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Drunkard's walk Fan-Step: Rock
 
#2
Do note that you misspelled Taylor's name twice. It is Hebert.
If you're planning on making a crossover which is faithful to the setting, I'll reiterate a post I recently made on the subject in another forum:
Quote:If anything, a lot of the fandom underestimates how much Shards can screw with their parahumans. If you look through the WoG thread, you'll find that:
  • Many parahumans are specifically chosen to gain Shards because Scion's precognition suggests they'll be great vectors for conflict.
  • People Trigger due to horrific traumas.
  • Your Shard chooses your power, and often ensures it has unpleasant side effects.
  • At the moment you Trigger, your Shard rewires parts of your brain. The younger you are, the more it can change.
  • Shards can continue to alter your thinking as your brain develops (ie. until your mid-20's. Note: All the Undersiders still had developing brains.).
  • As you engage in conflict, your Shard get more toeholds for continuing to rewrite your brain.
  • If you fail to engage in enough conflict, your Shard may mess with your brain to goad you into more conflict.
  • If you fail to engage in enough conflict, your Shard may mess with your powers ("Oops, I didn't mean to shoot little Timmy. My hand slipped.").
The WoG thread source for most of this info:
Depends on the shard. Bonesaw elaborates on the idea by noting 'breadth and depth' in her interlude. If the shard gets you while you're young, it can shape your personality across the board, on a deeper level. The more conflict you're involved in, the more toeholds it gets to rewrite your consciousness and your subconscious. To alter your thinking, it needs to do it as a part of the trigger event, or as part of the brain's development.
In the extreme cases, the shard can leave you with an impulse (Must fight when a fight presents itself), help set up an obsession ("Wall myself in!"), steer a neurosis in one particular direction (specific hallucinations rather than random ones, of you hurting people, pushing someone down the stairs, etc), create a link between A and B (Being around fire makes subject lose empathy and inhibitions. With lower empathy and inhibitions, subject uses power to make more fire.), or steer a personality trait to an extreme (Must be on top, I answer to no one!), or they just overwrite stuff (Can't understand humans, only dogs).
In the lesser cases, it can be a nudge, hard to distinguish from one's own psychology. You might be on the fence about something, trying to make a call, and the passenger pushes you one way over the other, based on your own feelings of doubt or fear. It might tap into emotions, and dampen X emotion while promoting Y, just dampen them across the board, or take the joy out of day to day living while adding excitement to the cape life. A vague sort of depression that only goes away when one's out and fighting. Sometimes, as mentioned before, it's set up as a trap, a flood of emotion or a set of mental switches that get thrown when a prerequisite is met - such as a cape just steering clear of all confrontations, except the shard set it up so they can't, and they have a sort of limit break/command cutting in that mandates them to fight in one way or another. Or it plays off a limit or a berserk button that already exists - Damsel can't spend too long being anything less than top dog or she gets restless, and if she goes too long despite that, then she has to act, she's acting without thinking about it. This takes time and effort for the passenger, and a host that doesn't demand that time and effort (by circumstance or intent) is going to develop a better connection with the power. This in turn is a reward of sorts. If Damsel did kill the local capes and assume control over the area, fighting off all comers, she'd find her facility and control with her power just ramped up like crazy.
It varies from cape to cape and shard to shard, and it varies depending on the host, the host's background and the host's personality.
Beyond that, other influences include the passenger playing fast and loose with the power itself, as it controls the metadata, which may be more visible if the subject breaks from their norm in terms of consciousness (gets a concussion, tranquilized), working off base instincts and impulses like 'stay camouflaged' (be a little more creepy and unsettling), intimidate/dominate (passenger works behind the scenes to make you look a little more dangerous as you mutate/grow/surround yourself in the aura of your power), etc, etc. In more pronounced cases, the power is just plain controlled by the passenger, not the host, and the passenger makes the seemingly random or uncontrolled aspects generate more conflict... pushing a power to kill rather than leave someone alive, or a thinker power turns up a vision of something the subject didn't want to see.
On the macro level, too, don't discount the fact that some shards (particularly powerful ones that warranted attention) are just sent to specific people, with the idea that it's a combination that's going to promote more conflict just by the sheer dynamic of it (Powerful person with a destructive power, a desperate person with a power with negative implications).
The fundamental problem with Worm is that everyone with superpowers got them from genocidal alien horrors that are mashing their neurochemistry to promote maximum mayhem. Given the nature of Taylor's particular Shard, she has a very strong psychological bias towards perceiving success as everyone doing what she says and failure as people not doing what she says, regardless of actual outcomes. This tends to make her a nightmare to work with unless your actions happen to coincide with her goals. And Doug succeeding in changing her behavior would just create disharmony between Taylor and her Shard, leading her Shard to angrily mash harder on her brain chemistry.
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"Anyone can be a winner if their definition of victory is flexible enough." - The DM of the Rings XXXV
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Messages In This Thread
Drunkard's walk Fan-Step: Rock - by Azunth - 04-12-2017, 04:37 AM
[No subject] - by Shepherd - 04-12-2017, 04:58 AM
[No subject] - by Azunth - 04-12-2017, 06:11 AM
[No subject] - by Dartz - 04-12-2017, 08:58 AM
[No subject] - by robkelk - 04-12-2017, 01:16 PM
[No subject] - by Bob Schroeck - 04-12-2017, 02:28 PM
[No subject] - by Azunth - 04-12-2017, 04:29 PM
[No subject] - by Dartz - 04-12-2017, 08:26 PM
[No subject] - by Azunth - 04-13-2017, 05:05 AM
[No subject] - by ECSNorway - 04-14-2017, 12:57 AM
[No subject] - by Acyl - 04-15-2017, 06:21 AM
[No subject] - by Dartz - 04-16-2017, 12:35 AM

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