Gnome BODY (important!)

As one would expect from somebody who goes by "Ninja-Bear".

Why would a hero want to buy a CON "buffer" to resist Drain instead of Power Defense?

People in this thread are explicitly talking about changing the rules. I am explicitly talking about a construct (left to the creation of the model-maker) that permits "Egads! It's so dark even I, Hyper-Eye Man, can't see!" "Foolish surfacer, we can!". I recognize that your stance is "You cannot", but that's a failure of your model in my opinion.

I'm not sure what you mean by "base it off of sight". Do you mean put it into the Sight Group, or do you mean to construct a duplicate "sight" power that's not in the Sight Group and so is unaffected by lighting? Both have obvious problems though. The former doesn't work without also integrating Hugh's solution, the latter has massive side effects since it renders the character immune to all sight-obstructions such as Flash and not-dark Darkness. I have absolutely no objections to this solution. Excellent work. I am very confused here. How does Suppressing the darkness leave our bold surface-world hero unable to see while the dread Cavelords of Chthonia can see perfectly? Am I missing something obvious? Because it seems like your solution is for a completely different problem.

I'm just going to leave this as a standing challenge to everyone's illumination models: How do you build the ability to see in darkness? Can your system model that too? Not dim light, darkness. As in "Gads, even my hyper-eyes are useless in this subterranean gloom!" "Haha, puny surface people's puny surface eyes are useless, unlike the superior eyes of the Cavelords of Chthonia!"

I disagree. The many small slots (hearafter MSS) model clearly demonstrates that there's a pricing issue. I see three obvious ways to fix it and only one is "Just say NO". I'm sure there's more I'm not thinking of. 1 - GMs just say NO. Solves the 'abusive' behavior but doesn't address the pricing issue directly. 1b - Change the stacking rules to forbid stacking. Prevents MSS, but at the cost of collateral damage to non-abusive stacking constructs. 2 - Change the price of slots, assuming that MSS is reasonable (ie, the pricing issue lies with variable slots). As demonstrated upthread, N-1 10 AP fixed slots and 1 10 AP variable slot will give the full flexibility of a 10N AP variable slot at a 1 point surcharge over the 10N AP fixed slot. Therefore, make variable slots a 1 point surcharge over fixed slots and permit fixed slots to be used in 10 AP chunks. 3 - Change the price of slots, assuming that MSS is unreasonable (ie, the pricing issue lies with MSS). For example, adding a 1 point surcharge to all slots would make any MSS construct significantly more expensive than single fixed slots, and the 10 AP MSS construct would cost as much as single variable slots. This at least is easily solvable by moving to flexible caps. Specify baseline, and then specify what a step up or down from baseline is. Then specify a maximum number of steps up/down per characteristic, specify categories and a maximum number of total steps up and down per category, and specify how many total steps up/down in general. This sort of capping structure means that Variable Slot Man can have the potential to reach actual-cap in everything and have it be useful, though he's paying a premium for the ability to shift around his strengths and weaknesses.

Or even just REC that doesn't work while transformed. I think this is the silver bullet for this solution: It's cheap, granular, and intuitive.

Are Continuing Charges a thing in 4th? The granularity is a bit high, but it should be pretty simple to add intermediate breakpoints at an intermediate cost.

So Mother-May-I. No thanks, I like my rules to be rules.

But what does, say, 10 points of unopposed darkness manipulation mean? Sure it can cancel 10 points of light, but what else can it do? How much area can I darken? How dark can I make that area? What happens to Ned Needslighttosee if he's fighting in my darkness? What about Feline Frank with his cat's eyes? And how do you build such things anyways under a light/dark manipulation system?

For the third time this thread, second time this page, I post this. Bolding mine.

But in comics, super-vision man can sometimes see in complete darkness because it turns out it was only 99.99% dark and super-hearing man can hear in total silence because his ultra-ears can pick up the interaction of sound on the wind outside the field and yadda yadda.

Ah, I'm not saying "Night should be -8". I'm saying "Really totally dark, the basically-zero point, -8 seems good instead of fudging it into Darkness but counts as CE".

Clearly the absolute darkness is Linked to the less-absolute darkness! Humor aside, I agree with PhilFleischmann that -4 isn't quite enough. I don't think we need to go so far as defining an absolute natural darkness, though, I think -8 is punishing enough that anyone without super-vision isn't going to see anything anyways. I like this idea. I like it a lot. I just wonder, why stop there? Have ambient levels for every sense group. Too loud or in a sound-dampening field, can't hear footsteps. Too smelly or in a cloud of anti-scent spray, can't smell particular things. Too much noise jamming or too close to the radio-absorbatron, no blips on the radar set. So on and so forth.

