Abilities that share Limited Use?

[ErhnamDJ]

I want to make a set of abilities that each share a pool of "uses" for Limited Use.

Say I have eight abilities in my group and three uses per day that I can use on any of the abilities in my group.

In the Discord, it was suggested I use Costs ER, but that only gives -10% (plus it doesn't work very well when you make it only recharge once per day; that steps all over the toes of Limited Use).

If I were to give each of them Limited Use, 3/day, that's -20%, and in that case I would get three uses of each of them, which isn't what I want. What I want is clearly more limiting than that.

Is there a way to do this buried in a book somewhere? If not, what would be a reasonable way to systematically handle this? For instance, what if I wanted to give them all two uses per day, or five?

If they all shared a single use, I could build them as Alternative Abilities, but they don't; I can use them all together at the same time, so long as I expend my limited "uses."

[Johnny Angel]

Would the Alternative Attacks (page 61 of Characters) work?

[Celjabba]

It is not only more limiting when seen globally. Each individual abilities could in theory still be used 3/day... If you increase the limited use return to, for example, -25% or -30%, be watchful of abuse.
A fair cost would also depend a lot on the number of abilities vs the number of use (8 abilities with a pooled 3/day is much more restrictive than 2 abilities with a pooled 3/day), and wether or not each abilities are likely to be used more often than others.

The shared energy reserve pool is mechanically the easiest, and allows for some abilities using more charge than others.
But you have to pay for the energy pool on top.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

Would the Alternative Attacks (page 61 of Characters) work?

No. The discount from AAs is due to not being able to use the abilities simultaneously. In this case, I can use the abilities all at the same time.

[lvalero]

Let's suppose the number of "uses" is three/day and you have eight abilitites that shares this limit.

You coud model with.

Modular Abilities: The list of abilitites is highly restricted (eight abilities). You can not customize the abilitites. You can have "Ablative DR 10" but you can't have "Ablative DR X" where X is customizble. [4 POINTS/SLOT]

You can not "buy" chips with new abilities with money.

Every ability has a built-in limitation of ONE USE. (-40%)

You have 3 slots.

You can put any ability in any slot, or in all slots, at any time (Cosmic Modular). However once the slot has been "burned" by a use, you can't put any ability in it until tomorrow. 4 points per point (or 5 depending of GM call)

So. If you can have a set of 8 abilities that costs more or less 30 points each, with the "One Use" limitation (-40%) they are costing 18 points. In order to create them with "Modular abilities" you need to invest 4x18=72 points PLUS 3 slots =3x4= 12 points. Total = [84]

The number is high but if it were done with 8 abilitites of 30 points and all of them having "Limited use 3 times" -20% and Nuissance (Share uses with other abilitites) -10% the final cost would be [168]

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

The discount from AAs is due to not being able to use the abilities simultaneously.

That's true, and it prevents you from using an AA for this situation.

But that's not the only reason AAs are discounted. An entire AA group is also disabled when any of the individual abilities gets disabled for reasons like Limited Use or cooldowns. (So it generally doesn't make much sense to put that sort of Limitation on just one ability in an AA group -- might as well discount them all the same way, which only makes sense if you remember there's supposed to be a logical reason the AAs are all grouped, not just a way to save points.)

An AA group with 8 abilities, each of which had Limited Use (3/day), would all get disabled as soon as the first ability ran out of uses. But that's still not the same thing as getting 3 uses total across the whole set.

The discount for Costs ER depends on your houserules for the Costs FP. I think it's a pretty widespread opinion that the RAW version is underpriced.

I can think of one RAW way that approximates the goal, but it's klunky, and still has a flaw*. So probably the best bet is to simply invent a new Pooled Uses Limitation.

One starting strawman for estimating a value there would be to consider 8 abilities with 8 uses per day. That's almost the same as one use per day each. However, it's noticeably more flexible, since you could use one ability eight times, when that's called for. So we could start with something like half the value of Limited Uses, calculated as (Uses / # abilities).

