The Bad Ideas Thread!

Given the evidence here and here, we are dire need of a Bad Ideas thread.  As such, I have created one.

The purpose of the Bad Ideas Thread is to share your ridiculous, stupid, and/or horrifying character ideas.  Anything from bad puns and obvious ripoffs to the downright horrifying.  That said, no idea is too good for the thread!

And since one person's trash is another one's treasure, let's make the default assumption that all characters posted here are free for adoption unless specified otherwise.

Try to keep the ideas PG13 and less than Biomancer levels of creepy.

Some ideas to get us started off:

Lima
An Omega whose appearance is similar to the later stages of the condition shown in A Bad Case of Stripes.

A long while back my RP group had once planned to play a game set in the Fallout universe which would use its radiation-drenched status as a flimsy excuse to have people who had Mystery Men-level lame superpowers.

I came up with the idea of a PC who was sort of the opposite of Absolute Zero: He was an engineer who at one point had accidentally absorbed a massive amount of radiation that left him physically unharmed but now basically a walking source of radiation emission. So he wore a suit (and slept in a lead lined tent) not to keep the rest of the world out, but to keep himself in for the sake of everyone else.

The other was a lady player who came up with the idea of a PC who had chameleon skin which could mimic everything around her and rendered her skin effectively invisible... so long as she wasn't wearing any clothes over it, was the kicker.

(There also was a PC who had very uncanny both bad and good luck and mistakenly thought he had psychic powers because of it, but that seems rather too similar to Setback and Kismet.)

I also once had a D&D campaign where I played a fighter who had been specifically engineered to be a tank drawing aggro/danger for an army, so while she had the upside of rapid healing and being revived any time she was mortally wounded, she also had the downside of being a magnet for any sort of ranged projectile or otherwise free-swinging object in the area. And I do mean anything; as in stuff like if you sneezed in her direction, the resulting goo would end up flying at her. If you were flailing your hands gesturing while talking your hands would be drawn to accidentally hit her if she was close enough. Etc.

***

In more Sentinels-specific ideas, I submit for the cause this thread that derailed into people listing ideas for ridiculous or weird Virtuoso instruments. (I do remember coming up with weird Bard ideas was a cherished pasttime in my old RP group.)

There's a character in The Stars My Destination who's exactly like that – no special suit, but he can only be exposed to people for a few minutes at a time to keep them from getting radiation poisoning.

Huh, I didn't know that. I've read The Demolished Man but haven't gotten around to reading TSMD yet. X3

(Basically in the original Fallout there's an old Brotherhood of Steel history tape which details the first BoS excursion to The Glow (a massive irradiated area), and it mentioned one of the initiates who instead of dying from the exposure like everyone else just sort of went slightly loopy and wandered off to fate unknown. So I turned him into a PC with the idea that he had basically become a Ghoul (humans turned immortal from radiation exposure) but without the usual deformation Ghouls typically suffer, gaining the radiation emission problem instead.)

At this stage my character is more than lilely going to be a reptilian alien whose egg would up in a nest on Insula Primalis. They hatched and were raised by some kind Utahraptors and always just assumed they were a dinosaur until their teens. When their home was attacked they found out they had powers, and thus… Dinomite was born.

Of my favorite 3 character concepts one of them deffinately belongs here. He's also the only one who is actually finished (but for rules stuff) because i'm still trying to figure out Jasmine. The second one i'm still waiting on the Tempest episode for more info on how Maerynian's powers work & how consistant they are. Any way, on to my concept

Robert 'Robbie' Brooker Jr. is from the backwoods foothills area south of Rook City, he lives in a rural community where most people know everyone. He gained powers just before graduation when a freind jokingly pushed him into a rainwater tub at his grandfathers old still. He got stuck & nearly drowned but there we no hard feelings. They didn't know it also contained Isoflux Alpha which after his time in the tub had thoroughly suffused his entire body.

Now Robbie is an Omega who is able to absorb and then redirect light energy to fire energy blasts, heat or burn things, manipulate the way light moves to make himself or other things invisible or disorient his enemies, Fly, and speed his healing. His first problem is that he is light powered so he can't opperate for long in complete darkness.

"But if that's his only weakness he would be near Citizen Dawn's level!" I hear you protest and you would be correct, except for his second weakness

The light also has an effect on him very similar to Alchohol.

Yep, if he goes out into light of any kind, the source of his power, he starts getting drunk and doesn't stop until he expends all the energy he's absorbed, no storing energy for him. The more light on him the quicker he gets powered up for impressive effects and the quicker he gets drunk. In daylight he wears a long brown coat(cause everyone wants a billowy coat or cape or something) long gloves, collared shirt, hiking boots, dark pants and his grandfather's wide brim stetson. All this is not just his style but is required if he needs to be coherent in daylight. A half hour in direct sunlight in a normal T Shirt with no hat leaves him in a state similar to someone at the legal limit.  His powers so overwhelming that he doesn't usually pull out his Sleveless hero costume(similar to Setback's) until after dark to do hero work because he can only opperate effectively at night. Well, Mostly.

