Dirty Cheap Unkillable [Powers]

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

If I wanted cheap unkillable, I'd stop at Unkillable 2.

Something like: Unkillable 2 (Limited Use, 4/day, -20%; Achilles Heel, Impaling Stone -30%; Hindrance, Stone, -25%; Trigger, touch of a friend, -5%) [20];

Load up on armor, get a nice big shield, flee stone golems and elementals, and don't run out of uses. Even 20 points isn't super cheap, but it's better than the 60 point charge (which eats all of a DF knight's advantage allotment, for instance). If you really need more than 4 uses a day, you need to buy off On The Edge (6) [-30]. Two uses would probably be fine: one to find out it's dangerous, one in case you have trouble leaving the danger.

Limited Use wouldn't mean anything given that you'd be dead for the rest of the day. I would wave a disapproving finger at that.

[AlexanderHowl]

Without Regeneration (and with a Trigger), it is probably an illegal build, though I would find it hilarious if the individual died on a gravel road.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Rupert

if killed in a no-mana zone, they're just dead.

Or if their corpse is moved into a no-mana zone while they're still in an unsurviveable range of damage, I would think?

Like for example if I had Unkillable 1, I wouldn't need to make a HT roll when reduced to -1xHP to survive, but if I was still there (had not recovered HP) when my body is moved into No Mana, I expect it would be reasonable to need to make a HT roll at that point to survive (2 if -2xHP, automatic death if -5xHP or less)

P151 requires "Cosmic, Works on the dead" for Unkillable 1 to prevent your death so long as you have more than -10xHP (B95 "body is physically destroyed and you die)

"only works on the dead – not injured living people" seems like something meaningless for UK1: if it didn't work on you, you become dead, so you qualify!

This restriction really only makes sense because they apply it to Regeneration as well, meaning the affliction doesn't apply Regeneration to non-dead.

That's actually a very STRANGE approach because it was elsewhere established (as Howl uses in OP) that "Unkillable Only" is -40%.

Once UK1 kicks in (makes a non-destroyed corpse still alive) it doesn't seem like Regeneration should need a cosmic enhancement at all, since if you had UK1 the Regeneration ability should work on you already?

I guess this is the logic: you can be Unhealing and Unkillable. If you were, you could not have Regeneraiton. So giving "Unkillable and you're alive again" doesn't mean "I can apply regeneration to you".

My guess is that whatever the "Corpse" metatrait is, it includes Unhealing which would prohibit Regeneration from working... (B80 "cannot have Regeneration if
you have Slow Healing (p. 155) or Unhealing")

In that case "Negated Disadvantage: Unhealing +300%" would be an alternative way to accomplish this. But that would allow ALL natural healing (and any other forms of Regeneration you might already have, or which might be afflicted) to begin working on you again.

The more conservative approach (giving Cosmic+50% to just one form of Afflicted regeneration) ONLY allows that form to work.

The only thing is... I'm not sure what the pricing incentive is here.

Regeneration (Very Fast) has a base cost of 100 points, so a +50% enhancement is worth 50 points, or +500% in Affliction, so it's actually more expensive to afflict Regeneration w/ this cosmic enhancement than it is to just negate the Unhealing disadvantage of corpses.

OTOH if we allow "Unkillable Only -40%" alongside with "Cosmic: Regeneration works when Unhealing +50%" that's only a net +10% (10 point value) which is merely a +100% enhancement on Affliction, 1/3 the price of Negated Disadvantage: Unhealing, so there WOULD be incentive to take this less-useful ability since it is cheaper.

If it's +50% for regen to work despite UH-30 then it should probably be cheaper for it to work on UH-30, or SH1/2/3 worth -5/-10/-15 since those are lesser/cheaper versions which are less restrictive.

I'm actually thinking we could increase the price of "works on Unhealing -30" to +60%. That still creates a net +20% (20 points is +200% to afflict, still cheaper than Negated Disadvantage) because that creates a convenient "cosmic enhancement costs twice the value of the disadvantage it ignores" ratio which makes it much easier to price ignoring the other traits.

You know, come to think of it... should it even be double? Anywhere else I've looked it's just "enhancement costs whatever would create the value of the ability" like with Diffuse (worth 100 points like R:VF) changing the point cost of Insubstantiality into the Swarm enhancement.

Regen basically shouldn't need cosmic at all (yet could still benefit from "unkillable only" discount) if you negate the Unhealing -30 disadvantage for +300% which is cheaper than the +500% for adding cosmic to the base +1000% that R:VF costs to Afflict.

