Power Rules

It's impossible to create a system for all fictional powers. Instead, Convergence sets guidelines for crossover roleplay.

Trivial characters vs Heroic Characters

A trivial character is a background character of little narrative import. They are often some kind of mundane, ordinary person walking down the street or manning a market stall. They exist because ordinary people often exist in droves.

A Heroic character is Someone Who Matters. This is your hero units from an RTS game, your superheroes from a comic, your main characters and bosses from games. Player characters and major NPCs in a TTPRG. These characters might be special because of their skills, their magical abilities and blessings, their inventions, or simply the fact that they have a name and are taking part in a grander story as a "badass normal." Though the word heroic is used, this also applies to anyone who'd be called a villain, anti-hero, or whatever.

Player characters are always Heroic characters, in this sense, as is anyone a scene runner deems to be so.

This terminology will be useful for explaining all of the further rules.

Sidebar: But I'm a B-Grade adventurer!

The idea of Trivial vs Heroic characters doesn't mean all characters who can fight monsters and rise above the crowd in the background are trivial, but for NPCs this can come in gradients. Ultimately this is just an abstract label to help with the spirit of rules arbitration.

Extreme Powers and Events

Avoid extremes and nonsensical comic-book bizarreness. Superman can't turn back time by making Earth spin backwards here... except, maybe, in a plot, which only affects his own world. Nobody gets to casually blow up a significant chunk of a setting using the Death Star or some other superweapon on a lark. We also aren't here to definitively establish which character is better than another at some feat. Both Sonic the Hedgehog and the Flash are insanely fast and that's really good enough for doing dramatic things.

Saving Throw for Everything

Heroic characters are tough as nails. They all have an innate resistance to things that would be instantaneous lose conditions to trivial characters. While few are blanketly immune to such things, they're not going to be instantly petrified or turned into a frog forever, cursed into uselessness, slain by an instant death spell or completely mentally dominated by a psychic through some off-the-cuff casual effort. It is best to portray such effects as more gradual and subtle with multiple chances at a "saving throw" before it really sets in, and even then such characters are often able to be saved where a trivial character might be doomed. It may well be even that transformative curses, petrification, and similar things will 'wear off' in minutes to hours without sustained, significant effort to maintain it. Deadly poison might meet an immune system that is actually capable of handling it, though it may leave a victim bedridden nonetheless.

This also applies to dictatorial-grade powers that would utterly remove agency, such as a full-fledged time stop. It turns out that many characters might inexplicably be able to struggle through it or even break free. Would that happen every time? Maybe not, but it can happen if they're pressed hard enough.

This isn't a license to ignore consequence and shrug off bad things happening, but rather to operate at a gradient, a sliding scale, where something would normally be much more instant and dire. It means that the target of a power or effect gets to decide how severely they are affected, bereft of any relevant immunities.

For trivial characters, being instantly turned to stone because you happened to gaze upon Medusa directly is just a "tough luck" moment. Basically anything is fair game with them. They don't necessarily get a saving throw.

Immunity to Everything Prana

True immunities exist. Undead and robots are often immune to poison or biohazards. Elementals are often weak to one element but absorb another. Sometimes, a character's physiology might turn a deadly situation into merely an annoying one - for instance, a robot might not be able to suffer from cancer, but ionizing radiation can scramble circuits and fissile material can leave them radioactive and in need of decontamination.

This can mean that, every so often, a matchup is simply bad. A Fire Bender is going to have a very bad time of trying to take down Ifrit from Final Fantasy. It doesn't need to be a complete shutdown, though. Mega Man might not much care about walking through a cloud of poison gas because he's a robot, but it may still obscure his vision and force him to act with great care.

It's bad form, and against the rules, for a character to be immune to everything under the sun. This can include the ability to switch immunities endlessly (a magical elemental barrier that can only block one element for instance), or combining broad immunities like "magic and physical." Immunities are an area for your character to show off being capable in an environment or situation that makes other characters flinch, and occasionally to force another character into a tight spot, not to be boringly invincible. Facing down a character who's immune to your main gimmicks isn't something everyone's gonna be comfortable playing though, so this requires some consideration. Heck, it might even be that a particularly powerful and skilled Fire Bender manages to overwhelm Ifrit's elemental nature and burn him enough to earn the spirit's respect. When different settings collide, things taken for granted might be proven to not be so.

