Expanding Scale Benchmarks - Advice Needed

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Ian
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Expanding Scale Benchmarks - Advice Needed

Post by Ian »

OVA is one of the best RPG games I’ve seen in a long time, great work Clay.

On the subject of scale, I’m one of those GM’s who loves to tinker & expand so I’m considering using OVA as our go-to supers game of choice.
The only thing I need to do is create a new series of Scale tables for Strong, Quick, Armoured etc. in regards to characters with Super Strength, Speed etc. but I don’t want to break the game so I need advice.

Would you suggest any official pointers in regards to this?

For example, in regards to the scale above human, for speed/quick/flight etc. I’m thinking of this: Human Speed/Land Speed/Air Speed/Missile Speed/Space Speed/Warp Speed.
Any greater scale will effectively out-trump any lower one, so this fits in with the game feel. They are also rough descriptors too, with Level 5 Human being beyond the fastest sprinter, Level 5 Land Speed being The Fastest Car and so on.

Things like Teleport are already covered in the game, so these are good to go as is.

However, building Scale Charts for ‘Strong’ is where it gets blurry. What rough weight multipliers should I use?

DN 12 on Human Scale Strong is a Car. If I create the next scale up (let’s call it Mecha), Where should a Car come on that scales DN?

I’m thinking of having several scales for Strong like: 1.Human; 2. Mecha; 3. Starship etc.

Could anyone please give me advice on this? Thanks!
Clay
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Re: Expanding Scale Benchmarks - Advice Needed

Post by Clay »

Thanks, Ian! I’m always so happy when people enjoy the game, and I hope you get a lot of use out of it!

While I gave some specific examples for Strong in parenthesis, it would probably be easiest to ignore specific examples in favor of the more vague descriptors for each level of heaviness, or even go back and reference the standard difficulty chart. Would you consider that space bus “Challenging” for a mecha? That radio tower “Nigh Impossible"?

If you really wanted to make some charts so each scale has its own, I would probably say Nigh Impossible (12) for one scale would be...Challenging (6) or Difficult (8) on the next scale, and down to Easy (2) or Moderate (4) for two scale jumps. (That is, a car would be 12 for a human, 6 or 8 for a mecha, and 2 or 4 for a spaceship with arms ala Outlaw Star.)

Hope you find that useful!
Ian
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Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2015 10:03 am

Re: Expanding Scale Benchmarks - Advice Needed

Post by Ian »

Thanks Clay that's a big help!
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