6th Edition Adjustment Powers Draft

'This document is a discussion of Adjustment Powers and a tentative proposal for house rules for 6th edition. Please feel free to contribute. When a conclusion is reached it will be included in the house rules.'

In the below I mostly use Drain as an example - this is because it is easiest to compare to other Powers, being basically a straightforward Attack Power.

Complications
The Adjustment Powers have always been tricky from a balance point of view. Some reasons are:


 * They work against Power Defense, which means that metas usually have no better defense against them than normals.
 * Different Powers have different typical AP levels (usually Attack Powers > Movement Powers > Defensive and Special Powers, and Characteristics are all over the place. (This is partly if crudely compensated for by the "defensive powers count double" rule.)
 * The point at which a Power becomes effectively useless also varies.
 * Adjusting Defensive Powers in particular can make for strong combinations with other Powers (again, partly compensated for by "defensive powers count double").
 * A Drain of STUN and BODY is effectively cumulative with mainstream attacks, but other Drains aren't.
 * Reducing certain Characteristics to 0 has extra effects. In the case of STUN and SPD it takes the victim out of the fight; in the case of END the victim has to spend STUN for END and so will soon be out of the fight; in the case of BODY it's relatively minor but doing 2x BODY is fatal; in the case of DEX to PRE it puts the character effectively on a 9- activation roll for most actions; in the case of STR it limits STR-based attacks and movement powers severely (which for some characters takes them out of a fight and for others is negligible).
 * Someone's last currently effective Attack Power, Movement Power, Targeting Sense and other Sense is significantly more important than their others.

It's not practical to try to balance these powers well without reworking the entire system. However, some of the worst problems can be addressed.

6th Edition
The new edition has made some changes which bear on Adjustment Power balance:


 * In general, the base Adjustment Powers are cheaper, though the Advtanges they take are more expensive.
 * Many Characteristics are cheaper than they used to be, because they no longer provide Derived Characteristics - but this makes it easier to reduce them to 0.

One can see how they came to the current value for Drain (still 10pts/D6 but now ranged):


 * 60 points can buy either a 6D6 STUN Drain or a 6D6 Blast, AVAD (Power Defense, +1), which are functionally nearly identical, doing 21 STUN on average.
 * 50 points can buy either a 5D6 Drain (1 STUN: 1 BODY) or a 1D6+1 RKA AVAD (Power Defense, +1/2) Does BODY (+1). The latter does 4.5 BODY and 9 STUN on average; the former does juat shy of 4.375 BODY and 8.75 STUN.

But it's interesting to note that these only work out the same by applying the "defensive powers count double" rule, although STUN and BODY are only mariginally "defensive powers" - lowering them doesn't make the character more susceptible to others attacks as such. (That is, they only make other attacks more effective in that they're directly cumulative with them, not because they reduce the defences.) Which suggests that a Drain vs Characteristics might be cheap by as much as a factor of two.

There are other reasons to think that Drain vs Characteristics is too cheap. For instance, taking INT, EGO or PRE down to 0 essentially puts the victim on a 9- activation roll for most actions. But a 6D6 Drain, with an average roll, will achieve this significant effect in one average strike of 21 not only against normals but against most metas, because the defence is Power Defense. (It may be that the best natural balance under the 6th edn rules is for most metas to have a small amount of Power Defense, but I'm reluctant to propose that approach, which differs so much from tradition.) To be fair, with INT and PRE this was already a problem in earlier editions (if only to the same extent at HTH range).

The're is an especial problem with END, which is so cheap in 6th that, even counting it as defensive, an average 6D6 Drain removes 52.5 END.

Proposal
I'm not especially worried about the changes as they apply to Powers - doubtless there will be a number of abusable uses, but we can worry about that on a case-by-case basis (in general Drain vs Powers don't seem that popular anyway, because they only work on people that happen to have such a Power). On the other hand the effectiveness of Adjustment Powers vs Characteristics probably should be moderated.

I therefore propose they apply at different rates vs Characteristics, as follows. Some of the values are rather tentative, so feedback is welcome.

Adjustments to Defensive Powers would still be at half effectiveness (in the case of defensive Characteristics this is built into the above table).

For ease, the REC and END of an END Reserve is Adjusted at the same rate as normal REC and END.


 * ' comment: This is, as you say, tricky. I agree with your reasoning but at the same time in the midst of combat I'd rather not be having to search for the above table to work out what effect that Drain power just had. Some more easily remembered process is needed for the benefit of the memory impaired among us. Such as me for example.


 * 'We could simply apply the half effectiveness rule across the board for Characteristics, with a exception of 1 for 1 for END. That would make draining DEX, OCV, OECV, SPD, and REC, more expensive. However as far as OCV, OECV, and SPD are concerned draining a few points from them effectively disables most characters anyway. DEX drains get a raw deal but I'm willing to live with that for the benefit of something simple and easy to remember.


 * 'Picking figures out of the air, assuming an average character has INT of between 13 to 18 - the 6D6 INT Drain takes the INT to 3 to 8 on the first hit and down to zero on a second hit. That seems to compare well with the rule of thumb of three normal damage hits to take down a character.


 * 'Interestingly, I note the option of imposing OCV/DCV penalties with Change Environment has been removed in 6th edition, so there's no worry about having to cost match an OCV/DCV Drain with a similiar effect from CE.


 * '(Ayesha 25/12/09)