Also maybe Day of the Ninja, but you didn’t hear it from me.
Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 5 (Sai Naekawa): What? The story the monster has been feeding her isn’t complete and possibly isn’t true at all? You don’t say!
Read (short): “Slaying the Dragon” (CE Murphy): Urban Shaman short after the end of the series. Not sure I approve of killing randomly-encountered monsters, but magical power is probably as good a reason as food to kill a nonsapient.
Written (game design): 195:
One of the things I like about incrementing/decrementing the cost
per rank is that instead of having to perform two separate calculations,
it’s just sliding up and down a chart, which is way easier. However,
that loses the distinction between active points and real points,
which we still may want to keep. The real distinction is between
modifiers that affect when a power can be used (not at night, 0
End) and how effective it is when used (reduced knockback,
armor-piercing), which even 6E doesn’t differentiate, but it’s still
probably not great to be able to get a 24d6 attack even if it only
works at night.
This is making the problem worse, since now we have power level separate
from cost, and modifiers on both axes, but I’d rather have that clear
than muddled, even if I’m not sure how to implement it yet.
I would also like to be able to count limitations in integers, rather
than floats. Even if it’s just a matter of scaling, I’d rather not
pretend we have that much precision when we really don’t.
If we say one limitation is about equal to a -1/4, so 80%, and multiply
that for each one, then the multiplier goes 4/5, 2/3, 1/2, 2/5, 1/3,
1/4. That seems simple, but the LCD is 1/60. Bah.
Quadrants are a popular way of pulling open problems. Will they help
here? We have advantages vs limitations, and modifies effectiveness vs
modifies usability. The first is a hard dichotomy (probably, although I
guess there could be a modifier that’s both good and bad without being
an advantage and a limitation in one trenchcoat), the second might be
blurrier. But let’s say the axes have only two positions for now.
Is an advantage that increases the effectiveness of the power
fundamentally different than another 1d6 of attack or 1 Def or whatever
the power gives? We can say that making the attack armor-piercing makes
every die armor-piercing, but what if instead a rank of piercing lets
the attack ignore 2 of the target’s Def? Or a rank of range increases
the range from melee to same hex to adjacent hex etc? Every square meter
that we increase an Barrier’s area by in 6E gets the full Def and Body,
but it’s a flat cost rather than an advantage.
Actually range should go, melee -> same hex -> couple of hexes based
on active points/ranks -> many hexes based on active points/ranks
-> line of sight, so maybe it’s not a good example. Or maybe it
shows that every advantage that increases effectiveness is different.
Either way, we see that Hero includes charging by both advantages
(multiplication) and adders (addition) for increasing effectiveness.
Instead of scorning powers that have multiple ways to absorb points
spent on themm, like my favorite example of Barrier, maybe we should be
embracing them. Put points separately into damage, range, penetration,
area, defense used against it, Def, Body, sense groups, everything that
applies to the power. Every aspect starts at minimum for 0 points, so
there aren’t many limitations that apply to effectiveness.
This would make everything a flat adder, so you’re not paying for each
die of your NND attack to bypass Def, you’re paying to negate the
target’s Def.
This is simpler in that everything is explicit, but now you have
to list everything that’s not minimum as one of potentially many
line items under each power. Is this simpler or cleaner than the
existing 6E system? Unclear.