Director's Tools: Scale

Scale

What happens when a character punches Triceratops? Takes a swing at a Skyscraper? What if a character with the same strength Attribute has the Űberstrength aspect? He can take out a bear with one punch or lift a helicopter off the ground, but lifting an M1 Abrams tank or an aircraft carrier is still impossible.

At times like these, the rules may say an attempt at a task is successful or something occurs, but determining effects of the interaction can be tricky, because there is such a massive size difference between the two object, and the damage system is really only designed to reflect weapons on the level of a human scale. In most situations like these, the outcome will be pretty obvious. But to get an idea of the effect of two bodies of vastly different sizes interact for purposes of describing it to the players, the following Scale Tool is provided for a quick and dirty estimations on the fly.

 The scale starts at 0, which represent objects 10 kilograms to 50 kilograms in mass. The next value, Scale 1, represents objects of a mass on the order of 100 kg, and reflects objects with a mass anywhere from 50 kilograms to about 500 kilograms. Each increase in the scale represents a further tenfold increase in the order of magnitude, with the range of each starting from the maximum mass of the previous range to the half of the order of magnitude for the next range. (See the Table Below)

  

Quick and Dirty Scale Table
*TBTM= Too Big to Matter
Scale Value	Magnitude	Range	Examples
0	10 kg	Up to 50 kg	Bunny, coati
1	100 kg	50 to 500 kg	Human, small bear, motorcycle, wolverine, bull shark
2	1,000 kg = 1 tonne	500 to 5000 kg	A large bear, passenger car, semi-truck cabin, RV, school bus full of nuns, civilian helicopter, hippopotamus, great white shark, small private airplane
3	10,000 kg = 10 tonnes	5000 to 50,000 kg	A triceratops, M1 Abrams tank, empty big rig with trailer, fighter jet, , elephant, stealth offshore powerboat, standard dump truck, construction equipment, assault helicopter
4	100,000 kg = 100 tonnes	50,000 to 500,000 kg	A blue whale, huge dinosaur, loaded big rig, loaded C130 Hercules, Boeing 747, Air Force 1
5	1,000,000 kg = 1000 tonnes	500,000 to 5,000,000 kg	Titan class dump truck, Eiffel Tower
6	10,000,000 kg = 10,000 tonnes	5,000,000 to 50,000,000 kg	Iowa class battleship, Brooklyn Bridge
7	100,000,000 kg = 100,000 tonnes	50,000,000 to 500,000,000 kg	Nimitz-class Aircraft Carrier, Loaded Oil tanker, Sears/Willis Tower
8	1,000,000,000 kg = 1,000,000 tonnes	500,000,000 to 5,000,000 kg	Golden Gate Bridge, Burj Khalifa Tower, The Great Pyramid of Giza
21	TBTM*	TBTM*	Moon

Using the Scale

To help determine the effects of two massive objects on one another, determine the mass of each object and figure out which range it falls in on the Scaling Table. Unless you have some information in front of you, in the heat of the game, if you don’t know the exact mass of an object, compare it to some of the examples given or make a list of your own and make a quick estimation. Once you have determined the Scale Values for each of the involved objects, compare the values. If the interacting objects fall within 1 scale of each other, they have an effect and damage rules can be used. If not, the larger object overwhelms the smaller object if the durability in your judgment is equal.

As an example, two characters with a Scale Value of 1, Sheriff Blokk and Jacques the Plucky French Weightlifter, decide to have a contest to see who is more macho. Both characters possess a STR attribute of +5, however Blokk has the Űberstrength aspect, which effectively increases his Scale Value by 1 to 2. They both walk up to a hippopotamus (Scale 2) and flip a coin to see who gets to punch it in the nose first. Blokk wins the toss, pops the creature in the nose, and due to his massive strength, is able to inflict enough damage on the hippo to force it to cringe in pain and back away from the lawman. Jacques then steps up and strikes the hippo, however his blow has no effect due to the fact that they are 2 Scale Values apart. The director decides that the poor hippopotamus gets a free attack. It opens its mouth, drives its massive teeth through the Frenchman’s abdomen, and starts whip him back and forth like a rag doll, shredding his intestines and breaking all of his vertebrae in the process.

As a second example, a player later attaches a remote control to an empty Boeing 747 (Scale 4) and crashes it into an empty skyscraper days before its grand reopening because he is annoyed that its new French owners have renamed it (Scale 7). If the durability of the two objects were the same, there would be very little if any damage done to the building. The Director, however, takes into account the speed and explosive potential of a fuel-filled plane and the relative vulnerability and fragility of a civilian building to such an assault, and concludes that the plane crash would definitely damage the building and depending on a random d20 roll, could result in its complete destruction. On the other hand, if the airliner had crashed into a Scale 7 alien building that were fully armored against missile and kamikaze attacks, the plane would not even make a scratch in the building.