Costs Fatigue - an alternative scheme

[Bruno]

I've been thinking about the "problem" of Costs Fatigue. For those of you new to the discussion, a single level of Costs Fatigue, for -5%, transforms an advantage from one you can use all the time with no limit into one with potentially highly limited uses per "scene" and that impacts your overall endurance.

The first level appears to cost too little for the amount of inconvenience it causes.

But taking lots of Costs Fatigue seems to return more points back than really seems warranted - the biggest part of the limitation value was in the first level.

After a certain point (and that point seems to vary from character to character), additional levels cost too much for the amount of inconvenience they cause.

And of course no form of CF really considers characters with unusually large or unusually small fatigue pools.

Proposal: Make the fatigue cost of Costs Fatigue relative to the size of the energy reserve/fatigue pool/whatever it can draw from.

One possible pricing scheme:
Costs Fatigue costs a flat -5% PLUS a further discount based on the proportion of your total fatigue reserve it costs you.

Reserve	Discount
1%	-0%
2%	-5%
3%	-10%
5%	-15%
7%	-20%
10%	-25%
15%	-30%
20%	-35%
30%	-40%
50%	-45%
70%	-50%
100%	-55%

If a FP 10 character has Flight that costs him 1 FP, his limitation is worth -5% plus -25% = -30%.
If a FP 10 character with a 10 point energy reserve has Flight that costs him 1 FP or ER, his limitation is worth -5% plus -15% or -20%.
If a FP 10 character with a 10 point energy reserve has Flight that costs him 1 ER only, his limitation is worth -5% plus -25% or -30% (no extra discount from being ER only - the limited size of the pool has already been accounted for in the cost of the limitation. This means if you have an ER of 50 and FP 10, making something ER only isn't a significant limitation - which sounds right to me, YMMV).

If a FP 5 character has flight that costs him 1 FP, his limitation is worth -40%.
If a FP 50 character has flight that costs him 1 FP, his limitation is worth -10%.

Obviously you can tweak the "up front" discount, the progression on discounts (I chose percentages based on the speed/range table) and the per-level discount. I'm not sure the exact values I chose are the best, but I figured I had to start the conversation somewhere and these seem OK.

One potential downside I can see is having to recalculate the cost of your discounts if you significantly raise your FP/ER pool, and the question whether the player should be paying earned CP for the increased value of these advantages.

Another obvious downside is that it requires more math, but not in play, only at character creation (which is less obnoxious, but still not going to make people happy).