This principle does extend to just about anything and everything, which means that punching out Cthulhu is very reasonable - if you can punch hard enough, anyways. Everything can be defeated, eventually, with the right effort.

Out of Gas

Characters have limited ability juice, effort points, time commitment, etc. No one can operate at full power indefinitely. Everyone must be affected by some form of attrition and/or exhaustion. Even if you can claim to have unlimited MP/mana/stamina, you're probably gonna run out of willpower and focus eventually.

Send in the Cavalry

Mobilizing large forces is a big deal and can be highly disruptive to a setting or plot. It's best to coordinate this kinda thing with plot runners and affected characters. Characters who can command armies should also be frugal and tactical about it. Some situations call for large forces, and many don't. The sheer logistics of managing a large-scale deployment are a fine in-character reason for not doing so.

Stormtroopers vs Cavemen

As the Ewoks proved in Star Wars, sticks and stones can be very effective against what seems like a much more advanced and organized opponent. Advanced tech level and supernatural powers is never a guarantee of anyone's victory. Sure, many player characters routinely shrug off the efforts of "trivial opponents", but some in the rank and file are not so trivial.

Size Matters Not

A tiny warrior against a giant monster or mecha is best overcome using Shadow of the Collossus strategies, if the tiny warrior doesn't have any other options like powerful magic blasts or epic super strength. Size is a complicating factor, but by no means a win button.

Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards

Aka: Specialists vs. Generalists. Both types are valuable characters.

The stereotypical example of this is the titular trope, of a warrior who can fight stuff up close super well... compared with the wizard, who has a huge and ever-growing set of broadly useful abilities. This trope might be found in many sorts of wizards/sorcerers but can also apply to genius inventors and mad scientists.

Our answer to this is, we don't want to restrict the wizards/equivalents from being able to do many cool things with their massive spellbooks fit for every occasion, but they shouldn't be outshining specialists where they overlap.

Timey-Wimey Balls

Time manipulation is a tricky thing. In short, any time travel that would impose on other characters somehow, like changing past events, requires consent. Rewriting someone or something's past such that it changes or impedes the efforts of a Heroic Character falls under the gradient/"save vs spirit" rule. It's generally difficult to do on Convergence MUSH, but there is leniency for settings which feature it heavily.

Patch me up, doc!

The ability to instantly heal maladies and crippling injuries is a powerful and respectable ability, but if it is used excessively it can also completely trivialize the efforts of other characters to inflict said injury. The best compromise here is that one can only benefit from so much dramatic healing in a short period of time. There is a threshold after which one's body can't keep up with the healing and the effects taper off no matter how many times someone casts Curaga, especially in the chaos of an action sequence. During calmer downtimes, the sky is the limit.

Sidebar: About that leg, Dr. House...

Sometimes, characters come from worlds that lack the kinds of medical care available to others. They may have injuries which are iconic to them in some way, but which might be trivialized when transported to another setting, or otherwise easily dealt with by encountering the right player character.

The general rule here is that such injuries have lasted so long that it may not actually be practical to just cure them with a wave of one's hand. It might take a sustained effort, multiple appointments, and some therapy to set things right, and so they may not respond to off-the-cuff healing spells. It's up to their player how they want to address it, if at all. This logic extends to similar phenomenon like lingering curses. There might be many ways to address the curse Magus placed on Frog in Chrono Trigger which don't require Magus's death, but it wouldn't be fun to trivialize it.

Resurrection Matters

A true death, the sort that requires more than simple medical resuscitation to undo, is a major consequence not meant to be easily overcome. Nevertheless, resurrection is a viable ability to have and use. Some characters may even able to do it at-will with little cost or preparation.

