How to model a Parasitic Infectious Jet Attack?

[Pursuivant]

I'm trying to stat up these guys* in a relatively simple fashion.

They've got the nasty ability to spray a short-ranged jet which initially just causes pain, but which also infects victims with parasitic eggs. The eggs burrow into the body, gestate, and eventually kill the victim when the hatchlings chew their way out. Time required for hatchlings to develop ranges from days to months depending on the victim's species. Until they emerge, however, the victim doesn't feel any pain or appear to suffer any damage.

The ability to create hatchlings is actually a drawback, since they are vicious, ferociously territorial, and will compete for dominance until there's just one left in a given area.

The trick is to model this power without stupid high point costs while more or less obeying RAW.

Yes, the simple thing to do is model them as just being monsters and handwave the exact point cost for their attack. That's specifically NOT what I want.

Inevitably, someone will want the same power for a PC or be idiotic enough to take a Gorn hatchling as an Ally.

This is what I've got so far:

Affliction 4x (Enhancements: Accurate (4x), +20%; Jet, +0%; Linked (Affliction), +10%; Low Signature, +10%; Moderate Pain, +20%. Limitations: Biological, -10%; Contact Agent, -30%; Limited Use (1x/day), -40%; Nuisance Effect (Multiple hits vs. same target only impose one Follow-Up Affliction), -5%; Reduced Range 1 (1/2x range), -10%.) [26]

Since pricing for multiple levels of Affliction is crocked, my house rules are that extra levels count as Secondary Abilities and get a 1/5x price break. That would give a revised price of 11. Not bad.

My first problem is that I haven't come up with a good, cheap method of modeling the nasty terminal conditions - effectively a Heart Attack and Infectious Attack as the hatchlings emerge.

This was my first attempt:

Affliction (Enhancements: Bestowed Disadvantage (Infectious Attack), +50%; Cosmic (Cannot be detected or treated using conventional medicine), +50%; Heart Attack, +300%; Linked (Affliction), +10%. Limitations: Accessibility (Delayed Onset vs. some species), -5%; Accessibility (Only vs. Size -1 or larger targets), -40%; Biological, -10%; Follow-Up to Affliction (Contact Agent, -30%; Jet, +0%; Limited Use, -40%; Reduced Range, -10%), -80%; Onset (3+ days), -30%.) [35].

Odd pricing on Accessibility represents the fact that the difference between Onset (1 day) and Onset (1 week) is just -10%.

Total price for the power is 61 points for 4x levels of Affliction 1, and 1 level of the follow-up Affliction, or 166(!) for four levels each of the two Afflictions (76 points with my house rules).

Even if you treat the Hatchlings as a -20% Nuisance Effect rather than a +50% enhancement, RAW cost is 29 points per level or 116 points for 4 levels.

That's ridiculously high for a short-ranged power that you can use just once a day, which takes at least a day to kill its victims.


That leads to my second problem:

The follow-up attack should be irresistible. If you get hit, you get infected. If you get infected, you eventually die. Per RAW, Affliction can't add a Cosmic modifier which removes the Resistance Roll.

My second attempt to model the power was this:

Innate Attack (Toxic, 17d HP (68 points), Enhancements: Cosmic (Cannot be detected or treated using conventional medicine), +50%; Linked (Affliction), +10%; No Signature, +20%. Limitations: Accessibility (Delayed Onset vs. some species), -5%; Accessibility (Only vs. Size -1 or larger targets), -40%; Biological, -10%; Follow-Up to Affliction (Jet, +0%; Contact Agent, -30%; Limited Use, -40%; Reduced Range, -10%), -80%; Nuisance Effect (Hatchlings emerge when victim dies), -10%; Onset (1+ day), -30%.) [14]

17d HP reliably reduces a typical victim to 5 x -HP.

Intensely territorial, vicious hatchlings that can produce more hatchlings are definitely a Nuisance Effect.

Total power cost is (26 + 14 = ) 40 per RAW, or (11 + 14 = ) 25 with my house rules. Still pricy, but not as broken.

The underlying problem is that multiple levels of Affliction get expensive, even with my reduced pricing scheme.

My gut feeling is that a fair price for this power should be about 20-30 points, primarily for the value of the initial "pain jet" affliction. The "slowly kill your victim in nasty way" part is mostly window-dressing.


*Yes, the new treatment of Gorn in SNW seriously messes with previous canon material regarding the species and breaks a lot of fans' head-canon. No, I don't care about that and it's not germane to this thread. I'm just trying to do a game mechanics exercise. Ignore the Star Trek references.

[Lovewyrm]

Hmm, if I wanted to do this, have an ability that is cheaper than it would be if built via the rules.
Then I'd probably just make the ability free and require an unusual background to use it, priced at the value I'd want.

That's handwavey, but, it does the trick :P

[Sunrunners_Fire]

I'd model the pain-inducing jet attack normally, and the rest of it is just the species having the Infectious Attack disadvantage.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

I'd model the pain-inducing jet attack normally, and the rest of it is just the species having the Infectious Attack disadvantage.

