Friday, February 1, 2013

SA 2.0 Dev Blog Post #5: Healing with Energy

Apology

  I admit that I had said that I was going to do wraith energy next, and I am. It's even mostly written. But I wanted to add something as an aside that plays into damage, death and dying. I wanted to talk about a small change to healing with energy because of how it plays in to the dying process.

What it is now

  There are a few things weird about healing with energy currently. It takes 1 minute if you're conscious to spend as much energy as you want to heal 1 for 1 with health. If you're unconscious it takes 10 minutes, costs 1 energy, and heals one point. In my experience at game, I've never seen anyone use this method to heal. Either one. Weird huh?

What it will be

  What we wanted to add was a way to clear this up and make it work one way. This is done with what we are calling a Regeneration rate. Shifters have a base rate of 2, wraiths and vampires have a base rate of 1. Humans have a base rate of 0. The idea here is that after 1 minute of inactivity you can spend energy to heal your regeneration rate of health. This means that if you stop fighting for a 60 seconds break you can heal a bit. It also means that once you're at 0 health you have a minute after which you will automatically spend your energy to heal and get back up.
  It's very much like it was with a couple of small changes:
1) Shifters heal faster than anyone else, because, they do.
2) Supernaturals trigger your auto heal at 1 minute instead of 10 minutes. This leaves less time lying on the ground and less time for an opponent to find a way to kill you before you're ready to kill them again.
3) It is a number that can be increased or decreased by powers and fetishes.
4) It replaces the vagueness and metagaming aspect of the current regenerate power with a specific time period at which you get back up.
5) Throwing a supernatural into a fire won't guarantee their death. They may just get up 60 seconds later and be really, really mad.

There are a few other changes which we expect will cause more people to want to use energy to heal instead of using other methods. A shifter's regeneration rate is only twice as expensive as healing touch but can be done on their own.

Why?

  The simple answer is that we don't like the 10 minute wait. It's too long to be sitting there in limbo. With this rule you'll know after a minute if you can expect to live or not. Plus, if someone wants to burn you out, they've got to be ready to do it right away. No time to run and get friends.
  This is also really what the regenerate power probably should have been anyway to be a balanced power. The "pick your time" nature ended up being super cheesy and immediately generally isn't very useful. This means that if someone really wants to jump you and kill you, again, they can. But in a sprawling combat, you'll probably make it back into the fray. This also means that any delays in killing someone with additional health can seriously hurt your chances to pull off the kill successfully. Unless you have 5 people burning you out at once. Then, again, you're pretty screwed.

4 comments:

  1. I love the idea that innate regeneration is finally going to be useful. If someone doesn't regenerate exactly after 60 seconds, I assume they can still regenerate at any time after that before they die?

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  2. That's a really good question. But the answer is actually no. The regeneration automatically happens at 60 seconds. If it doesn't it's only because the target is out of energy, or wants to die. Either way, the path is the same. This does NOT allow someone to pick when they regenerate. It's automatic at 1 minute.

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  3. So sorry for hitting this thread after my response to #10. That's what I get for trying to read the most current material first.

    So the above addresses most of my concern raised on regenerate in blog post #10, which was really in response to blog post #3 or some such...confused yet?

    The major difference, is that I was proposing the above as the real Regenerate power. And the innate started the 10 min wait.

    So with the above are we saying the actual Regenerate power is gone and there is just the innate regeneration?

    I also still stand by my comment in Blog #10, item (2), in that even a human, just beaten to hell on the side of the road, but with no actual intent to be killed, should have a way of regaining consciousness, even if they can not further expend energy to heal.

    Again, apologies for the out of order understanding, but I'm almost through all of the blogs. :)

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