Not Eraserhead
September 21st, 2018
The previous two heroes I've gone on about from my days in the City of Heroes were what I called 'challenge' characters. You know, those folks who have one or two underperforming power sets, with which I forced my way through the game solo, for the most part. This, of course, because I am stubborn, and wanted to prove my favorite, if difficult characters could be built to work that way. Somehow.
Probably my earliest such character was Psychophant. Well, the other Psychophant, because the original was deleted in favor of a second Psychophant after a particularly harrowing group mission I'd participated in involving zombies. Lots of zombies. Well, they were accurately Frankenstinian horrors that plagued the lower levels of the game, but still, I called them zombies because zombies.
Anyway, the original Psychophant was like Mesmeroticist, who was also built after I replaced him, in that he was a mind controller. Instead of the empathy power set, however, he had force fields as a secondary ability. And whether teaming or soloing, that combination was a bit too awful for even my liking, and thus, he was deleted in lieu of a 're-rolled' Psychophant.
The new Psychophant, the one I stuck with for the vast majority of the game, had force fields as a primary power set, and psionic blast as a secondary, making him a 'defender' instead of a 'controller'. This allowed him a lot more physical controls of enemies, mostly involving knocking them all over the place, as well as his shooty mental powers to make them stay down once they stopped.
He was also a difficult character to play solo, but he did wind up teaming a bunch over time, and not just with my friends' characters. That wasn't my intent with the guy, but what can you do? I liked the vibe Psychophant had, though, even if I tried to make him the creepiest costumes that I could with the system's character generator, again and again. Included here: the nipple rings ensemble.
I still liked the mind control power set, though, which is why I ultimately created Mesmeroticist. Thus, I was playing two mainly psionic characters at about the same time, which was probably because I was on a big psychic kick at the time. Mind you, I was working on a complete rewrite of my Manual of the Psi RPG book at the time, so that may have had something to do with it. Probably.
Bonus nerdery: Psychophant written up for the nerd game I support on my nerd site. Complete with even more screenshot imagery!
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