Look... What You Made Me Do

My daughter is a Taylor Swift fan (a ‘Swiftie’), and I have a running joke where I sing “Look… what you made me do” as a lounge singer. I was thinking of all y’all this morning, and that song came into my head… because you need to look… at what you made me do.

Stalwart has had a few knocks against it, and I have accepted those as functions of the system. It doesn’t do street-level supers all that well. It doesn’t have a lot of granularity. The dice get swingy (especially at the higher end).

This change addresses all those concerns.

In my proposed change, there are two ‘types’ of tiers: human and superhuman. The human tiers roll 1 die, and have SVs of half the die rating +1. Human dice range from D4 to D10 (I go back and forth on the D12, but for right now it's not there)… So if you are an enhanced human who has been given a dose of the Freedom Formula, you have D10 Might and Reflex. However, the moment you cross the line from ‘human’ to ‘better than human’, you now roll two dice, starting at 2D6 and peaking at 2D12 (with 2D20 reserved for cosmic entities). However, there are also places between these tiers where we can mix and match dice to create more granularity… For example, at the Meta tier, you roll D6+D8… for these tiers, the SV is the average of the two dice, which creates a nice, smooth scale.

Human Tiers

• Normal (D4; SV 3/1)
• Trained (D6; SV 4/2)
• Expert (D8; SV 5/2)
• Paragon (D10; SV 6/3)

Superhuman Tiers

• Super (2D6; SV 6/3)
• Meta (D6/8; SV 7/3)
• Legendary (2D8; SV 8/4)
• Colossal (D8/10; SV 9/4)
• Titanic (2D10; SV 10/5)
• Supreme (D10/12; SV 11/5)
• Ultimate (2D12; SV 12/6)

This would also change dice shifts a bit, since you would shift your lowest die up +1… so you would shift down from 2D6 to D4/6, then down one more to 2D4… you would shift up from 2D6 to D6/8, then to 2D8, then to D8/10… this mechanically distinguishes humans from superhumans, and creates a remarkable amount of granularity. I am not too concerned about balance… as a quick thought through this, Arrow is an Expert human (so he attacks with D8), but he also has Aim +3, so he’s averaging 7 to hit (max 11), which means that he can reasonably use his bow against someone with Titanic Evade (10). The numbers don’t scale to the point where they are impossible. I plan to play test the HECK out of this before making edits, but I’m seriously considering this change to the core mechanic.