Duration of Binding

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

It has struck me, on the occasions when it is brought up, that making the duration indefinite by default was kind of a curious decision... not wacky beyond belief, but just a little funny when the mechanics for most other attacks have either default durations of instantaneous or ones measured in minutes.

There was a suggestion to combine it (and 25 other abilities to do stuff to stuff) into a single generic attack ur-advantage, but it was decided the current three-way split gave the best trade-off between genericism and ease of customization for physical bad stuff.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

There was a suggestion to combine it (and 25 other abilities to do stuff to stuff) into a single generic attack ur-advantage, but it was decided the current three-way split gave the best trade-off between genericism and ease of customization for physical bad stuff.

Just curious... Would that have worked like the Natural Attacks scheme from Compendium I?

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

Just curious... Would that have worked like the Natural Attacks scheme from Compendium I?

Lord I hope not. Were those ever used in a published product other than CI and FANTASY FOLK?

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Lord I hope not. Were those ever used in a published product other than CI and FANTASY FOLK?

I did not remember it being in Fantasy Folk... my copy is stored away. CI was the only source that I could verify. I kind of liked the idea in the presentation of Natural Attacks, as it made it easy to reference the different options when building attack abilities. Your problem with it is related to the pricing?

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I did not remember it being in Fantasy Folk... my copy is stored away. CI was the only source that I could verify. I kind of liked the idea in the presentation of Natural Attacks, as it made it easy to reference the different options when building attack abilities. Your problem with it is related to the pricing?

Yes, it had intentionally bad scaling. "In the interest of preventing player character races that are biological artillery pieces, it is quite expensive to increase these abilities beyond minimal level."

The generic attack advantage, on the other hand, had linear levels that increased damage, 1/2 D, Max, area affected, and so forth, with Enhancements and a few limitations to customize it into binding or Will damage or whatever, which was a fairly cheap way to get lots of powers when combined with Selectivity, if I recall correctly.