"Can't wear Armor" for other abilities - Advantages replicable by technology

[Yako]

I have recently returned to mastering a post appocalyptical campaign with both a certain level of technology, inventions and supernatural abilities and it of course did bring up, for me, the issue of advantages that can more or less be replicated with relative ease using the existing technology or have the group gadgeteer develop something.

I had been toying with the idea thus to either create a limitation for advantages that are partially or fully replicable with gear or perhaps a modifier on the final ability, similar to how alternative abilities work.

I had been inspired partially by the Can't wear armour limitation on DR, which, after all, is meant to reflect that your ability could be replicated with technology and that you cannot use both.
This also does apply for many other abilities, though they are not leveled to start with, you can of course both have infrared goggles and infra vision, but it just won't be more useful than one of it alone.

Or take innate attack, there should be a significant difference, or else anyone will come to the conclusion that he better buy his fireball as an optional selective universal follow up to his gun than as a standalone, even if he can not afford as much pure fireball power then.

If there is a no combination price reduction for having several attacks and for DR not working with normal armor, why not make it a ore universal streamlined rule about abilities that have an easily available tech counterpart.

It could be something like x0.8 for something that has an expensive and / or restricted counterpart to x0.2 if the counterpart is ubiquitous, easy to conceal with no major drawbacks.

Of course, one could also do a more in depth application of the rules as they are and price a signature version of the gear, get the "gadget limitatons" that gear would have as an advantage bought with points and then see what point cost an advantage with those gadget limitations would have if its net cost, post limitations was equal to the signature gear's cost...

[Genesis]

I'd say that DR is special in that the default assumption is that it can be stacked. Innate attacks can't be - having a wand of fireball and the ability to shoot them yourself gives you two different ways to shoot fireballs, but it doesn't make your attacks more powerful. Contrast with armor - DR (Tough Skin) + DR (armor) yields better protection overall. I'd allow a "can't use external sources" for things like Temperature Tolerance, maybe - where your layer of blubber could reasonably be expected to stack with a down jacket.

Charisma from pills (Fallout had charisma pills, right?) that doesn't stack with the natural sort, maybe.

Reduced Consumption that doesn't stack with super-rations like Lembas Bread, maybe.

I'm sure there are others, but I would specifically disallow Attacks to benefit, I think. At least, it'd be a job convincing me.

[Bruno]

On the other hand, there's the Weapon Mount limitation for Extra Arm, which more-or-less lets you spend two points to buy a piece of equipment and make it a sort-of-innate-attack.

You could buy that equipment as a piece of Signature Gear and perhaps add the Accessory perk on top, buy Weapon Mount for it, and do a pretty fair job of pretending it's a regular advantage...

Whether the point cost with Signature Gear is better or worse than the point cost from Innate Attack is another thing entirely. But it would reflect the relative availability of that thing in your environment.

[Anaraxes]

I'd agree with Genesis. The limitation of Can't Wear Armor isn't that you could have had gear _instead_. It's that you can't have gear _in addition to_ your innate armor.

[Anthony]

Note that CWA is kind of broken. If you would normally wear, say, DR 6 plate armor, you can buy DR 20 (CWA) [60] for less than the price of DR 14 [70], and in both cases you wind up with DR 20. CWA should probably be either a fixed-price disad or a limitation on ST (the main reason you buy carrying capacity is for wearing more armor...).

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Note that CWA is kind of broken. If you would normally wear, say, DR 6 plate armor, you can buy DR 20 (CWA) [60] for less than the price of DR 14 [70], and in both cases you wind up with DR 20. CWA

I see no problem with this considering that CWA is supposed to represent creatures and superheros that will never wear armour anyway.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Note that CWA is kind of broken. If you would normally wear, say, DR 6 plate armor, you can buy DR 20 (CWA) [60] for less than the price of DR 14 [70], and in both cases you wind up with DR 20. CWA should probably be either a fixed-price disad or a limitation on ST (the main reason you buy carrying capacity is for wearing more armor...).

CWA is definitely not good design.

I'd be inclined towards fixed-price.