Mimic

So the first power the immediately looks to be problematic in any mutants and masterminds campaign is mimic. There's always someone who decides he can get around everything by just having "all the powers".

With the right extras, you can hold near-unlimited powers. That means all your great villains, all the other PCs, every powered NPC- suddenly all the great powers are inside one PC.

So how do you handle this?


Well let's look a bit at mimic and how it works, which might provide some limitations a clever GM can exploit.

Innate- Innate powers can't be nullified or drained. Some might argue that they can't be mimicked. I mean, can a mimic gain the flight power from a bird or bat? Can he gain scent from dogs? Those aren't "powers" so much as the standard abilities of a given race. Birds only fly because they have wings. Unless your mimic is gaining wings he won't gain flight.

Nullfiy/Power Control- You don't actually gain any powers when you mimic- you are holding them inside a "mimic array". You can nullify the mimic and he will lose ALL the powers he's mimicked so far. Sure, he could go re-mimic them (if he can find them again), but he has to start over every time he's nullified. Likewise, the "power control" power can force a mimic to "turn off" his mimic ability- purging him of all held powers. With power control you could also force a mimic to "fill up" by forcing him to mimic specific people.

Mimic- Remember, you don't actually "gain" mimicked powers. So you realistically shouldn't be able to mimic powers from another mimic. Now, in fiction this isn't always accurate. Peter Petrelli gets TK from Sylar, and Arthur Petrelli steals all Peter's held powers, but as written it doesn't seem like you could actually mimic powers which are gained via mimic. So there's that.

Bad Powers- Don't want your mimic stealing powers all the time? Start having enemies have powers that have horrendous drawbacks. (Maybe an always active flight power that's distracting and has a linked strength drain or something). Remember, a character won't know what powers he gets until he mimics them. And unless he has selective, he must take ALL powers from a character he attempts to mimic- he can't pick and choose. (Sure, he could link precognition to learn the powers prior to mimicking them- but that forces him to choose). And remember, unless the mimic is REVERSABLE AND SELECTIVE- he can't choose what powers to drop. Once he fills up he must drop all his powers in order to start filling them up again.

Devices- Like innate- a mimic may not be able to mimic devices. Certainly he can't gain flight from an airplane or blast from a gun, right? So by having enemies carry weapons instead of powers you can limit the power of the mimic.

You control the powers- Remember, you control what powers the mimic comes into contact with. You can always have the enemies use dumb powers. I remember a mimic in a campaign I ran ended up with powers such as "Mind control: limited to hacidic jews" and "create object: limited to uninflated balloons" and "super movement: slithering". You can also have powers which contain limited so as to make them useless- such as flight when wearing a red cape, or burrowing when wearing a luchador mask, etc. The mimic will be forced to dress like a buffoon to use all his powers.

Max Ranks- By the mimic power description, you can't gain more ranks in a power than your ranks in mimic. (Which itself is probably limited by your PL). That means powers like immunity and regeneration (perhaps also teleport and such) which themselves aren't limited by PL or which are effectively a ton of rank 1-2 powers are severely limited to a mimic. A PL 5 character could have a rank 20 immunity if he wanted- but a PL 5 mimic can only mimic up to 5 ranks of immunity- not nearly as useful.

Immunity- You could always go cheap and have a villian with immunity: mimic. (You might even have non-mimickable as a 1 point extra on a given power). Kind of a cheap way to nerf the power, but it's legitimate.


Now that you've seen some ways to nerf mimics- I'll just quickly list some of the "novel" mimic I've seen used.


The Reverse Mimic- He doesn't copy your powers- he gets the reverse of your powers. This came to be very useful when they fought Molam Ram and could put hearts back into the body, or when the King of Atlantis with the power to project himself into the future and possess people attacked, and the reverse mimic was able to go back in time and fight the king in his physical form. It's more work on the GM sometimes to figure out what the reverse of a power is sometimes, but it was novel.

Disease Mimic- This guy copies a disease and then can inflict it on others. The downside- he almost always has at least one disease- the good news, he can be cured by bringing him around another disease.

Muscle Mimic- This guy could only mimic innate powers and physical skills. Been done on Heroes and Alphas before, but it comes up to not be as broken as your straight mimic.

Ramza Mimic- The mimic from final fantasy tactics- he doesn't keep your powers or hold them, he can just use your powers on you in response to you using your powers on him. Like deflecting except he doesn't actually block the original power. Breaks the "one action per turn" concept- but still pretty cool.

Mega Man- A robot who can only mimic the powers of devices and other robots, like Mega Man. He had the "unreliable-5 uses" flaw on every mimicked power because he ran out of battery power and had to recharge- just like the video game.

The Power Broker- This ended up getting used in Misfits- but this character would mimic the power, but instead of being able to use it, he was instead able to grant it's use to someone else. So he mimic's flight- but cannot fly, he is able to give other people the ability to fly. Great as a support character- he holds powers he is not able to personally use.