A rent-a-cop security guard is PL3, a beat-cop is PL4, a SWAT cop is PL5, and a "mega cop" with the beginnings of super-strength is PL6. That's a mere +3 difference in key features between Paul Blart mall cop and the newly enhanced cyber-police of Villain City. Yet the difference in key values between Mister America (PL8) & Hal Jordan (PL14) is +6. A competition between Hal & Mister America is practically guaranteed whereas one between Blart & one of the Mayor's new cyber-enhanced police force is only very slight tilted against the mall cop on his Segway.
Now, I understand where that comes from. After all, based on the Ability Benchmarks, '0' is your average person, 3 is just "gifted", but a 6 is "one of best in the world". Which stems (at least partially) from Ranks & Measures table. We start at how fast, strong, etc the "average person" is, then double that for every rank of ability given, which very quickly leads to world record levels of weight lifting, sprinting, etc. For Avengers-level heroes - that's OK. But drag that back down to the level of shows like Heroes, Alphas, and the movie Push and the difference between the weakest & strongest of the cast starts washing out.
My little brainsnap the other night was to simply stretch out the Ranks & Measures table. To simplify conversion between the standard and stretch table - keep the exponential nature, just double the ranks. So instead of table values being "(Rank 0 Value) x 2^Rank" it would be "(Rank 0 Value) x 2^(Rank/2)". Everything with a fixed DC (either completely or by addition) doubles, PL levels double (i.e PL10 becomes PL20), etc.
The only problems I can think of with this solution is that:
- The R&M table is now 40 lines long and isn't "quite" as easy to calculate values in your head for odd numbers.
- The d20 spread is essentially a d10 spread, which may affect the ability of lower PL characters being able to hit higher PL characters (not necessarily an issue)
- Skills might need some jiggery pokery in cost to balance out the effect of Abilities being essentially halved (intuitively though, I think it might be fine given DC's all double).