If he has to pull out the stops to deal with anything bigger than a mugging or some "idjit" trying to rob one of the small banks in town, he will probably miss at least once, leaving creaters in walls or setting fire to a tree or something. Being drunk is not conducive to accurate energy blasts. It is also not conductive to flight, if you've tried those drunk driving simulators you know how difficult that is! Now try flying at up to barely sub-sonic speeds while blitzed out of your skull. He has spent a couple days sitting in the sun to repair broken bones after a relatively high speed collision with walls around town. There are a couple places with loony toon style imprints of him in alleyway walls.

Whenever he deals with local law enforcement he tends to seem either Still somewhat drunk, or hung over after expending all the stored up power he can. Luckily he is a cheerful and kind drunk, constantly throwing out "I love you"s and "Your great"s as well as a gentle happy glow from any left over energy he has but can't quite contain because he's drunk. Sherrif Dougie from his hometown has said "I'd love havin' 'im round, ifn he didn' seem like a Mountain Dew runner who couldn' stay out o his own stock." Between that and the drunkenness and the opporating at night, and the folk heroes from the area he lives in (to which he is unknowingly related) his superhero identity could only have been one thing, even if he was too drunk to come up with it on his own.

Moonshine! 

I love him.

Bad ideas ahead! 

So here is a bad idea to deliver! The Luchador! A criminal Luchador with the powerful ability to drain the wrestling skill from other champions! And after murdering all the Luchadors in Mexico he turned to a life of crime, and was only stopped by a combined assault from Haka and Macho Man Randy Savage.

a later version would be used from a former super soldier turned pro wrestler who defends Mexico from rabid monsters and a gang of wrasslin' robots.

Hair Apparent:

A hero with telekinetic power over all hair greater than 1 cm long within 50 yards.  Quickly leads to the proliferation of bald criminals in the city.

My wife constantly threatens to play a superhero called The Bricklayer when I run superhero games. The Bricklayer can create blocks of rough stone up to the size of a common brick, and she can expel them from her person at any speed up to that of a bullet, making them extremely dangerous projectiles or rapidly replenishing building materiuals. Unfortunately, unlike most elementalists who can create material from their hands, she can only create her bricks from her... um, rear area. So her costume includes a buttflap like old-school pajamas so she can rapidly unsnap them to use her special attack, "Moon Rock." Fortunately, she's never followed through on her threat of "playing a superhero who can literally shit a brick." XD

Your wife sounds like a charming person. XD

After remembering that the RPG suggests that one can actually deal damage by taunting your enemies and hurting them psychologically, the following sprang to mind.

Rachel Ho was raised by a Jewish mother and a Chinese grandmother.  Between the two of them, she learned every parenting trick traditional to both cultures and was more than prepared when she became a mother herself.  Unfortunately, her husband and children were killed in the OblivAeon attack.  Rachel herself was critically injured, but she almost would rather have died.  Her loss, combined with exposure to the massive cosmic energies unleashed in that battle, caused her pent-up passive-aggressive mothering style to grow to arms-grade power.  As The Ultimom, she wields guilt, shame, and adherence to tradition to lethal effect, subduing all who oppose her tiniest whim.

During a defeat in a sinister genetic modification laboratory, The Ultimom fell into a vat of volatile DNA and became augmented with the genes of a great cat.  Adding feline strength, speed, and claws to her psychological weapons, she is now known as Tiger Mom.

I am disappointed that Tiger Mom isn't a Cougar instead.

That reminds me of how I loved in Marvel Avengers Alliance that Maximus Boltagon had a move called "Technobabble" that caused Broken Will and Incapacitation in people, as well as how in Genius: the Transgression you could likewise cause actual damage to people by monologuing at them, and I always had this yen in the back of my mind for combining these two concepts into a general archetype.

Like basically a mad scientist character that had weaponized geeking out and mad sciencing at people, where they can both warp reality and mentally manipulate people by talking (mad) science to it/them.

I mean, if you're going to rant about reversing the polarity flow and "THEY CALLED ME MAD BUT THEY DIDN'T APPRECIATE MY BRILLIANT MASTER PLAN!" at people anyway, why not get some tangible benefit out of it?

She's a laugh riot. XD

Tiger Mom’s nemesis should be The Helicopter Parent.   

Playing West of Loathing lately reminded me that oh yeah, thanks to Sentinels I now have a tabletop RPG where I could entirely in character play someone wielding a Disco Banjo and if that's not the best thing I don't know what is.

I think you mean BEST IDEA EVER.

That reminds me of the old-school internet cartoon 'Doodieman'. He also had a but-flap for easy power usage, but his powers were not as… hygenic as Bricklayer's…

DoytHaban from Schlock Mercenary can excrete shaped charges

reminds me of mulch diggums from artemis fowl.