Emotion

Type: Sensory (mental)

Action: Standard (active)

Range: Perception

Duration: Sustained (lasting)

Saving Throw: Will (staged)

Cost: 2 points per rank

You can instill different emotions in a target that fails a Will save to resist. Failure by 10 or more means the target will not take any hostile action unless attacked. You also choose the object of the emotion. So you decide what the target loves, hates, fears, and so forth. You can produce the following emotional effects:

• Calm: The subject adopts an indifferent attitude and does not feel any strong emotion. Calm can counter any of the other emotion effects and they may counter it (see Countering Powers, M&M, page 70).

• Despair: The subject is shaken, suffering a –2 on attack rolls, defense, and checks. Failure by 10 or more means the target is overcome with hopelessness, helpless and unable to take any actions.

• Fear: The subject is shaken, suffering a –2 on attack rolls, defense, and checks. Failure by 5 or more means the subject is frightened and flees from the source of the fear (specified by the user) as quickly as possible. Failure by 10 or more means the subject is panicked, dropping any held items and fleeing

blindly from the source of the fear. A panicked subject unable to flee cowers and does not attack—most likely using total defense instead (see Total Defense, M&M, page 159).

• Hate: The subject immediately becomes unfriendly. If the save fails by 5 or more, the subject’s attitude becomes hostile. Hate counters and is countered by love.

• Hope: The subject feels no fear or despair. Hope counters those emotions and similar effects and is countered by them in return

• Love: The subject’s attitude becomes friendly. If the save fails by 5 or more, the subject’s attitude becomes helpful. If it fails by 10 or more, the subject becomes fanatical. Love can counter despair, fear, and hate and they may counter it. The GM may allow other emotion effects, generally variations on the previous. For example, extreme jealousy can be seen as hate directed at a particular subject, anger as undirected hate making the subject less friendly and more likely to take hostile action, and so forth.

POWER FEATS

• Mind Blank: Targets don’t remember time under your Emotion Control; their memory of that time is blank.

• Subtle: Subtle Emotion Control is tailor-made for true manipulators, leaving victims wondering why they are suffering such uncharacteristic bouts of emotion. Combined with a degree of finesse in choosing the right feelings to impose, the controller can escape notice altogether.

EXTRAS

• Alternate Save: Emotion Control may be based on Fortitude to reflect a biochemical effect, such as a drug or control over various hormones.

• Contagious: Contagious Emotion Control could be a contagious disease or toxin or some sort or a contagious psychic effect passed from one person to another.

FLAWS

• Limited to (one emotion): You can only cause one of the listed emotional effects, not any of them. This is a common flaw for power concepts involving a particular emotion rather than the general ability to control emotions, such as a fear based power.

• Sense-Dependent: Your Emotion Control works through a target’s senses rather than as a strictly mental effect. Examples include eye contact (visual), voice or music (auditory), or pheromones (olfactory).

DRAWBACKS

• Noticeable: Your Emotion Control effect has some noticeable element: your eyes or head glow, your subjects’ skin changes color, a particular scent fills the air (perhaps differing according to the emotion), and so forth. This drawback often occurs in conjunction with the Sense-Dependent flaw.

ASSOCIATED EFFECTS

• Fatigue: The ability to affect emotions may also involve the ability to affect someone’s sense of energy and drive, suited to the Fatigue effect (with a +2 modifier if the effect is perception range like Emotion Control).

• Mind Reading: Mind Reading (possibly Limited to a subject’s emotional state) can be a useful ability to have when you intend to manipulate someone’s emotions (see the description of the Empathy power in the next chapter for more information).