Search the Community

The rules on Extended Searches (as found under the description of the Search skill in the Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Ed. core rulebook) have always been a weird case -- they go by the diameter of the area being searched, not the, y'know, area -- I thought it might be useful to add some notes/tips to our Guidebook. (Especially if we're going to be doing more stuff in SPAAACE, and scanning planets.) Probably put this on the Skills page. Maybe something like.... Search: Remember that, when doing an Extended Search, the time is based on the approximate diameter of the area being searched. Steps Diameter Examples Time 0 5 feet 1 round 1 10 feet 1 minute 2 100 feet 5 minutes 3 1,000 feet 20 minutes 4 1 mile ~500 acres or ~200 hectares 1 hour 5 5 miles 5 hours 6 20 miles Freedom City (approx. 15 x 25 miles) 1 day 7 200 miles 1 week 8 2,000 miles Ceres (0.6k miles diameter), Eris (1.4k mi.), Pluto (1.5k mi.) 1 month 9 20,000 miles Earth (8k miles diameter), Mars (4k mi.), Moon (2.1k mi.), Venus (8k mi.) 3 months 10 200,000 miles Jupiter (87k miles), Neptune (31k mi.), Saturn (72k mi.), Uranus (32k mi.) 1 year 11 2 million miles The Sun (865k miles) 5 years 12 20 million miles 10 years 13 200 million miles [2.1 au] 50 years 14 2 billion miles 100 years 15 “Same solar system” Sol System (out to Neptune, 6.64 billion miles / 30 au) 500 years 16 “Nearby star systems” Proxima Centauri (4.2 ly from Earth) 1,000 years 17 “Distant star systems” 5,000 years 18 “Same galaxy” The Milky Way (105k ly diameter) 10,000 years 19 “Nearby galaxies” The Andromeda Galaxy (2,500,000,000 ly from Earth, and 152k ly in diameter) 50,000 years 20 “Anywhere in the universe” The observable universe is ~93,000,000,000 ly in diameter. 100,000 years Thus, performing an extended search of all of Freedom City would take 1 day (which can be reduced by Quickness or Rapid ESP/Super-Senses), while doing an extended search of the Earth would take 3 months (or about 1 hour with Quickness 10 [x2,500], or 3 seconds with Quickness 20 [x5,000,000]). ------ M&M 3E changed the Extended Search guidelines so it does go by area. Would we want to consider doing that? If so, doing an extended search of Freedom City (with an area of about 375 square miles) would take 1 month, while doing an extended search of the Earth (total surface area of ~197,000,000 square miles) would take 50 years (or about 1 week with Quickness 10 [x2,500], 2 days with Quicknes 12 [x10,000] or with Rapid 4 on ESP, or ~5 minutes with Quickness 20). A longer time, but it would add some consistency to the rules. (Not as long as the ctual rules in M&M 3E. Per those rules, doing an extended search of the Earth would take 50,000 years!)

Hey folks! Welcome to 2019! We're putting some changes through to start that new year off right - largely things we've been discussing for a while now, but hadn't formalized or brought to consensus. They are as follows: Effective January 2019, the Posting Award break points for posts will be 1/10/25/50/100 instead of 1/15/25/50/100 (you now have to make only 10 posts for a character to hit 2pp, rather than 15 posts). That 1->15->25 jump was always very awkward, and we're glad to have it sorted out properly; this change will apply to posts made in January, and all posts thereafter. The House Rules on Character Advancement & Awards have been updated accordingly. Effective immediately, we are retiring the 'Promotion' use for Veteran Rewards, which previously let you boost a character's PL and roll points over. This was terrible for math and auditing, was rarely used, and with the increase in character slots is just not worthwhile. Any awards already tied up in a promotion have been refunded; promoted characters will be allowed to keep their 'free' rollover points, as we aren't interested in penalizing anyone for a rules change. This change has been reflected in the House Rules as well as both the Active and Inactive Reward Trackers. We have formalized a rule that was informally already in use: if you have a need or desire to shuffle your characters between available character slots, you may do so (by request) so long as the character is moving to a slot big enough to hold them (a character originally built PL10/150PP can occupy a PL10/150PP slot or a PL12/180PP slot, but not a PL7/105PP slot, for instance). A character so moved retains any and all PP earned. We don't expect this to be used much, aside from moving PL10s out of Veteran Reward slots and into a more fitting, freed-up home, but it's a nice way to capitalize on the Titanium status freeing up slots for new concepts and new characters if you've been building below the theoretical maximum allowance. This has been made explicit in the House Rules on Character Advancement and Awards. If for whatever reason you want to promote a character (e.g., they were built PL7/105PP and you'd like them to be PL10/150PP, and you have a free PL10/150PP slot), you may still retire the old sheet and submit a new one, built to the new slot's caps and budget, without rolling over any PP earned. This has been clarified in the Character Submission guide. We have updated our House Rules to clarify that the Origin Story prompt is always an active vignette, and always counts as a vignette, including the relevant Power Point awards, available once per character. This was already the case, but was easily lost as a lone news forum announcement instead of being formalized in our rewards manual. An oversight on our part, and hopefully we'll see more of those wonderful stories now that it's more visible.

Rewards Announcement: (TITANIUM) As our site enters its second decade (words that startle me, reader, perhaps more than they even startle you!) we've decided to go ahead and implement some rules changes (effective as of January 2018) that will benefit both those of you that have been part of this community for so many years and those of you who are lucky enough to have just joined our community. Maxed Characters: When a player maxes out a character (250 pp) that character no longer takes up the character slot/veteran award that it once occupied. The character can still be played for full posting credit, regardless of how many threads the character might be in for a given month. Those posts can be rolled over to other PCs as the character chooses (similar to GM posts). This character level (as opposed to player) is called TITANIUM, and is tracked in the Reward Tracker. This does not replace the existing extra slot received when you max out your first character, nor does it refund any additional slots used on those characters (e.g., if you spend a veteran reward on 15 points of equipment, that reward is still considered spent even when the character reaches Titanium status). New Player Boost: New players to the site will be provided a boost to their posts for characters for the first three months they post on the site. New players will receive double the posts for their characters during this time (similar to the boost given to GM posts). We will annotate this on the Reward Tracker.

Hi everybody! As you know in just over a week, Spaaaace hits Freedom City. There are going to be a lot of new PCs, and Space events both large and small. In order to help simplify and clarify spaaace, the refteam have agreed on two rule clarifications and expansions.