(M&M 3e) Enhanced Trait Cost Error

[jaydarkson]

Hello. I was looking over a character that was done in Hero Lab using the Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition License and one of my players pointed out to me that the cost of Enhanced Trait: Intimidate is wrong. The power is supposed to cost 1/2 pp per rank to increase the skill by +1. Hero Labs is instead giving the character a +2 increase in skill at the cost of 1 pp per rank.

[Duggan]

Just to clarify, you gave your guy 2 ranks of Intimidate via Enhanced Skill and got charged 1 pp? Or is it that you're trying to give him 1 rank and found that it charged you 1 pp irregardless? The latter is a slight artifact of the system in that it doesn't handle fractional Power Points. I think there's even text in the book stating that no power is allowed to cost less than 1 pp.

[jaydarkson]

It's treating enhanced Intimidation as something that gives you +2 intimidation per rank (at a cost of 1 point per rank) rather than simply having it have its correct cost of 1/2 a point per rank. This is OK if you don't add extras, but it's completely wrong if you do.

Each rank of intimidation actually costs half a point, so with a +3 extra, the total cost for 10 intimidation is 30 points (.5 per rank > 1 per rank > 2 per rank > 3 per rank, times 10 ranks).

[Duggan]

Ah. Enhanced Traits is one of those areas where it's tricky to figure out how to include Extras and Flaws, especially since there are so many other items included inside of it, and it's like Alternate Form and Growth in that it generally doesn't matter as much if it's Flawed since you generally only need to bring it up once and then you can keep it up.

Based on the value provided for the Modifier, it looks like you're trying to add Reaction to your Intimidate. Since you can't trigger usage of a skill, you're probably building this off of the book's example of a conditionally enhanced trait, say the Hulk's tendency to get stronger as he gets angrier. To be honest, the book went about it in the wrong way, at least in my opinion. A power which is only present in some situations is a Flawed power (or a Quirked one), not an enhanced one. It doesn't make sense to charge more for a power which shows up less of the time.

Nevertheless, you're right that Enhanced Skills should start at a base cost of 0.5 points per rank.