Powercap

[thusianetwork]

How Does You Powercap

Thusia has a flexible powercap system where you basically choose your own solution. The idea is that the beasts need to be fairly difficult for everyone: no one can consistently fight a beast one-on-one and come out of it unscathed. Hunting in groups should generally be more effective, and you don't want to try to deal with beasts if you are out numbered.

However, as long as your character falls within this balance, it is up to you what skills he loses, how much energy he has, and how the power downgrades.

Example:

Ticky is a godmode who can simply pass through anything he wants. In canon this means you can't stab him or drop rocks on him, and he can reach into your chest and steal your heart at any time and the only hope of defense you have is running faster (which isn't much of a help because he can also shoot lasers, grab you with tentacles of darkness, or sic maneating butterflies on you).

To scale his power (considerably) down to acceptable levels, he can now only reject/accept things in a limited space (about the size of a basketball) and only for a limited amount of time (about a minute) with a limited part of his body (just his hands). He can only do this to things that are close enough to touch, and he can't pass it on through someone else (he can still walk on air but he can't let someone else do it). He does still have access to his darkness, but he can only cover one limb at a time. He can move it across his body fairly quickly but not super fast. He can still use it to shoot lasers but at the cost of using it as defense. Finally, if he uses any of his powers too much he gets a god awful migraine and can't use them any more until he recovers.

Ticky otherwise retains his superior to human levels of endurance, pain tolerance, speed, and stamina.

What this all adds up to is that Ticky can still rip off limbs fairly easily, or take out hearts, but he won't be invulnerable while he tries to get close enough to do so. He will have a considerable advantage against slower short range opponents and a weakness to long range or very fast ones. He is pretty much useless in a group setting because his only defense abilities are for himself (and those aren't terribly great), and the only help he can offer is if he manages to get close enough to one-hit kill things.

Requirements - Offensive:

Below is the outline of the maximum your character should function at. It's fine to be weaker, but if you find yourself thinking that your character can easily dispatch at least one beast, or that fighting two at a time might not be an incredibly stupid idea, you're doing it wrong.

The assumption is that even a powercapped character is still significantly more dangerous than an ordinary character. Assume that these beasts would eat perfectly normal folks for breakfast.

• Beasts should be hard!


• You can (generally) kill one beast by yourself with moderate injury or three beasts in a group of four with minor injury.


• If you try to kill more than one beast successively you will take rather serious injury


• If you try to kill beasts when you are out numbered (unless they are things that are weak but attack in numbers) you will probably lose someone or least most people in the group will take pretty serious damage.

Requirements - Defensive:

This does doesn't refer so much to an offensive character's ability to defend themselves, but rather things like white mage abilities: healing spells, defensive spells, natural regeneration and so on.

• Healers should never be able to fully keep up with the amount of damage the fighters are taking.


• Rather than having a healer heal whole person, try to focus healing skills on single wounds. A good rule of thumb is one major wound, or three medium wounds, or five minor wounds a day.
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• Passive regeneration abilities should be limited so that a character can lose a fight, but don't need to disappear all together.


• Defensive and status magics should only maintain for a limited amount of time, and be castable a limited number of times.

The bottom line here is that the GAME should be hard for all characters involved. So must as no one can easily fight the stronger beasts and win, healing and defensive types should not be able to easily keep everyone in perfect health.

❧ Ordinary Humans

But wait, you say. My character is a badass gang fighter in his world, but he's still just an ordinary kid. Does that mean he'll be totally useless?

First, no. While it would be a very bad idea for such a person to go fighting solo, in a group or with a partner he can absolutely still be helpful.

Secondly, your character is no longer limited by their canon abilities. He has the option of finding a god to make a deal with for more power. Pretty much every god should offer something along the lines of stat bonuses, magical items, or magical power. These all come with either a negative side effect or a very high up front cost. But if your character is looking for power to be more useful, he can definitely find it.

❧ Magic and Magical Items

Magical items, like characters, are power limited. You are welcome to have your character bring along their sword of +100 death killing, so long as you realize that for the purposes of the game it's probably more like +5.

Whether or not magic itself works depends on how your canon handles magic. If it is a general "draws on the power of water/fire/spirits", then it should fine. All basic elements are present in Thusia. If it draws on the power of nature, the magic may even have a boost (be easier to cast/faster to recover) due to the level it has overtaken the world.

If your magic system requires something specific such as aer, fonons, or the presence of a specific deity, then you have the option of finding a god whose domain is close enough that they could provide a way for you to re-establish your magic, however, the only way to get something this pricey and permanent from a god is to become their priest or priestess.

If there are any questions, please direct them to the FAQ.

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