The only thing which seems to need Cosmic is Unhealing since you are retroactively enacting the "prevents death".

Cosmic is also sort of a clumsy way to do that: I would think Time-Spanning (past only +25%) is the proper way.

You'd want to apply that to JUST the Unkillable (not the Regeneration) so you'd need to split it into two Afflictions which are linked: the UK goes back in time, the Regen stays in the present, but you "fire" them at the same time.

The benefit here is that this creates a growing penalty the longer a corpse has been dead for, which matches how a lot of resurrection abilities work.

Realistically: decomposition is probably going to "cause HP damage" to a corpse over time so that eventually the corpse reaches -10xHP unless you embalm it or something like that. I just don't know what rules to use to represent that. At some point you gain "Doesn't Eat" advantages at a corpse which prevent FP loss (and thus HP loss) from starvation, so you'd need actual destruction by bacteria and oxidation.

To prevent "you didn't die so you kept fighting" doesn't take anything extra: you're only adding UK1 but not negating Unhealing (that stays paired with Regeneration) so the target remains at whatever HP his corpse was.

The idea is you're perfectly intervening at some point where extensive damage causes corpselike "Unhealing" before actual "death" occurs, which is realistic: if someone is reduced to negative HP you might expect things like "Unhealing" to crop up as their body loses it's healthiness.

Someone on the thin line between life and death is probably effectively Unhealing: all resources are just going to maintaining life, it can't spare anything to recover HP.

As a house rule for example you could do:

1) survive -1xHP = gain unhealing 1
2) survive -2xHP = gain unhealing 2
3) survive -3xHP = gain unhealing 3
4) survive -4xHP = gain unhealing -20
5) survive -5xHP = gain unhealing -30

This creates problems for UK1 in normal situations but it's easy enough with stuff like:

"Not Unhealing 1 (Unkillable Only -40%) [3]"

3/5 (60%) cost means that this only costs 18 points to not gain Unhealing-30 at -5xHP, which is like charging a +36% enhancement to Unkillable 1. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

You could also have non-unkillable people buy this. I'm actually using "Unkillable Only" to reflect "your HP is low enough that you could die from it" which is -1xHP and beyond when HT survival rolls are made.

The assumption here being that most people aren't actually treating the true point at which UK1 kicks in (when you fail your HT roll at -1xHP) but rather just having regen kick in at -1xHP period.

Otherwise you get a weird situation where Regen is less likely to kick in the better your HT is, and penalizing people for high HT is pretty odd.

UK1 could be treated in as "activates at -1xHP to prevent a roll" rather than" activates at -1xHP failed roll to prevent roll's outcome"

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The Regeneration can be lower without majorly impacting the concept. For example, Regeneration (Fast; Bane, Occasional, -30%; Limited, Unkillable Only, -40%; Magical, -10%) [10] would bring someone back to life in a few hours, which is probably sufficient for most character concepts.

The downside to slower regeneration is this is more time for your enemies to find your UK2 corpse and vandalize it with your Bane or Achilles Heel.

However you wrote 1st post with UK3 which has no corpse to target so I see your point.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Without other super powers, you ain't breaking out of the ground zombie/vampire style.

They don't deserve to be lumped together. Janos doesn't break the ground he just mists through it using his Insubstantiality :)

Downside to being a vamp like Janos: with UH-20 he doesn't heal normally, he can only use his Vampiric Bite (ie Leech) since he doesn't have Regeneration (which can't restore HP lost to Draining) so it's not entirely clear how he'd actually come back to life.

Especially since he also has Dependency (Daily) and Draining (Blood) and Weakness (Sunlight) which creates some problems:

1) leave his corpse out in the sun, it's going to take damage every minute, keeping it at -10xHP
2) the daily loss of 2 HP from no blood can only be recovered by getting blood
3) per B130 if he does not touch soil from his homeland at least 1 hour per day, he will take 1 HP per hour (unlike Draining, I think Dependency HP loss CAN be recovered with stuff like Regeneration, but the B262 template Janos uses doesn't even give Rapid healing

Janos is wealthy (B321) so he probably has nurses on standby ready to dump blood bags on his corpse (mitigate the 2 HP lost per day) and surgically repair him to mitigate any damage done by sunlight/soillessness

I think his HP has to get high enough to be conscious to actually use "Vampiric Bite" though. Leech isn't a passive ability (it requires an attack maneuver) so you can't exactly do "pour blood into the corpse's mouth" to get it to function .That only mitigates his Draining HP loss, but not HP lost to other stuff.

