Side Effect vs Affliction Part II: Should Psi-Wars make Afflictions Cheaper?

 So, my previous article on Side Effect provoked some interesting discussion.  There's nuance that I missed, and people were kind enough not to call it out directly on the blog (though by all means!), but the broader point still stands: you can build Side-Effects into simple Innate Attacks for what often amounts to a cheaper and better Affliction than the Affliction advantage.  Malediction often does the same too: rather than take a bunch of levels of Affliction, you can take Malediction and take a bunch of levels of Talent or the controlling Attribute (Will, I believe) and get the equivalent to more Affliction.

So what? What am I going to do about it?  See, if we're talking the broader context of GURPS, I'm mostly just tossing it in the general direction of the complaints box for if Kromm ever gets around to a 5th edition.  But with Psi-Wars, I've already adjusted costs.  Sure, I mutter about it and complain mightily about the complexity costs of adjusting everything, but I've done it.  So why not do it again?

The arguments for tend to go along these lines: Ultra-Tech weapons deal pretty hefty damage for cheap, which reduces the utility of buying that damage as an advantage, thus the cost should be lowered.  By the same token, Ultra-Tech weapons inflict afflictions for cheap, which reduces the utility of Afflictions, thus their cost should also be lowered. If you can inflict Agony on someone with a cheap neurolash baton, why should Agony still be full price as an affliction?

The counter-arguments tend to go like this: changing afflictions means people have to know the specifics of your new rules (but that's already true for other elements); you'd have to reprice tons of traits in Psionic Powers (but we already to that!); and you lose compatibility with RAW (but at this point, Iteration 6+ Psi-Wars has the same relationship with GURPS that the DFRPG or other "powered by GURPS" works have, which is that they use those rules, but aren't afraid to adjust them).  However, the most compelling argument against that I can think of is that there are weird edge cases where afflictions can do things that ultra-tech cannot, like resurrect people, give them cool powers, take psychic powers away, etc.  What do you do with those weirdly specific edge cases?  For example, Neutralize seems priced around Affliction, as a broadly capable Affliction that removes whatever power the target has.  If I reprice Affliction, should I reprice Neutralize? Where does it end?

I don't really have a good answer there.  But I would like to explore what a fair price for Affliction would be if I followed the logic of repricing it.

An Affliction vs Side-Effect Baseline

One of the things I failed to notice is that Side-Effect "cannot be combined with other penetration modifiers" with one important exception, which struck me as odd at first, but I think I understand the logic.  The problem isn't that Side Effects aren't allowed to penetrate armor, it's that most of the other penetration modifiers imitate what Side Effect is doing.  In a sense, Side Effect is a penetration modifier where you're mode of penetration is SHEER DAMAGE.

The one exception is Armor Divisor.  It's up in the air if it's fair to allow Cosmic (Ignores DR), but I think it's fair game, so we're going to go with that.  But I want to contrast it with Malediction.  Malediction allows you to ignore DR, sure, but what you're actually doing is replacing DR with a Will Contest.  Your opponent can still defend, they just do so differently.  If we made a Side-Effect malediction, you'd double up on that: you'd roll Will vs HT to defeat their defenses and inflict the damage on them, and then roll again to see if they resisted the Side Effect.  That doesn't strike me as "unbalanced" but it's pretty clunky.

Even so, we can work around this limitation in some ways.  This raises the price of Side-Effect, but that might help give us a sense of what a balanced version of this trait might look like.

Baseline 1: Neurolash Batons

This is a pretty straightforward one.  Psi-Wars uses Neurolash Batons, but has changed them in pretty much the same way I'd want to change most of my afflictions.  That is, I've made it so Neurolash Batons inflict some fatigue damage, and have the possibility of stunning or afflicting the struck target.  Thus, instead of it resulting in an all-or-nothing daze, numerous strikes with a neurolash baton becomes exhausing and potentially damaging ("Stop it!" she screamed "You're killing him!").  I wouldn't mind if the Reaving Hand or Mental Blow worked the same way.

