Making Active Abilities Sustained

[dfinlay]

I would like to model a version of Innate Attack that is considered Sustained, in the sense that you pay Limited Use, Costs FP/HP, etc as if you turn it on and then can use it for free until you turn it off. This obviously reduces the severity of those limitations, but I'm not sure by how much. Is there any RAW way of doing this or does anyone have any NON-RAW arguments for a particular pricing?

[Anaraxes]

If the cost activates the ability for the usual one minute, then for a combat ability that's effectively infinity. As far as our combats usually go, you'd get 90% of the use out of the activation in about five seconds, and 99% of the use in ten. So this is really a "cost once per combat" limitation.

For Costs FP, that's negligible. The standard fatigue cost for being in combat at all will be similar, so all it really does is make you rest a little longer afterward. Only if the FP cost is so high as to actually affect the combat -- a significant fraction of the character's FP, so they're fighting exhausted -- would this be noticeable, and it seems likely the player wouldn't build the power that way. If the ability switches to an ER, you wouldn't have even that effect. I'm in the group of people that think Costs FP is underpriced, but a once-per-combat cost is a fraction of the book price. Something like 2% per point, perhaps, un-pentaphilic as that might be.

"Limited" Use is only going to be limited if you routinely have multiple combats per day. You could multiple the number of combats by typical uses-per-combat to get a equivalent for the single uses in the RAW chart -- say, 5 uses per combat for an IA. But since the single-use discount caps at 10, even one or two combats per becomes tiny. With this assumption, one minute per day equals five single uses, so -10%, as would two uses (so make that -5% instead). More uses (15+ equivalent) aren't limited enough to qualify for a discount.

[dfinlay]

Those are some valid points and you've convinced me that it might not be a good idea to have a general rule for this. That said, your points don't really apply to my specific use-case.

I'm using The Last Gasp so even a small amount of FP loss does matter. Additionally, I'm not really too worried about players making really abusing abilities with it as I will be building the powers that they can learn.

I've house ruled Costs FP to be -20% when using TLG (though I do it multiplicatively, so n levels multiplies cost by 0.8^n) so I'm thinking a quarter of that, or -5%, seems reasonable for this. Thoughts?

[Kuroshima]

The only way to make an active ability such as innate attack or affliction into a sustained ability that I know of is Aura, and it's kind of special in how it works.