BCZ Retrospective VIII: Rush Powers.

The next two pages of Genre Powers are cleanly divided into four categories with unique mechanics, each having three Powers. Looking at the final result, you'd think that was my plan from the beginning, but that is not the case.

While writing new Powers, I started to try out new mechanics (such as powering them up when at high Tension or by spending Energy) and lumped all of them together with the General Powers in a common pile. It wasn't until I had 4-5 Powers of each new mechanic that I realized I could group them up and have six of each.

And that became the plan for the expansion: To include six Rush Powers, six Boost Powers and six Limit Powers (Restoration Powers either didn't exist yet). As you can probably imagine from looking at the list of Powers actually printed in the expansion, things turned out a little bit differently.

There weren't enough effects worth spending your Energy, waiting for Tension 5, and even less of them were worth spending your next Action in advance. It was disappointing to cut so many of them and I figured I'd go back to having just three pages of General Powers again.

Flash forward a few weeks and, after doing some testing on the rest of the expansion mechanics, I thought of writing Powers specifically made to help builds using the weaker Upgrades and Weapons in the game. I immediately wrote down two Restoration Powers and then looked again at my Power list. I had 14 of 18 Powers ready, I only needed four more. There was also a problem in that some of them were very wordy. Repeating the rules for, say, spending future Actions easily doubled the length of each of those Power's rules text. Those four Powers would read a lot cleaner if I made them part of a larger category and explained their unique mechanics at the top of the page... And I needed exactly four more Powers to have a full set of 18. From there, it didn't take long for me to realize that, if I could write one more good Power for each of these new mechanics, I could make four categories of three Powers each and kill two birds with one stone. Er, four birds, really.

And that's the story behind Rush, Restoration, Boost and Limit Powers. Now let's have a look at the first batch:

Go, Funnels!
This was the last of the Rush Powers to be written, after I decided to have three of them rather than two. Remotes are the one category of Weapons that has a specific Power instead of a specific General Upgrade to build around them. For most people, Remote Weapons mean combos with multiple attacks per turn, which would be a terrible passive ability to give to anyone, not because it is bad but because it is too good. Multiple attacks means you're playing the game twice as much as anyone else, of course that is imbalanced. Spending one Genre Point and your next Action, however, turns it from an insurmountable and constant advantage to a burst of damage that can turn around a losing fight or seal the deal when you're already winning.

Lightspeed Assault
This was the second of the bunch to get made. Also, it is a Commission. The request was to have a Power that would let the user do a Zero Shift from Zone of Enders. That was basically an attack disguised as a Power, so I thought of stealing the mechanic from Twin Strike below to spend your Action as a balancing cost. At the same time, I had been trying out a Weapon based on the idea of charging at one enemy multiple times (you know when anime characters turn into meteors and ram each other or one of them rams the other a bunch of times? That) but it wasn't quite working out. I fused the ideas together into one Power. It took a while to balance it but the ability to dash through one enemy multiple times is super cool and makes the Power much more useful than the original idea, which was basically just a Line that moved the user when Attacking.

Twin Strike (Specialist)
The most basic form of the 'attack twice this turn' Powers and the first of them to get made. There are many Weapons in the game that combo well together (the flavor text includes one such combo) so I thought that allowing people to use them at the same time at the cost of missing on their next Turn could be a good tradeoff. And... That's it. No, there's not much of a story to this one. It is pretty clear-cut.

And that's Rush Powers. I think they're okay, with Lightspeed Assault being the clear winner in a pure optimization contest. You have no idea how many versions of it we went through to make sure it was both good at cleaning up Grunts and damaging Bosses without being overpowering to one or the other, so it damn better be good! I think Twin Strike and especially Go, Funnels! could be slightly stronger to make the turn trading more appealing (like, say, give them an Advantage to the Tests, or let the Remotes ignore Active Defenses or something like that), but they're not bad per se. When you already have your core kit of Powers, being able to use two Attacks in place of one is super handy in emergency situations.

Next: Restoration Powers.

Gimmick Out.