Broken Power

[kamikazzijoe]

Has anyone noticed how broken energy absorbtion is? One gigawatt per level of anything you touch. Thats one BILLION jules every second. So in the description when they say 10,000 car batteries, thats 10,000 batteries per second. Thats the power output of an average centralized power station. At first level that kind of power drain would allow this character to cause a north east blackout every time he got near power lines. On a more practical game level he could shut down every robot he touches even with if they have a fusion reactor. It completely negates an entire super power category. Nothing else in the game can do that except the magic item power granting immunity to magic, but that comes with a heavy cost. This doesn't.

[MADMANMIKE]

..First off, it doesn't say you can absorb that in one second, it says that's the maximum amount you can absorb. The broken part is the missing amount of time it takes to absorb that much.

..Second, the average starting character has ony 4 or 5 attacks, which works out to 3.75 to 3 seconds per attack. You'd have to have 15 Attacks per melee for anything you could do to only take one second..

..Third, nobody knows a Gigawatt from a joule. It's a game. All they care about is how much of that electric guy's energy expulsion they can absorb and redirect...

-Mike >8]

[Borast]

What the mad cuban said...

Do you know how many bits in a byte?

How many bytes in a kilobyte (and for the metrically minded out there, it is NOT 1000)?

Can you explain WHY the light turns on when you flip the switch on the wall (and I am not referring to the electrical heating of a tungston filiment...)

Can you prove mathematically that 2+2=4? (it usually takes about 40+ pages of complex calculations)

Can you PROVE that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow? (And the fact that it did today, and every other day since the Earth formed is not proof.)

99.9999%+ of us will not be able to answer most/all of the above questions. However, that does not mean we don't or can't use a computer, turn on a light, use simple math, or enjoy a sunrise...

Just enjoy it! It's Broken...MAYbe they'll fix it (likely not)...if you're the GM, come up with a workable do-around to show the PC that that is his limit of storage, not how much he can draw at once!

[kamikazzijoe]

for the non-engineers out there
A watt by definition is a joule per second making a gigawatt 1 billion joules every second making it a measurement of power not energy.
So the rate of absorbtion is stated in that fact and making a first level character able to 15 billion joules a melee.
The average car battery can give 1200 watts (100 amps* 12 volts) How long it can do that I don't know.

[Reagren Wright]

My only problem with this power is what is the limit? I mean lets say
a APS-Fire guy stands next to him and Super Novas, does they guy
just stand there and yawn? It also bugs me that Bhlaze characters
have this power yet it says they take 1/4 damage from light and
energy attacks, and 1/2 damage from all other energy attacks
Is this a turn on and off power? Any let me get this straight, you
touch a computer and send 3 gigawatts of juice into and its
shorted out for 3D4 melees Definately a power along
with teleport that needs to be updated or at least revised in its
functioning.

[Borast]

For Borast:
3 - The electrical heating of the tungsten filament is important <Ka-SNIPITY> Good enough for ya?

Nope... I was referring to how very few people can explain why the bulb works at all, except to say that the filiment heats to white-hot from the electricity. They can not explain the "back-up" starting at the dam/reactor/electrical plant, all the way up to the switch and light. For a obscenely large percentage of the adult population in the "modern" world, electricity is just so much modern day "magic." (after all, how many supposedly rational adults still place electrical appliances in the washroom, or stick an all-metal fork or butterknife into a plugged-in toaster everyday?

4 - I probably could do this one too, if i remembered squat about doing proofs from all those advanced math courses i took in highschool

Only if you were REALLY advanced...this was one guy's PhD dissertation, and the proofs took something like 40 pages, single spaced, both sides of the sheet.

5 - you cant PROVE this. Not in the sense that most people think of a proof. You could mathematically model the behaviour of the Solar system i suppose, but why you would need to is beyond me. The sun rizes from that direction because of the way the earth rotates. Short of changing the earths rotation, or its placement in the solar system as a whole, there isnt really much proof needed to state that the sun rizes from a particular direction

You can prove anything mathematically... And like I said...Empirical Evidence (ie: waiting for tomorrow) don't cut it!

So there. Got any more sweeping generalizations that i can poke full of holes?

Lots of em... You're just the exception that proves the rule!

[Borast]

My only problem with this power is what is the limit? I mean lets say
a APS-Fire guy stands next to him and Super Novas, does they guy
just stand there and yawn? It also bugs me that Bhlaze characters
have this power yet it says they take 1/4 damage from light and
energy attacks, and 1/2 damage from all other energy attacks
Is this a turn on and off power? Any let me get this straight, you
touch a computer and send 3 gigawatts of juice into and its
shorted out for 3D4 melees Definately a power along
with teleport that needs to be updated or at least revised in its
functioning.

No...the energy absorbtion will not save him from the APS guy's Nova blast...he's still dead. Hell, an invunerable character will still feel that (although not be hurt by it, or the several km of pretending to be a rubber ball that follows immediately thereafter.
Try reading it as "Light Energy" attacks
3Gw of power into ANY computer will (permanently) fry EVERY circuit in it, hardened or no, surge protected or no...that kind of power is going to jump almost ANY surge protection you can think of...however, if the computer is not grounded, and is in a completely ino-conductive envirnoment, you could dump as much energy as you wanted...nothing is going to happen, since ther is nothing to conduct it!

Just another example of "I don't know what I'm writing about. but it sounds kewl to have an unshielded pocket (fission) reactor capable of putting out 1Tw (Terrawatt) of energy!" Sadly, PB is riddled with this sort of writing. (Case in point, the bit about the areas affected by the Super Volcano that erupted in Chaos Earth in Yellowstone...Kevin had Seattle and other coastal areas inundated by a metre (or more) of ash within hours of the eruption, despite the fact that the jetstream (which more or less flows across NA at about that level in December) blows West TO East... Where that to happen, the West Coast MIGHT see a millimetre or two in about two to three weeks, after it circles the globe!

[Borast]

Yup...no research sometimes...

But then Frank Herbert spent six YEARS in research before he wrote word one of the Dune Trilogy.