Electrical Power represented as FP

[Myckou]

Hello, I have tried to find a solution to this by searching through the forums but I've only come across half answers at best. If I missed a thread with a perfect solution I apologize for the trouble. Now, onto my current predicament.

In a supers campaign that I am participating in I am trying to create a character with electrical powers that require recharging from external power sources in the vein of Cole from Infamous or Static Shock from the show of the same name. There have been a number of threads regarding this and I think I've got it narrowed down to some manner of Leech or Regeneration (FP Only) with an accessibility requiring an electrical device present, along with a nuisance effect of draining the power.

The problem I'm having is trying to find out how much FP would be able to be drawn from the vast array of electrical devices in our world. How much could I Leech from a device before it is empty or how long should the Regeneration be active before whatever I'm standing by runs out of juice? One thread I found from years ago had some manner of system which converted wattage into damage which they believed was equal to FP based upon a 3rd Edition table.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=15309

This is the thread in question, the last two replies are the ones I am referring to.

I guess we could handwave it based upon common sense, a toaster won't fill up a 100 point ER in a second or some such, however I am a fan of having hard numbers I can be consistent with.

So the question in a concise form, how do I convert electrical power into FP?

Any help with solidifying the Leech option, how it would interact with machines seeing as they have no FP and HP isn't indicative of power output (or could it be?) would also be appreciated.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by Myckou

So the question in a concise form, how do I convert electrical power into FP?

Unless you want the character to become fatigued when they use their electrical powers, you might want to use an ER instead.

If you go the ER route, you will probably want to add Special Recharge, -70%, and possibly Abilities Only, -10% (if you can only use it to fuel your abilities, not for extra effort and stunts).

You're going to want to buy Regen with an Accessibility: Only when exposed to electrical energy and a Nuisance Effect: Drains electricity. That will be the Special Recharge condition, so it'll never regenerate without an electrical source. The Accessibility will ensure that the minute the machine is "out" you stop the regen (maybe it's battery powered, as generally if it's connected to a wall socket it probably won't be a problem unless there's a blackout or someone's forgotten to pay their power bill).

If you want to drain electrical characters, like robots and other electric-powered supers, you'll need Leech with appropriate modifiers though.

If you use FP instead of ER, that's fine (although a bit more complex a build), and definitely not out of genre, but your character naturally, by default, heals FP at 1 FP/10 min. If you want your character to have their physical vitality to be linked to electricity, so they never regenerate even at the natural human rate, then you can sell down your FP to 0 and then buy it back up with the Special Recharge (mentioned above) limitation, although if you're playing with a disadvantage limit that could get messy unless you're allowed to claim only the difference toward the limit instead. Alternatively, either add another Nuisance Effect (-5% maybe) to your Regen which disables your natural 1 FP per 10 min regen... or, thinking about it, it's probably not worth more than a quirk -1.

If you want your Regen to be variable based on the voltage... well, that's more complicated, but doable. I think you could use the Variable limitation. Or have different levels of Regen (only paying the difference between them), defining Accessibility limitations based on voltage thresholds for each Regen level. A lot more complicated.

[Myckou]

You're going to want to buy Regen with an Accessibility: Only when exposed to electrical energy and a Nuisance Effect: Drains electricity. That will be the Special Recharge condition, so it'll never regenerate without an electrical source. The Accessibility will ensure that the minute the machine is "out" you stop the regen (maybe it's battery powered, as generally if it's connected to a wall socket it probably won't be a problem unless there's a blackout or someone's forgotten to pay their power bill).

This sounds like what I'll probably end up doing however when the source is limited, in the case of batteries and such, I'm looking for a way to judge how much FP in the form of an ER could be gathered from them. Like how would I judge how much FP could be gathered from a car, semi, or industrial battery before they're drained?

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by Myckou

This sounds like what I'll probably end up doing however when the source is limited, in the case of batteries and such, I'm looking for a way to judge how much FP in the form of an ER could be gathered from them. Like how would I judge how much FP could be gathered from a car, semi, or industrial battery before they're drained?

You could go with the amount of energy contained within the item.

