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Mega-Scale Overkill!!!


Demonsong

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I'd treat megascale and normal scale as different realms, metaphorically; for game purposes, some things happen in megascale, others happen in normal scale. When you're travelling cross-country you're operating in the megascale realm; when you're in a fight you're operating in the normal realm. If you buy just one, your power only operates in that realm; if you want both, you need to buy both, usually in a multipower.

 

If you just buy megascale movement you're saying "My movement power is good for travelling huge distances quickly, but not useful in fights." The specifics why it's not useful could be thought of as inaccuracy, turning limits, extra time, whatever. The exact reason really doesn't matter; for game purposes it just means your power can get you to the fight quickly, but has limits such that you don't use that power during fights.

 

Whereas if you buy both megascale and normal versions, in a multipower, you're saying "This is how useful my power is for travelling huge distances, and that is how useful it is for maneuvering around a battlefield." Comic-book characters would have that multipower if their powers are useful in both situations. And you'd simulate their specifics by varying how much normal scale and megascale they have; some characters are better at the tactical than the long-distance, while others are the reverse.

 

It's a game construct, but it strikes me as a useful one. You have your tactical battles, and you have your long-distance trips and plot-device weapons and so on, and they're pretty much separate aspects of adventures. So it makes sense to define how good a character is at each separately as well, rather than to start with a single power and try to flaw it enough so the megascale capabilites don't turn into overwhelming tactical capabilities.

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Originally posted by Squid

The alternative is what we had in 4th edition. 10 points for FTL travel, about 100 points to go supersonic. Made no sense.

 

Megascale's great. Very in-genre.

Hmm.. makes me wonder how people would like Megascale as an adder (when applied to movement)? Surely that has already been discussed in another thread.. anybody know off hand a good thread title to search for regarding this?

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Originally posted by Squid

The alternative is what we had in 4th edition. 10 points for FTL travel, about 100 points to go supersonic. Made no sense.

 

Megascale's great. Very in-genre.

 

To split hairs, isn't that really like 50 points? 10 minimum for moving 10 meters in a phase. If you go just at SPD 2, and +5 points doubles NCM, then isn't that 2,560 meters in your phase at 50 points (15 pts = 20 meters, 20 pts = 40 meters, 80, 160, 320, 640, 1280, 2560), and 2x2,560 =5,120m in 12 seconds, speed of sound is roughly 340 meters/second, so sound moves at 4,080 meters in 12 seconds.

 

To the earlier point that Tesuji made (and this came up over at the M&M board as well) I think it matters a lot if characters can get somewhere in 30 minutes versus 1 minute. THat's often the difference between "they got away, you guys were too slow" and "they're surprised, they didn't think you'd be there so fast." Or any number of other things, such as the trail growing cold.

 

I think megascale is "in genre" but only for some high end power stuff or certain niche effects. To me, movement was costed fine in 4th. The 2x NCM is also fine to me instead of megascale. My feeling is that megascale is only warranted when something really isn't as useful as the power with extended area or range or movement.

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Originally posted by zornwil

To the earlier point that Tesuji made (and this came up over at the M&M board as well) I think it matters a lot if characters can get somewhere in 30 minutes versus 1 minute. THat's often the difference between "they got away, you guys were too slow" and "they're surprised, they didn't think you'd be there so fast." Or any number of other things, such as the trail growing cold.

 

In real life, you are dead spot on.

 

In a comic book, I don't agree.

 

Look at it this way... say you have one character who spent for megascale a few points and got the ability to cross town in a minute, while another character wil take 30 minutes or perhaps 15 minutes because he spent those 3 cp on say a photography skill.

 

With a typical superhero engagement taking 20 seconds to a minutes, that difference may seem significant from a non-0scripted real world sense.

 

Nut in practice how many times with all the players sitting there is the "alarm goes off, bank robbery on 5th street?" or whatever "crisis we were not expecting" scenarios are you gonna look at the 15 minute player and tell him "your character gets there 15 minutes after the others do, do you wanna go get drinks while we run the fight?"

 

or, is it more likely that by coincidence, his character will be scripted to be in the vicinity, closer to the action so that he will arrive in time to participate in the evening's festivities?

 

Spidey doesn't have the ability to travel as fast as many of the heroes in the comics, but he gets to the trouble often enough. Villains get away for plenty of reasons but rarely is one of them "I out raced the superhero"... more often it being a diversion or a case of a movement ability the hero lacks... not a speed issue.

