One set of Charges, different durations

[Tywyll]

How would you build a set of powers that only has X charges, but where some powers were instant and others had a duration? They all draw from the same pool of Charges however.

[Grailknight]

Build it as a Multipower with a set number of uses for the entire construct.

[Gnome BODY (important!)]

I can think of a number of solutions, but I can't be sure which to suggest without knowing the problem better. 

What is this set of powers?  Do they all get used at once, or are they usable separately? 

[Doc Democracy]

Without further detail, I like Grailknight's solution.  You burn a charge each time you activate a power in the multipower.  If you give us a bit more detail, you will get a lot more, for instance, as it stands Grailknight would be able to use his forcefield forever or until he switched it out for another power.  He would also be able to use his energy blast again and again. 

 

There are all kinds of ways to mix this up depending exactly what you want it to play like, in game.

[Ninja-Bear]

I second Grailknight’s suggestion.

[dmjalund]

what would be nice is a clip limitation for multipower, which is for a particular clip size, you have to specify beforehand which slot of the multipower is "loaded"

[LoneWolf]

I think what Tywyll is looking to do is to mix standard charges with continuing charges.  This is a little different than just slapping on the charge limitation on a multipower.  Since continuing charges reduce the value of the limitation it creates a problem. 

[Tywyll]

On 10/13/2019 at 5:15 PM, LoneWolf said:

I think what Tywyll is looking to do is to mix standard charges with continuing charges.  This is a little different than just slapping on the charge limitation on a multipower.  Since continuing charges reduce the value of the limitation it creates a problem. 

 

Exactly.

 

Say a person had 5 spells/powers. He could only use these 5 spells, say, 8 times a day. He could use one power 8 times to two powers 4 times each, but regardless, no more than a total of 8 power uses per day. 2 of the powers are attack powers that go off and are done. 2 of the powers are movement or protection based, once activated, they stay on for X amount of time. The last power lasts as long as the character concentrates.

 

Note, this is just for clarity, I'm not actually trying to build the above example, just something similar. 

[Duke Bushido]

How does magic work in your system? 

 

Is it pool-based?   Put Cgarges on the pool and just fudge the END costs when they aren't identical. 

 

 

There is always the meta "this is how it works" solution. 

 

Still, a few more details might belp. 

[Killer Shrike]

My "solution" for this design problem in the "Sorcery" magic system I offered circa 5e was an alteration of RAW, as described in the following section, repeated here for convenience:

 

CHARGES

The most significant of the above restrictions is that all Spells must be on Charges in this system of Magic. As a deviation from the letter of the HERO System Rulebook Charges may be applied to individual slots even though the Reserve has Charges so long as the Charges on a slot do not exceed those on the MP. This is allowed primarily so that the individual Spells can function on Charges rather than costing END, and take advantage of some of the other features of Charges without causing major mechanical headaches.

Some slots might have fewer Charges than the Reserve; for example a Spell might have two Continuing Charges, but the Reserve for that Spell Level might allow six Charges. The intention is that activating a slot expends one Charge from the Reserve and one Charge from the slot. In order to use a slot, the Multipower and the Spell Slot both must have a Charge available.

CONTINUING CHARGES

Continuing Charges are used for Spells that are not Instant in nature. All Continuing Charges must have a defined method to end their effect, which for Spells is globally defined as Anti-Magic, which is any Area of Effect Suppress or Dispel which would affect the Spell and is of equal or greater Active Points, regardless of any Effect Rolls.

OTHER CHARGE OPTIONS

By default Recoverable Charges are not allowed. Fuel Charges can be used with GM permission, but if a slot with a Fuel charge is activated and later the Multipower is switched to another slot the entire Fuel charge is expended instantly regardless of how much "fuel" was remaining. Boostable Charges may be used with GM Permission, but a GM might require that Boostable be applied to the Charges on the Reserve instead of individual slots, or both.

NUMBER OF CHARGES ON SPELL LEVEL MULTIPOWERS

A Spell Level Multipower Reserve cannot have more Charges than the Spell Level Multipower below it.

