Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

[Mister E]

Re: Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

 

We found them sufficiently powerful to limit them to five for any character' date=' but we had a lot of skilled characters in our campaigns.[/quote']

 

Yes' date=' more than 4 has the problem of inflating Skill Roll way over the campaing limits.[/quote']

 

The typical range of Skill rolls is from 11- to 15- for standard starting Superheroic campaigns.

 

I think 15- is low as a campaign limit, but accurate for the typical Skill rolls of typical superheroes.

 

Atypical superheroes then, imho, are those able to make Extraordinary Skill rolls w/ Skills that are at least 18- at base.

 

Note: any Brick w/ a STR of 60 (& a STR roll of 21-) is virtually god-like if no one else in the game has a ANY roll better than 15-. Add 5 or 6 OSLs to a 60 STR roll, and you end up w/ a PC that can actually bend reality w/ its bare hands.

 

Huge OSLs (e.g., 10 OSLs for 120 pts) are examples of potentially broken, "cosmic" level, HEROSystem wooj... ought to be extremely rare [unique, even]... & should require GM approval.

[Vondy]

Re: Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

 

We found them sufficiently powerful to limit them to five for any character' date=' but we had a lot of skilled characters in our campaigns.[/quote']

 

Our cap was 3 per character - and that was with typical skill rolls of 10-13, with 15 being considered "a high roll."

 

But that was a fairly narrative-character driven heroic level game.

[Christopher]

Re: Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

 

Note: any Brick w/ a STR of 60 (& a STR roll of 21-) is virtually god-like if no one else in the game has a ANY roll better than 15-. Add 5 or 6 OSLs to a 60 STR roll' date=' and you end up w/ a PC that can actually bend reality w/ its bare hands.[/quote']

The propblem is, that there is virtually no STR roll in game. At best there are STR-Contests (wich are solved by rollin STR damage and counting normal Body). And you average superharo usually has a little difficulty getting a firm grip on reality (no pun intended).

[Ice9]

Re: Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

 

I find 11 to 15 rather low for superheroes, actually. Sure, it's fine for "non-super" skills that the character just happens to have, but for anything where the character is supposed to be world class or beyond that? Insufficent.

As a guideline, I tend to rank things by "tiers", where someone in a higher tier can with often do things that would be nearly impossible to others, or trivially do things that would be challenging for others.

 

So for example, I call 12- a "professional" level of skill. That's what you'd get if you're either naturally suited to the skill (stat 13+) or put a little more work in (one skill level). For a professional:

* A task with a +3 bonus is trivial - they have a 95%+ chance to succeed.

* A task with a -2 penalty is challenging - they have a 50% chance to succeed.

* A task with a -7 penalty is nearly impossible - they have less than a 5% chance to succeed.

 

Based on that, you can see that the next few tiers would be something like:

* Master: 17-

* Legendary: 22-

* Godlike: 27-

 

Incidentally, by this reasoning, "novice" proficiency should be 7- instead of 8-, or else "professional" should be 13-. However, 13- seems a high rating to require for the typical person, so I'd rather overlook this.

I set the boundary amount at 5% instead of 1% for a couple reasons:

* It keeps the gap between the tiers at a more reasonable level

* It makes it easier to use this as a conversion guide for non-bell-curve systems.

 

I would say that a fair number of superheroes should have "master" (17-) level skills in their specialty areas, and some could go higher.

[Bloodstone]

Re: Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

 

Most of my veteran heroes have one or two of them, just to represent their experience and versatility. My super lucky and hyper-competent characters often have many more.

 

There are many situation where you don't need to make multiple rolls in the same phase anyhow, so the ability to focus on any one specific task can be a major boon and be particularly fitting for certain character concepts.

 

In general, I don't know that they are overpowered, but they are incredibly powerful in the right hands and I have had two separate GM's underestimate two of my characters abilities because they forgot about their Overall levels...

 

It's my feeling that if the character is already good without them, then he will be amazing with them.

[Christopher]

Re: Are Overall Skill Levels overpowered?

 

One interestign use that I almost fogot:

I was tasked with creating a Template for a Star Trek Klingon (TNG and DS9 time) and when asking for help, some posted parts of a template containing:

1 Overall Skill Level, Only in Combat or Stressfull Situations (-1 it think).