The following appears here on my Patreon for public access. Note this will NOT be implemented in HEROIC, but as possible "expanded rules" in a future product of options.

WHY THE LADDER NEEDS MORE RUNGS

In any rank-based RPG, especially one that thrives on cinematic escalation like HEROIC, there’s always going to be a conversation about damage scaling. About when "strong" becomes "too strong." But the problem we’ve been bumping into in playtesting isn’t simply that damage is high—it’s that damage accelerates. And not just incrementally. We’re talking about an upward curve that goes from zero to nuclear in a heartbeat, and once you're at AM50, it doesn’t take much to light the fuse.

Let me lay it out.

Under the current system, damage Ranks increase according to a fairly recognizable curve. From TY06 to GD10, all the way up to CZ5000, the leap from one Rank to another is substantial, and meaningful. But what’s happening at the table is a different story. Once a character hits AM50 base damage, they’re sitting right on the edge of a cliff. And then we hand them every reason to jump off it.

That’s not theory. That’s actual table math. AM50 becomes MG75, then UN100, then SP150, maybe even FN200—all from one dice result. And it feels wrong. Not because the players are doing anything illegal, but because the system itself invites that kind of vertical leap. It’s not cheating. It’s just easy.

And here’s where the danger truly comes in.

Once a character’s HEALTH is gone, any excess damage rolls over into Endurance, and that is where things get lethal fast. If a +4RS strike pushes an attack into UN100 territory, and a character has already taken enough hits to be on the ropes, that overflow damage doesn’t just knock them out—it can instantly kill them. That’s not dramatic. That’s not heroic. That’s just a numbers cascade. And it turns high-stakes scenes into sudden-death mechanics where one bad round evaporates a character.

So here’s the design fork in the road:
Do we limit how much RS can stack? Or do we address the curve itself?

A lot of systems lean into restriction. Cap the RS gain. Limit it to +2 total. Only allow one Talent to apply. Only this perk or that maneuver. But that’s not how HEROIC is built. We didn’t write a game about limiting possibilities—we wrote a game about leaning into narrative momentum. A Red Result should feel like it matters. An All-Out Attack should have weight. A Martial Artist who knows what they’re doing should hit harder than a guy throwing haymakers in the dark. The answer isn’t to slap hands. The answer is to make the ladder taller.

And that’s where the Expanded Rank Ladder comes in.

By interspersing additional Ranks between the existing ones, we soften the exponential slope. AM50 doesn’t jump straight to MG75 anymore. It moves to FN60, then SP70, then MG80. Each +1RS still matters—but now the mechanical distance it travels is smaller. That +4RS burst? It no longer warps the scale. It climbs through FN60 > SP70 > MG80 > LG90, possibly peaking at UN100, and that feels a lot more reasonable than going from AM50 to FN200 in one swing.

The real elegance of this fix is that it’s not just reactive—it’s proactive. We’re not just cutting off spikes; we’re future-proofing the system. We’re giving Judges more flexibility in enemy design, giving players more room to grow, and giving narrative stakes a clearer gradient. This isn’t about nerfing damage. It’s about contextualizing it.

Let me be crystal clear: this is not about reducing fun, excitement, or cinematic moments. This is about preserving stakes. When every Red Result turns someone into a one-shot death machine, then nothing matters. Defense becomes a joke. Tactical choices become irrelevant. We lose the nuance between “strong,” “very strong,” and “absolutely devastating.” The Expanded Rank Ladder gives that back to us. It brings the drama back into range.

And narratively? It’s gold.

Being FN60 is not the same as being SP70. MG80 is distinct from LG90. We now have space to define power tiers with precision instead of big, vague jumps. It lets us draw cleaner lines between a top-tier human (MG80), a metahuman elite (UN100), a mythic powerhouse (AS150), and the big deific guns (DV1000 and above). It adds texture. It adds flavor. It makes it mean something to move up in Rank.

This is not a cosmetic change. This is a structural reinforcement of what HEROIC already does well: tell bigger-than-life stories with mechanical fidelity to narrative scale.

The best part? We don’t need to nerf the Red Result. We don’t need to kill All-Out Attack. We don’t need to police the Talent system. We keep everything that makes this game exciting—and we just build better scaffolding underneath it.

So yeah, this is a fix. Not a limitation. Not a cap. A recalibration of gravity. Because in a system built on elevation, we owe it to the players to make sure they’ve got something solid to climb.

And we just gave them more rungs.

BE HEROIC!