Semi-Overlapping Disadvantages

[Isawa Brian]

Sorry about the response time; it's been a crazy couple of days getting my students ready for their EOC.

While I'm here, to make an Innate Attack that attacks spirits and the physical alike, plus ignores all DR, that requires both Cosmic, +300% and Affects Insubstantial, +20%, right? Insubstantiability doesn't count as a passive defense?

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

First off, are we talking about a type of NPC ally here? In that case I wouldn't sweat it too much. I'm treating it as a PC in this case, though.

Normally, I'm not too keen on overlapping disadvantages, but yours don't seem so bad. CoH: Professional and Chivalry can certainly work together IF you don't just reason away conflicts between each other. The little fluffball would have to decide when to joust and when to counsel and might make a mess of it. Likewise SoD: Nature (meaning all non-evil animals and plants) and "Good" entities (including humanoids) is not a problem for me. Unless the fluffball has a Detect: Evil ability there should always be a benefit of the doubt when it comes to who counts as "good".

Well, they are NPC allies, but I'm not the GM, and I'm already going to be doing some strange things in the Innate Attacks and the Create Light, so I want to be clear here. I was specifically requested by the cleric and holy warrior players to put Detect Evil in on it, though. I'm just the wizard! But noooo, I volunteered...

Having said that, I must say that extending the alternate abilities rules to include overlapping disadvantages is quite intriguing. The problem is that only one alternate ability can be used at the same time. Either the GM decides which one or this is an actual advantage for the character (being able to choose a CoH). Of course, you could just reduce the points the disadvantages give instead of increase them.

Would it work by saying it's about when they count? In other words, in this situation, it's covered by x CoH, in this one y, and when they overlap, doesn't matter?

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Shouldn't SoD: Nature be all natural organisms? Plenty of unnatural and invasive species aren't evil, but still plenty harmful.


When 2 advantages or disadvantages overlap, I prefer to drop the cost for the overlapping traits from one of the two. The difficulty is figuring out how many points that should be.

I suppose. Blind Mapmaker made some decent points about them not being too overlappy. I'm considering just passing the buck along and saying, "For this lens, take -15 points worth of disadvantages from this list...""

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Countdown to player proposing concept for anti-paladin with fluffball corrupted to the Dark Side in 5... 4... 3...

The first example, COH (Guiding Light), seems pretty much subsumed in SoD (Good). Most of the later examples seem much more orthogonal.

Like Vaevictis, I would deduct points for the degree of overlap; or, equivalently, redefine the CoHs so that their bullet points didn't overlap with the SoD, and rate them at a lower cost.

I'm not really sure that the Code overlaps with the Sense in any point-significant fashion. Both of them operate semi-independently; the Sense tells the Guiding Light to care about and aid in a general sense; the Code prescribes and requires certain forms of action to be taken (as a result of the Sense, but, it's still a different type of behavior restriction).