Supers: Power Levels
In many roleplaying games, it's customary for all the characters to be roughly comparable in abilities. For superteams, this can be explained either by saying that the teammates all gained their powers from the same source and in the same measure, or by saying that heroes sort themselves out into power levels, with the heavy hitters joining a national or world-wide superteam while the lightweights stay in lesser groups that protect single cities, states, or small countries.
To create this kind of lineup, assign players a point value in one of the following ranges:
Wild Talents: 100-200 points. The heroes are normal human beings with one exotic ability or a group of related minor abilities; usually this supplements rather than replaces their normal skills. Best suited to a hidden heroes campaign or one about nonadventurer metahumans (see Supers...but Not Super Heroes). New heroes-in-training, who may have only one ability and no Talent, or one Talent and no manifested abilities, also work well in this power range.
Low-Power: 200-400 points. The heroes are better than any ordinary human being, and are well-suited to a street-level campaign or a game about advanced trainee heroes in a four-color setting. It can also work for a hidden or weird heroes campaign.
Moderate-Power: 400-1,600 points. The heroes have several powers at fairly high levels; individual human beings are no threat to them, and they can perform quite impressive feats. This is suitable for a four-color campaign; in one about darker protagonists, the existence of beings at this power level may make the world a scary place.
High-Power: 1,600-6,400 points. The heroes are a significant threat to governments; dealing with them may be an important political issue. Good for a world-shakers campaign, or to weird heroes who spend most of their time dealing with alien dimensions and mysterious inhuman powers.
Once a campaign gets past the "wild talents" level, the usual guideline for disadvantage limits – up to 50% of the base character points – needs to be applied with caution. A low-power hero with 100 points in disadvantages may be believable if designed well; a high-power figure with 500 points in disadvantages is almost always a caricature. GMs may instead want to set a limit of 100 points in disadvantages, plus any that are campaign requirements like Duty, Secret Identity, or Social Stigma.
GMs have the option of treating these power ranges as rough guidelines for players. If one low-power hero is built on 210 points, and another on 375 points – but both fit the players' concepts – let it go, rather than forcing them both into a 300-point straitjacket. Some GMs may want to consider wide-open games, where players first agree on character concepts and functional roles and then build their characters to those ideas, spending as many points as it takes to realize a given concept. This kind of campaign calls for more active management to make sure that all the players have something to do. It works best if everyone avoids overlap in their designs, with the high-powered heroes being massively capable in one or two areas rather than being able to do everything.
GMs may also want to place limits, not on point value, but on combat capabilities. A convenient reference point for these is the rules for scaling damage; these rules provide for dividing damage, HP, and DR by 10 or 100 to avoid excessive dice-rolling. In high-powered supers campaigns, a further scale step may be needed: M- (or millennium) scale. These limits ensure that heroes on a given scale are not quite immune to attacks by other heroes on that scale. These are in addition to, not instead of, point value guidelines; a hero whose powers do not add to his ST, DR, or dice of damage may still be a formidable threat in ways that this scale does not capture.
I-scale (divide by 1): Maximum dice of Innate Attack or basic swing damage: 15d. Maximum DR: 50. Maximum Damage Reduction factor: 10. Maximum level of ST with Super-Effort: +10 (+100). Heroes at this level are comparable to infantry forces.
D-scale (divide by 10): Maximum dice of Innate Attack or basic swing damage: 150d. Maximum DR: 500. Maximum Damage Reduction factor: 100. Maximum level of ST with Super-Effort: +16 (+1,000). Heroes at this level are comparable to tanks.
C-scale (divide by 100): Maximum dice of Innate Attack or basic swing damage: 1,500d. Maximum DR: 5,000. Maximum Damage Reduction factor: 1,000. Maximum level of ST with Super-Effort: +22 (+10,000). Heroes at this level are comparable to large warships.
M-scale (divide by 1,000): Maximum dice of Innate Attack or basic swing damage: 15,000d. Maximum DR: 50,000. Maximum Damage Reduction factor: 10,000. Maximum levels of ST with Super-Effort: +28 (+100,000). Heroes at this level are more powerful than the largest military vehicles.
Rather than flatly prohibiting combat abilities above the desired scale, GMs may want to follow a suggestion from GURPS Powers: charging an Unusual Background cost for them. For this purpose, treat D-scale abilities as comparable to LC1 armaments, with an Unusual Background cost of 100 points. Treat C-scale abilities as comparable to LC0 weapons, or strategic weapons, with an Unusual Background cost of 200 points. M-scale abilities should have an Unusual Background Cost of 300 points.