A potential issue with using Infectious Attack is that the roll to determine if the target is infected is based on the amount of HP lost to the delivery method, and a pain-jet doesn't cause the target to lose any HP. Of course, Infectious Attack (or, rather, Dominance, which it uses the same mechanics as but lacks the "this creates an Ally for you" effect) also has issues with scaling, as it's just a roll against total HP lost, without regard for the HP of the target (so against a foe with HP 100, a relatively-minor 18 HP wound is guaranteed to cause infection, while against an HP 10 one, a severe 10 HP wound only has a 50% chance of doing so), but that's easy to fix - divide damage by (Target's HP)/10 before the roll.

As for if the "guaranteed death after n days" effect has an appropriate price, well, guaranteed death is pretty serious, so a high price is appropriate. One arguably-munchkiny idea to reduce the cost would be to Afflict the target (probably Permanent +150%, so it can be cured before the character dies via some method) with a Rare Dependency for whatever the cure is (or if there's another method to stave off the hatching), then apply some modifier to the Dependency that it only causes Injury for purposes of checking to see if the character dies (so an infected target doesn't suffer any ill effects, right up until time runs out and out pops a chestburster or whatever). That would arguably be worth -50% on a character, but a case could be made for this to be +0% on an Affliction.

A typical human has HP 10 and HT 10, so you have a 50% chance of them dying at 20 HP Injury, 25% at 30 (half of those who survived 20 HP), 12.5% at 40 (half of those who survived 30), 6.25% at 50 (half of those who survived 40), and 6.25% at 60 (all of those that survived 50). This means it takes an average of 29.375 HP of Injury to kill a typical human. If it takes around 3 days to kill a typical human, that means the character needs to lose around 10 HP per day. Losing 1 HP per hour would result in 72 HP in 3 days; losing 1 HP per six hours (the next step up) would result in 12 HP in 3 days, so we're somewhere in between. As 1 HP/hour is x3 and 1 HP/six hours is x2, perhaps x2.5 or so might work. That makes it +75% as an Enhancement to Affliction if we treat the "no damage until death" effect as +0% (+37.5% if we treat it as -50%), which combined with Permanent +150% is a bit cheaper (at net +225%, or net +187.5%) than Heart Attack +300% with Variable Onset -35% (net +265%).

As for making Afflictions cost less, consider Side Effect on a No Wounding attack. Affliction 4 (Heart Attack +300%) is [160], but Innate Attack 2d+1 cr (Side Effect: Heart Attack +350%; No Blunt Trauma -20%; No Knockback -10%; No Wounding -50%) is only [42.55], which rounds up to [43] - yet the latter has the same effect and averages the same penalty (-4).

[Donny Brook]

Linked Afflictions; pain and Terminally Ill.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Varyon

As for making Afflictions cost less, consider Side Effect on a No Wounding attack. Affliction 4 (Heart Attack +300%) is [160], but Innate Attack 2d+1 cr (Side Effect: Heart Attack +350%; No Blunt Trauma -20%; No Knockback -10%; No Wounding -50%) is only [42.55], which rounds up to [43] - yet the latter has the same effect and averages the same penalty (-4).

Genius!

I knew that there were workarounds, I'd just forgotten what they were. Side Effect looks eminently exploitable. Symptom also looks like it might be a good choice.

I could design the "pain jet" as a weak Innate Attack with Follow-Up involving a much more nasty delayed Innate Attack. That would bypass the whole broken Affliction disadvantage. It would also allow use of the standard Infectious Attack disad, with a virtual guarantee that the victim will succumb, rather than the rather sketchy attempt to describe hatchlings as a nuisance effect.

Thanks!

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Linked Afflictions; pain and Terminally Ill.

Possibly, but I really want to stay away from more than one level of Affliction if I can.

Terminally Ill is too slow for the lethal effects I'm trying to generate, but would work well for a slower-acting attack.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Side Effect looks eminently exploitable. Symptom also looks like it might be a good choice.

No Wounding (etc) + Side Effect on an Innate Attack is almost invariably cheaper than a comparable Affliction. The only advantage Affliction has over it is that DR only gives a bonus to resist, rather than potentially preventing the target from even needing to roll to resist... but considering DR is basically twice as effective against Affliction as it is against Side Effect (DR gives +1 per point of DR to the resistance roll for Affliction; Side Effect's damage causes a -1 per 2 points of penetrating damage, so you need 2 DR for every +1 to resist), I'd say the much-cheaper Side Effect wins out. Personally, I prefer to make Side Effect scale with the resilience of the target a bit better - rather than -1 per 2 points of penetrating damage, use -1 per 20% of the target's HP as Injury (or what would have been Injury, if you opt for the No Wounding route). So, 2 HP for a character with HP 10, 3 HP for one with HP 15, 4 HP for one with HP 20, 20 HP for one with HP 100, etc.

As for Symptoms, if you don't want your pain-vomit to cause Injury, that gets a bit hairy, as Symptoms are normally reliant on how much HP the target is missing. There's also the issue that once you heal above a certain point, the Symptoms automatically end... which is potentially problematic if the parasites have a long incubation time (also, Heart Attack isn't a legitimate option for Symptoms... but my Dependency hack could be). You can see some possible options for dealing with these issues in this thread.

[David Johnston2]

Cyclic toxic attack.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Cyclic toxic attack.

That was my first choice, but I realized that, a) Damage doesn't accrue over time. The victim appears fine until the chestbursters burst. b) Enough cycles of toxic damage to have a decent chance of killing the target carry a humongous modifier cost which negates the relative cost break of Innate Attack vs. Affliction.