Transfer

Effect: Boost, Drain

Action: Standard (active)

Range: Touch

Duration: Instant

Saving Throw: Fortitude

Cost: 2-10 points per rank

You can take power points from a target’s traits and add them to your own. You must touch the target (succeeding at a melee attack roll) and the target makes a Fortitude save (DC 10 + Transfer rank). Each point the save fails removes one power point from the affected trait and transfers it to yours, up to a maximum of your Transfer rank. The trait lowered does not have to be the same as the one increased (so you could, for example, transfer an opponent’s Strength to your Blast power).

The traits you can transfer from and to must be chosen when you take this power and cannot change. You do not need to have points already in the acquired trait; in other words it can be a trait or effect you gain only after transferring points into it. You lose transferred points, and the target regains them, at a rate of one per round. The Slow Fade power feat reduces this rate. You can only transfer power points up to twice your power rank. Once you have done so, you cannot transfer any more from a subject until some of the transferred power points fade.

To determine your Transfer’s cost, take the cost of a Drain effect of the appropriate level and add it to the cost of a Boost effect of the appropriate level. So if you lower one of the target’s traits and raise one of yours, for example, Transfer costs 2 power points per rank.

FLAWS

• Tainted (–1): You acquire the subject’s drawbacks (see Drawbacks, M&M, page 124) as long as you retain transferred points from the subject.

UNDER THE HOOD: TRANSFER

Like Boost and Drain (which it essentially combines), Transfer can be a powerful effect. Gamemasters may wish to limit player characters to lower ranks of Transfer, as well as limiting levels of the Slow Fade power feat. One means of simulating the effects of Transfer while making it a little less fearsome is to use the Mimic power instead: increase its cost by 1 point per rank, and have the target suffer from a Linked Fatigue effect to represent the loss of “vital energy”

to the attacker. So the target retains his normal traits, but might be somewhat tired out by the “energy transfer,” making for a more even struggle.