I was wondering what the official way to make an overcome harder or easier given that a single overcome roll has a set difficulty chart.
For instance if a speedster hero wanted to snatch 5 guns from peoples hands vs 500, do you add a hinder or just require more overcome actions to succeed. What about if the hero wanted to lift an aircraft carrier over her head? Same method? To me one would be best by adding rolls, and another would be adding hinders.
Thanks
Unless I'm wrong, it's already precedent that taking on multiple targets (at least in terms of attacks) incurs a minor twist. I'd simply follow that sort of pattern to its logical conclusion.
"Yeah, you can crank up to hyperspeed and snatch guns from the whole battalion. But, doing so, you're really straining yourself: take Max+Mid in damage as you're burning through your reserves."
"Yeah, you can lift that aircraft carrier. But, if you do,you're making yourself a priority target with no way to defend yourself. Anyone who attacks you is going to get to add their Min die to their damage, as you're a sitting duck."
Or ask them how they're accomplishing it, letting them decide what the twist might be. ;-)
Taking that idea into mind though, what of the twists one naturally causes when they roll low enough? Would you apply two twists at the same time to the hero if they decide to go with success?
Thinking on it though, I don't really see any reason Tachyon or any other speedster couldn't grab all those guns, or why Legacy or any other super strength hero couldn't lift that carrier? Each of their coresponding dice in Speed and Strength are quite high level if not the highest they can be, so why inflate the difficulty if your players' heroes are pros in their field and such acts should be easy for them?
There's a saying that's gone around for a while in GMing: "Say yes, or roll the dice."
If it makes narrative sense, I'd have no issue with Tachyon disarming a whole bunch of goons. If it were a matter of ending a scene or there wasn't meant to be combat or any real sense of risk to the scene, I likely wouldn't even have her roll, regardless of the number.
For an Overcome action, though, there's an implied sense of risk--Tachyon, an ally, or even a bystander might get shot if she tries to disarm a bunch of goons who are actively firing at her. That said, there's also a matter of scale here, too. A handful of goons? Likely not a problem. A whole army? It might be possible, but much more difficult. To me, the level of risk goes up significantly as the number of targets increase, hence the imposition of a twist.
And, honestly, part of this depends on what kind of game you want to run. If I were running a cosmic/space-style supers game, where characters are punching spaceships and taking on entire battle-fleets by themselves, entire spaceships might just be d6 or d8 minions. If I were running a gritty, street-level game, a single goon might have the exact same rating. It all falls upon what makes sense for the narrative at that time.
The difficulty is kind of already implied with how the Overcome chart is devized I’d say, but instead of forcing a twist you could also break the overcome into parts. For example we’ll use OP’s 500 gunman problem: each time Tachyon makes a successful overcome roll she disarms an agreeable number of goons, let’s say half the goons, and therefore the player has to spend at least two turns rolling before they can succeed. At the end of the day it all comes down to your GM style.
One thing that pops into my mind when you say this is something I heard Christopher and Adam say on the ‘Starter-Kit Stories’ Episode of the Letters Page. Yes, you can always arrange a game to have a certain ‘level’ of hero, like Cosmic or Street, but this system was designed for such characters to be able to co-sxist in the same game without too much worry.
Within the sense of scale, though, there's also the premise of each action taking place in a single comic book panel.
To me, something along the lines of disarming a legion of goons would take up more than one panel: perhaps one of Tachyon speeding towards a goon, another of her pinballing between goons, and then a third where she skids to a stop with an armload of guns. That's just one way of visualizing it; it's the sort of thing where, if it were at my table, it'd likely take either multiple rounds or I'd incur a twist as I'd mentioned above.
As for the co-existing issue? Yes, it's certainly possible to put such heroes together, but as a meta-game issue, a GM should likely talk to their players and get a sense of what kind of game everyone wants before the game actually starts. If you have one player expecting lots of street-level investigation and another player expecting to go out into space to fight aliens, trying to cater to both parties is likely to simply leave both dissatisfied. While mechanically, they might be on the same level, that representation doesn't necessarily carry into a narrative particularly well. I'm still a big believer that "kitchen sink supers" isn't a particularly strong theme, and that the best comics (and the best comics-games) are ones that carry a tighter, more focused thematic structure: Watchmen is supers by way of detective story; Captain America: the Winter Soldier is supers by way of 70s spy thriller, etc. Even though Mister Fixer might have a character sheet that's relatively equivalent to Captain Cosmic's, there's a reason that you don't see Fixer bopping around in space very often...(outside of that one trip to the Enclave of the Endlings)...
