The Gaming Den

No hyz, the thing that's oppressive to roleplay is fucking everything about how the story is presented. It runs on enough author fiat to choke a horse. That's fine for a story but motherfucker every player can't get Skitter's breaks and you sure as shit can't have the enemies they face be the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Endbringers, Scion, or even fucking Cauldron as they are presented in the serial. If you are that wedded to the story, you have to play Munchausen or Fiasco or Wushu; where the game is telling a story and the mechanics solely exist to quantify how much narrative bullshit the characters can get away with.

That's not a bad thing, I would totally play that. But for a mechanistic game you have to realize that Worm as is does not work from anything deeper than "Saints Row with Superheroes".

Now, I haven't read the work itself, only a bit on tvtropes, but why do people give crap to Skitter about her powers? Any form of mind-control is an instant game changer, isn't it? Does no one in wormworse knows about the existence of poisonous insects?

EDIT:

Jack Slash wrote:"My interest is in the design of people. What makes them tick? What holds them together? All too often, it’s one little thing. In architecture they call it a keystone. The one stone that keeps the entire arch from collapsing. The weak point. And I’m very, very good at finding those weak points."

O hai, Sylar!

EDIT2:

I've read the first chapter. Is school bullying a thing in America?

EDIT3:

tvtropes wrote:Damsel of Distress
A relatively harmless villainess who makes her home in a small town while occasionally trying to extend her influence into the larger, neighboring cities—only to fail and return to lick her wounds. Damsel has space warping powers, capable of destroying any matter or construction, albeit with a minimum of control.

:|

Does no one in wormworse knows about the existence of poisonous insects?

There are a lot of things wrong with this statement, so I'm going to give you a bulleted list.

• Murder is a felony. In the Wormverse, superpowered felons all go to the same prison, and that prison is essentially a pit in the ground full of superpowered murderers and rapists. You don't want to get sent there, so you're going to take special effort to avoid murdering people. Having powers that let you murder people is a bad thing, not a good thing.
• Insect bites that are deadly are slow acting. A brown recluse bite is asymptomatic for several hours and takes days to actually kill. Thus, even if you did decide it was worth it to murder someone, it would be faster and easier to just buy a gun.
• Insect bites that are fast acting are neither deadly nor debilitating. A person can survive a huge number of ant bites or bee stings without even falling over. If you want to incapacitate someone without killing them, it would (again) be faster and easier to just buy some pepper spray. Or a taser.
• Even assuming you did somehow find a situation where it would be more effective to kill someone with mind controlled insects than to shoot them with your gun, you still wouldn't do it because modern forensics exist. When someone shows up at the morgue with a lethal dose of spider venom in their system and a bunch of bug bites, who do you think the cops are going to come looking for?

School bullying is an excessively common thing in America.

Also, insect control strikes me as an incredibly creepily terrifying power. There's a shit ton of insects in any arbitrary location you might select. I cannot imagine taunting an insect controller about their powers to their face. Sure, a pissed-off hive of killer bees is probably not actually better than a gun, but I would not want to attract the wrath of someone who can send one after me.

Now, how useful it is basically depends on how much raw power she's got; it takes a bunch of insects to really be a noteworthy threat, but if she could control every anthill in the city that would be something else entirely.

name_here wrote:Now, how useful it is basically depends on how much raw power she's got; it takes a bunch of insects to really be a noteworthy threat, but if she could control every anthill in the city that would be something else entirely.

Taylor's can control all the bugs in her powers radius, and that radius is pretty big more than one city block I think. She also can the sense things through her bug to some degree and mange giant swarms of bugs efficiently enough that she get's a "thinker" rating on top of her "master" classification. Her power is unconventional that for sure but I have no idea how people get the impression that it's weak.

Grek wrote:

• Murder is a felony. In the Wormverse, superpowered felons all go to the same prison, and that prison is essentially a pit in the ground full of superpowered murderers and rapists. You don't want to get sent there, so you're going to take special effort to avoid murdering people. Having powers that let you murder people is a bad thing, not a good thing.

One of the heroes has a superpower of "create weapons". Having powers that a scary and intimidating is a good thing for a villain, and incapacitating someone with a thousand bees (my god!) isn't that hard.

Grek wrote:

• Insect bites that are deadly are slow acting. A brown recluse bite is asymptomatic for several hours and takes days to actually kill. Thus, even if you did decide it was worth it to murder someone, it would be faster and easier to just buy a gun.

Painful and incapacitating. And while one poisonous spider might be slow killing, hundred of them should work faster.

Grek wrote:

• Insect bites that are fast acting are neither deadly nor debilitating. A person can survive a huge number of ant bites or bee stings without even falling over. If you want to incapacitate someone without killing them, it would (again) be faster and easier to just buy some pepper spray. Or a taser.

A giant swarm of bees should make a great distraction, removing a person from a fight for a while.

Grek wrote:

• Even assuming you did somehow find a situation where it would be more effective to kill someone with mind controlled insects than to shoot them with your gun, you still wouldn't do it because modern forensics exist. When someone shows up at the morgue with a lethal dose of spider venom in their system and a bunch of bug bites, who do you think the cops are going to come looking for?

The Joker? Trying to be discreet when you are wearing a superhero/villain costume is kind of silly.

You use the power of insect control to go to Japan and become a GODDAMN CELEBRITY BEETLE KING. You could have your own goddamn Beetle Wrestling League that's perfectly choreographed and can even follow scripts, because you control everything.

OgreBattle wrote:You use the power of insect control to go to Japan and become a GODDAMN CELEBRITY BEETLE KING. You could have your own goddamn Beetle Wrestling League that's perfectly choreographed and can even follow scripts, because you control everything.

Holy shit this is great.

And Skitter's power is undersold because she's the "eternal underdog". Being Wriggle Nightbug is an amazing ability, especially when Taylor starts to cultivate the real exotic shit.