[Deviant] Ask a Simple Question, Renegade-Style

[cybirddude]

I have a number of questions in regards to touchstones:

1: If a deviant's touchstone is pregnant, can the deviant take the baby and the mother as separate touchstones?

2: Can a pregnant deviant take their unborn baby as a touchstone?

3: Can a deviant destroy their conviction touchstones indirectly and still get the benefits? For example, if a deviant hires a hitman to kill a conviction touchstone for them, does the deviant count as being the killer for willpower and instability purposes?

4: Can a deviant help their loyalty touchstone indirectly and still get the benefits? For example, if a deviant kills their loyalty touchstones stalker, do they gain benefits?

5: Can a deviant have a loyalty touchstone that hates them or a conviction touchstone that loves them? For the first, an example would be a loyalty touchstone that holds a grudge against the deviant, while for the latter an example would be a conviction touchstone that is a yandere.

6: Can a deviant have a group of people that collectively count as one touchstone? For example, a polyamourous deviant whose lovers all serve as one touchstone.

[Satchel]

1: If a deviant's touchstone is pregnant, can the deviant take the baby and the mother as separate touchstones?

2: Can a pregnant deviant take their unborn baby as a touchstone?

I feel as though the unborn child does not have enough of an independent existence from the parent carrying it to justify the kinds of things that a Loyalty Touchstone mechanically affects.

3: Can a deviant destroy their conviction touchstones indirectly and still get the benefits? For example, if a deviant hires a hitman to kill a conviction touchstone for them, does the deviant count as being the killer for willpower and instability purposes?

Does this sound like the sort of thing that fulfills the drive of a stat called Conviction?

Like, sure, you almost definitely don't need to lethally end the Touchstone's existence with your hands around their throat, but the story beat regaining Stability in this way represents involves something that the deviant can actually identify themselves by. Riding along with the hitman or having the Touchstone on a video call when the hit comes in or controlling the hitman with Variations or otherwise being able to be there and involved when the destruction happens has firmer ground to stand on, but giving a guy with a gun money to break into a secure compound that produced a sewer mutant like yourself does not feed into the narrative of a burning need for vengeance the way dropping a building on your creator, burning them alive, or even just shooting them after the guy you hired to kidnap them delivers them to you does.

4: Can a deviant help their loyalty touchstone indirectly and still get the benefits? For example, if a deviant kills their loyalty touchstones stalker, do they gain benefits?

"Take a risk or suffer for a Loyalty Touchstone" or "perform some service for a Loyalty Touchstone" both jive with this, yes.

5: Can a deviant have a loyalty touchstone that hates them or a conviction touchstone that loves them? For the first, an example would be a loyalty touchstone that holds a grudge against the deviant, while for the latter an example would be a conviction touchstone that is a yandere.

I mean, yes? One of the defining things about the Touchstone provided by Living Progenitor is that it can flip categories entirely instead of Wavering, which is itself just a more specific mechanic to the ability for any deviant to change the category of a Touchstone and all the material about Touchstones generally concerns the deviant's feelings on the relationship.

6: Can a deviant have a group of people that collectively count as one touchstone? For example, a polyamourous deviant whose lovers all serve as one touchstone.

"Some Broken forge ties with an object, place, or organization, but these are always concrete and localized — something that can be threatened or destroyed by a single actor in a single time and place, whether with a gun or an explosive."

The ability to have an organization as a Touchstone is not a way to have a Touchstone with extra lives, it's a way to make a group with the capacity to be put in danger one of the things holding your Stability together. Any collective Touchstone should account for that.

[cybirddude]

I feel as though the unborn child does not have enough of an independent existence from the parent carrying it to justify the kinds of things that a Loyalty Touchstone mechanically affects.

Does this sound like the sort of thing that fulfills the drive of a stat called Conviction?

Like, sure, you almost definitely don't need to lethally end the Touchstone's existence with your hands around their throat, but the story beat regaining Stability in this way represents involves something that the deviant can actually identify themselves by. Riding along with the hitman or having the Touchstone on a video call when the hit comes in or controlling the hitman with Variations or otherwise being able to be there and involved when the destruction happens has firmer ground to stand on, but giving a guy with a gun money to break into a secure compound that produced a sewer mutant like yourself does not feed into the narrative of a burning need for vengeance the way dropping a building on your creator, burning them alive, or even just shooting them after the guy you hired to kidnap them delivers them to you does.

"Take a risk or suffer for a Loyalty Touchstone" or "perform some service for a Loyalty Touchstone" both jive with this, yes.

