Area Attacks--Am I Missing Something?

[Sdrolion]

To be clear, I'm not looking at this from a realistic angle--I'm looking at it from a game playability one. Yeah--straight AE physical/energy damage attacks are not realistic (arguably, a poison cloud sort of thing is, though), and if you're building a realistic game you should basically just go with Explosion/Frags instead (if you even bother with building things as advans instead of using GURPS honestly-quite-good selection of existing explosives). The way that you could "realistically" dodge an AE attack is therefore not really a concern, since an AE attack really can't be said to exist in reality for the majority of attack types. Furthermore, what is "realistic" depends somewhat on what an AE attack means to you: the GURPS books use the "fills an area" interpretation, which means that, correct, it wouldn't be strictly realistic to allow someone to "dodge" it unless they could actually leave the area by doing so. However, another interpretation is just that the attack hits the area and attacks everyone in it with individual bolts/beams/etc. (just a multi-target attack defined by attack zone rather than number of shots), in which case a dodge is indeed very realistic. That said...that's pretty clearly not what the GURPS books are going for.

Anyway, just wanted to make sure I was indeed properly reading the rules and hadn't missed something, and it seems that I was reading it right.

For anyone interested: my opinion, in general, on this is that AE is overpowered for its price: the default meaning of AE should probably be more along the lines of the multi-target attack, above: it just attacks everything in the area with a single attack roll, and they get to defend as normal for a ranged innate attack. That, in my mind, is more than enough value for +50% per level. Then, if someone wants to do a "fills the area" type, that could raise the cost (I'd say at least +100%, but honestly, I could see going further if you're actually going to almost completely disable active defense with this thing--though it should still be lower than the full +300% for disables Active Defense, as there are indeed some types that work against it: cover, getting out of the area, and certain power-based defenses.).

I guess the main reason I have a problem with this, honestly, is that GURPS is a system in which one hit can massively change the course of the battle--it isn't like in some other systems, where you're likely going to be hit time and time again and still be able to go on fighting perfectly well (though I'm sure there are GURPS character builds that can do that, likely via high DR or using DR to represent more HP, or using Injury Tolerance). And that's a strength of GURPS, to me, by the way. But this--which basically guarantees a hit and doesn't cost so much that it's prohibitive to mess with it--doesn't really play nice with that idea. It's relatively easy to create a fairly low-CP cost attack with this that is astonishingly lethal to any active defense-focused character build (your stereotypical fantasy martial artist, expert swordsman, acrobatic thief, ninja, etc.).

This resonates a little more with me, I guess, because in our game 3 out of the 4 player characters are low-DR, active-defense focused characters...and we frequently run into enemies of the same type. So, basically, this attack would probably be massive death to the majority of the combatants out there.

Anyway, I've got some solutions for the game that I'll be looking over (likely just using the multi-target attack version above unless another modifier such as Respiratory Agent, which has its own specified reasonably common defense, is also used--that way we can still allow AE attacks that aren't "explosions," but they aren't superlethal), but wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking something that would negate any need to modify/exclude this power first.