The problem there, of course, is that the original example (and many actual cases) are going to be fractional, less than 1 use / day.

But then, we could look at that as a chance you'd get to use any ability (if they were selected at random, which of course they're not). That means we can consult the Accessibility table to get a discount for a fractional use.

Following this line of thought, 3 uses for 8 abilities means 3/8th uses per day, which is -40% for 1 use/day, -25% for Accessibility (3/8ths of the time), for -65%, halved for that flexibility factor, or -32.5%, which we can round against the player to -30%.

Seem too high, too low?

Scaling to other cases: 8 uses for 8 abilities would be the same as 1/day (-40%), halves to -20%. That's the same cost as 3-4 uses for each ability independently, but has that flexibility of possibly using the same ability 8 times, which is actually a small benefit, but that's offset by the fact that you can't do _something_ 24 times per day. (Whether or not "something" is actually relevant and useful depends entirely on the mix of abilities. 8 attacks is not the same as two attacks, two defenses, two movement, and two investigation/social abilities.)

12 uses would be an average of 1.5. If we look at that as a 50% chance of 3 uses, then it's -20% -20% Accessibility, for -40%, halved to -20%. If we look at that as 1 use plus a 50% chance of a second use, the math gets uglier (halfway between 1 and 2 uses, or about -35%, halved to -17%, so not so far away from the -20% number).


--
* If someone cares to figure out a way to fix it:
- Add a "flag" ability to the character. Ideally this is a 0-point-cost feature that does nothing. Give that ability Limited Use as desired. You also want some Reduced Time to make it a free action. This ability is just a program hack, not a real ability, so you want it to have no actual visible effects or cost.
- Give all the other abilities Environmental (Only While Flag is Active). (See the Krommpost on using Environmental to enable abilities rather than Link.)
To use any ability, you have to activate the flag. That uses up uses; when that pool runs out, you can't use any ability in that group.
Big flaw in the build: it doesn't distinguish between 1-minute activations and instant ones. So an IA, for instance, would be available for 1 minute, three times, not three shots.

[Culture20]

My guess is the MA route costs more for something that should be more of a limitation than regular Limited Use per each ability.

My idea isn’t RAW, but what if you fiddle with Link a little to allow it to link together limitations on different abilities:
linking the Limited Use:3 -20% on Fire Bolt with the Limited Use:3 -20% on Fire Shield would put a +20% on the percentage for Limited Use on each, making each Limited Use actually -24%
I’m not sure it’s the right amount of points though.

Edit:

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

One starting strawman for estimating a value there would be to consider 8 abilities with 8 uses per day. That's almost the same as one use per day each. However, it's noticeably more flexible, since you could use one ability eight times, when that's called for. So we could start with something like half the value of Limited Uses, calculated as (Uses / # abilities).

Hmm...
8 seperate powers, each with LimUse:1 (-40%) versus 8, each with linked-LimUse:8 (-12%)

[Plane]

If you had "Accessibility: Only while X" then if X is disabled after expending all Limited Use, would the ability no longer work?

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Plane

If you had "Accessibility: Only while X" then if X is disabled after expending all Limited Use, would the ability no longer work?

That's a good idea. Certainly a clean way to do it, and you just have to figure what the Accessibility value should be.

From where I'm sitting, this is strictly hypothetical. There's no way I'd allow a fixed value limitation on a build like the eight ability set mentioned in the OP. I'd have to know what they all were to get an idea how much each of 'em is really limited by the proposed mod.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Plane

If you had "Accessibility: Only while X" then if X is disabled after expending all Limited Use, would the ability no longer work?

Yes. That's the core of the klunky method I mentioned upthread. A shared pool is emulated by having all the real abilities depend on the activation of some additional ability (which might actually do nothing significant; it's just the light switch). See post #5 for issues that you might think of a way around.