Are Powers Overpriced?

[ArchonShiva]

I feel Sorcery was balanced by the absolute requirement of the Costs FP limitation, which for a low, low rebate turns everything it touches into one-fifth the useability. Of course, without that, it’s pretty terribly underpriced.

I never let players design AA wholecloth, so I can keep things balanced, but if you do, what it comes down to is that game balance is fiction anyway.

[Daigoro]

Any significant amounts of DR always seemed overpriced to me, and it's hard to make it an Alternative Ability of something.

You're more likely to want high DR in a high-TL setting, facing higher damage weapons, but then you can purchase high DR armour more easily. So having high enough DR as a trait costs more and more, but is more easily made redundant by equipment.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

I feel Sorcery was balanced by the absolute requirement of the Costs FP limitation, which for a low, low rebate turns everything it touches into one-fifth the useability. Of course, without that, it’s pretty terribly underpriced.

I never let players design AA wholecloth, so I can keep things balanced, but if you do, what it comes down to is that game balance is fiction anyway.

Without the FP cost its not balanced against most magic systems.
I tried my own AA system based on something else and me and the GM were concerned about overuse compared to the party mages. So costs FP was added.
However thats only a problem when up against mages who after all were given the FP cost for the same reason. So they didnt outshine warriors too much.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Refplace

... mages who after all were given the FP cost for the same reason. So they didn't outshine warriors too much.

Plus heritage from TFT.

[Anthony]

A considerable number of powers are overpriced, and alternate abilities are a bit of a hack, as an 80% discount for abilities that are useful in entirely different circumstances isn't really justified. The problem is mostly that the prices for powers are mostly balanced for a setting that lacks meaningful gear.

[Anaraxes]

Not having access to all your spells is a significant limitation for anything that has an ongoing effect. AAs for attacks are actually the most abusive form of AA, not the least, because attacks are generally instant (fire them in one turn and their effects are resolved immediately). The reason those aren't too terrible is simply that you don't get much benefit from two different 5D attacks -- just the small benefit of being able to match enemy's weaknesses.
But for defenses (say, DR), losing them in order to make an attack is a big drawback compared to having two abilities (or AA groups).

As Merlin in Zelazny's second Amber series put it, "A good sorceror should always have one attack, one defense, and one escape spell ready at all times". With Sorcery or single-group builds, you can only have one of those three up. You might well want a 3-of-N build just to meet that criteria.

You also can't stack multiple buffs on yourself or the party, as you'll lose the previous buff every time you switch to the next one. So putting all buffs into the "buff group" as distinct from the "attack group" helps, but still is only a partial solution compared to having separate full-price abilities. The same is true of most environmental / battlefield control effects. Spells don't continue once you've cast them, but only as long as you actually have the ability. So a discount seems appropriate.

If something is overpriced, it's probably Modular Abilities. Partly that's because of the few examples of chip slots that we have before it leaps straight to Cosmic. But the 10x cost is also pretty steep. Generality is quite valuable, but it means AAs are a better deal until you have a fairly ridiculous number of abilities in the group (46). That generality has diminishing returns, so there probably ought to be some intermediate steps based on how many different abilities you can configure.

[dataweaver]

Yeah; I make extensive use of Wildcard Abilities rather than messing with the complexity and expense of Modular Abilities.

BTW: I know that not having access to multiple spells is limiting; I never took issue with that. My concern is whether it's on par with such things as an ability that only works on one person in the whole world (Accessibility, -80%) or similar examples of crippling restrictions that fill the -80% level of Limitations.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

My concern is whether it's on par with such things as an ability that only works on one person in the whole world (Accessibility, -80%)

To me, Accessibility is a poor standard of comparison for evaluating Limitation prices. I use it myself, and the probability structure is so very tempting. But in truth, the values it produces are fairly small in comparison to most Limitations in RAW that seem to produce similar loss of use. It's nice to be conservative to avoid abuses, but it's not like the system really starts with probability-of-use and thus all Limitations are really special cases of Accessibility. Accessibility is much more the odd one out than the typical center value.

similar examples of crippling restrictions that fill the -80% level of Limitations.

-80% is a cap on total Limitation value, not a cap on the value of any single Limitation. It's a number that's really common as forum shorthand for "nearly useless", but the actual number for "nearly useless" should be much smaller. -80% is just a simple cutoff to avoid abuses via arithmetic. (HERO used to let you get away with quite a lot by piling on the Limitations.) But I've often thought the rules need more high-value Limitations. In simple cases, they'd just get clipped to -80% anyway. But there ought to be something that can counter the Enhancements. RAW is pretty free with throwing around +100%, +150%, +300% values, but there's little way to pull the cost of those abilities back down. (That's a factor that sometimes pushes people to use Multiplicative Modifiers instead.)

[dataweaver]

I didn't pick -80% because it's a cap; that's irrelevant to my point. I picked it because -80% is equivalent to ×1/5. And I mentioned Accessibility because it was the first -80% Limitation I found; most other Limitations tend to stop before -50%.

[AlexanderHowl]

What happens if we introduce a TL divisor for abilities that can be replicated by the technology of the setting? We could have the TL divisor being equal to (TL-4, minimum 1), meaning that a TL8 character would divide the cost of DR, Enhanced Move (Air), Flight, Innate Attacks, etc by 4.