When we published Metahumans Rising, included in the Power and Gear Examples, Pg. 69 – 75, are a number of weapons and items. A lot of this Gear has been scaled to play at the Classic power level. To let everyone behind the curtain for a moment, this is because we could list powers without a Value and they can scale to any power level so long as the character had the right number of Selections and / or AP to select them. Gear on the other hand is more of a package deal purchased through Boons of the same name. Now, let’s unpack that deal.
Exceptional heroes do not begin with a Power by default, but have key Attributes at a value of 6 (8 for a Focused character.) Investing AP to purchase a Power will give them a Value of 1, 4, or 7, while staying within that range. Low Powered Heroes begin with a Power with a Value of 8, while Classic heroes have a Power starting with a Value 12.
Understanding Values in Metahumans Rising
Characteristic Levels, Pg. 21-22, lays out what these Values mean:
- Baseline: 1 – 3
- Typical: 4 – 6
- Above Average: 7 – 9
- Expert: 10 – 12
Now, compare these Values to the Gear examples:
- .45 Hand Cannon, Cape Stopper Special Edition 12
- Flak Jacket 12
- Kylar Micro-Weave Enhanced Armor 12
- Kylar Thin Suit 12
- Kusarigama 12
- Staff, Bo 9
- Sword, Great 10
- Sword, Katana 10
It’s clear that the majority (7 out of 8) are keyed to that Expert or Classic Power Level. The Bo Staff being an outlier, which could easily be brought to parity with the Kaana and Great Sword through the investment of 1 more AP. (We apologize now to any Donatello fans.)
This section of the Characteristics Chapter was, as the title of the section they appeared in states, examples. The Classic Power Level was chosen for these examples because this is where playtesters gravitated. Acknowledging that we could have done a better job at the time explaining this, that .45 does imply we’re not dealing with off the rack kit.
So let’s deal with some off the rack kit!
In the coming weeks, this series will provide examples of gear, scaled to different Power Levels, we might not always go Cosmic, by the end though, players and GMs will have a solid understanding of Gear by Power Level, and a host of new items for their characters.