However, success is never guaranteed.

Resurrection can fail for any number of reasons which may complicate or utterly bar the attempt. For instance, the soul may have already moved on and doesn't wish to return, or is barred from returning by a death god who's unwilling to bargain, or has been irreversibly mangled to a point of being unable to live again. Sometimes it might fail for no discernible reason at all. The state of the soul is usually far more important than the state of a body.

Death and matters of the soul are a complex phenomenon that few to no characters can claim to have full, complete, incontestable knowledge and mastery over, even if they're a God of Death or something like that. Every death is unique, and every resurrection is unique, even if there are some standard facts established in a setting about it. When characters start dying in Worlds not their own, or to forces from outside their World, or to be resurrected by forces from outside their World, there's really no telling what's gonna happen.

A character who is capable of resurrection should be careful about portraying it too casually or in a way that disrespects other settings. However, it's not a bad idea to quietly reach out and ask if a plot could benefit from some choice resurrection... sometimes people want to go off the rails.

Energy Fields Bigger Than Your Head

Powerful artifacts and phenomena should be used with respect to their power and plot-tastic nature. Examples include the Chaos Emeralds (Sonic the Hedgehog), the complete Triforce (The Legend of Zelda), the Dragon Balls (Dragon Ball), the Infinity Stones (Marvel comics) needs careful planning and plot coordination.

This doesn't mean that you can't have them. Tails uses one to power his experimental plane in Sonic Adventure 1. Dr. Strange is often in possession of the Time Stone, as its guardian. Bulma in Dragon Ball Super is routinely using the Dragon Balls for for silly vain things. That's not a problem. The Thanos Snap however, very much is.

Magic and Technology Equivalence

From Convergence's perspective, magic and technology are two sides of the same coin. Both can achieve similar results but might work differently. A solution to a problem shouldn't be poo-poo'd or considered impossible because of its nature.

I am a God, you dull creature!

Physical Gods, whether fictional or based out of some real world Mythology, are playable, but they cannot be omnipotent. Generally speaking, divine authority's limited to its World of origin, degenerating into something more like high-level magical feats elsewhere. In practice, most Physical Gods in fiction that are "player characters" are already pretty fine, like Marvel's take on Thor, or Amaterasu from Okami.

Must be This Tall to Ride

Barriers to engagement need some hand-waving. Characters should be able to interact despite setting-specific phenomena. Examples could include things like Stands (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure) being visible to people who don't have stands (or some kind of equivalent mystical sensitivity), or magical barriers that keep out mundane people who lack magic from accessing an area, like the Leaky Cauldron and Diagon Alley and Platform 9 and 3/4 from Harry Potter are inaccessible to "muggles."

For the purposes of our game, Heroic characters are rarely considered "muggles" in the latter sense, though lacking actual magical abilities may lock them out of being able to make great use of such areas to follow that example. It doesn't necessarily mean that they can see Stands (although, chances are characters with similar mystical abilities, like a wizard or a psychic or a Jedi or whatnot would be able to), but a badass normal like Batman or Himura Kenshin might find themselves evading trouble out of their finely honed combat instincts screaming "dodge!". This is always OK as a fallback.

Still... if a plot is going to make heavy use of gatekeeping mechanics, it's always good form to figure out some way to make things plausibly accessible. Allies of characters operating in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure might create some kind of gadget or trinket that can see Stands, as an example.

You want to Multi-Class into what?

Characters can grow and adapt, but core concepts and specializations should remain intact. Avoid excessive "multi-classing" that dilutes the character’s essence. Characters have to go through a lot to maintain their skills, abilities, and tactics, so it's not easy to utterly change these around, usually.

Gameplay and Story Segregation

Stat systems are guidelines, not rules. Adapt them as needed to fit narrative logic here. We always want the movie or novel version of how a thing turns out, not the game logic of it.

For a litRPG setting/character, though, you're gonna have to figure out how to adapt that. It's a case-by-case thing.

Power Copying

We have a [[Power Copy|whole article]] discussing power copying in detail.