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For an upcoming Nightbane campaign, I am considering toying with a balancing idea. I was thinking about rating each of the OCCs with a 1-5 number. The higher the number, the more powerful the OCC, PCC or RCC.

For example: I would rate a Vagabond as a 1 and a Glitterboy as a 5. I would rate a Human as a 0 since they are the default race for many OCCs, but a Human with psionics would be a 1. I would rate an Ogre as a 1 and a Phase World Promethean as a 5.

The goal would be to give the players X points to build their character. Let's say you give them 3 points and they could play mix and match with races and classes and have some sense of balance.

GENERAL CRITERIA and my thoughts on ratings
1 - Vagabond, Rogue Scholar
2 - Coaltion Grunt, Headhunter, City Rat
3 - Crazy, Juicer, SAMAS Pilot
4 - Mind Melter, Ley Line Walker, Full Conversion Cyborg
5 - Dragon Hatchling, Glitterboy

So...do you agree with my ratings? Make your own list of OCC / RCC / PCCs from various books and let's compare thougths!

Your plan is inherently flawed. What a given OCC/PCC/RCC lacks in raw combat power they make up in skills and abilities. Not to mention that Smart Play balances things out exceedingly quickly, moreso than in other games I'm familiar with.

You can rate classes on Brute Force, but it won't mean much.

I split classes into three tiers.

Tier 1- sdc beings, anything that is sdc regardless of "powers"
Tier 2- Augmented classes: anything that changes a base race into something more. Juicers, crazy, PA's and robots etc..
Tier 3- Natural MDC/supernatural beings

Once i build the game setting up i have a pretty good idea on mdc totals and capabilities that will make the setting challenging but not impossible. Then i form a list of occ's that i think fit my game profile.

I then tool the game after i inform the players what the setting is and what occs i think would fit. This doesn't mean they can not select anything else. The group sits down as a whole and decides if they want to have that occ in the party.

My players know that i will challenge everything that they have in the party and if they have a juicer i will throw something at the juicer to challenge him. We actually had our party juicer back down from a fight and the Enemy nearly wiped out the entire party. So they Select OCC's accordingly.

But what do you consider to be "powerful"? As CaptRory said, playing smart can balance just about any occ/rcc. I think you underestimate the power of an psionic operator with a bag full of home made toys...

Also, your rating system would only be applicable to open combat in the field. Your level 5 glitterboy won't be s*** in a bar fight though, being just a regular human out of the armor.

Yea too many flaws and holes, and really i find that ALL the O.C.C.s have inherent pros and cons that make them ALL worth playing equally.

So funny you mention that, I had a character named Howlen, a D-Bee operator (slightly higher stats than human, and wings, thats it) who had telemechanics. I had a transforming set of armor, super-nueral mace (extended staff for zapping while parrying, increased power for shocking others in full armor) and like Myndtrip said, many more goodies that he was actually developing for a coalition secret project...

It's all how you play your character. Though, he wasn't as powerful as a glitterboy at first level. My advice is just look over a character and decide whether or not you'll allow it based on what's in the campaighn. And remember, there's always something more powerful than the characters, so you can ramp up the difficulty if needed.

I'm getting the fighting staff imagery from B5 Rangers. Tell me I'm wrong so I can stop dreaming

can you post the stats regardless

I have absolutely no idea what B5 rangers is, so yes, you can stop dreaming

Stats? Well, nothing really changed numbers wise. Picture a normal neural mace (I forget if it came out of the original main book or the coalition sourcebook) with the 'active area' that does the shocking extended all the way to the hilt so that while activated, I could parry and shock someone unconscious, making every enemy attacking me in HTH a possible limp body.

Also, I created a new setting that really saps the batteries (custom made as well) that would go right through environmental and power armor. I forget what the 'overload' mode did to those outside of armor, but I imagine it wasn't pretty.

It's my favorite weapon and character to date. I'll never forget playing "Ice base-ball" where another player character was trying to hit me with ice balls (he was a super spy with ice abilities) that I would easily parry whith me neural mace while we both floated in zero-g after the guards in the space station activated the emergeny systems

oh, in that case I'm not interested...

"balancing" is a delicate thing, and your point system already stipulates a power level. The temptation is to try to put numbers on things, but in general, 'balance' is not so easily evaluated. PB does need a character point system.... but it needs one a lot more developed than this.

the number of points stipulates how powerful you want the characters to be, and not much else (is an Ogre juicer with major Psionics... is he *really* on par with a glitterboy? not really, and ogre juicer with major psionics is really not much more than a human juicer). So why not cut to the chase and say, "Ok, I want characters on the power level of Glitterboys", and now that the players know what you expect, they can make characters appropriately. The number is meaningless. It's more about power 'categories', but these are harder to quantify.

Unless you want to really iron out the point system, I would say 'Ogre' is 0.3 points, but something like 'Seljuk' would be 1 or 1.5 points. Juicers tend to be bigger than crazies, so crazies should be more like 0.75 points. T-man conversion... more or less points than borg? The point system *also* requires you to assign point values to *EVERYTHING*... and by the end you're just pulling numbers out of intuition.

Eliminate the point system, instead use the 'points' as power categories and say, "yeah, make characters on par with CS grunts" or "make characters on par with juicers". And allow wiggle room.