The Gift: Scale, and doing it the hard way
Many powers let you act on a super powered scale. What does that mean?
The Gift normally only uses two scales: normal and super. Occasionally you might see a scale above super, usually called cosmic. Rarely, you might need an ad-hoc scale for sub-human power, like if a super villain hits you with a shrink ray.
When you take super scale action against super scale resistance, you don’t need to do anything special. Scale only needs rules when acting across scales.
Most of the time, a super powered character acting against normal resistance automatically succeeds. Don’t bother to roll in most cases. In an action scene, it doesn’t even need an action. If you do roll for such an action, roll with a +4 bonus.
If you've read Dresden Accelerated, that number will seem very high. It's the level described as "godlike" in that game.
A smaller value would make for a more forgiving game. But it breaks suspension of disbelief if someone can lift 50 tons, and then lose a wrestling match to a normal person. It makes for a bad game if you're only super human until things get interesting enough for the dice to come out. Relying on the game master to bend the rules as needed just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
So I decided to do things the hard way.
A whole host of design decisions have been made to keep that imbalance from wrecking the game. That's why every mantle has a defensive power. That's why combat powers don't distinguish between finesse and raw power. That's why mental powers and super senses don't use scale.
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ReplyDeleteYour idea for scale intuitively appeals to me, and I think if you're careful to lay out when it should apply early on a GM should be able to figure out when and how to apply it fairly easily.
It sounds like you only have two levels of scale: superhuman and human. Does this mean that the setting has fairly flat power levels in the superhuman level, or do you have a way to distinguish superstrong characters who juggle buildings from superstrong characters who juggle planets?
(Come to think of it, if you allowed some way to redefine who's the superhuman in a given situation then you could extend the Gift into truly astonishing levels of power. That's assuming you want big differences in power between heroes, of course!)
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DeleteYeah, I decided to mostly keep all supers on the same tier. I built the setting to be gameable, and having power levels all over the map would work against that.
The cosmic tier is mostly reserved for giant monsters and apocalyptic threats, but normal supers can get there temporarily via Ultimate Effort or Mad Science.