The Ranks Table

Post date: 12-Aug-2014 21:06:59

If you read my last post and looked at all closely at Universal Table 2.0, you probably noticed the Ranks Table above it and did a double take. After all, the original game had only ten playable Ranks, four Shifts (including Shift Zero) and four Classes (including Beyond). My Ranks Table has twenty-eight playable ranks, five Shifts not counting Shift Zero, renames Shift Zero as Useless Rank, and has ten Classes including Beyond.

I had several reasons for adding the additional Ranks. Primarily, I had always felt cramped by merely ten Ranks. There was just not enough variety within a given range of abilities to make heroes all that different from one another. "Superhuman" was just three Ranks: Remarkable, Incredible and Amazing, and the heavy hitters only had Monstrous and Unearthly before you started bleeding into the Shifts. Even human-ranged heroes felt a little cramped in their Ranks. I wanted more room to breathe.

Now each of the four ranges of Ranks (human, superhuman, metahuman and inhuman) each have seven Ranks, for a total of twenty-eight. This gives much more room for variety in each range.

It also expands the range of Ranks well beyond what the original game could accommodate. Many fans of the game tried to write character stats for prominent DC Comics heroes. Yet the most powerful of those heroes, such as Superman, were far and away too powerful to be represented on the Rank System in place at that time. Superman can press 800,000 tons! Even Shift Z couldn't accommodate that. Now we can comfortably place Superman's Might at Invincible (140) Rank.

Finally, adding all these Ranks allowed me to add more variety to Talents. Instead of a flat +1CS for all Talents (+2CS for very special and rare Talents), Talents can now be Graded from +1CS to +5CS, giving even more variety to your characters.

• • +1CS: Novice

  • +2CS: Pro

  • +3CS: Expert

  • +4CS: Guru

  • +5CS: Master

For me, it was all about choice and flexibility, and the ability to differentiate between characters that looked a little too much alike otherwise.