Recently I had occasion to recall the RPG [url=http://www.atlas-games.com/arm5/]Ars Magica[/url] and the idea of playing secondary characters. These are characters that would be played if the main character is indisposed for some reason or if the task simply was not suited to the main character. The way I envision that this might work in CoT is that each character has the opportunity to obtain one or more contacts. The player would play these contacts as they engage in their own tasks for specific rewards.

Why have some contact go through this rather than the hero? First of all, I'd love to see the devs used these as an opportunity to flex their ability to create non-combat missions. Past that, these "missions" might be something this person just happened across (e.g. Jimmy Olsen discovers he's made some interesting photos, or a police officer comes across something they can't explain well enough to follow up through official channels) or any of a thousand other situations a superhero isn't likely to encounter. Or due to the simple fact that not even superheroes can be everywhere.

Rewards are always tricky. My best idea is to provide a clue (Jimmy's photo or the cop's "thingie") to a particular kind of mission. This would essentially make this idea a variation on doing radio/newspaper missions to obtain safeguard/mayhem missions. Ideally these would be larger and more spectacular than whatever may pass for normal safeguard/mayhem missions (always assuming that such will exist).

Such a system could have plenty of other little features. For example, each contact could have their own bio page (and perhaps even family tree). If/when the secret identity stuff is implemented a contact could be associated with that identity rather than with the superhero.