Janos probably relies on his mage buddy William Headley to cast healing spells to help him in situations like that. I think ISWAT would put WH on the job of restoring Janos any time he's laid low in combat, he's perfectly suited for it. Works way faster than surgery.

I don't even know if surgery is really suited for recovering HP from -10xHP up to -5xHP. That's not a level of damage surgeons generally deal with, that's mortician/embalmer/DIENER (ie six feet under) would do: restoring corpses, since you would just view this as a non-destroyed corpse which somehow moves around until -10xHP in a really gruesome way (most stop moving 100% guaranteed at -5xHP if not earlier)

[AlexanderHowl]

As a modifier for an Affliction, Unkillable 1 is limited to -(HT×10) because Unkillable 1 allows death at that point. If you are able to give Unkillable 2 or 3 instead though, there is no real limit, as someone could have been vaporized by a nuclear weapon and still come back. An Affliction with Cosmic (+50%), Regeneration (Fast; Limited, Unkillable Only, -40%) (+300%), and Unkillable 3 (+1500%) would allow you to bring anyone back from the dead into the present day, as long as you had some logical connection to their remains (Time-Spanning would bring people back to life in the past).

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Common threats tend to be 1/10th of the threats faced by an individual. For example, damage type is a common threat, and damage type includes burning, corrosive, crushing, cutting, fatigue, impaling, piercing, and toxic (afflictions would be a very common category, so I am counting it as two common categories).

Afflictions are not a damage type, and Fatigue is not really a legitimate category, given it does no HP damage (at least not directly). That makes them 1/7th, on average. Given that what tends to show up is setting and campaign dependant (as you mention later), more than 1/5th would be when you should start questioning things, depending just what you took - piercing in a fantasy game is safer than in a modern one, and impaling it often fairly uncommon in am SF game (depending on the popularity of knifing people in alleyways.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

As a modifier for an Affliction, Unkillable 1 is limited to -(HT×10) because Unkillable 1 allows death at that point. If you are able to give Unkillable 2 or 3 instead though, there is no real limit, as someone could have been vaporized by a nuclear weapon and still come back. An Affliction with Cosmic (+50%), Regeneration (Fast; Limited, Unkillable Only, -40%) (+300%), and Unkillable 3 (+1500%) would allow you to bring anyone back from the dead into the present day, as long as you had some logical connection to their remains (Time-Spanning would bring people back to life in the past).

I think you need more cosmic, or at least a better defined one, because you have to be able to target them (so you're looking at a pretty high-grade exception if you want to just be able to bring anyone back willy-nilly). A logical connection isn't enough - you need the actual remains normally. Then, if they're at -10xHP or worse you need another 'cosmic' to work around the limit there (that at that point the remains are too ruined/dispersed to be useable).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

As a modifier for an Affliction, Unkillable 1 is limited to -(HT×10) because Unkillable 1 allows death at that point. If you are able to give Unkillable 2 or 3 instead though, there is no real limit, as someone could have been vaporized by a nuclear weapon and still come back.

I think the conceptual problem with that as a retroactive affliction is there's no natural target for your Affliction to aim at.

If you had Time-Spanning OTOH you could consult historical records to find out where someone was standing when they got vaporized and target that area.

Given how it would be hard to get EXACT measurements, I think it would be realistic to have some Area Effect enhancement.

The nice thing about AE is if it's big enough, you can fail your roll to hit be a huge margin and still hit an intended target. Which is useful if there are big time-spanning penalties trying to bring back someone who was vaporized by a nuke twelve centuries ago.

OTOH the downside to AE is that you might accidentally resurrect EVERYONE who got nuked, unless you also take Selective Effect where you can specify "don't resurrect those people, just this one person I have in mind"

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

An Affliction with Cosmic (+50%), Regeneration (Fast; Limited, Unkillable Only, -40%) (+300%), and Unkillable 3 (+1500%) would allow you to bring anyone back from the dead into the present day, as long as you had some logical connection to their remains

Powers 151 gets Advantages +2,250% because it's Regeneration [150] + Unkillable 1 [75], the +50% is applied to the underlying advantages not Affliction itself.

AFAIK the only thing preventing Regeneration from working on corpses is that corpses have Unhealing so you just need Not Unhealing instead of enhanced regen.

Cosmic Unkillable seems to be "avoiding HT rolls to die even when I've already died" but mechanically it makes you wonder what trait represents "dead" with corpses as characters, especially since we can have stuff like animated corpses w/ Unkillable too.

