Scale
Everything in Verge carries a Scale from 0 to 6. You do. So does a car, a security frame, a bridge, and the thing that comes for you in the third act.
| Scale | Tier | Lifts | Shrugs off | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Baseline | 200 lb | a fist | sprint |
| 1 | Peak | 600 lb | one bullet, with armour | rooftop leaps |
| 2 | Superhuman | 5 tons | small arms fire | highway speed |
| 3 | Metahuman | 100 tons | autocannon, tank round | faster than traffic can track |
| 4 | Titan | 10,000 tons | artillery, airstrike | supersonic |
| 5 | Paragon | mountains | tactical warheads | hypersonic |
| 6 | Ascendant | tectonic | anything short of a planetkiller | orbital |
You start at Scale 1.
The gap is the game
Before anything else happens, compare the two Scales involved.
| Gap | What happens |
|---|---|
| 0 | Roll normally. |
| 1 | The higher side takes +3 dice. The lower side's direct attacks can inflict Conditions, but never Wounds. |
| 2 or more | No roll at all. The higher side simply succeeds, and the lower side cannot hurt them by direct force. |
Read that bottom row again, because it is doing all the work. At a gap of two, the dice do not come out. Nobody rolls to see whether a Titan can pull open a car door.
What this buys you is a game that never needs rebalancing. Your seven-dice pool at Scale 5 is exactly as tense as it was at Scale 1, because the only fights you roll for are the ones against near-peers. Everything below you is automatic and everything above you is a wall. As you climb, the nouns change — you stop rolling to lift the car and start rolling to lift the bridge span — but the arithmetic in front of you never does.
Then how do you fight something bigger?
Not directly. That is the point. You need a Lever, and there are four kinds:
Environmental. Do not hit the thing. Hit the building it is standing in. @Missing file is four kilometres of stacker gantry and none of it is bolted down.
A scale-matched tool. @Missing file do not care what Scale you are. That is exactly why they cost what they cost, and why every case is stamped and traceable back to whoever signed for it.
A vulnerability found in play. Not assumed — earned. You investigated, you asked the right person, you read the log. Now you know the one thing that works.
Face or Focus. Social and mental pressure ignore physical Scale completely. @Missing file works on a Titan precisely as well as it works on a courier, because nothing about being able to lift a mountain makes you harder to lie to.
That last one is the promise this system makes to you and keeps for the whole campaign: Scale does not protect a Tie, an identity, or a conscience. It is how a street fixer threatens a god. It is why you will still have something to lose at Scale 5.
Look at @Missing file if you want proof. She is Scale 1, she has no powers, she has never wanted any — and she is more dangerous to a starting character than @Missing file is, because everything she wants is in the same building as your family.