Another Minor Tweak: The Flying Ratman Rule

I obviously won't CALL it this rule, because of trademark infringement and all those silly things, but the idea is actually pretty simple. It's a gift called Prodigy; as a prodigy, you have a pool of points in tags equal to your tier die instead of your tier SV (so double as many points). You may have a tag rated as high as your tier SV -1.

I got to thinking about this because of poor Twilight Archer. I've made him a key figure in the story of the world; he's a mover and a shaker behind the scenes. He is not the guy you need in a fight; but he's the guy you need before and after (and maybe on the sidelines during) the fight, since he's going to help strategize, and he's going to coordinate stuff, and he's going to be one step ahead.

But right now, he's a pretty bland regular old paragon-tier hero. Nothing in his stat block would suggest any of those things about him, so the implication is that this all has to come through in role playing. And that's great, except that this is a game with mechanics and stuff, and the mechanics should support the roleplaying. The roleplaying cannot be an excuse to cover up holes in the mechanics. 

Using this new gift, Twilight goes from 4 tag points (capped at +2) to 8 tag points (capped at +3).

This moves him from (Aim +2, Infiltration +1, Stalwart +1) to (Aim +3, Infiltration +1, Leadership +2, Stalwart +1, Stealth +1). By also giving him the Elite gift on his tier, he gets to roll 2 dice for all tier checks (which covers both his attack AND damage /effects rolls, since his trick weapon is linked to his tier). He's still a normal guy - just super well trained and very efficient. The mechanics now reflect what the roleplaying should indicate.

The reality is that everyone would want this gift, but only a few characters should truly have it. And everyone wants invulneraerable and resists to all energies and time travel and disintegration, too, but the game stops being fun if everyone has those things.

As far as the Flying Ratman, I figure that he's maybe legendary tier (D12) but he has D8 across the board; he has elite tier, and the prodigy gift gives him 12 points in tags, with caps as high as +5 (which he will probably never use). He could have profession (detective) +4, stealth +2, infiltration +2, and maybe a +4 in stalwart so he gets a bunch of hero points to offset the places he might be lacking otherwise. This begins to feel more like flying ratman; the game now gives a viable pathway to build him, and also (because of the way points can be allocated) creates a lot of different variations on this character; you could now have four or five characters on a team with similar builds, but because they are going to have different point allocations (Twilight and Ratman on the same team, for instance), they are going to be functionally different in play.

One of my own admissions about the game (in a discussion thread on DriveThru) was that it doesn't do street level 'great' because of the limited options you have. Between the elite and prodigy gifts, you now have all of the tools you need to build much more variety in your lower-tier (more mortal) characters.