Elite Gift

Thanks to the robust conversation you all encouraged me to engage in (THANK YOU), I'm backing away from the idea of adding a layer of granularity to the official rules. I still would like to find a way to insert tiers between D12 and D16, and again between D16 and D20, but I'm happy enough with how things stand now; and realistically, there aren't a lot of characters in that '30 ton' strength range (of 200 ton range) in comics - the trend has been to get to around 10 or 20 tons, and then jump to 50... at least in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe! And, the FASERIP system went from Incredible (10 tons) to Amazing (50 tons), so I have good company in making huge leaps near the top of the scale.

Ahem. All that said, I did come around to an idea that makes sense to me: a gift called Elite. If you have this gift, you designate one of your traits as elite, allowing you to always roll 2 dice and take the better of the two results. This would come with a companion limitation: impaired. You can designate a trait as impaired, meaning that you roll two dice and take the lower of the two. For example, I would think that the Hulk then has Might D20 (elite), and Mind D4 (impaired). He's still in the same scale, but his might is, in practice, superior to a 'regular' D20 might, and his mind is, in practice, inferior to D4 mind. I like this as a clean, intuitive and reasonable option that doesn't hurt the math at all.

The character who got me to come around to this way of thinking is Battle Master. I needed to give him something that made him a 'master' of battle in some way - the elite gift is it. He has elite EVERYTHING (including his tier), so he's always just rolling really well. He's a relatively normal (albeit highly trained) dude, but he's just so flippin' consistent that he can kick your butt anyway. This is the Batman hack - Batman has elite traits, so he's usually better than the other guy.

Plus, I really like how this drawing came out. There are a handful of characters I've had in my head for decades, but have never actually gotten around to trying to draw them - Battle Master is one of those. This is his first draft, and I think he's pretty much exactly what I want him to be. I am looking forward to using him in play - I could see him taking down an entire group of younger heroes (but we'll see how that goes when I play it out this weekend...)