See this (Wikipedia) for reference: Orders of magnitude (energy) - this will determine how much . If you want to have your rate of Regen vary based on the power source, use Orders of magnitude (voltage).

This is a link on batteries and the energy contained within them, and various measures of voltage and longevity:
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physi...batteries.html

So, decide on a conversion rate between joules and FP or ER. Or, base the rate of Regen on the voltage and then find the amount of time the battery retains a charge with continuous use - you can convert that directly to joules (energy) also. Decide how many joules it'll take to give you back 1 FP or ER. Then, you might either scale that up linearly, or use the Size & Speed / Range Table or some other scale to figure how much ER you can drain before it empties.

For example, a "D cell" battery (used in flashlights) apparently has 6480 J of energy. Maybe you can get 1 ER out of that in total. Maybe you want it to be more, maybe it should be less.

A car battery has 288,000 J of energy + 2,000,000 J of "reserve" energy (from the link above, I didn't know this stuff and know nothing about cars or car batteries!). So if you allowed the D cell to give you 1 ER, and then scale this conversion linearly, that single car battery will last you an awful long time - who knows, it might still be full by the end of the campaign (it'd be good for roughly 353 ER).

So maybe that D cell is insignificant, and you convert energy to ER by ER = joules / 10. That way the car battery is only good for 35.3 ER (might want to keep track of fractional ER just so you can burn through lesser batteries too)... depending on how big of an ER you have, that's about 2 or 3 full recharges, which isn't so bad. I'm not sure how expensive car batteries are, so costs could be an issue and you'll need to factor that into any calculations about plausibility for your character and group (then again, the costs may be balance things too). Of course, you've always got wall outlets (although realistically you should try to calculate how much energy you've absorbed and figure out how much it adds to your electric bill if you're drawing from your own home).

I hope that helps!

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Myckou

This sounds like what I'll probably end up doing however when the source is limited, in the case of batteries and such, I'm looking for a way to judge how much FP in the form of an ER could be gathered from them. Like how would I judge how much FP could be gathered from a car, semi, or industrial battery before they're drained?

Depends. You can probably set it at whatever you like, with the relative ease of finding enough batteries or high enough rated wall sockets simply changing the Accessibility limitation on your recharge condition. A point of fatigue is *not* a fixed amount of energy, despite the occasional conversions you see for special cases in GURPS.

That said, for a normal 12V industrial battery, 1 fatigue per amp-hour falls into the right general range - tens to low hundreds of points for the battery in most mobile equipment, maybe 5 for a good laptop, not quite 1 from your fully charged expensively high capacity cellphone. That's somewhere around 40 or 50 kJ, or about 2 FT per minute out of a typical wall outlet before you blow the fuse. As long as you stay around this order of magnitude, your numbers won't look too unrealistic relative to hard work, but note that most stuff with "costs fatigue" on it is ridiculously out of scale with those energies, so its not like this matters much.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Myckou

This sounds like what I'll probably end up doing however when the source is limited, in the case of batteries and such, I'm looking for a way to judge how much FP in the form of an ER could be gathered from them. Like how would I judge how much FP could be gathered from a car, semi, or industrial battery before they're drained?

Since "FP" aren't a real world unit, there is no generic rule on how to convert from watt seconds to FP. Therefore that's basically a factor of how much of a discount you're getting from your Accessability - the bigger the discount, the less-efficient your conversion rate is going to be.

GURPS Magic Technology college spells use the conversion of 1 kilowatt-hour = 10 energy (360 kilowatt-seconds or 360 kilojoules = 1 FP). That's a pretty harsh ratio if you're looking to eat 9V batteries like popcorn - a 9V battery has ~0.00007 kilowatt-hours...

A 6V lantern battery (the chunky big square ones) are better, with 0.003 kilowatt-hours, but that's still only 10.8 kilowatt-seconds. You'd need 34 to regain 1 FP/ER. At about $9 each online, that's ~$306 (plus tax) and 50 lbs per FP, which as a Trigger probably counts as Expensive (or at least a big pain), and thus -20%, if you're going for 1/minute Regeneration.

I pulled up a premium car battery at $180 with exactly 360 watt-seconds, which is more affordable, but just about as heavy.