In other words if a Sorcerer has six Charges on their Spell Level 0 MP, then their Spell Level 1 MP can have no more than six Charges. Similarly if that Sorcerer had four Charges on their Spell Level 1 MP then their Spell Level 2 MP can have no more than four Charges, and so on.

EXAMPLE: Kael the Sorcerer starts off with 3 MP's for Spell Level 0 through Spell Level 2. If Kael has 12 Charges on his Spell Level 0 MP then he can have up to 12 Charges on both the 1st and 2nd Spell Level MP's. If Kael only takes 8 Charges on his Spell Level 1 MP, then he may have up to 8 Charges on his Spell Level 2 MP.

 

 

 

[Tywyll]

22 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

How does magic work in your system? 

 

Is it pool-based?   Put Cgarges on the pool and just fudge the END costs when they aren't identical. 

 

 

There is always the meta "this is how it works" solution. 

 

Still, a few more details might belp. 

It's not a specific concept I'm working on, more the idea of powers that would work that way. Over the years I've had different ideas or wanted to  convert things from other systems that would best work that way, but I don't know how to approach such a build in Hero. Charges are linked to the individual power, rather than a group.

[Tywyll]

18 hours ago, Killer Shrike said:

My "solution" for this design problem in the "Sorcery" magic system I offered circa 5e was an alteration of RAW, as described in the following section, repeated here for convenience:

 

CHARGES

The most significant of the above restrictions is that all Spells must be on Charges in this system of Magic. As a deviation from the letter of the HERO System Rulebook Charges may be applied to individual slots even though the Reserve has Charges so long as the Charges on a slot do not exceed those on the MP. This is allowed primarily so that the individual Spells can function on Charges rather than costing END, and take advantage of some of the other features of Charges without causing major mechanical headaches.

Some slots might have fewer Charges than the Reserve; for example a Spell might have two Continuing Charges, but the Reserve for that Spell Level might allow six Charges. The intention is that activating a slot expends one Charge from the Reserve and one Charge from the slot. In order to use a slot, the Multipower and the Spell Slot both must have a Charge available.

So as I understand this, you'd have charges on the slot and the MP, and the slot would use the lesser of the two, is that right?

 

[Killer Shrike]

2 hours ago, Tywyll said:

So as I understand this, you'd have charges on the slot and the MP, and the slot would use the lesser of the two, is that right?

 

Effectively but not exactly; as it says in the second paragraph:

 

Quote

> The intention is that activating a slot expends one Charge from the Reserve and one Charge from the slot. In order to use a slot, the Multipower and the Spell Slot both must have a Charge available.

 

Each MP reserve in that system represents a "spell level", thus a sorcerer capable of casting up to "4th level spells" has 5 overlapping MP's...one each for Spell Levels 0 thru 4. Each Spell Level MP has some number of charges on the reserve itself representing the "X times per day" idea. Thus our example sorcerer might have 8,6,4,2,1 spells per day across spell levels 0,1,2,3,4. In each Spell Level MP the sorcerer must have at least one spell slot, and can have up to some maximum number of spell slots per MP; these are the spells that they "know". A given sorcerer might have more spells in a given spell level MP than the MP reserve has charges...for instance in our example maybe the sorcerer who can cast 1 "4th level spell" per day knows three "4th level spells"...aka has 3 slots in their 4th spell level MP. On any given day the sorcerer can potentially cast any of the three "4th level spells" that they know but once they cast any one of them they can't cast the others that day...but their # of "3rd level spells" and "2nd level spells" etc are separately tracked and unaffected by how many "4th level spells" they have cast.

 

This basically models a scheme which I think is pretty familiar to most gamers...the Sorcerer class circa D&D 3.x / Pathfinder.

 

A mechanical issue rears its head here...this works fine for Instant spells on Charges but what about spells that are not Instant? The magic system wants those to be on Continuing Charges. The Charges on the reserve are just normal charges. Normally either the reserve or the slots would carry the charges. It is awkward, mechanically, to try to hoop jump around that. My general approach when using a toolkit game system is, when a particular rule such as this gets in the way of me modeling something I assess the rule to determine if I think it is "load bearing" or not...if I think it is then I respect the rule and find a work around and if I think it is not load bearing I feel free to modify or make an exception for that rule, or to try to respect the intent of the rule but via a different mechanism.

