Weapons and Ammo Powers and Upgrades! Woo!

A poster on EN World brought a couple of points to my attention regarding things-not-well-detailed. His post has been reproduced here for completeness.

SilverKeyMan writes:

"This morning I had the idea of writing up Mass Effect using Marvel Heroic, but being lazy and all, I decided on checking to see if anyone else already had.

I must say, it looks amazing. I really like the idea of rescaling the d6-d12 for physical attributes, so even a base human can have a d8 strength.Excellent work! I do have a question about weapons, however. In Mass Effect, part of the character customization (especially in ME3 multiplayer) revolves around weapon customization. Any plans for this, perhaps as additional power sets?

Additionally, how does a Class go about getting additional weapons? For example, it doesn't look like it is possible for an Engineer to use anything except a Shotgun, and the Sentinel doesn't get anything at all.

Cheers! -SKM"

Skill customization could pretty easily be done through adding new SFX to them. For example, someone playing an Engineer may want to upgrade their Drone to one of those Exploding Drones from ME3. I'd probably write the SFX for that like: "SFX: Step up or double Combat Drone (1 PP for both) on your next roll, then shut down Combat Drone. Recover on an Opportunity or during a Transition Scene.". Such an SFX would cost a character 10XP.

As for changing out weapons, if it's a simple matter like "I don't see my Engineer using Shotguns, but she's pretty likely to use a Sniper Rifle instead." then talking to the Storyteller would be the easiest way to go about it. If you're wanting to upgrade, then paying the XP to permanently step up the die related to the weapon or adding an SFX would work well. The Ammo Powers could pretty easily be mirrored with an SFX like: "Custom Ammo: When using (Weapon) in a die pool, you may add another power from the (Class) skill set. Both of these dice are at -1 step for this die pool." I wouldn't recommend using an SFX like that until your non-weapon powers are at a d8 or higher, since adding a d4 is usually more of a liability than a help.

I'll see about writing these things up in a more coherent manner and adding them to the MEHR document after I get off work tonight.

Thanks for the feedback, SKM. And thanks for the feedback from those who've emailed me as well. I'm gonna make this thing playable if it's at all possible.

-J