BCZ Retrospective II: New Miracles.

One thing I didn't mention when I did the BCG retrospective is that Miracles are actually very hard to design. You need to come up with a powerset that is broad and useful enough to make it worth the cost, yet can be successfully boiled down to two paragraphs and a handful of examples. Many of the Miracles in BCG went through multiple iterations in which they were streamlined, toned down or otherwise rebalanced compared to themselves and the other skills. The final result wasn't perfect (the power is particularly skewed towards Awareness and Intellect, which, well, read below) but it did its job well enough and was certainly better than the earlier versions.

While writing the first draft of the expansion, I had a handful of superpowers (4-6, I forgot how many) that could be found in anime as well as in other RPGs but weren't present in BCG. I initially tried all of them, but they didn't meet the qualifications in the previous paragraph. In the end only two remained. Life was present in a previous version of the game but got removed from BCG because it lacked the versatility to make it worth taking, while Portal was brand new to BCZ. I wish I could tell you what the other candidates were but I've forgotten them by now.

I'm going to review both of the Miracles in BCZ using the same system I had back for BCG, which is as follows:

Proactive - A good Proactive skill is one that can be used to advance the plot or further your PC's agenda.
Adaptable - An Adaptable skill lets you react to GM prompts and resolve the problems they present.
Synergy - This grades how well the Miracle Skill complements General Skills and Traits using the same stats.

Life

Proactive - Mediocre. It takes the least proactive aspects of Medicine and Investigation and combines them into a single Skill. You can find proactive uses for Life with some creativity, such as locating a plot-critical person or entity that can't be located with other means, or using your healing powers to form a cult around your person... But it just isn't as good as other Miracles at that.

Adaptable - Excellent. A buff to Medicine and Investigation in a single Miracle? Why yes, that does help you adapt to a whole multitude of problems. It is almost like those two are very good reactive skills and getting additional Advantages to them is really good or something. The only problem here is that you can't use Life to heal yourself, but Miracles hurt the user so doing that would be... Not very useful, to say the least.

Synergy - Good. Awareness and Intellect have lots of really, really good Miracles that slot easily into many different builds using those Attributes. This is a good one that also happens to benefit from taking some of the best Skills that those excellent Attributes have to offer. If you have both relevant Skills, this is a no-brainer. If you have only one, then this is a good reason to consider taking the second. If you have neither, then you have better options.

Portal

Proactive - Good. The only thing holding this back from being Excellent is that your Windows need to be set up in advance and that you can only have two at a time. It doesn't make Forces, Phasing, Athletics or Stealth redundant because you still need to physically reach the place you're going to first. Once you've been there though, you can come and go as you please. At least until you need to use another Window to reach somewhere else.

Adaptable - Good. The secondary use of Portals is the ability to create pocket dimensions. Anyone who has played D&D knows how handy something like this is. Need a place to hide something or someone? What about hiding you and your entire group from the enemy sentries? It doesn't actually solve any of your problems, but it sure can avoid them long enough that you don't have to worry about them until a better solution comes up.

Synergy - Good. You know how I mentioned that this Skill isn't a replacement for the other Skills that let you move around? Well, those Skills use Fitness (and Intellect, in the case of Forces), while this uses Awareness. If you don't want to actually invest in Fitness then this lets you have a way to escape from danger and get to places fast with a different Attribute. What is very interesting is that, unlike most Skills in competition for a similar function, Portals is even better when combined with its competition, because you can combine it with Forces, Phasing, Athletics or Stealth to get anywhere and transport your whole team afterwards.

I really like both of these. At least, I like them by themselves. My one problem with them is that the Awareness and Intellect builds already had some of the best General Skills and Miracles in the game, and this just gives them more toys to play with. By the time I did the BCG retrospective and realized this, the expansion was already out. If I'd caught wind of that a few months sooner, I would have made a serious attempt at coming up with more Miracles using the other Attributes. It is something to keep in mind for possible future supplements.

And that's all for today! Join me next week when we continue making our way through the Character options towards the Mecha goodness 5 pages away. We're getting there!

Next: New Traits.

Until then, Gimmick Out.