 

At least, from most of my comic reads, thats how i recall things. I never saw an issue of spidey where the issue was him swinging across town while faster supers handled the bad guys.

 

Net result, IMO, the significance **in the scenes run in an RPG/comic** of faster strategic speed seems minimal at best. As i commented earlier on a different subject, in the course of say a year in "the real world of the comic" there might have been a dozens of situations in which the hero did not arrive in time and there was basically no event... but those are normally not the ones highlighted and put "on stage" to show in the comics (to run as a session in the rpg.)

 

The exception is of course the "mystery, find the villains before they strike again" episodes but those cases hit everyone, regardless of strategic speed.

 

perhaps your games, or the comics you read, are different.

 

Regardless: keep in mind my preference would be for +5 pts for NCM to be x10 or x20, maybe x5 for some style games. I do not endorse the ultra cheap megascale with the cannot tell where i am going might smah into walls and kill myself limitation we have now.

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Originally posted by tesuji

Regardless: keep in mind my preference would be for +5 pts for NCM to be x10 or x20, maybe x5 for some style games. I do not endorse the ultra cheap megascale with the cannot tell where i am going might smah into walls and kill myself limitation we have now.

I tend to agree. But I also think MegaScale is a necessary thing to do do many Powers correctly, and it is very genre. Megascale movement would perhaps have been better handled as a +5 or +10 Adder per level rather than as an Advantage, but that's just my opinion. I don't mind it being a bit clumsy, but a potential 100% rate of inaccuracy does seem a bit much. I think the original idea was that if you fly from Los Angeles to Detroit, you might end up in Cleveland or Duluth. That seems reasonable as a 1-5% inaccuracy, after all a 1 degree error can multiply considerably when you travel 2000 miles. But missing by a Km when you only leaped a Km is a bit much. Perhaps a Navigation roll for a cross-country trip would be appropriate?

 

Nobody in our current team has MS movement, although our team vehicle does. While we have one character with an MS attack, it is Change Environment (a magical thunderstorm a kilometer across) so it's effect is not overly powerful. (And no way would I allow him to take Selective Target as an Advantage.) It often inconveniences his compatriots as much as his enemies. (Ask me how much I like my lightly defended character falling off a 4 story high castle wall in a magical thunderstorm and having to make her Breakfall roll at -4) :eek:

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Originally posted by tesuji

In real life, you are dead spot on.

 

In a comic book, I don't agree.

...........

 

perhaps your games, or the comics you read, are different.

....

 

"...or the comics you read..." is part of it, and moreover, this is not about just 4-color traditional comics. Even this being the "Champions" thread, this is about super-hero roleplay gaming, and that is much broader than 4-color. Your post is about 4-color comics, as far as I can tell. I don't play those, at least not "straight", I don't care for them, and don't want/expect a system to veer too closely towards those. By the same token, I don't run a particularly realistic game, either, so my objection isn't about realism per se.

 

It's moreso about the dramatic tension of timing and speed. This is probably more akin to action movies and some of the grittier comics than 4-color comics. Every minute the team misses the mark by can make a difference. Even in a relatively "normal" 4-color-ish setting in my games it can matter though - for example, in a very recent game, the team had someone dispatched to concoct some techno-magical solution to getting into the Kingpin's heavily protected fortress. It took the character a couple hours round-trip to do it all, including importantly travel time. This allowed a villain they just defeated enough time to revive and for the Kingpin to complete his preparations, but not enough to get further reinforcements. Had the players assaulted directly, they would have faced one less major villain, although I don't htink they practically could have done so and succeeded. Hard to say. But anyway, it was all about the timing of their actions, including long-distance movement (they had to go from Oklahoma countryside to Detroit and back).

 

That's just "for instance", and I fully recognize, Tesuji, that this doesn't reflect yours or necessarily even many others' games. But I wil lay claim that it isn't so outside of heroic fiction and even super-hero gaming that it is irrelevant.

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Originally posted by zornwil

That's just "for instance", and I fully recognize, Tesuji, that this doesn't reflect yours or necessarily even many others' games. But I wil lay claim that it isn't so outside of heroic fiction and even super-hero gaming that it is irrelevant.

 

The key is... all those elements of how long does it take the villain to recover... how dlong does it take his allies to arrive... how long does it take to make the bomb, how long does it take to get from the bad guys base to our home base to build the bomb oir wherevere those elements are that we need to go to... are all determined by the GM when he assigns values to them. The "time is critical" elements are determined by the G when he scripts the setting and scenario, not by the player character's movement rate.