I mean, yes? One of the defining things about the Touchstone provided by Living Progenitor is that it can flip categories entirely instead of Wavering, which is itself just a more specific mechanic to the ability for any deviant to change the category of a Touchstone and all the material about Touchstones generally concerns the deviant's feelings on the relationship.

"Some Broken forge ties with an object, place, or organization, but these are always concrete and localized — something that can be threatened or destroyed by a single actor in a single time and place, whether with a gun or an explosive."

The ability to have an organization as a Touchstone is not a way to have a Touchstone with extra lives, it's a way to make a group with the capacity to be put in danger one of the things holding your Stability together. Any collective Touchstone should account for that.

So for 6, would multiple lovers count as one touchstone if they all lived together? An enemy could simply bomb their house or shoot all of them.

[Satchel]

So for 6, would multiple lovers count as one touchstone if they all lived together? An enemy could simply bomb their house or shoot all of them.

Is "the deviant's lovers" an organization that can concretely be brought to an end, or is it reasonable to assume that Alice, Bob, and Cal could not be be Ship of Theseus'd out of the quadrouple one by one and still leave Devin the deviant with a functional anchor to humanity?

[cybirddude]

Two questions regarding Genotypals:

Is a possible for a Genotypal to be a deviant from birth, in the sense that they became deviants in the womb rather than later in life?

Aside from reincarnation shenanigans, how can a Genotypal be Self-Made?

[Cauthon]

Swallow a mutagen of your own concoction

[Satchel]

Is a possible for a Genotypal to be a deviant from birth, in the sense that they became deviants in the womb rather than later in life?

In the larger setting metaphysics, the human soul appears at birth and Scars and Variations are symptoms of the soul being broken. In practical terms, literally nobody is going to be playing an unborn fetus, but the book says that while Genotypal Remade often discover their Variations in adolescence the trigger for their powers manifesting might come earlier or later.

Aside from reincarnation shenanigans, how can a Genotypal be Self-Made?

Same methods an Autourgic might use with a greater emphasis on the criteria that would make a Genotypal, like tapping into a family curse or discovering and leveraging the notes of a destroyed conspiracy who put the markers in place for them to undergo the Divergence.

[cybirddude]

Can a deviant have a loyalty touchstone that is a friendly rival (i.e. a romantic rival who will accept being the loser, a rival business that engages in healthy competition, a rival martial artist who inspired the deviant to improve themself)?

[Satchel]

Can a deviant have a loyalty touchstone that is a friendly rival (i.e. a romantic rival who will accept being the loser, a rival business that engages in healthy competition, a rival martial artist who inspired the deviant to improve themself)?

One of the example Loyalty Touchstones is "The Frenemy," a rival whose blurb includes the statement that "Competing with him made you try harder, and you both became experts in your field." Yes.

[Satchel]

Making sure I've correctly understood how Channeling a Variation through Lash works:

• You roll to attack with the Lash as normal, and if the attack deals the necessary amount of damage based on the damage type of the Lash and the target's Armor, the secondary Variation is reflexively activated without a roll.
• For the purposes of determining if the target is subject to the effects of the Channeled Variation, the target rolls the relevant Resistance pool contested against the Lash's rolled successes.
• If the Lash targets multiple characters (i.e. through Blasting, Burst, Full-Auto, or Circle Strike), it can affect up to the normal maximum number of characters that Directed Variation normally could, and each target contests the successes as normal.
• Channeling a Variation through a ranged Lash can thus allow it to reach further and affect multiple targets faster than the normal Directed Variation ranges, as well as potentially using a different dicepool than the secondary Variation would use by itself, with the principal tradeoff being that the Lash needs to be entangled with another Scar (or the same Scar as the secondary Variation, which caps the Magnitude of the secondary at 4 at most).

Is that all correct?

[Scriptorian]

Making sure I've correctly understood how Channeling a Variation through Lash works:

• You roll to attack with the Lash as normal, and if the attack deals the necessary amount of damage based on the damage type of the Lash and the target's Armor, the secondary Variation is reflexively activated without a roll.
• For the purposes of determining if the target is subject to the effects of the Channeled Variation, the target rolls the relevant Resistance pool contested against the Lash's rolled successes.
• If the Lash targets multiple characters (i.e. through Blasting, Burst, Full-Auto, or Circle Strike), it can affect up to the normal maximum number of characters that Directed Variation normally could, and each target contests the successes as normal.
• Channeling a Variation through a ranged Lash can thus allow it to reach further and affect multiple targets faster than the normal Directed Variation ranges, as well as potentially using a different dicepool than the secondary Variation would use by itself, with the principal tradeoff being that the Lash needs to be entangled with another Scar (or the same Scar as the secondary Variation, which caps the Magnitude of the secondary at 4 at most).

