But that just makes me want to return to the glorious future of Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 13 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): Of course once you’ve been to the Otherside, you can never escape weird shit. Also Kozakura’s scorn for the two leads and their hot spring adventure plan is 100% justified. I completely understand about wanting your own space and not liking being in other people’s space, though.
Written (game design): 283:
Back to the drawing board again. We can reduce the cost of individual
powers, we can give extra points separately, we can make powers with
fewer than some number of limitations cost more, or an
as-yet-undiscovered fourth option. Or, of course, a combination.
Giving points separately would something like this. You have your
powers each with their base cost, say a plasma-based flying energy
projector package:
– Plasma bolt (blast)
– Plasma shield (forcefield + damage shield)
– Plasma rocket (flight)
– Magnetic Sense
Then there are limitations that apply to these, each with a base value,
and then a multiplier for how many of the powers it applies to:
– Doesn’t work in strong magnetic fields – applies to all, x4 base points
– Too bright to hide – applies to most but not sense, x3 base points
– Backblast – applies to only flight, x1 base points
The important thing here is to not make the extra points larger
than the cost of the power(s) being limited, to avoid a runaway
spiral of infinite power(s). But, the points have to be enough for
limitations to be tempting and roughly balanced. Sticking with the
idea that a limitation gets a multiplier depending on how many of
your powers it applies to (per power, or few/some/most/all), we can
obviously say that if the total cost of the powers that a limitation
applies to is X, then you can’t get more than X-1 points for the
limitation. That can lead to recalculations of multiple limitations
every time you change a power, instead of only recalculating that
power, which is obviously not great but might not be too bad since
you only have to add up the integer costs, not do any fractional
arithmetic. The upside of this scheme is that it encourages common
limitations, which a character with a strong concept should have.
(I think. I might be basing this too much on the current game, where
everyone has the same power source.)
For increasing cost for powers that don’t have X limitations, we have to
pick a number of limitations to be the base, say 4. Then with the same
powers and limitations, we have
– blast – not in magnetic fields, bright, needs 2 levels of unlimited power
– shield – same
– flight – not in magnetic fields, bright, backblast, only needs 1 level of unlimited power
– magnetic sense – not in magnetic fields, needs 3 levels of unlimited power
This is easier to calculate (only advantages), but it means having
more than four limitations never gives any points, which could be
good or bad depending on whether the massive limits on the power
are legit. It also allows counting limitations (obviously some can
count double or triple) instead of working with fractions like 11/4.
Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages and I’m really not
sure whether either is better than the existing system. They do, maybe,
solve the problem of fiddling around with piles of -1/4 limitations to
shave fractions of a percent of a character budget, but is it worth it?