Per you can in 6e where you have OCV and DCV outside any Power Frameworks. I've never argued you can't.

Unless you have rPD and rED outside the MP. I completely agree with you that Variable slots are generally not worth it. I can't think of any application where I'd need full flexibility instead of just a couple intermediate slots, to say nothing of summing small slots.

But then you're attaching mechanical penalties to certain SFXs. Not even mandatory Limitations, just arbitrary penalties. Bob Bright makes his Entangle a pulsing field of light that restrains the target. Freddy Ferrous makes his Entangle a handful of immovable iron bands that appear around the target's joints. Runic Ralph makes his Entangle a blood-red scrawl that appear on the target's skin detailing the laws of stillness they are now subject to. I'd call these equally visible, but only the first logically obscures the target in any way. Or perhaps you forbid the latter two just because they conveniently dodge the nerf you've applied to a SFX instead of Entangle, thus refusing player creativity. If you want to nerf Entangle, attach the nerf directly to the Entangle instead of stapling a nerf to a SFX.

So if I get a 1d6 Cosmetic Transform: "Target begins glowing brightly" spammed on me while I don't resist, nobody can effectively called shot me? Cool! Hey Wizzy Wally, hook me up with that light spell. That's honestly a really awkward solution with a giant pile of side effects, I can't recommend going through with it instead of just saying "No Entangles that don't take damage from attacks, guys".

Of course, another solution could be to just shave two or three points of CV off everyone.

Were you at my table, you'd have to justify why paying 1 END is worth a -1/4 discount and why it only lasting 300 Segments is worth a -1/4 discount. And why it somehow only lasts 5 minutes. And why you should be allowed to have an absolute effect, for that matter.

Glad we could help! Let us know how it winds up working in play.

I went over this before, but keep in mind that 5 CON currently gets you +5 to your Stunning threshold and +1 to all CON rolls. A CON roll skill level is 2 points, so if you accept that as a valid pricing (depends overwhelmingly on the frequency of CON rolls, as I've said there's none in my game) then 15 points of Stun threshold is 25 Stun threshold. If you could buy +25 CON only to prevent Stunning, that'd generally be as good as Can't be Stunned. I think the real issue is that CON rolls don't happen often in some genres so 2/5ths of the theoretical value of CON is wasted. If CON were 1/2 point per, it'd be a lot more practical compared to just trying to get Can't Be Stunned past your GM.

I personally just wouldn't allow Entangles that don't take damage from attacks. The fundamental mechanic is not workable, it turns the game into "Have the countermeasure to this thing or lose immediately". That said, if you're married to the idea I'd suggest that you: - Give all targets of an Entangle an immediate casual breakout roll. When the Hulk gets lasso'd, he just rips out instantly in the comics. Why should your game be any different? This makes it so a very weak Entangle can't turn off DCV for the moment it takes to dogpile the target. - Make Entangle cause 1/2 DCV not 0 DCV. Per Mental Illusions, standing still is only 1/2 DCV. This makes it so that an Entangled target isn't a total sitting duck. - Bring up EGO ratings. If most foes have dumpster EGO compared to incoming mental powers, mental anything is going to be an insta-win. When a strategy exists that dwarfs the effectiveness of all other strategies, the game collapses into Rock, Paper, Scissors, Nuke. And we all know that's a terrible game.

I don't think any of the existing tools we have are perfectly suited to getting this peg in this particular hole. I do think we can get this peg in this hole with something new. I'm envisioning a minor houserule derived from Change Environment, with thanks to @redsash for setting me down this lane of thought. Change Environment spells out how to change the environment, and ambient darkness is just an environmental effect. So in the same way that a Dispel Fire can put out a campfire despite the campfire not being explicitly built as a power or Suppress Wind can drop a kite from the sky despite the kite having no game statistics, let Suppress Dark turn off ambient darkness. Therefore, "build" ambient darkness as CE -4 to normal sight, AoE 1m, 0 END. That comes out to 14 AP which conveniently enough is the average result of 4d6, one die per point of penalty. So each 1d6 of AoE Suppress Dark will cancel a point of darkness penalty in its area.

FRED p310, 6e1p399