Is that all correct?

This matches my reading.

[cybirddude]

Could a Deviant have a conviction touchstone that they don't want to kill, but want to live in misery? For example, the deviant might nurse the touchstone back to health when they are sick, or stop them from killing themselves, but only to make them miserable in ways such has driving the touchstone to poverty, isolating the touchstone from their friends and family, enslavement, torture, rape, etc.

In addition, would tormenting a conviction touchstone count as pursuing a conviction touchstone for willpower and instability purposes?

[ArcaneArts]

Could a Deviant have a conviction touchstone that they don't want to kill, but want to live in misery? For example, the deviant might nurse the touchstone back to health when they are sick, or stop them from killing themselves, but only to make them miserable in ways such has driving the touchstone to poverty, isolating the touchstone from their friends and family, enslavement, torture, rape, etc.

In addition, would tormenting a conviction touchstone count as pursuing a conviction touchstone for willpower and instability purposes?

If I may make an observation about the way your posts have collectively been going, It seems like you have a overall interest in just how terrible you can have a character be and still have it be mechanically...permitted. If that's the case, I would suggest just making an overarching question about it in the Ask a Simple Question thread. If not, you might want to rethink your presentations.

Anyways, RAW would suggest this is arguably viable for the purposes of pursuing the conviction for Willpower/Instability purposes....so long as there's an endgame to it. The Causes section clause about furthering a Touchstone or suffering Instability implies there's no such thing as a holding pattern (Hey, like over in Werewolf), and Loyalty is the place long, affirmative relationships-Convictions are about solutions, however small, to the ongoing problems of the Conspiracies in the Web of Pain. Sure, that might include dropping people into the Pit of Eternal Torment and No Escape, We Promise, but the incentive to resolve Conviction through murder is motivated by the fact that it's the most reliable way of ensuring they don't get to keep contributing to the Web, where as imprisonment requires resources to be kept perpetual, resources a Renegade is unlikely to be able to keep supplying for long given the target they have on their back.

Also of note, in that vein, is that any Deviant trying to game the system of their Instability through imprisonment (or worse) is increasingly unlikely to keep their allies. A lot of Deviants, even if they have burning hatred for the actors of Conspiracies, also take issue with the sort of actions that Remade them, and that often includes imprisonment and torture-nevermind what Baseline allies are going to feel about it. A willingness to explore enslavement and rape as a means of action against them just exacerbates the problem, and continues to ensure that a Deviant interested in this violation as their coping mechanism is rapidly going to start losing the resources for doing.

And of course, none of this is addressing the issues of such an interested character with players at the table.

[Satchel]

Some Body Snatcher questions:

1. Do the Magnitude 4 effects require you to first be riding the victim's senses with the Magnitude 1 effect before you take over their body for the scene, as the Magnitude 2 and 3 effects imply is required for their respective effects? If so, can this be taken to mean that using Body Swap multiple times in one scene (transferring your consciousness to a new target's body) effectively leaves your body comatose and intermittently occupied by whoever you've swapped with, with every previous swap returning to their own body once you've moved to a different body? If not, does using the Body Swap effect sequentially put each new target in the body of the previous target until the end of the scene?

2. Are Persistent Perpetual versions of Variations affecting the character's Attributes, Skills, and internal Mental Merits (i.e. Superhuman Attribute and Hyper-Competence) an exception to Body Snatcher's stipulation that you can't use your other Variations in a stolen body? If so, would the same exceptions apply to Controlled or Involuntary forms of those Variations? What about Computer-Aided Processing and Omnicompetence, whether Toggled or non-Persistent? If not, does this mean that e.g. a Psychic with Superhuman Intelligence could drop from Intelligence 8 to Intelligence 1 while operating in a borrowed body?

[BronzeDog]

I'm revisiting a character concept: Ray was partially Spirit-Claimed by a void spirit. He's been physically transformed, but most of the time he's invisible, or as he describes it, "technically not completely existing." Right now, he's got Relentless/Suppressible Camouflage 3 entangled with Power Failure (Main Scar) and Concentration (Secondary Scar for Suppressible). I'm thinking of applying the Disfiguring Scar Deviation, so when his Camouflage fails, or he reveals himself, it's Overt. Relentless Variation specifies +1 Magnitude if persistence would cause problems, specifically mentioning Camo 3+ as an example. Disfiguring Scar gives +1 Magnitude to the scar it's attached to, and I'd say it'd make both PF and Concentration Overt.

How do I work out the final magnitudes of Camouflage, Power Failure, and Concentration? If you were the Storyteller, would you allow this?