A problem that often crops up in higher TL games which feature any form of special abilities built from advantages is that Innate Attack and its counterpart Damage Resistance seem to be way overpriced in comparison to what you can easily attain with off-the-shelf gear. This most recently came up for me when assisting one of my players build a robot character for the Hidden Suns campaign.
With the Can’t Wear Armor limitation, the character would have had to invest a whopping 90 of his 330 points to get the same level of protection as other player’s characters would for no point cost and just spending 1/10 of the campaign starting wealth on widely-available suit of armor. Even when slapping on the appropriate Gadget limitations bringing the total modifier to -75%, that’s still 38 points. It was similar with his built-in weapon, where it would have cost 75 points in order to perform exactly the same as a commonly available piece of gear.
I decided to solve this case relatively simple. Since both abilities essentially emulated easily available gear, I priced each of them as an Accessory perk. Because the cost of such gear is not trivial, I still required the character to pay the appropriate monetary cost. The caveat is of course that these two items can be temporarily forcibly removed from the character in the same manner as the gear they represent, but that fits with the way in which the abilities are “skinned”. The DR is simply an outer layer of plating, which could be stripped from the robot with the same amount of effort as a sealed suit of armor from a man. It’s similar with the built-in weapon, which isn’t as much built-in as just attached to the robot’s arm on a mount.
I actually already solved a similar problem earlier in the same manner. Instead of including Infravision into the android racial template as the full-priced advantage, I included it simply as an Accessory. Infrared contact lenses are cheap and commonly available in the setting.
While I’m perfectly happy to use this approach with things such as robots and cybernetics, I’m not quite willing to use it for modeling supernatural abilities (magic, psionics, etc). Funny, because it’s primarily a “look and feel” issue.
Anyway, my second solution is to give all Innate Attacks a free level of the Armor Divisor enhancement corresponding to the most common armor divisor of weapons in the setting. This can sometimes be tricky to adjudicate if you use multiple “families” of weapons available at a specific TL, for example high-energy lasers and gauss guns are both TL10 weapons, yet the former have armor divisor (2) while the latter have (3).
As for Damage Resistance, I let 5 character points buy more than 1 point of DR, again depending on the campaign “average” values. The simplest solution is a multiplier with the same value as the free armor divisor granted to Innate Attack. An alternative would be to grant free levels of the Hardened enhancement, but I don’t like this approach because DR from gear doesn’t have Hardened and having multiple layers of DR with different levels of Hardened complicates damage calculations. The two approaches also cause different interactions with other enhancements, which is something that needs to be kept in mind. Both Innate Attack and Damage Resistance should ideally be modified in the same way, so I’m actually inclined to change my approach and instead of granting a free Armor Divisor to Innate Attack, I’d let 5 character points (in case of Burning Attack, appropriately scaled for other types) buy more than 1d of damage, just as with DR.
The above approach is relatively simple, but can still produce too expensive results. For finer calibration, I think it would be better to base the cost on the level of “threat” expected to be encountered in the campaign. If we take TL3 as a baseline (which I personally find as a sweet spot in the terms of damage and DR numbers) where damage is usually (eyeballing) 1d – 3d at TL3 and say that the Innate Attack and Damage Resistance prices are ok, then if the damage is usually 12d – 16d in for example a TL10 campaign (including the effects of armor divisor), 5 points in Damage Resistance or Burning Attack would give 7 DR or 7d damage.
I am sure a “default” multiplier could be calculated for each TL by analyzing the values for damage and DR present in equipment available at that TL. It could also be fine-tuned for each campaign, since “threat” can vary due to other, setting or campaign style specific factors.
Lair Of The Chaotic GM 