Quote:
Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice
Honestly, it might be -80% because you can only use that attack one one person: yourself.
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In this case, it's not an attack -- Flight, as I recall. A one-person-only
attack is quite limited, I agree. A one-person-only (self) ability is far less so. Most abilities are self-only, after all: Flight in its normal form, Regeneration, Combat Reflexes, Night Vision, etc. You have to spend a lot to get Affects Others (but not +80%). Most abilities are pretty selfish, and most players want their spotlight time more than a way to give someone else the spotlight.
My first reaction was "no discount; it's just a complicated way to buy the ability directly". I certainly wouldn't give away all self-only abilities at -80% (which does stack with the 1/5 AA multiplier, so together they're a 25x force multiplier). But I think the Limitation worth something, because if you did buy Affliction (Flight), you could give the members of your party the ability to fly -- which is going to be quite useful from time to time. Giving that up is going to show up in games and restrict the player's getting maximum use out of the ability.
Advantage Afflictions are expensive. (In the case of flight, it's 10 CP +400%, so 50 CP, more than Flight at 40 CP, so the -20% would make them come out the same*.) So the question really boils down to "why would you buy a self-only Affliction rather than the straight ability"? (That's a different question from "what would the Limitation value be?")
I can't think of any good reasons off the top of my head. Munchkinly reasons are easy to come by -- exploiting loopholes with Cumulative and/or Permanent, or just doing the math both on every ability and taking whichever one happened to be cheaper, setting metaphysics irrelevant. And there are good reasons to prefer simpler builds over more complicated and esoteric ones.
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* I usually lean toward Multiplicative Modifiers when it comes to games where the powers are central. The rules throw around a lot of +100%, +150%, +300% modifiers, but there's really no way to counterbalance those with the additive method, due to the lack of similar large values on the Disad side. The point costs just explode with AM. You can give away more points, but that just leads to the non-powered characters becoming OP because the scale tilts. (And if the your philosophy were "I don't care about points", why would you care about the method for calculating those irrelevant values?)