Looking at what I know of the rules? If you take a twist to activate an ability, and then the roll generates another twist, you get two twists.
Personally, some other things I might do, just to put them on the table beyond what has already been talked about.
Honestly though, it all comes down to the specifics of the moment. Tachyone disarming 500 gunmen is more realistic to me than Headlong. She’s just billed as faster despite their very similiar character sheets. And, when you hit the intersection of “Rule of Cool”, “What the Story Demands” and “What is Fun for the table” there is nothing beyond spur of the moment adjudication.
I can agree with talking with a group to come to a consensus about the type of game you want to make. That’s good advice for almost any RPG, and I think that’s important to do in SCRPG as well. With that said PW, I don’t think we should totally rule out running different ‘level’ heroes together. Hell, I can think of two major examples off the top of my head that have been doing that for years.
Batman, a character that (for the most part, in my opinion) is human, is part of the Big Three of the Justice League with Wonder Woman and Superman. Captain America is considered one of the greatest Avengers ever, but he doesn’t exceed the level of ‘peak-human performance’ compared to heroes like Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk. Now we have the Wraith, a basic human level character that we could consider a street level hero can easily run with ‘High Power’ Sentinel Comics figures like Legacy, Tachyon and AZ.
Each of these arguably human level characters have their place on their respective teams that are literally FILLED with veritable powerhouses. How do they do this? It all depends on the roll they fill, or in SCRPG terms, their archetype. Bats, along with all his money and training, fills out the roll of the detective. Cap is a master combatant and an expert battlefield tactician and leader. Wraith’s archetype is technically down as ‘Shadow’, working similar to Batman in many ways.
I’m not saying we should expect Daredevil to seamlessly work with the Silver Surfer all the time. With such different heroes there WILL be some need to ajust player characters and the story so no one feels totally useless or gets too bored. But we shouldn’t totally write off the possibility of those two working together. Heck, The World’s Finest wouldn’t be a thing if someone didn’t think to consider the possibility of teaming up a masked vigilante with a super-powered alien. 
(I may be going off topic here. I’ll leave it to the mods to decide if we need to break off this conversation into a new thread or not.)
*nods* I'm with you; the 'mixed supers' game isn't something that should be just tossed out altogether, but I think it does bear some significant thought during the Session Zero as to what kind of game is desired from all parties. Those sorts of "missed expectations" can often lead to very dissatisfying sessions.
I do take a bit of umbrage with the Batman example, but that's more of a personal beef on my end. To me, Batman is the sort of character that really isn't one character, but several. In one comic, he might be The Dark Knight, brooding over rooftops and dropping Carmine Falcone off of a fire escape. In another, he's the World's Greatest Detective, piecing together esoteric clues like a bat-themed Sherlock Holmes. In yet another, he's the proverbial Billionaire Playboy Philanthropist, bankrolling entire space stations and fighting off aliens in his jet with missiles. Rarely, if ever, do you see all three at the same time. The Dark Knight, for instance, almost never has a partner or sidekick, while the World's Greatest Detective often needs a Watson to his Sherlock, so Robin/Nightwing/Batgirl/etc. tend to appear more often. Yes, they're all Batman. But no, they're not the same character. To me, that's actually where the DC movies tend to fail: they're trying to hammer The Dark Knight into a scenario better suited to the Billionaire Playboy Philanthropist.
And if there's some question as to why Cap belongs in the Avengers, there's a page in Daredevil: Born Again I need to show you... :P
But yeah, in the end, it comes down to a matter of taste. What works in one group with a certain GM won't work in others; that's not a bad thing. Different strokes, right?
Trust me, you're preaching to the choir when it comes to Bats and his multiple variations. I find I'm a Superman fan stuck in a 'Man of Steel' and 'BvS' world. :/
And you won't find a bigger Cap fan than me out there. ;) He's proven himself to be my favorite Marvel character again and again over the years, weather it be him becoming Nomad, taking on an Infinity Gauntlet weilding Thanos one-on-one, or his awe-inspiring speaches that not only moved his fellow heroes to action, but have moved myself to action in real life. I have no qualms as to Captain America being on and leading the Avengers.
But to come back to the point, yeah, it all comes around to the group composition along with the group of players and the one running the game. I just don't want a GM or player to never consider having different 'power level' characters together in one team.
I love it when minds come together... :D
A scene-trait which counts as a penalty on that kind of overcome is an easy way to frame a "hard overcome"...
Just don't overdo it.