The default version of the Neurolash Baton is an Affliction-5 with an armor divisor of 2.  If we bought this as an advantage, it could look like this:

• Affliction 6 (Stunning; Armor Divisor 2, +50%; Melee, 1 -25%;) [75]

That's pretty steep, and it's obviously going to be a problem. In Psi-Wars, it would look more like this (setting aside a little nuance for the sake of simplicity):

• Innate Attack 1d fatigue (Armor Divisor 2 +50%; Side Effect, Stunning +50%; Melee, 1 -25%) [18]

The latter is obviously much cheaper. But this might be an artifact of the absurd costs of multiple levels of Affliction. The sensible rule that everyone seems to agree is a good idea is 10 points for level 1, +3 per level thereafter.  In this model, the first power is:

• Affliction +5 (Stunning; Armor Divisor 2, +50%; Melee, 1 -25%;) [32]

That's much less crazy, but it's still twice as expensive as the the Innate Attack.  Is that fair? I'm not sure. Let's carefully explore the differences between the two. The standard version applies a -5 to your HT, but DR will slow it down. With about 10+ DR, you're pretty safe.  Against an HT 10 person, they will resist the effect (with no DR) 5% of the time. The Psi-Wars one inflicts 3-4 fatigue damage; about 8 DR would be enough to stop it on average. It'll apply a -1 to -2 HT penalty, which means an HT 10 target with no DR will  resist the effect about 25% of the time. So, as an affliction, it's about 5 times as effective at stunning the target, but the Psi-Wars one balances this out by dealing a few points of fatigue damage. I think you could make the argument that Affliction is still overpriced, but the 3/additional level is certainly fairer than the 10/level.

But this doesn't actually solve our core problem which is is it fair in Psi-Wars, because Psi-Wars divides the cost of the innate attack by 3, to pay for a "free" armor divisor 5.  So our updated versions look like this:

• Affliction +5 (Stunning; Armor Divisor 5, +150%; Melee, 1 -25%;) [57]
• Innate Attack 1d fatigue (Armor Divisor 5 +150%; Side Effect, Stunning +50%; Melee, 1 -25%) [10]

So, the reduced cost the innate attack is really making a difference here.  If we divided the Affliction by 3, we'd be looking at about 19 points, which brings it back to the same ratio as with our default versions above.  This seems to indicate that, yes, Afflictions should get a reduced cost, at least in certain specific cases.

Baseline 2: Mental Blow vs Mental Stab

Neurolash batons aren't especially pertinent, as characters won't generally be using them directly as powers (though robots sometimes have them built that way, but I'm still not sure they're not better off with a weapon mount).  But what about something like Mental Blow? That's a pretty classic example of an Affliction a player would take as an advantage.  It also seems one that would be interesting to add a fatigue cost on, so that if someone resists repeated mental blow attacks, it might still exhaust them.  

The problem is, however, that mental blow is a malediction and that makes it much trickier to turn a side-effect into, since Malediction's aren't allowed as they're a penetration modifier.  We can ignore that, but the logic seems more-or-less sound enough: don't roll Will to work out if they've been hit with the fatigue damage, then HT to see if they've been hit with the side effect.  But on the other hand, I think you'll see that it's pretty easy to work around this, so I'm not sure why this is a rule.

So, if we make a simplified Mental Blow, it looks something like this:

• Affliction 1 (Malediction +100%) [20]

If we trim out the various elements that make mental blow "feel like" mental blow and focus on the pure mechanics of it, that's it: a stunning malediction.  Note that it doesn't use multiple levels of Affliction; nothing in Psionics does, and that's the real legacy of the broken cost of Affliction: everyone uses workarounds.

So what are our options to build the same effect a different way?  Well, we could just try to blast the target with as much fatigue as possible. Now, I should note that you really need a lethal amount of fatigue to knock someone out, but 10 or so fatigue is enough to seriously weaken anyone.  So it might look something like this:

• Fatiguing Attack 3d (Malediction +100%) [60]

This is not how Mental Stab works, of course, but if we're trying to figure out how best to simulate the effect on as few modifiers as possible, this is pretty close.  This deals an average of 10 fatigue damage in an attack, and it's three times the cost of our Affliction.  If we use Psi-Wars pricing, they come to about the same. This might be a bad parallel though: this is guaranteed to knock you unconscious in two attacks, which will keep you out of the fight for minutes, not seconds, and once you recover, it'll take you the order of hours to be fighting fit again.  So it's legitimately more powerful than a basic affliction.  While it speaks to the power of the "Just hurt him, stop playing with him" approach that the high price of Afflictions seem to encourage, let's see if we can create a side-effect to stun our target.

