Public Merit
Superheroes are often judged in the court of popular opinion. There are examples from all sorts of movies and shows about how influential public opinion can be to a superhero’s career.
Shows like The Boys and My Hero Academia both include concepts like superheroes being ranked in popularity, specializing in public relations, and earning government contracts and assignments. The Incredibles and The Watchmen both have scenes depicting public sentiment towards superheroes changing.
We’ve drawn inspiration from our favorite movies and shows for many aspects of We Can Be Heroes. We wanted the concept of public perception to be a core part of the game; it’s the golden thread that ties together combat and roleplay. It gives weight to your actions and affects how you interact with the world. We’ve decided to call it Public Merit.
Public Merit is the measure of your standing with different groups or communities. Building your reputation and gaining public merit within a certain group will allow you to cash in favors like gaining intel or upgrading your equipment. Your reputation essentially becomes the currency of the game.
There are six different Public Merit branches:
General Popularity
Corporations
Government
Media
Scientific Community
Underground
The largest source of Public Merit will come from the missions that your team completes. At the end of each mission, you and your team will be awarded Public Merit according to your actions during the mission, as scored by your GM.
The hero trait you choose during character creation will also grant you a specialty in one of these branches. Whenever you complete a mission, you will get a bonus to your chosen branch.
Keep in mind that Public Merit can also be lost. Let’s say you respond to a hostage situation at a bank. You save the hostages and dispatch all of the baddies, but manage to demolish the bank in the process. In this situation you might gain some Public Merit with General Popularity and Government, but lose some with Corporations.
Throughout a campaign you will need to balance whether or not to spend your Public Merit. As you gain more and more Public Merit, you will advance to higher tiers as you hit higher thresholds. Higher tiers will grant you more significant rewards. If you choose to spend Public Merit and you drop below the threshold level for a tier, you will retain the status and benefits of that tier. However, you now have a longer way to go before advancing to the next higher tier.
We’ve developed a Public Merit scorecard that GM’s can use to score these missions. It can be found on our resources page. Right now we have it set up in a google spreadsheet. Make a copy of the sheet, then edit it to make it your own. I’ve found using the scorecard to be helpful while building encounters as well. It helps me plan out what the main objectives are for a mission and what the major plot points are going to be.
We will be including guidelines for how much Public Merit a GM can plan to reward players with, but like all things, the final discretion lies with the GM. Most importantly, have fun with it.
Cheers!
