Say what you will about the state of superhero media I can’t deny that I still enjoy it. We can chalk it up to me being the perfect age to enjoy the Sam Raimi spider-man films or growing up with the MCU being an almost omnipresent part of popculture while I was in highschool. So with the release of the new Marvel superhero TTRPG I was excited to see what the game had to offer. For players used to D&D 5e it is pretty much perfect since despite being a 3d6 system it was clearly built with that audience in mind.

However, for narrators (the games term for Game Master/Dungeon Master) the core book offers almost nothing. The entire narrator section offers almost nothing but generic game mastery advice. The only advice for building an encounter in the book is:

“As a rule of thumb, you can match a character of any rank against two foes of the next lower rank or four foes of a rank two less than theirs and so on.”

For a game that is clearly based around combat that is no where near enough. So in preparation for my own games using this system we’ll create what I call a Danger Threshold table.

Before we can calculate how dangerous each encounter can be we need to do some math.

To begin, a character is, on average, expected to have 1 in each stat for each of their ranks. So our math will assume this average.

Attacking. Unlike a normal 3d6 system, this game has a Marvel dice. That means one of your dice is treated as a 6 if it ever rolls a 1. This means that our range of results is actually 4-18, and our average result is an 11. If this attack beats a characters corresponding defense stat it deals damage.

Damage. You calculate damage by taking your Marvel dice result, multiplying it by your rank, and adding your static ability. This means that for a rank 1 Hydra soldier with a +1 to their ability score, their average damage will be 5 (4.3+1).

Additionally we need to calculate that an attack does double damage if the Marvel dice comes up (16% chance).

Heres a quick table to show the averages for each rank.

Rank	Average Attack	Average Damage
1	12	7.6
2	13	13.2
3	14	19.8
4	15	26.4
5	16	33
6	17	39.6

Now lets look at the progression of PC health and defenses.

Health. Each character has 2 hit point pools: Health, a characters physical hit points, and Focus, their mental hit points. Both pools are calculated by multiplying their relevant stats by 30 (Resiliance for Health and Vigilance for Focus). Eg a rank 1 Hydra agent with 1 Resiliance and Vigilance will have 30 in each of their hit point pools.
To ‘die’ a character must be reduced to either 0 Health or negative their maximum for Focus.

Defenses. The game uses 4 different types of defense, two for each health pool. Melee is for melee attacks and Agility for ranged, both defending Health. Focus has Ego is for psychological attacks and Logic for telepathic attacks.
Defense is calculated by adding 10 to the ability score, so a rank 1 Hyrda agent would have about an 11 defense in each stat.

Heres a quick table to show the averages for each rank.

Rank	Health/Focus	Defense
1	30	11
2	60	12
3	90	13
4	120	14
5	150	15
6	180	16

Comparing our two tables we can see that, for characters of the same rank, our average to hit is 1 higher than our defense. Since there are 216 different results we can get from our rolls and an average 132 of them are success. That means we have a 73.1% chance of success. So that means we deal an average of 3.7 damage per rank to characters of the same rank, per turn.

What about characters of different ranks.

So lets say our rank 1 Hydra agent attacks the rank 4 Captain America. With these ranks the Hydra agent has +1 to hit and 11 defense, while Captain America has +4 to hit 14 defense. This means that the agent needs to roll a 13 or higher (35% chance) which averages to 2.6 damage per round. Or 2.2% of his health each turn.
Conversely, Captain American hits the agent on a 7 or higher (95% chance) which averages to 25.1 damage per round. Or 83.6% of the agents health per turn. So with that math done, lets make our Danger Threshold.

Now here is the hard part, we need to take all of this information and transform it into an easily readable table. To do this I’m creating four categories of difficulty (easy, medium, hard, and severe)

Easy: Take barely any damage.
Medium: Take a low amount of damage.
Hard: Take about 50% of health as damage.
Severe: Take about 80% or more of health as damage.

Then I’m giving a number to each of these categories. This number shows the total ranks a single character can handle in a single encounter. However, since each rank isn’t linear, I’m giving each rank a score equal to its number squared.

Eg.
Rank 1 enemies = 1 point
Rank 2 enemies = 4 points
Rank 3 enemies = 9 points
Rank 4 enemies = 16 points
Rank 5 enemies = 25 points
Rank 6 enemies = 36 points

Rank	Easy	Medium	Hard	Severe
1	–	–	1	2
2	–	2	4	6
3	1	6	9	12
4	3	12	16	21
5	8	21	25	33
6	13	33	36	48

Let’s create an example medium encounter using this table for Captain America (Steve Rogers)

Cap is Rank 4 so his medium encounter would be 12 points. For this example we’ll use Crossbones (rank 3 = 9 points) plus 3 Hydra Agents (3x rank 1 = 3 points).

Cap has 90 HP
Crossbones has 90 HP
The Hydra Agents have a pool of 90 HP between them
Cap can expect to take ~19 damage per turn but lowers that by 10.8 however, due to his shield 3 power, in total he’s only taking 8.2 damage a round. He deals an average of 26 damage a round. This means he takes about 7 rounds to beat every enemy (assuming he uses no powers).
After 7 rounds (assuming he take out Crossbones then the Hydra Agents) he will have taken ~33 damage or 1/3 of his health.
This falls in line with what we expect from a medium encounter.

Before finishing two aspects of this table design should be made clear.

1. Do not use too many enemies. It can be tempting to have Captain America mow through 12 Hydra Agents but, unless you are an extremely experienced narrator, doing so will slow down the game significantly. For most narrators it is better to have 3 or fewer enemies each encounter per player.
2. When there is more than 1 player you can pool their collective points together. So a team of four Rank 2 heroes would have a hard encounter of 16 points.

Hopefully this table can help you design MARVELous adventures for your super heroic table.