"ablative" force field

[Old Man]

How would you make a force field that only protects against a set number of attacks no matter how strong they were?

example:

Force Field 10 PD / 10 ED, 5 "uses"
Character A gets hit for 12, 4, 7, 20, 1 points of damage and then the Force Field drops. But up to that point the Force Field will work to it's full ability?

[Old Man]

oops...

[Monolith]

As far as the FF, I would buy 5 Continuing Charges, with a Limitation that each charge ends when it is hit.

As far as the Alien blood, you can consider it to be a Penetrating Killing Attack Damage Shield which only activates if the creature takes BODY damage.

[JohnTaber]

I would just simply add a limitation to the power saying that it only works for 5 hits. Using continuing charge means that you would lose 1 charge if you activate it and the duration runs out. :)

[Monolith]

Originally posted by JohnTaber
Using continuing charge means that you would lose 1 charge if you activate it and the duration runs out. :)
That is true, but if you activate the Charge and do not get hit, it ends on your next phase. Force Fields are constant powers, and as such they either need an expendature of charges each phase, or they don't work. At least with Continuing Charges you can set the time to 1 hour, so if it runs out you still feel like you got some use out of it. :)

[Gary]

Continuing charges won't work because you need to spend a 0 phase action to activate after a charge is used up. That means the FF will give no defense to any further attacks that occur before the character's next phase.

Just define it as a power limitation. Takes 5 hits in one day is probably work -3/4 or -1, unless it's easy to reset in which case it's probably worth -0 or -1/4.

[Yamo]

Just use a custom Limitation. There's no need to reinvent the wheel over this one.

[Talon]

Watch out for those Autofire attacks!

[Tom McCarthy]

I tried playing around with an END Reserve which lost END when the force field was hit, but the cost of the reserve plus the REC to reset it always cost more than the savings to the FF.

Sounds like it's time for a custom limitation.

[Tech]

Originally posted by Yamo
Just use a custom Limitation. There's no need to reinvent the wheel over this one.

Agreed. Making the power 0 End, with a limitation works for me.

[Ndreare]

I would use armor with the limitations of 5 Charges and non persistant. Posibly even visable.

[NuSoardGraphite]

How about trying Recoverable Charges.

If the Force Field is not hit in the duration, the charge is automatically recovered and the FF can be activated again. If the Force Field is hit in that time however, that charge is gone (takes significantly longer to "recover")

[tesuji]

Use a custom lim "goes down after X hits and cannot be reactivated until..." with the value of the lim determined by the humber of hits and the until clause severity.

However, please note that the value of this lim will be HIGHLY subjective by campaign and nothing like a "standard" value.

In a game where lots of agent skirmishes "VIPER thugs with grenades" are in play and are probably frequtnly used as "warm ups" for the main badguy, this can be very severe.

In games where "one big bad" is opposed by a swarm of heroes commonly, this wont be that severe at all, unless given very few hits.

heck, the significance would even be sujective based on other defenses... for example a character with 20 defenses and this force field was only for "+10 more" raising it to 30 would not use this force field against the "VIPER thugs with grenades" and thus probably walk in full against the big bad.