Mitigator Schedule...

[hal]

Hello Folks,
Looking more closely at the mitigator effects and such, the pricing is "variable" and then goes on to give the reader the following:

Daily: -60%
Weekly: -65%
Monthly: -70%

So what would the hourly mitigator be? Should it be -55%/

What would the next time interval be for the -75%?

What should the time interval be for a mitigator that was worth -95%?

For example? If a cybernetic eye has a montlhy mitigator value of 70%, blindness worth 50 points, is now only worth 35 points when it has this level of mitigation.

But if you had a mitigator of -.95%, the value of such blindness would only be 2 points.

So, thoughts?

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by hal

What should the time interval be for a mitigator that was worth -95%?

Too infrequent to be a Disadvantage. If we continue that progression, it will come out to something like 75 years between treatments. (Dropping the "common named time interval" pattern for a 5-ish pattern gives you 6 months / 3 years / 15 years / 75 years. Being blind once per lifetime isn't really a restriction -- but I'd probably let you take it for a Quirk (rather than -2 points) as a sort of pre-defined Quirk-level Cursed, where the GM will maliciously cause you to go blind once at some time of his choosing. Trading the pattern for the Speed/Range progression still gets you up to about a year (50 weeks) for 4 steps past monthly. Keep the "common names" progression and you're looking at year-decade-century-millenium.)

[hal]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Too infrequent to be a Disadvantage. If we continue that progression, it will come out to something like 75 years between treatments. (Dropping the "common named time interval" pattern for a 5-ish pattern gives you 6 months / 3 years / 15 years / 75 years. Being blind once per lifetime isn't really a restriction -- but I'd probably let you take it for a Quirk (rather than -2 points) as a sort of pre-defined Quirk-level Cursed, where the GM will maliciously cause you to go blind once at some time of his choosing. Trading the pattern for the Speed/Range progression still gets you up to about a year (50 weeks) for 4 steps past monthly. Keep the "common names" progression and you're looking at year-decade-century-millenium.)

I was thinking more in line of this:

x -.60% = 1 day
x -.65% = 1 week
x -.70% = 1 month
x -.75% = 3 months
x -.80% = 6 months
x -.85% = 12 months
x -.90% = 24 months
x -.95% = >24 months.

If you have a mitigator that is permanently attached, hard to remove, and reasonably reliable such that it lasts longer than a month, we'd need some time frame to determine what would be a valid value for -75%, -80%, -85%, -90% and -95%.

As I pointed out, there are only three such time frames. I wondered if any other SJGames publication maybe contains such information, as GURPS POWERS doesn't seem to do so.

[Anaraxes]

I don't know of any other "regular dose period" Mitigator examples. Pyramid is the main source I don't have, though my PDF collection is far from complete even otherwise.

The only Mitigator I know of that's more than -70% is Monster Hunter's "Morphology Inducer" (a piece of equipment that lets aliens / demons / etc look like a normal human, and has to also be bought as a Gadget in addition to letting you Mitigate Disads like Appearance or Social Stigma).

I suspect anything over monthly / -70% is by RAW simply considered not to be a Disad. (I don't know of any source that uses really short dose intervals, either.) Anything over -80% would get clipped by the Limitation cap anyway, though such values are still useful when it comes to countering large Enhancements. But in this case, the common interpretation of -80% as "will never come up" isn't far off.

From a gameplay perspective, longer and longer time periods have increasingly less effect on play. There's not a lot of practical difference between six months and two years. (In some games, it will literally never come up again!) You can of course make up whatever schedule suits your own view, but given that we stick to a linear increase of -5%, then the time period has to increase exponentially to model that sort of declining negative effect.

The Mitigator dose is usually as trivial as popping a pill. A really burdensome "dose", like having to complete some six-month quest to find the guru that lives on a mountaintop and randomly relocates every time someone visits him to dispel their Disad, might interfere with the character enough over a multi-year timespan to matter. But that's the sort of thing that's an in-game adventure, triggered by the GM just imposing the Disad to motivate the adventure, rather than a strict clock, or else by threatening imposition of the Disad to give a "ticking time bomb" feel to the motivation -- but during the adventure the Disad hasn't actually reappeared yet. Or, the Mitigating action is just is assumed to take place in downtime -- which is another case where the character shouldn't really have the Disad being Mitigated on the character sheet in the first place. (That would be a case of the "Disads that don't actually affect the character aren't worth points" rule. You'd have to be in one of those immortals-over-centuries long-view sorts of games for these kind of rates to matter.)

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

(That would be a case of the "Disads that don't actually affect the character aren't worth points" rule. You'd have to be in one of those immortals-over-centuries long-view sorts of games for these kind of rates to matter.)

I think it's fair to say though that the OP might've had that case in mind when he posed the question.

[whswhs]

It looks like the multiplier for a step is approximately 5; that is, "a number that is closer to 5 than to 0 or 10." So for shorter intervals, I would say 6 hours, 1 hour, 15 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute, 15 seconds, 5 seconds, 1 second. For longer ones, probably 6 months, 2 years, 10 years, 50 years, 200 years, 1000 years. Those are mostly between 4 and 6, but are also conveniently round time periods.