Life as best I can guess is an "animating force" so if death is lacking that animating force, restoring life would be negating the disadvantage.

Paraplegic -80 + Mute -25 is the closest listed disadvantages (sum value -105], while Paralyzed [-150] is an implied value by B36.

I would view Paralysis as "animating force" as a distinct thing from DX, since DX is the body's agility when the animating force is restored to it.

For that reason I would skip on being unable to move at DX 0: just add your skill / Determined Attack / Evaluate / etc bonuses to that, allow being penalized to negative DX by attacks and stuff, ie a soft cap. This keeps Paralysis as a more clear monopoly for hard cap.

Same thing with ST: just because ST 10 is hit with -10 to ST no reason to interpret that as "paralyzed" because you could use Extra Effort (on your base ST, not effective ST) to temporarily increase your base beyond what is penalized (this is how Technical Grappling allows movement when "pinned" to ST 0)

"Not Paralyzed [140]" is an advantage living creatures could just all be assumed to have by default to cancel out the built-in paralysis of inanimate forms (it's busy so it can't help you when hit by another instance)

Normally it would have "while conscious" so unconsciousness prevents all movement but breathing too, as well as thoughts/dreams (why it's the extra +50% on B36)

Sleep (+150) otoh doesn't: you can make some movements (tossing and turning) and maybe more (sleepwalking) and think during your dreams, it's more like you just can't focus on the waking world and your senses as much as normal and lose your impulse to make more motions.

B146/T119 mention "comatose" but B36's left column makes that an "instant" (no MoF duration) thing like heart attack so I don't think there's a basis for basing trait pricing on it like with Irritants (and maybe Incapacitations at -10 to remove Stunning)

I think comatose is flavor text anyway because there's no mention under NMS of needing to pass HT rolls every 12 hours to avoid death. I think that's just meant to be "unconsciousness" with the obvious implication that you're effectively paralyzed while unconscious because there is no mind directing the body (unless possessed ... compartmentalized mind)

B146 Nocturnal would have "Accessibility: Only at night -20%" (B110)
T119's "No Mana Shutdown -20" would have "Environmental: Mana -20% (P110 Occasional per M152 Dependency)

reducing 150 to 120 actually saves 30 points which makes me think they should higher-value disadvantages... and that's just based on negating paralysis alone: negating unconsciousness being a 200 point advantage saves 40 points by a -20% accessibility.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

(Time-Spanning would bring people back to life in the past).

My idea with time-spanning is you give them UK2 but since they're Unhealing they remain trapped in an "unconscious death limbo" until they can actually heal, and that won't happen until the non-time-spanning "Not Unhealing" (plus Regeneration to speed it up) hits their corpse at the moment of death.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Achilles Heel, Common, -50%; Hindrance, Common, -25%

With this I'd just assume my power wouldn't do anything. I'd be like Superman assuming all my enemies have kryptonite.

Mortal is a limitation I really like to take. Removes Unkillable 1 for the nice price of -20%*. Pact is also a fairly 'free' limitation for Unkillable (then again, a patron that can resurrect you might also work). I feel Reincarnation shouldn't be overlooked, either. That's already -50% that doesn't really hurt your ability to come back. Maybe slap on a -20% for "wherever the rest of the party is, regardless of how safe it is" for [45]


*It's not canon but I see most people give -50pts instead of -20% http://www.mygurps.com/pmwiki.php?n=Main.GURPSModifiers

[AlexanderHowl]

Reincarnation is -20% (Basic, p. 95). Once again, the GM is acting in bad faith if they make your various limitstions apply more often than they should. if your Achilles Heel is Fire, which is common, it should not occur for more than 1/10th of the potential causes of death. Afflictions and Fatigue Attack are both able to cause death, Mortal Conditions in the case of Afflictions and just piling on the FP damage after someone reach 0 FP in the case of Fatigue Attack, which is why I include them in the calculation (DR applies to both as well if they do not have penetration modifiers).

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Plane

My idea with time-spanning is you give them UK2 but since they're Unhealing they remain trapped in an "unconscious death limbo" until they can actually heal, and that won't happen until the non-time-spanning "Not Unhealing" (plus Regeneration to speed it up) hits their corpse at the moment of death.

And that means the person you want to resurrect is now a corpse with unbreakable skeleton (which will become just the skeleton over time), lying where they died. For most people that means the corpse is going to get taken away and processed in some way. This might cause all kinds of problems, some of them history changing.