[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

i'm trying to stat ki blasts. so far i have rays, medium beams, large beams (two handed, like the kamehameha), spheres which can get pretty big, and custom (anything else you can think of).

These will mostly be Innate Attacks of various types, as you've already guessed, I think? So, the basic "ki blast" (basically a "ranged punch" that does similar damage to your unarmed damage, just projected at a distance) would probably be a Crushing Attack. Innate Attacks are already ranged by default, so you don't need to modify that. But you might want to put on modifiers to further customize it. For example, by default a ranged Innate Attack has a 1/2 damage range of 10 yards. I'm not super familiar with Dragonball, but I think that they can probably throw effective ki blasts further than that. So you'll probably want the Increased Range enhancement.

A good way to approach this in general is to describe the type of attacks you want to build, in fairly specific terms. For example, the explosive ki attack you mention - how big of an area can it cover? Does the damage decrease as it moves away from the center of the blast (like a real explosion), or does it just cover the whole area pretty much equally? What range can someone shoot it at? And so on. Once you've pinned down those numbers, you can use modifiers to model them more precisely.

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

also i settled on a "ki meditation" ability, the cost of which i have not decided yet, which grants a number of starting ki reserve points.

This sounds like an Energy Reserve, which is described in Powers. If you don't have Powers yet, here's the short version: an Energy Reserve is basically Fatigue Points, which can only be used to fuel abilities from a particular power source: magical, psionic, etc. In this case, it would be Energy Reserve (Ki). Every point of Energy Reserve costs the same as 1 FP (3 points), though that can be modified. Energy Reserves recharge (by default) at the same rate as FP (1/10 minutes), but you don't need to be resting to recharge them, and they recharge simultaneously with regular FP. So, for example, if you power an ability that needs 4 FP with 2 from your regular FP and 2 from your Energy Reserve, you'll be back up to full in only 20 minutes, not the 40 minutes it would require if you spent them all from your regular FP.

So I'd build your "Ki Meditation" as a certain number of levels of Energy Reserve (Ki), plus whatever other advantages you think everyone who can do that should have (Combat Reflexes sounds like a good idea, for example). If literally every single player in the campaign is supposed to have this automatically, then it's fine to say that you're giving it to everyone "for free". (I'd actually describe it as you're giving everyone enough starting points to buy that, then whatever extra points you want to give them, but same difference, really.)

When deciding how many Energy Reserve points to give out, don't go overboard. There can be a tendency, especially when building something high-powered like Dragonball, to inflate the numbers to make them feel more impressive. I'd say to avoid that. For example, you could make the weakest ki attack cost 10 FP, while the strongest costs 100. But it would be much simpler to make the weakest cost only 1 FP, and the strongest cost 10. That means the relative difference between the strongest and the weakest remains the same (the strongest can throw their blast once compared to the weakest's 10), but you don't have to track a bunch of extra FP when the strongest character has an FP/Energy Reserve pool of 100, but is just throwing out little 10 FP attacks, and the lower numbers also mean that the lower-level characters aren't spending hours or longer recharging their batteries after each little attack, and you don't have to resort as much to things like giving really powerful characters Regeneration (Extreme, Fatigue Only) to get their FP back in combat time.

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

i'm not sure how much upgrades should cost but they should be fairly cheap, and you can take as many as you want.

I would suggest that you do put some limits on how much people can take, at least unless you want results where one character sinks almost all their points into just Energy Reserve, and then just throws minimum-power attacks all the time with no effective limits.

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

saiyans get an instance of this upgrade for free if they're beat up and then healed. not an overpowered story ability, i don't think.

Mm. I would disagree. If you're expecting to play with some characters who are saiyans and some who aren't, giving the saiyans more of the power resource for free is going to quickly make them much more potent than the other characters, which is generally not a good scene. Instead, I would suggest putting limits on the number of Energy Reserve levels people can buy, but allowing saiyans, when they're defeated, the opportunity to raise those limits, but they still have to spend character points to do so.

This even makes sense dramatically - as I understand it, saiyans get more powerful after being defeated, but they still typically need to train and exercise to take full advantage of that power, correct? That is, being defeated raises their potential, without necessarily automatically boosting their raw power? Having caps on things like Energy Reserve, and other stuff like the levels in things like Innate Attacks and other ki abilities, but raising those caps means that a saiyan who saves their points can then spend them once they're defeated to get a sudden power boost. That actually sounds pretty much right for (again, what I've heard of) the show: characters tend to develop new abilities either after long, arduous training, or at a big dramatic moment of reversal, when they've been kicked around a lot but are now ready to turn the tables. They don't seem to just develop abilities at a steady pace, introducing them just at random moments. Giving saiyans an incentive to bank their points and then spend them in a bunch when they've just been defeated sounds pretty good to me.

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

so i'm not sure of the costs for abilities, such as the various ki blasts, or physical ki-based enhancement, or short distance teleport, or healing, etc.

These are all going to be based on advantages (mostly in the Basic Set, though Powers has a few new ones too that you might want to look at), with appropriate modifiers. The first thing I would do, actually, is look at the rules in Powers for building a power - that is, a set of abilities that all "belong" to the same group, and share certain characteristics. You'll want to make a power modifier, which is a set of modifiers that apply to all the abilities within the power. So, for example, if you think all Ki abilities should cost energy somehow, you can add -5% to the power modifier, for Costs Fatigue 1. And if you think that all Ki abilities need a big "windup" (obvious gestures and shouting the name of the move out loud, for instance), that's another -10%. So if you think all Ki abilities share those two limitations, you'd call the Ki modifier -15%, and apply it to all the abilities.

You can always add more modifiers to individual abilities as well, so if you want your big blast attack to cost 10 FP instead of just one, you'd add Ki, -15% to it, and then Costs Fatigue 9, -45% as well (because the basic Ki modifier already includes one level of Costs Fatigue by default).

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

edit: striking still uses karate, so that costs fatigue points, right? fighters should get fatigued as they go on, but get a mind over matter option to resume fighting, like Goku always does when he gets tired.

Using karate or any other weapon skill doesn't cost FP by default, no. Battles can have an FP cost if they go on for longer than 10 seconds, with the cost depending on the weather and how they're dressed, but there's no 1 FP cost per basic attack. If you use Costs Fatigue on the abilities you build, though, those will cost FP, as I described above.

For more standard combat, if you want characters to be fatigued regularly by combat, I'd recommend you push the rules for Extra Effort, especially Extra Effort in Combat (Basic, p. 357, and expansions in Martial Arts, p. 131). Powers also has rules for spending FP to boost your special abilities, covered under "Stunts" (Powers, pp. 170-174).