amadine: (Default)
Sabetha Belacoros ([personal profile] amadine) wrote in [community profile] synodiporia_ooc 2017-03-06 02:24 am (UTC)

I actually disagree with most of this, for a few reasons. First, both of those skills require a pretty significant investment - Liminal Severance is 6 skills deep, and Psychic Severance is 7. Assuming someone arrows straight for one of them along the shortest path and doesn't take anything else, that's minimum 3-6 months of work for the former, and 4-7 months of work for the latter, depending on how often they manage to make double AC (and find a skill teacher) and assuming they don't straight up miss skill during any of those months. You're already looking at something that should be pretty shiny, just based on the time commitment required.

Second, having a couple of potent skills boosted by the number of skills you have in the applicable tree seems like a pretty fitting reward for focusing primarily on that tree. It's essentially giving people the option to either be versatile (by focusing on Jaunt skills, or by splitting their focus across a subset of Jaunt/Liminal/Psychic/Favor), or to potentially do a limited section of things very well. Characters who've already been skilled to focus on one aspect do have a bit of an advantage, but that seems like a fair trade off for the loss of flexibility.

Third, if someone like Matthew had Liminal Severance and decided to use it, the target would be cut off from Liminal Space for 23 hours. That's less than a day. Even Armin, if he hit someone with Psychic Severance, wouldn't cut them off for more than a day and a half (slightly less, actually, if I'm not miscounting). In a game that runs in real time, that isn't all that long - it'd essentially mean that someone couldn't use those powers in a small handful of threads. It wouldn't even bar them from using them for a whole mingle, unless there was a particularly time-compressed Jaunt going on.

It's also only usable once per week, so once it's used, it's used - it's not like someone could spam it to keep a target locked down for days or weeks at a time. (Unless they bought a half dozen uses of Liminal/Psychic Power and were willing to blow them all on keeping that one person locked down, which probably isn't going to happen barring the mutually agreed upon culmination of a very antagonistic personal plot arc.)

I do think a skill to unsever someone would be a neat addition, though. Not because I think either version of Severance is actually overpowered, but because it'd be a cool addition to the game, especially when we've had a character come temporarily unglued from Liminal Space and the Network once before, meaning there's IC motiviation to figure out how to undo that in the future in place already.

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