[Powers] Area of Effect (60° or 120° Arc) or Wave Attacks

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

On one hand, your reasoning is plausible. On the other, though, if we're dealing with one level of Area Effect, it's not actually very different from mine. Subtracting my proposed reduced values of Area Effect from the full value gives 50%-35%=15%, 50%-20%=30%, and 50%-12.5%=37.5%, which is quite close to your 15%, 25%, and 35% reductions.

The big difference seems to be that your approach is purely additive and doesn't give a greater reduction for a bigger area.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'm not so sure that you should get a bigger reduction for a bigger area. Area effect is priced by what you already have, and each application of the +50% after the base area will increase the area covered by by factor of 4, regardless of how big of an arc you have.

And yet I'm not so sure that you shouldn't apply the discount per level of area effect either.

What I really want to avoid is to charge extra for an area of effect which is shaped like a 60° arc or a 120° arc from the user's hex over a circle with a greater area which can be placed anywhere within a certain range.

I'll grant that there is some slight advantage in utility to being able to make a one-directional attack with an area of effect, but it's of less value than Selective applied to an Affliction or Innate Attack with Area of Effect.

What I want is for all intents and purposes an extremely short-range Cone which starts out 2-3 hexes wide instead of 1 hex wide. Maybe it's fair to just add a small extra Enhancement to Cone.

Maybe not even an enhancement, as this is more of a wave than a Cone. It's not round, as it only reaches a height of ca 8-10' or so. Granted, that isn't usually relevant for attacks on walking foes on a level plain, but it can be relevant to even mundane foes if they are in a fortress or even any kind of structure with different levels, and it's certainly relevant for flying foes.

Maybe gaining an extra five to ten hexes of total ground area, concentrated near the caster, is not an unfair compensation for losing all the volume that a Cone that reaches up and down as well as to the sides would have. Maybe Wave should even be slightly cheaper than Cone.

I'd have to run the numbers on the total surface area of a 120° arc Wave reaching 10 yards out, as well as a few other benchmarks, and compare them to the cost of Area of Effect for a similar surface area.

[Icelander]

Running a few numbers demonstrates that Cone is extremely expensive compared to Area of Effect if we're reducing the range down to 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 yards. Granted, the Reduced Range limitations will counteract that to some degree, but in fairness, you could apply the same Reduced Range limitations to an Area of Effect attack and get a circle you could place in front of the attacker, for a cheaper attack that affects a larger area.

Considering that a Wave shaped like a section of a circle (slightly foreshortened next to the caster, so that it starts out affecting 3 hexes) instead of a normal circular Area of Effect is mostly a special effect that suits the intended attack form, I don't think it's fair to charge extra for it. As far as I can see, it offers no benefits that are not situationally dependent and the situation might as well favour a circle shape over a wave shape.

Compare a Cone that's 10 hexes wide at the base (+150%) and has a Range of 3/5 to a Area of Effect 4 yds (+100%).

The Cone, even if we add 4 'free' hexes to it by having the minimum width by 3 hexes, affects a total of 30 hexes and the vast majority of those at half damage or effect.

The Area of Effect affects 50 hexes and all at full damage or effect. We can even get a nice cost reduction over and above that of the Cone by taking Emanation instead of Reduced Range.

It gets worse with a Cone with 20 hex width (+250%) and Range 5/10 compared to Area of Effect, 8 yds (+150%). That's around 108-110 hexes of total surface area for the Cone, depending on how many 'free' ones we have to give out to ensure that the width is 3 hexes at narrowest point, with the Area of Effect sitting pretty at 200 hexes of total surface area. Almost twice as much. And it costs less, too.

I'll either create a new Enhancement called Wave for this or just use Area of Effect with a Limitation to account for actually affecting only 1/3 of the area paid for (or 1/6 for the focused wave, if I end up having a setting for that).

[Icelander]

Ignoring half damage for a while, the actual surface areas, in hexes, of my proposed Waves are as follows:

120° Wave
1-yd long [3-yd wide at start and terminus) = 3 hexes = Equal to the calculated surface area to Area of Effect, 1 yd (+25%), but two more actual hexes.
2-yd long [3-yd at start, 4-yd at terminus) = 7 hexes = Just over half the calculated surface area of Area of Effect, 2 yd (+50%), but same actual hexes.
3-yd long [3-yd wide at start, 7-yd wide at terminus] = 15 hexes = Just over half the calculated surface area of Area of Effect, 3 yd (+75%), but only four fewer actual hexes.
5-yd long [3-yd wide at start, 9-yd wide at terminus] = 28 hexes = Just under 60% of calculated surface area of Area of Effect, 4 yd (+100%), but only 7 fewer actual hexes.
10-yd long [3-yd wide at start, 17-yd wide at terminus] = 88 hexes = Just under 80% of calculated surface area of Area of Effect, 6 yd (+125%), but exactly equal in actual hexes.

Apart from the 1-yd one, which is a bit of an anomaly anyway, it seems that treating it as an Area of Effect of more-or-less the same size, that has a Special Effect that it differs in shape from a circle, might work well enough.

That 1-yd one is an irregular Area of Effect that I think might be fairly priced at around +35%. Basically, it's an Area of Effect, 2-yd that affects only 4/7 hexes (but probably the most useful ones), for a small price reduction.