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).

[PK]

While I agree with your summary of the issues, I don't think this is the best approach. After all, GURPS doesn't give a genius less of a price break for Requires IQ Roll than an average person. It seems kind of wrong to make a person who pays to buy their FP up really high also pay extra on any powers that costs FP. It's kind of like double-charging.

After all, if I have an ability that costs 2 FP per use, and then I buy FP 30 to compensate for that, I'm hardly working the system. The only time a real problem comes up is if you let someone buy FP 40 and then take "Costs Fatigue, 16 FP, -80%" on 500+ points' worth of abilities. Because of that, I recommend just capping how many levels of Costs Fatigue you can take (I cap at 4 levels, but give double value.)

[Brandy]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

While I agree with your summary of the issues. . .

Ditto here. I think that coming up with a one-size-fits-all fix is not the correct approach here, but that setting-specific adjustments to the value of the costs FP limitation would be great.

For example, in a fantasy setting where the only ways to buy FP are personal FP bought in the normal way (with the usual restrictions about keeping it close to your HT score) and buying an ER to power magic, you could list the new values for Costs FP (assuming FP of 10 from your table above) and Draws from Magic Pool (assuming, say, an FP of 20). That would balance it better than the rules-as-written and not require any character-specific adjustments to the costs.

I do agree with the core issue, though. If Costs FP was a greater limitation but scaled slower that would be a fairer scheme for any way that I've used Powers so-far.

[naloth]

Reading the other thread I came up with a slightly different idea.

Costs Fatigue -10% for the first level and an additional -5% per level thereafter. The first level works like normal costing 1 fatigue per use (up to 1 minute for advantages with duration effects). Each additional level doubles the amount of fatigue required.

Costs Fatigue 3 (-20%) would cost 4 fatigue.
Costs Fatigue 5 (-30%) would cost 16 fatigue.
Costs Fatigue 7 (-40%) would cost 64 fatigue.

This doesn't cure the problem that Costs Fatigue is still a pretty nasty -10% limitation; however, it does effectively cap the useful value of the limitation around -25%.

[vitruvian]

Well, there's two aspects to this, aren't there? One's the actual FP cost, and what that does to your ability to repeat the performance; the other's the reduced duration of the ability, whether you're paying FP per minute or per second. For extremely transient abilities, such as Innate Attack, the latter might not be a consideration, but the -10% per FP per use cost might be more appropriate.

As a solution, we could take the values for the Maximum Duration, and reduce them by 25% based on that being approximately the value of a 'Takes Recharge' for 5 minutes, which we don't want as a standard part of this. So, uses lasting a minute would be -40% plus another -5% per FP actually charged; uses lasting a turn would be -50% plus the same -5% per FP charged, since we're already accounting for the reduced time available to do something; and only transient abilities like attacks would get a flat -10% per FP. We could extrapolate a longer level starting off at -10% plus -5% per FP charged, that allows use of an ability for an hour (I believe there was a level of Costs FP or Limited Use that matched this in 3e), but some GMs might feel that this runs afoul of the regular fatigue rules, i.e., doing something for a whole hour is going to make you tired to the tune of 1 FP *anyway*. On the other hand, when modifying a normally always on ability like DR, that's not necessarily true, is it?

Maybe that's too generous, but for abilities that you aren't planning on continually 'renewing', so too is Maximum Duration. Anyway, if we did this for Costs FP, we'd want to do this for Limited Use as well, to be fair. So, we'd get:

Duration of Use Limitation Base Value Per FP Limited Uses

Hour -0% -5% per table
Minute -40% -5%
Second -50% -5%
Transient/Immediate -0% -10%

Considering that for the most common durations, you hit -80% at either 6 or 8 FP, I think that models the 'diminishing returns' effect folks were looking for...

[Bruno]

Kromm's made it clear else-forum that the "per second" cost is not the way to make a normally indefinite ability have a duration of seconds. It's solely for abilities that otherwise already have a duration measured in seconds (very very very few of them, from his comment).

Which IMO is good, because having -5% for "suddenly very limited uses" and -5% for "Suddenly very limited duration" is totally not fair.