I guess Saturday was Come to Terms With Your Increased Psychic Powers Day and now it’s time to get back in the danger room.

I thought I didn’t sleep in as much as usual, but that’s because the clocks all changed while I was asleep, and actually it was the same time. Whatever. I managed to get and eat a pad thai before going shopping to return with boons for all cat-kind.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 9 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Rae gets to make use of her past-life skills as well as her game-specific knowledge,, but the outcome is still not smooches from Claire, only getting more embroiled in various plots and schemes.

Written (game design): 442:

As we decrement the cost per rank …3, 2, 1, 1/2, 1/3, … it does go
asymptotically toward 0, so it seems like it should be close enough, and
yet.

If the standard cost of a rank is 2, then reducing it to 1 is halving
it, or the equivalent of a -1 limitation. Reducing it another step to
1/2 makes it a quarter the original cost, so a -3 limitation. One more
step, to 1/3, is a sixth the cost, -5 limitation. Etc.

Suppose we make a standard rank cost 4, so each increase is the
same as a +1/4 advantage. Then the first decrease is to 3,
three-quarters of the original, a -1/3 limitation, and the next
step is to 2, half the original, a -1 limitation. This isn’t bad
so far, but then we’re down to a quarter of the original cost, -3
limitation, and then an eighth, -7 limitation; a twelfth,-11
limitation, etc.

Even if the standard cost is 8, so it has to be increased by 2 for each
+1/4 advantage, the effective limitations are -1/7, -1/3, -3/5, -1, -5/3,
-3, -7, etc. Turns out “asymptotically approaches 0” isn’t a complete
description of a function, what the heck?

Okay, so we can’t just port the existing power modifiers system to this
alternate way of reducing the cost of limited powers. Either we need to
come up with a different way of reducing costs, or we need to develop a
significantly different relationship with the idea of power limitations.
Or both.

As little as I think the game is improved by people checking to see
whether one-handed gestures vs two-handed gestures saves a point,
the incentive to have some limitations is a good one, so throwing out
the idea of limitations altogether isn’t the way to go. It’s the piles
of small limitations that I want to avoid. I just don’t know how. Do we
give up on the idea of ranks and just stick with active points?

Buying powers in ranks also does raise the question of how to include
adders. Do they just get turned into advantages? Is that an accurate
reflection of their utility? Since we started, I’ve been assuming that
there is no actual way to quantify utility and the point values are all
handwaved to match what Hero players think they should be, since that’s
as close as anything. This is another reason to not want to be too
finicky with costs, since small variations probably don’t mean anything
anyway. But am I right about this? Of course I think I am, but what do I
know? Not game design, that’s for sure!