I only ate one bagel, though.
No office again, and now the office is closed until after the first of the year, so it’s all WFH all the time. This would be more productive if Sage were less affectionate, but who wants that? Also would help if the online lab site for the online Kubernetes course actually worked.
Read (manga): Dandadan vol 16 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Yes, apparently you can find weird magical artifacts on every street corner in this world. I guess two expeditions into supernatural spaces with their own rules in sixteen volumes isn’t that many, although there was an alien invasion in between, which doesn’t seem to have been noticed by anyone except the PCs.
Written (game design): 236:
None of these addresses the effectiveness vs usability issue, so I think
we’re still holding out for the hitherto-undiscovered fourth option.
Unless usability limitations are just Complications, which they might
be. But also none of this is fundamentally changing our notion of what
it means for a power to be limited or advantaged or both or neither.
No, actually, we did reconsider what it means to be a default power
with the second option there, where all powers have some downsides
unless you buy them off with advantages. I don’t know that it works very
well, since it’s not obvious how to apply it to non-powers (ie,
characteristics), but it is at least different.
What else can we say about limitations and advantages that might offer
openings for reconsideration? Why are limitations more of an issue than
advantages? Part of it is because if we peg cost to utility, making the
power (or characteristic or whatever bolus of points) less useful means
reducing the cost and we can’t go below zero or the whole system breaks
down. Another part is that limitations are less constrained, since in
wargaming, it’s assumed everyone wants to be as powerful as possible and
that’s what has to be kept under control, so the ways you can make a
power better have to be carefully enumerated and restricted. I’m not
expressing this well, possibly because it’s not a well-formed thought,
but I think I’m right.
Having a set of powers that cover every operation your system is
interested in, in a basic way, and then a selection of advantages to
make them better but more expensive or weaker but cheaper is pretty
elegant, but not the only way to do things. If your set of “advantages” is
sufficiently restricted, you could not have them separate at all: blast,
area-effect blast, etc. Or, if the system is structured appropriately,
do something like I tried earlier where each power has a slider for each
of the various attributes (number of targets, fatigue, armor
penetrations, etc etc) that you can buy up or down. I didn’t get it
to work, but I didn’t try that hard.
Do limitations even reduce the cost? As previously mentioned, you could
instead get XP when your limitations come up, at least for ones that put
requirements on the power.
Maybe effectiveness limitations, instead of giving points back that you
can use for whatever, directly give you ranks (dice, active points,
whatever) in the power. If you want more ranks than you get from
limitations, you can buy them with points. Minimum cost applies for each
power, although it could be varied to give some of the same effect as
power frameworks (less for attack powers after the first, etc). This is
another one that’s mathematically similar to previous ideas, but might
feel different in play.
(Speaking of ranks, what if instead of ranks in a power, we had ranks of
damage, ranks of area/size, ranks of defense, ranks of penetration (may be
the same as ranks of defense, actually), etc? Then you could make your
forcewall out of ranks in defense plus ranks in area, instead of having
to have ranks all called Forcewall but doing different things. Maybe
you have to have at least one rank in the specific power to get the
basic effect and define what what exactly the other ranks do, or maybe
that’s free.)
Ranks gained from limitations can’t exceed whatever the campaign limit
is, of course, but can be any kind of rank. With requirement limitations
being Complications, is this a system at last? I’m still worried that
we’ll end up with all powers at minimum cost, but maybe the only way to
resolve that issue is to move forward.