 

For instance, in the Hero System action economy an attack or abort ending a character's turn is what I would consider to be load bearing; one can certainly envision a model where a character is allowed to move and attack or attack then move (plenty of other systems allow that) but in the Hero System the costing of various things and certain assumptions are founded upon that basic idea and changing it to ease a design problem in one area would have a significant ripple effect so I would consider that "load bearing", on the other hand an accounting restriction such as Charges on reserve and slot does not seem load bearing to me, so I opted to make an exception to the general rule within the context of that magic system. Thus, in that magic system, a spell like "detect magic" which sticks around for a while is built on Continuing Charges, and an Instant magical attack is built on normal Charges, and both can co-habitate in a spell level MP with normal charges built on the reserve. 

 

Lets say you have a sorcerer with a reserve that has [6] charges total at max capacity, and 5 slots each also with a maximum of [6] charges. Over the course of the day the sorcerer casts slot 2 once expending a charge from slot 2 and a charge from the reserve, slot 4 once expending a charge from itself and the reserve, and slot 5 twice expending 2 charges from the slot and 2 charges from the reserve. At this point, the reserve has [2] charges remaining. The sorcerer gets into a combat situation and casts 2 more spells...slot 4 once more leaving that slot at 4 charges remaining, and slot 5 again leaving it at 3 charges remaining. The reserve now has [0] charges remaining for the day, and the sorcerer cannot cast any more spells from that spell level MP for the day. 

 

 

[LoneWolf]

You could always use a VP and have limitation the all powers need to be on a defined list.  Then build each power with the same number of charges and simply adjust the limitation on each slot.  The value of the limitation will be different for each slot but as long as the points add up that is all that matters. 

[dsatow]

The two easiest solutions would be a VVP with 8 charges on the pool.  The powers themselves could have the charges limitation too with varying lengths of time.

 

Multipowers are the other easy solution and can be constructed in much the same way.  You could put 8 charges limitation only on the pool and then each slot would have its own charge and duration, though you would have a problem switching out the power in the slots and continuing to run them.

 

A third method would be to make all powers cost end to cast with extended ones using the Costs end to activate advantage,  Each spell then would use the same amount of end and you would put exactly 8xend cost into an endurance reserve.  The reserve would have a recovery that would take 24 hours to start.

[PhilFleischmann]

Wouldn't just straight Fuel Charges work?  Instant powers use just one phase of "fuel".  And Continuous powers use more.

[massey]

One of the greatest strengths of the Hero System is something that is rarely talked about.  It's the Limitation "Limited Power".  Basically a custom Limitation.  Learn to use it and learn to love it.  You can apply it all the time, however you want.  That's my solution to things like that.

 

40 point Multipower (23 points real cost plus 8 points for slots) -- Magic Spells

    Incantation (-1/4), Gestures (-1/4), Limited Power: All Charges in Multipower go off of same 8 charges (-1/4)

--Fireball Spell, 8D6 Energy Blast, 8 charges (-1/2) -- 2 points

--Open Doors Spell, 13D6 Dispel vs Body, only versus doors and locks (-1), 8 Charges (-1/2) -- 1 point

--Invincible Armor Spell, 16/16 Force Field, 8 Continuing Charges: 1 minute (+1/4) -- 2 points

--Cannot Be Seen Spell, Invisibility vs Sight, 8 Continuing Charges: 5 minutes (+1/2) -- 2 points

--Blinding Spray, 4D6 Flash vs Sight, Area Effect: Cone (+1), No Range (-1/2), 8 Charges (-1/2) -- 1 point

 

There you go.  The Limited Power is only -1/4, because 8 Charges for the whole pool would be -1/2, and the whole reason we're using Limited Power is because simply going with 8 charges is a harsher limitation.  We want an easier one, that is less restrictive, so it's only -1/4.