 

Anyway, for me, those types of scenario drama moments are not something i arrive at by "putting things where they should be" and then running the math. The "where things should be" includes will speed and time be important to this scenario, and dont exist as a separate entity.

 

it never appears to me in comics that its the actual MPH a hero travels that is the determining element between win and loss or even necessarily the hardship. if the scene calls for "can he get there in time" drama, the mcguffin is far enough away for that to be the case. if "is he fast enough" is not the drama of the week, the events are closely linked enough to make travel time not an issue.

 

YMMV.

 

BTW, i run a little darker than 4 color, more like dark xman level. Definitely not street level whens a normal pistol is any real threat to a super tho.

 

for lower powered games, where normal cars and stuff is a likely mode of travel, where really fast flight would be out of place, i wouldn't be looking to allow MS for its usual price at all.

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Originally posted by tesuji

The key is... all those elements of how long does it take the villain to recover... how dlong does it take his allies to arrive... how long does it take to make the bomb, how long does it take to get from the bad guys base to our home base to build the bomb oir wherevere those elements are that we need to go to... are all determined by the GM when he assigns values to them. The "time is critical" elements are determined by the G when he scripts the setting and scenario, not by the player character's movement rate.

 

Anyway, for me, those types of scenario drama moments are not something i arrive at by "putting things where they should be" and then running the math. The "where things should be" includes will speed and time be important to this scenario, and dont exist as a separate entity.

 

it never appears to me in comics that its the actual MPH a hero travels that is the determining element between win and loss or even necessarily the hardship. if the scene calls for "can he get there in time" drama, the mcguffin is far enough away for that to be the case. if "is he fast enough" is not the drama of the week, the events are closely linked enough to make travel time not an issue.

 

YMMV.

 

BTW, i run a little darker than 4 color, more like dark xman level. Definitely not street level whens a normal pistol is any real threat to a super tho.

 

for lower powered games, where normal cars and stuff is a likely mode of travel, where really fast flight would be out of place, i wouldn't be looking to allow MS for its usual price at all.

 

All fair enough, and where my M does V is that this is a game, not a comic book and not a story; elements are intended to be competitive situations (not against each other or the GM but against situations) and not completely scripted. The players can lose, they may not make it in time, they may not cut the mustard. As a GM, I feel they are to be presented with a challenge which will typically not be lethal (for my super-hero games anyway) and typically has a very good chance for success, but that's the limit. If they can't make it in time, then oh well, there's plenty of other situations and threads to follow up on.

 

Re the lower powered games, of course, I agree.

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Originally posted by Trebuchet

I tend to agree. But I also think MegaScale is a necessary thing to do do many Powers correctly, and it is very genre. Megascale movement would perhaps have been better handled as a +5 or +10 Adder per level rather than as an Advantage, but that's just my opinion. I don't mind it being a bit clumsy, but a potential 100% rate of inaccuracy does seem a bit much. I think the original idea was that if you fly from Los Angeles to Detroit, you might end up in Cleveland or Duluth. That seems reasonable as a 1-5% inaccuracy, after all a 1 degree error can multiply considerably when you travel 2000 miles. But missing by a Km when you only leaped a Km is a bit much. Perhaps a Navigation roll for a cross-country trip would be appropriate?

 

Nobody in our current team has MS movement, although our team vehicle does. While we have one character with an MS attack, it is Change Environment (a magical thunderstorm a kilometer across) so it's effect is not overly powerful. (And no way would I allow him to take Selective Target as an Advantage.) It often inconveniences his compatriots as much as his enemies. (Ask me how much I like my lightly defended character falling off a 4 story high castle wall in a magical thunderstorm and having to make her Breakfall roll at -4) :eek:

Hmmm, time for everybody on the team to buy Environmental Movement: Thunderstorms :)
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I've actually been tempted to retain a meta-creator shtick that resulted in the travesty which was the usurper who attempted to supllant the dominion which is hero...

 

Supersonic Flight. 1 Mach Per 10 Points, though I would be tempted to lower it to five points since its basically a plot device power.

 

This was used extensively in my game prior to this whole megascale wackiness and often translated as:

 

Multipower (Flight Array) 40 Point Base, Half End (50)

5) 20" Flight

5) Mach 4 Flight

5) Rude FTL Flight [usually: only in space]

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