Stat Scale Doubling

[Morrus]

I've talked about this on this forum before--inspired by the way DC Heroes created its superhero stats with each point being double the one before, enabling very high values to be accommodated by the system. I always thought that was a clever innovation.

 

[tomBitonti]

it seems to be a great system for a supers type game.

What’s with the placement of the international space station (in the lift column)?

Tom B

 

[Davies]

it seems to be a great system for a supers type game.

What’s with the placement of the international space station (in the lift column)?

I suspect that whoever put this chart together misread the ISS' mass as tons rather than pounds. (It would be a 27 rank weight if that were the case, but it's not; it's around 16.)

 

[Morrus]

I suspect that whoever put this chart together

That'll be me.

 

[Morrus]

So I've been adding to it and it's now waaaay too big to view in a thread. But here goes!

 

[BigJackBrass]

In many ways it’s a wonderful solution to the scaling problem, easy to understand and avoiding some of the pitfalls of alternative system.

On the other hand, it does introduce its own problems. In DC Heroes, for example, the Joker was twice as strong as Batman, while Saturn and Jupiter were the same distance from the sun. There comes a point where the range being encompassed ceases to have a useful real-world meaning.

 

[Morrus]

On the other hand, it does introduce its own problems. In DC Heroes, for example, the Joker was twice as strong as Batman,

Well, that just sounds like he was given the wrong strength score. I could believe Batman being twice as strong as the Joker. But yeah, at the lower ends it's not granular enough (in this version I've made human-level abilities span 7 levels, but it's still doubling).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well, that just sounds like he was given the wrong strength score. I could believe Batman being twice as strong as the Joker.

I think we need some context here. This was '80s Joker. I know modern portrayals of The Joker have him as physically weaker or normal-human, but in a lot of the '80s and some '90s portrayals he had borderline superhuman strength (whether as a result of his insanity or chemical treatment or whatever was unclear), and Batman didn't necessarily have that, but was generally "competitive" with him, strength-wise, hence it seeming off.

What DC has here is a good comparator system for diverse teams of superheroes, particularly those where cosmic levels of power are involved, but a bad one for granular stuff, it's particularly "not good" for the Bat family and their villains, who exist on a much narrower scale, and where the narrow differences are likely to matter. No system is ideal for everything of course.

 

[Morrus]

One way to address that would be to increase the granularity by an order of magnitude, so you could have a score of 4.6 or whatever. It feels less user friendly then though.

 

[billd91]

It’s a strong-enough concept that Mutants and Masterminds uses something similar with a few different calibrations.