Converting Mighty Protectors to Marvel Superheroes Advanced Set and vice versa

Converting Mighty Protectors to Marvel Superheroes Advanced Set and vice versa.

(see also FASERIP, and scroll down to the "linked systems" section)

MSH has power ranks that are neither linear, nor geometric, in progression, but do a good job of capturing the flavor of the source material.

MP has geometric progression, where essentially every 2.5 CP doubles the qualitative value, even while adding only +1 to the effect.

Now, this applied across the board. So, someone with IN 15 is twice as smart as someone with IN 12 and four times as smart as IN 9.

The translation between games gets a bit weirder when you realize in MSH +1 Column Shift increases success by +5%, and MP success increases +5% with either 2.5 CP or +6 to a BC. (Unless it's Knowledge, where +15% to a Specialization is 2.5 CP, and +15% to a Skill Background is 5 CP…)

(Image poached from Brian Adam's MP Writeups Blog)

Anyway, let's just use the BC Table to make it all work

MSH Rank	Strength Range	MP BC Range	MSH Examples
Feeble		7 or less
Poor		6-8	Hulk’s Agility
Typical		9-12
Good	300 to 600 lbs	13-16	Talented Athlete
Excellent	600 to 1200 lbs	17-19	Thor’s Agility, Dodgeball Champion, Tough Mudder Endurance Champion
Remarkable	1200 lbs to 2 tons	20-25	Captain America’s Endurance
Incredible	3 tons to 20 tons	26-34	Olympic Gymnast, Captain America’s Agility
Amazing	21 tons to 60 tons	35-39	Spiderman’s Agility
Monstrous	61 to 100 tons	40-41	Hulk’s Endurance
Unearthly	100 tons to 200 tons	42-44	Thor’s Endurance
Shift-X	200 tons to 400 tons	45-47
Shift-Y	400 tons to 800 tons	48-50
Shift-Z	800 tons +	51+

Strictly speaking, I exaggerated the Unearthly and higher range, because otherwise the geometric progression of MP literally collapses it to “ST +1,” instead of a range.

Another quirk of MP is that while the qualitative value doubles, the quantitative value, that is the effective die roll, only increases by 1.

This means you get a weird effect, such as we all know the Hulk can smash thru battleship armor without breaking a sweat (after all, the Hulk’s Strength is Unearthly, while Super-Heavy Battleship Artillery, which can destroy a battleship, is “merely” Amazing), but in MP this equates to approximately +3 damage, which given that common, everyday steel has an SR of 11, means that in MP the Hulk isn’t guaranteed to breach a bank vault door, let alone destroy a battleship with one punch.

You can see where Brian Adams ran afoul of this by looking at his various MP adaptations of Marvel characters. Brian made the reasonable design decision to give characters like the Hulk and Iron Man enough raw power that they can reliably destroy most targets (in MSH, Iron Man’s Repulsors exceed Super-Heavy Artillery in damage potential, and still don't match the Hulk’s Strength without overload mode), but this also means that effectively, in MP, Iron Man’s Repulsors have the “in world” equivalent power of the Death Star for power output (given geometric progression).

MP is not unique to this problem. It certainly goes back to the early days of gaming, where VnV 2e had the same geometric progression, but the dice scaled differently. In VnV 2e, it felt a little less weird where Behemoth did 6d10 damage, and Mountain Man - 8× stronger than Behemoth - did 9d10, or effectively +16 damage. I mean, yeah, of course 8× stronger is +16 damage!

Jump to MP, and 8× stronger is +3 damage. Erk.

(Hero System, at least thru 5e, when I stopped playing, had its similar problem where ×2 in-game power resulted in +1d6 Stun, +1 Body, which doesn't feel like ×2, either.)

(model Spiff Zaya)

Basically, just don't think about it too hard :)

Now, tangentially, MP does have a mechanic to help retain the feel of both “reasonable power,” AND “reliable damage,” i.e. Heightened Attack (and its cousins Natural Weaponry and Weakness Detection).

For my build of the Hulk, I would do something like this:

• Strength 42
• Natural Weaponry Attack +4, Damage +10

This gives him an average damage of 23 points, which is a 16-foot deep hole in an “average” steel wall, with one punch.

So, there you go. Some notes on converting from Mighty Protectors to Marvel Superheroes and back again.

(model unknown)

(MP Android Body)