Questions about Innate Attack (Wall)

[Varyon]

Thread Necromancy Part II: Electric Boogaloo!

A bit of discussion with Nedorus via PM has brought up some more Wall options I want to jot down so I don't forget them.

Alternate Scaling: Rather than getting three Wall Units per nominal yard of radius, it was suggested to have it scale such that you get a number of Wall Units equal to the radius squared - so 4 at radius 2 (AE1), 16 at radius 4 (AE2), 64 at radius 8 (AE3), etc. This means you'll typically have a lot more Wall to work with than the default (unless you only had a radius 2 Wall, in which case you're two Wall Units shy), but then that also means you don't have to give up proportionally more and more area as you have a larger area effect, as the number of Wall Units is scaling to same way the area is, with the square of the radius (roughly, anyway; using hexes means area doesn't quite scale with the square of the radius, but close enough).

Power Parry: It's always seemed like a projectile should potentially be affected by a Permeable Wall; the PM suggested letting such Walls do a Power Parry, with a success resulting in the Wall rolling damage and subtracting this from the attack's damage. This seems an elegant solution to me. Note this does mean Permeable Walls can potentially protect just as well as Rigid Walls against projectiles (as the average damage is equal to a Rigid Wall's Cover DR). Think of it as Rigid Walls getting No Roll Required for their Power Parry, in exchange for becoming vulnerable to being destroyed (with a slew of side effects associated with being a rigid wall, like characters being unable to walk through them without destroying them first).

Obscuring Vision: That PM brought up something I don't recall ever showing up in this thread - B109 actually states that at least Permeable Walls impeded vision, although it doesn't say by how much (and doesn't explicitly extend this to Rigid Walls, but the implication is certainly there). But I determined if you treat that as completely blocking vision, you can get something very close to Obscure 10 at only around 1/10th the cost (with a 1 point No Wounding Permeable Wall). But if you instead required around 10 damage for that -10, you get rather close to the [20] of Obscure 10. So, I'd say it's a -1 to Vision per point of damage; you can either go with average damage here, or you could even roll - once per use, once per second, or even each time someone tries to see past the Wall - to represent a variable obscuring effect (like flickering flames). You can forgo or reduce this effect as a Feature when designing the Wall; being able to vary it is probably worth +10% or so (but for a powerful Wall, you probably shouldn't apply the Enhancement to more than 3d of it). Enhancements for Obscure are available at 1/5th normal cost (but Stealthy requires you to also buy Sneak Attack at full cost, unless the Wall is No Wounding + No Blunt Trauma + No Knockback; also, as above, you probably shouldn't buy it for more than 3d of the damage). By default this only blocks visible light; buy Extended (again, at 1/5th cost) to cover Infrared and/or Ultraviolet.