Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Help Me Name A Kind of Power

As promised, I haven't posted anything in a good while, not because I'm not doing anything, but because the work on Heroes of Industry is at a stage where I have nothing interesting to post.  And I never try to bore my imaginary readers.  But now I could use some help naming something.  

I've discussed in previous posts how I am organizing Powers in various ways: Category, Scope, and Effect.  The last includes such Effects as Attack, Defense, Movement, and Alteration (actually, I just did some stuff with Alteration that is kind of worth posting, but that's for another day).  There is another type of Effect for which I can't quite come up with a good name.  Right now I have been calling it "All-or-Nothing Attack".  It represents powers that entangle, blind, paralyze, and bind; that is, rather than go through a full conflict, you roll once and it either takes effect or not.  In the T&J book, we see an example when Snow Owl create ice manacles to shackle the bad guys.

"All or Nothing Attack" is an awfully unwieldy name.  Ideally, it wouldn't have the word "Attack" in it at all (since that is the name of another Effect) nor would be longer than a single word (since all the other Effects are single words).  I'm drawing an absolute blank and so I turn to my hypothetical readers.  What do I call this thing?

9 comments:

  1. Howzabout calling it an "Overwhelm"? Very little just "whelms" in English. It either overwhelms or it doesn't.

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  2. True - the only "whelm" I can think of is in White Plum Mountain. :)

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  3. How about Supress. For example: Entangle supresses movement. Blindness supresses sight. Paralize supresses movement. Bind, etc.

    Or Hinder might be a good option too. (replace supress with hinder in above examples.)

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  4. Good suggestions so far. I'll throw out two more:

    Bind

    Shut-down (which is technically a single word because of the hyphen ;) )

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  5. I like Overhelm but that suggests it goes over their defenses rather than in many ways, just aren't applicable.

    What about Impair?
    Or Limit?
    Imperil?

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  6. Hey, I got a few minutes of working internet! Hurrah.

    I quite like "Control". I also thought of "Subdue".

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  7. Subdue is good.

    How about Incapacitate? Or Subjugate?

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