• Fatiguing Attack 1d (Based on Will +20%; Cosmic, ignores DR +300%; Short Range -10%; Side-Effect, Stunning +50%) [46]

This is a little more complicated.  First, it just bypasses DR, but you roll to hit with Will, and you suffer -1 per yard of distance, like with a normal Malediction.  You do not roll a contest (your opponent can, apparently, dodge). It'll inflict 1-6 fatigue, and the target will have to roll Will (not HT) to resist stunning. It's more than twice as expensive as Affliction, but only about 15-16 points with Psi-Wars pricing.  This does seem to imply that, if we strictly follow the rules, Afflictions aren't crazy, but they could, perhaps, use a reduced price in a setting that discounts Innate Attacks, at least the attack-based afflictions.

Baseline 3: Reaving Hand

Christopher Rice devised a lovely advantage called the Reaving Hand which is, in essence, just an Mortal Affliction.  This is another good case study, though, because it brings us to a major crux of innate attack vs affliction: why not just kill the bastard?

A simplified version of the Reaving Hand:

• Affliction 1 (Heart Attack +300%; Malediction +100%; Melee, C -30%) [47]

That is, you have to touch your target, you roll a contest, and if you succeed, they die. But we could also, you know, just kill them.  That's what Hand of Death does.

• Toxic Attack 6d (Malediction +100%; Melee, C -30%) [41]

If you succeed at your attack, the target will take ~20 damage, which is about enough to kill them.  Not always, of course.  The affliction version has some additional utility: it'll kill a dragon as easily as a human, while the toxic attack won't.  And neither has an advantage of the target resists: either they die or they're fine, or the take the damage and then either die or don't die, or they're fine.  However, once again, we see that if I don't discount Afflictions in the same ruleset that discounts innate attacks, it unfairly punished Afflictions.  If we drop the price of the Toxic Attack version to 14 points on the basis that armor and weapons have reduced its utility, we should probably reduce the price of the Affliction version to 16 points.

This is where I'd really like to use Side Effect, however.  I'd prefer something like: always inflict at least 1d toxic, but maybe inflict death.  This is not allowed: you can't use Side Effect for mortal afflictions.  So, your best bet then is a Toxic Attack with low damage with a follow up resistable toxic attack that does high damage: either you resist and take 1d, or you fail and take 6d.

Should We Discount Affliction?

Probably.  As I mentioned in the previous post, Affliction is overloaded.  I don't think I'd reduce the cost of any "bestowment" afflictions.  If bestowing DR or Innate Attack should be cheaper, it's because the underlying attribute should be cheaper, not because giving people advantages has less utility in a UT setting.  The real reason to reduce the cost of Innate Attack is not just because blasters are everywhere, but because high levels of DR are everywhere.  The price to inflict harm on someone in a battlesuit is prohibitive when compared to just getting a rocket launcher, thus a discount is necessary.  By the same token, if we want to knock someone out with an affliction, we need to drop that cost too, otherwise players are better off with armor penetrating fatigue attacks and the like.

A lot of this is hidden by the Malediction modifier, as it ignores armor.  But the problem is, here too, malediction is a penetration modifier.  We need it to bypass that 100+ DR, and it's effectively "Cosmic, ignore DR" with a pile of built in limitations (short range, resistible, etc); I'm not sure Malediction remains fair in Psi-Wars, but you can apply it to Innate Attacks too, so saying that Malediction balances Affliction is nonsense.

But is it too much work? Well, I can only actually find a couple of uses of Affliction in my Communion rules, so that's not particularly hard to change.  I'll have to alter some basic Psionic Powers, but there's actually not that many:

• Confuse (Not used in Psi-Wars)
• Flash (Rarely comes up, but I believe House Grimshaw has it)
• Curse (Rare Power, but Witchcats use it)
• Disease Shield (Actually a "Bestow" and so not affected by the change)
• Sleep
• Drain Attribute
• Mind Wipe
• Mental Blow

So only 4 are critical to change, and another 2 make good sense. That's not a huge change.