see at first was the requirement that, regardless of the form the “white event” takes, it can’t change things so much that there would be no unified government to even have a department of managing anything. It’s interesting, because I’m not usually so merciful in my fictional universes: my every “folks with powers” idea turns either into Kowloon, Mogadishu or Mad Max.

I’d like to see a mash-up of The Office and Heroes — playing up the comic potential of having a deeply, absurdly, dysfunctional corporate bureacracy overseeing superhumans. Sort of like if Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin was the head of SHIELD during the Civil War storyline.

Not sure that comedy in general and this idea in particular is really “RPG-able” though. A funny rule book doesn’t equal a funny gaming session. This is probably more suited for a short story/screen play/comedy sketch.

During a particularly large, unexpected fall that occurred intermittently over three days, those who discovered and touched the meteorites found themselves imbued with strange powers… and stranger dreams…

A large portion of these meteors fell over the Antarctic, and the Americans quickly repurposed the OPP’s ANSMET (the ANtarctic Search for METeorites) program to search for them. Unfortunately, this is quickly becoming an arms race, as a Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition, EUROMET, the Italian Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide, KOREAMET and the Antarctic Scientific Exploration of China all comb the icy plains of Antarctica to find and recover these artifacts…

Anyone who has gained powers from the meteorites finds themselves drawn to untouched ones, and any patriotic American with powers knows it is his or her duty to join up with the NSF and ANSMET to ensure that these meteorites don’t fall into the enemy’s hands…

Sort of a cross between Meteor Man and Whiteout… a cold war indeed!

The non-federal idea is a fun one to play around in, that said. If supers have been “pushed off” to the states as far as regulation goes, there’s all sorts of interesting political attitudes implied there. That says to me that at the federal level, supers are seen as more of a nuisance and maintenance problem than a big deal. On the state scale, however, they’re a big deal, so I’d expect that there are few if any supers that are capable of acting in a national scope. And of course any state program for dealing with them will be strapped for cash and clamoring for federal funds that never come…

Also, what about a branch for each different power?

DOT, for instance, for speedy types and FAA for flying types …

A game focused on a cleanup crew would be neat. A bit offtopic, I wanted to run a Shadowrun adventure with an Aztechnology spill team, who get sent in from HQ to clean up after local branches run amuck. I’d be tempted to adapt Dogs in the Vineyard for that now.

In a game where every superbeing is considered a sovereign nation, supers might fall under the State Department.

Most likely, if supers are a limited resource then they’d be fought over bitterly by every govt agency, the same way budgets are now. “Why does Dept of Interior need its own super strike force?” “To protect our national forests!” “Is anyone threatening our national forests?” “They might!”

There was also a “Project” being directed by the U.S. Military.

I like the idea of receivers, but I’d go a step further and have *transmitters* as well: all superpowers travel in waves, when *used*. Mind control is a different wave than the one generated by telekinesis, and maybe superspeed creates a bow wave. More for the FCC to regulate! I’m sure they consider photons to be waves, no argument. This would also give a nice in-setting explanation for how you can keep mind powers from becoming ridiculously overpowering: there’s technology to counter it, and the gubmint (at least) has it.

An idea Earl inspired was to have superpowers be something that hierarchical organizations couldn’t deal with. Superpowers are usually Physical or Mental, but why not operating at the social level? Corporations, as a way of organizing activity, were a huge breakthrough from the previous family or small group business model, so perhaps the Future holds some method of organizing that would seem equally mysterious to us.

It would also nicely sidestep “secret govt black ops agencies hunting supers”, a setting element I am heartily sick of by now, and calling out the army. As a bonus, groups in which some people follow the orders of others would be useless against supers, nicely justifying the rather chaotic decision-making styles of most superteams.

I recall someone or other had a campaign in which every super being was a sovereign power, like a country to themselves, so you could declare war on them, but you couldn’t arrest them.

Darn, thinking about this sort of thing is making me want to run supers again.
Time to take another look at Super Bliss Force Zeta.