New Devotion: Puissance (nWOD VTR LARP)

By combining their supernatural vigor with unyielding resilience the power of a vampire’s strikes shifts from inhuman to downright unearthly. Able to strike with enough force to batter apart even the most stalwart defenses, an individual able to bring their unearthly might to bear becomes a truly unstoppable force.

Prerequisite: Vigor •••••, Resilience•••••
Cost: 1 Willpower. Before activating this power the kindred must have their Vigor and Resilience active; this power builds upon the foundation of their supernatural strength and endurance. If either of those powers are deactivated for any reason this power is also deactivated.

Dice Pool: This power requires no roll to activate.
Action: Reflexive
Upon activation of this power the vampire's form undergoes a subtle transformation. Imbued with the unholy strength of their Vitae, their Brawl and Melee attacks deal aggravated damage. While the character's body has been hardened to withstand the massive forces being inflicted weapons cannot be constructed to do so and suffer an equal amount of damage, quickly being destroyed.
This power remains active until the end of the scene unless Vigor, Resilience, or this power itself are ended prematurely.
This power costs 30 experience points to learn.

~~*~~

This power is an example of a fundamental principle I have regarding spells and special abilities. In short; published rulebooks demonstrate the cheapest, most effective, and most common form of a power. By making abilities available through alternate paths it makes the suite of abilities of antagonists much harder to predict easily. This is especially true of mechanically simple abilities such as, in this case, increasing the class of damage. The ability to make paths to a given ability less predictable adds interest because it makes builds with specific outcomes less uniform. This is of particular interest in a LARP, where every other player is potentially an antagonist for other players and ending up with a single build all players must target to be effective in a certain capacity becomes intensely boring and can unbalance a game, particularly when such central powers are limited to a specific faction by default.

The first limitation is, more technically, the cost to obtain a power. A cheaply obtained power will appear on far more character sheets than it should, as it becomes a more direct path to a given effect than the published power. This power, in fact, cuts directly to the point; the cost for this power alone is equal to the in-clan cost to get the same effect. There is virtually no reason a character able to get this power at the favored cost would get this power instead. For out of clan characters it is more cost effective, saving 12 experience points... assuming they were already going for a the 5x5 build required as a prerequisite. This is a fairly niche and, since at least one of those powers will almost certainly be out of clan, exceedingly expensive build to have as a baseline. So, saving less than half of the cost to get the core power doesn't seem like an enormous break.

The second limitation, reducing the effectiveness of a power, can be difficult. There are two main levers to use and generally it requires leaning to some degree on both. The first is of these two levers is directly removing power. Sometimes, as with the translation from the cannon Claws of the Wild to the custom Puissance, it's as easy as stripping off extra bonuses. In this case, removing the bonus to attacks and climbing. Depending on the power, the work needed to remove power and keep the core concept may be more or less possible. For some powers, especially exceedingly focused or low level powers, this simply isn't possible because all that exists is the core function and very little room even within that to make adjustment. For example, a spell providing a small (+1 to +3) flat bonus and no other effects is both exceedingly boring and impossible to significantly adjust. In this case, rather than take this reduction in effectiveness as part of the overall power balance, I traded it in for flavor, allowing weapons to be used (and destroyed). The second lever is to adjust the effect as related to the cost to obtain it. Basically, increase the power's activation cost. In this case I've also done a mild version of that by "increasing" the cost from Vitae to Willpower. In doing this I've shifted to a resource that is treated as less plentiful and harder to refresh. The requirement of the prerequisite powers being activated doesn't factor significantly in this calculation because they are likely to be activated in conjunction regardless. Though, if a power that was unlikely to be used in the same situation, or directly disadvantageous to activate, was a required that would certainly count. The analysis here is less concrete than simple xp cost by path comparisons. However, the goal is that, by adding the two levers together, you create a power that retains the core function, and thus utility, but loses some of the "extras" of the original. The result being that it is overall less efficient but not unusable.

The third feature, these "recycled" powers being less common, is largely handled by the first two. Because a custom power is less economical fewer players will find it worthwhile to build around or towards that path than the cheaper version. This innately reduces its prevalence not only in lore but, more importantly for a player's actual experience, in the game. However, by making this option available for these alternate builds you create fewer "dead ends" because they lack access to a specific experience-changing rule.