Quote:
Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
Um...I don't think you understand what I'm trying to say.
Limited Duration on combat-scale durations (say, 20 seconds of flight), a five-minute delay is a huge deal! It lasts for a fight, but if you get into another fight quickly enough after that one, you'll have to do without a major combat ability. And if you want to use it out of combat for some utility function, you'll have to deal with only being able to use the ability for a tiny fraction of the time.
But if you have a longer-scale duration (day, 12 hours of flight), a five-minute delay is nothing. You can use your ability basically all the time, with some basically inconsequential breaks in the middle. Even if your ability is something directly responsible for keeping you alive on a minute-to-minute basis (say, staying high above the clouds without turning into chunky salsa on the ground), you just have to make plans to be in a safe place every so often.
The sheer difference in the effect that limited duration has in these different scenarios is staggering. A combat-scale power has a "cooldown" on a scale which would potentially allow multiple combats to pass, if the tables turned in just the wrong way. A travel-day-scale power has the same "cooldown," turning the limited duration into little more than a footnote and a reason to take an occasional break. It's just weird, and something that could have been solved almost effortlessly by having the "cooldown" scale with the duration. (Say, twice the maximum duration, or maybe twice the amount of time the ability was used for. Or if you're feeling fancy, something like twice the maximum duration or three times the actual duration, whichever is shorter.)
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I think I understood you just fine. I don't happen to agree.
First, just in case there is such a Limitation and I missed it, we're talking about Maximum Duration, not Limited Duration.
Second, the reason for not altering the cool-down period is inherent in the pricing of the limitation. Anything over 12 hours Maximum Duration is worth nothing as a limitation, because a five minute cool-down is nothing at that scale. For anything with a Maximum Duration of more than an hour and no more than 12 hours, it's worth only -5% because, while it's not quite nothing, it's not a limitation that's terribly inconvenient. Between 30 minutes and an hour, it's worth -10% because there's some chance that the ability will be in cool-down when you need it. Between 10 minutes and 30 minutes, you get a -25% limitation because about one time in four you're in cool-down. Between one minute and 10 minutes, you get -50% because about half the time, your ability isn't going to be there. Between 30 seconds and 1 minute, there's still a chance you're going to be able to get out of your cool-down before things are over and if you're not in cool-down there's very little chance that your power is going to conk out before combat is over. You get the -75% for 30 seconds or less (which is almost the maximum -80%) because it is potentially debilitating to your power. (There is no separate 20 seconds or less, so if your Maximum Duration
is 20 seconds you presumably have good role-playing reasons for doing so and the pricing is irrelevant.) If you're currently in cool-down, you're probably not going to be out of it in time to do anything useful and if you aren't in cool-down, there's a slight chance that your power will conk out before the combat is done.
But all those values for the Limitation are based on a constant value of five minutes for the cool-down period. If you change the cool-down period then you need to recalculate the value of the limitation according to how much it now limits your use of the power.