Restricting Variable Enhancement

[dataweaver]

I understand why Variable Enhancement, as written, costs ten times as much as the largest Enhancement hit allows: being able to use any Enhancement is powerful. But can you limit it to restrict the range of Enhancements it allows?

I don't see this coming up very often; but every once in a while, you get an Enhancement that actually represents a whole class of Enhancements, such as Affliction's “Advantage” Enhancement. Could I go with a lower cost for an Affliction that can grant any physical or mental Advantage but can't impose Disadvantages, Negated Advantages, Attribute Penalties, Irritants, Incapacitations, or Mortal Conditions? Could I go with an even lower cost if I further restricted it to, say, mental Advantages, mundane Advantages, or both? Let's say I'm making a super who can lend his Abilities to others: would I have to write up each Ability twice, once as normal and a second time as an Affliction? Or could I write up a single Affliction with a Variable Enhancement that's restricted to “Advantage (any of my other Abilities)”?

[Kelly Pedersen]

I think limiting Variable Enhancement is pretty reasonable, if it's not fully variable. I've used such builds in the past. As for the value of the limitation, I'd take a page from Modular Abilities, the "trait-limited" limitation, and go with something like this:

• -10%: A very broad category of enhancements (e.g., Innate Attack with Variable Enhancement (all enhancements intended for Innate Attack)), or everything but a single important enhancement or narrow category of enhancements (e.g., an Affliction with Variable Enhancement (no lethal afflictions)).
• -20%: A broad class of enhancements (Affliction with "all enhancements to add advantages, disadvantages, irritating or incapacitating conditions"), or to improve any existing enhancements (your Innate Attack has RoF, Increased Range, and Accurate, and Variable Enhancement can improve any one of those).
• -30%: A medium-sized category of related enhancements (Affliction with "Incapacitating or Irritating conditions").
• -40%: A subset of a medium-sized category (Affliction with "irritating or incapacitating conditions you can justify as neural stimulation").
• -50%: A single enhancement with very flexible applications (Innate Attack with Follow-Up, for example, allowing you to set which attack it follows up with).

[Refplace]

I wouldn't go there, but I can see an Accessibility limitation on the Enhancement as a way to reduce its cost that gives you some guidelines to work with.
If your looking for a way to ge more variety a less cost the two methods I use the most are...
1) Temporary Enhancements from GURPS Powers. Cheap but FP heavy in use.
2) Alternative Enhancements from GURPS Power Ups: Enhancements which I LOVE, specially for Afflictions.
Cost per additional 'ability' winds up being just a few points each, very similar to spells as skills.
Hmm how about SAS Magic for the default system name?

EDIT: Written before Kelly Pedersons idea which I'm now digesting.

[dataweaver]

I like Alternative Advantages, except that it only works for a finite and predetermined list of Enhancements: so if I wanted to be able to use Affliction to grant any mundane mental Advantage, I'd have to add up the costs of every mundane mental Advantage in the game except for the single most expensive one, divide that cost by 5, add the most expensive one to the total, multiply the result by +10%, and hope that it comes in under +100% (what I'd pay for Variable Advantage, which is overkill). Temporary Enhancements is a possibility, if I make use of an appropriate option to make it available; but it's also overkill as there are no restrictions on what Enhancements you can add using it.

“SAS Magic”? Where did that come from?

[Bruno]

Before Variable Enhancement was on the books, we used a Modular Ability limited to "Only to add Affliction specific enhancements on a curse-appropriate theme to my Affliction", for a character with a wide variety of curse effects (a crone demi-deity).

It was exceedingly effective, to the point where I'm pretty gun-shy on Variable Enhancement being used for basically the same thing.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Before Variable Enhancement was on the books, we used a Modular Ability limited to "Only to add Affliction specific enhancements on a curse-appropriate theme to my Affliction", for a character with a wide variety of curse effects (a crone demi-deity).

It was exceedingly effective, to the point where I'm pretty gun-shy on Variable Enhancement being used for basically the same thing.

I'm a bit gun shy on Variable enhancement myself, but so far its too cost prohibitive to have seen use in any game I have been involved in.
Alternative Enhancements on Affliction in a DF game seems to work pretty well though. When I first considered going from AA to AE for Affliction the increase in number of effective spells made me think it might be too good.
However breaking it down per ability makes it still more expensive than the normal spell casting system.
In some cases its more effective regarding range, duration and FP cost but that is a different issue/thread and due to the nature of Affliction not how you get more for less cost.

[AlexanderHowl]

Am I missing something or did someone screw up and use the same name for two different enhancements? The Variable enhancement that I am familiar with is +5% (Characters, p. 109) and only regulates the level of an attack.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Am I missing something or did someone screw up and use the same name for two different enhancements? The Variable enhancement that I am familiar with is +5% (Characters, p. 109) and only regulates the level of an attack.

One enhancement is named 'variable'. The other is named 'variable enhancement'.