house rules Extended Searches

[Dr Archeville]

The rules on Extended Searches (as found under the description of the Search skill in the Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Ed. core rulebook) have always been a weird case -- they go by the diameter of the area being searched, not the, y'know, area -- I thought it might be useful to add some notes/tips to our Guidebook.  (Especially if we're going to be doing more stuff in SPAAACE, and scanning planets.)  Probably put this on the Skills page.

 

Maybe something like....

 

Search: Remember that, when doing an Extended Search, the time is based on the approximate diameter of the area being searched.  

 

Steps	Diameter	Examples	Time
0	5 feet		1 round
1	10 feet		1 minute
2	100 feet		5 minutes
3	1,000 feet		20 minutes
4	1 mile	~500 acres or ~200 hectares	1 hour
5	5 miles		5 hours
6	20 miles	Freedom City (approx. 15 x 25 miles)	1 day
7	200 miles		1 week
8	2,000 miles	Ceres (0.6k miles diameter), Eris (1.4k mi.), Pluto (1.5k mi.)	1 month
9	20,000 miles	Earth (8k miles diameter), Mars (4k mi.), Moon (2.1k mi.), Venus (8k mi.)	3 months
10	200,000 miles	Jupiter (87k miles), Neptune (31k mi.), Saturn (72k mi.), Uranus (32k mi.)	1 year
11	2 million miles	The Sun (865k miles)	5 years
12	20 million miles		10 years
13	200 million miles [2.1 au]		50 years
14	2 billion miles		100 years
15	“Same solar system”	Sol System (out to Neptune, 6.64 billion miles / 30 au)	500 years
16	“Nearby star systems”	Proxima Centauri (4.2 ly from Earth)	1,000 years
17	“Distant star systems”		5,000 years
18	“Same galaxy”	The Milky Way (105k ly diameter)	10,000 years
19	“Nearby galaxies”	The Andromeda Galaxy (2,500,000,000 ly from Earth, and 152k ly in diameter)	50,000 years
20	“Anywhere in the universe”	The observable universe is ~93,000,000,000 ly in diameter.	100,000 years

 

Thus, performing an extended search of all of Freedom City would take 1 day (which can be reduced by Quickness or Rapid ESP/Super-Senses), while doing an extended search of the Earth would take 3 months (or about 1 hour with Quickness 10 [x2,500], or 3 seconds with Quickness 20 [x5,000,000]).

 

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M&M 3E changed the Extended Search guidelines so it does go by area.  Would we want to consider doing that?  If so, doing an extended search of Freedom City (with an area of about 375 square miles) would take 1 month, while doing an extended search of the Earth (total surface area of ~197,000,000 square miles) would take 50 years (or about 1 week with Quickness 10 [x2,500], 2 days with Quicknes 12 [x10,000] or with Rapid 4 on ESP, or ~5 minutes with Quickness 20).

A longer time, but it would add some consistency to the rules.

 

(Not as long as the ctual rules in M&M 3E.  Per those rules, doing an extended search of the Earth would take 50,000 years!)