I Am Marvel Super Weapon Or Whatever

 I've been saying a lot about things I want to do for I Am The Weapon. Converting from MSH - the FASERIP game, for example. 

Which shouldn't be so hard, right? Zak knows MSH, Zak played MSH, Zak appreciates MSH and clearly wanted to use the good stuff from MSH for his own game. 

All you have to do is... well, let's take a look. Bold is MSH and cursive is IATW...

Fighting – ignore it if it’s lower than Strength and Agility. Otherwise it becomes Hand to Hand skill.

Agility – Agility. Man, converting stuff is easy!

Strength +Endurance – in IATW they’re both defined by Toughness. Pick whichever’s higher, this is superheroics, after all.

Reason – this is Intelligence.  

Intuition – this is Perception.  

Psyche – this is Calm. 

That's the main FASERIP stats, now let's take a look at the secondary stats. 

Health – this is HPs.

Karma – this is mostly experience.

Resources – this becomes Networking, sort of.

Popularity – I’ll think about it. Appeal + contacts or something.

And here you have all seven CAPTAIN stats, more or less. Yay! Moving on.

Powers: look, I am NOT GOING to translate every entry from Ultimate Powers to I Am The Weapon. It’s just not going to happen.

Talents: these become skills.

Contacts: these are contacts, duh. E-a-s-y.

Origins: these require some tinkering. 

So far so good. Here comes the tricky part, let’s look at Power Ranks.

MSH had this lovely table that goes Feeble to Unearthly, or Shift+0 to Shift+Z on a wider scale, but I’ll start with the narrow one.

Now, IATW has ability scores represented as dice. The worst case is just 2, no dice – you just always have a result of “2” when you try to use that stat, which means you lose to anything but a “1” or “2” on the dice. Lame, right?

Then there’s this table:

D4: Bad

D6: Average

D8: Impressive

D10: Amazingly good

D12: Arguably the best in the world (for a human) in that ability.

Fortunately there’s a table in MSH Judges’ Book with examples of what the ranks mean for, say, agility of the character. Since agility in MSH becomes agility in IATW, let’s use that.

Feeble – psysically limited. Let’s say this is 2.

Poor to Typical – clumsy, inaccurate. Normal human reactions. As an example, MSH give Mister Fantastic – just ask Victor von Doom, he’ll confirm that Richards is clumsy as a child! Let’s say this is D4, like my girl Dolphina out of water.

Good – some training in dexterity and accuracy. Let’s give it a D6 – “some training” is close enough to “average”.

Excellent – intensive training in dexterity and accuracy. Good enough for D8, I’d say.

Remarkable – Olympic athlete. Which seems to be amazingly good, so D10. And…

Incredible – Olympic gymnast. How an Olympic gymnast is better than Olympic athlete, I have no idea, but whatever, this is what Captain America has, and he’s literally got top human ability, so that’s a D12 and no arguing about that.

Anything better than Incredible is beyond normal human ability, for now I’ll just equal Amazing to D20, Monstrous to D20+D4, and Unearthly to D20+D6.

Now, if you look at the table for Reason, Reed Richards and Doctor Doom are both in Amazing cathegory, which puts them into “smarter than any normal human” in IATW if we keep the same scale. Does it bother me? Absolutely not, they’re super duper geniuses and deserve their D20 Intelligence.

Moving on.

Health in MSH is calculated by summation of initial rank numbers of Fighting, Agility, Strength, and Endurance. Which doesn’t make sense to me, I mean, your ability to hit something really hard doesn’t make you a healthy person, though in a superheroic campaign, it sure helps you stay that way. And it’s kind of complicated. I say ditch the health and just recalculate it based on Toughness.

Like Health, Karma is calculated as the sum of rank numbers, only here it’s Reason+Intuition+Psyche and clearly just a case of “Well it has to be based on SOMETHING”.  Since you can’t use experience points in IATW to affect the dice rolls like you can use Karma in MSH, I say let’s just cut it away and let the heroes get their experience points the old-fashioned way – in an alley! With their fists! Showing up in time to keep your old Auntie happy!

For new characters, Resources start at Typical, giving them a Networking of D4. Since in IATW you roll up Networking like every other stat, this doesn’t really matter.

Because Popularity in MSH is represented by a number and not a rank (and is used as a rank number), I officially claim it to be the lamest MSH stat ever. But fine, let’s make another table JUST FOR IT.

Popularity – Appeal

1-2 – 2

3-7 – D4

8-15 – D6

16-25 – D8

26-36 – D10

37-45 – D12

46-62 – D20

63-87 – D20+D4

88-125 – D20+D6

Wasn’t that fun. 

Armed with our knowledge, let’s convert Spider-Man from MSH to IATW.

 

Spider-Man 

(IDENTITY REDACTED TO PROTECT 

SPIDER-MAN’S LOVED ONES)

 

Fighting RM

Agility AM

Strength IN

Endurance IN

Reason EX

Intution GD

Psyche IN

Resources PR

Popularity 30/6 (secret identity/public identity)

Health: 160

Powers: Wall-crawling – Amazing

Spider-Sense – Amazing

Web-shooters up to Monstrous

Spider-Tracer – Amazing

 

Talents: chemistry, photography

 

Contacts: Daily Bugle, Aunt (NAME REDACTED)

 

Becomes…

 

Spider-Man

 

Calmness D12

Agility D20

Perception D6

Toughness D12

Appeal D10/D4

Intelligence D8

Networking D4

 

Hit Points 12

 

Powers:

Enhanced Perception: D20 (danger sense)

Climbing: D20

Gimmicks:

Web D20+D4 (requires cartridges)

Tracer D20 (can be traced in under a mile)

 

Skills:

Occupational skill: photographer D8

Science D10

Chemistry D12

 

Contacts:

Daily Bugle, Aunt (NAME REDACTED)

 

So I cut out Fighting/Hand to Hand completely because it's lower than Spidey's Toughness and Agility and thus irrelevant. I also just wrote what the Spider-Tracer does because I couldn't find anything suitable in IATW list of powers/gimmicks. I kind of like how Spidey gets double Appeal based on whether he's wearing the costume. 

If I was making up Spidey from scratch instead of converting, I'd probably give him Personal Armoury or something similar to reflect how he tends to come up with new gadgets to deal with the villain of the week. 

I probably missed something here, feel free to tell me if you notice something. 

Excelsior.