   Negative impact of positive benefits
  What are peoples opinions of applying negative impacts for the use of certain abilites.  for example the character who has the regeneration ability can completely regenerate every cell in their body instantly healing any and all injuries hower using this ability causes the character to age seven years. Some abilites would exact a perment toll on the character who uses them other tempory but potentially lasting consequences.   -----------------------------------------------------"Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own."Current Design project: Ambitions Slave  
  I think its an excellent system.  It already exists in many senses - many action games have all weapons and locomotive systems draw from a common power or heat supply, meaning that an overemphasis on movement costs your attack abilities, or otherwise.This would be a good alternative to coming up with ammo systems or mutual exclusivities in a gameplay.  Want to use your cloaking device?  Sure, but you''re blind while its in use.  Your jetpack?  Yeah, but it hurts.  So you can use both at once, but its gonna suck. ;  That is commonly implemented but at short term. If the game was an rpg where you age and fight constantly, maybe 7 years is too much. Most people would rather save and load, unless it''s one of those games where you save and exit only.I think long lasting penalties it''s cool, if it''s implemented nicely. But so many things could go wrong. You have to be sure that if every penalty that is posible is applied to the player, he still can win. Even if it''s hard as hell, as long as it''s posible.Thinking about that, there could be a game where instead of gaining abilities throught the game you would lose em. We could say you start an adventure game with near god status, and the more you use your abilities you keep losing them. So if you keep throught the entire game using human habilities when you got to the final boss you could wipe his ass easily with your mighty powers. ;  These abilities would not be for every day use.  Things like regeneration would be a character''s ace in the hole, the kind of thing you use when the chips are down and you''ve got no other way out.  After all if the player finds themself relying on these kinds of abilities then they arn''t going to last long any way.   -----------------------------------------------------"Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own."Current Design project: Ambitions Slave   ;  I guessed that is what you meant, my last paragraph is about an idea that came with your post But now, I have been thinking about MMORPGs and players know exactly what they are going to fight. Honestly I don''t like it. If you are fighting against another player you can tell his level by the clothes he is wearing and with the level you can guess what magic or weapons he is using, since there is no variety (if you are lvl 10 there is a sword that is stronger than the one you can use when you are lvl9, but weaker than that of a lvl11) althrought there should be variety, that''s another thing to discuss that I don''t want to bring to this topic.If every player were to be given one of these special abilities with serious long term(not necesarily permanent but some could be) penalties, and you could choose it at the beginning, it would give another aspect of mystery to the game, tought you could almost bet that your oponent won''t use his special ability, but still it would add something new. ;  It''s a good system because it makes the player think about performing the positive benefit (eg, turning invisible) on a case-per-case basis and seeing what would be better, turning invisible or preserving energy levels, rather than just blindly doing it every time.   Red Sodium;  I only like it if it is truly a last ditch effort and the player will only need it very rarely unless they play poorly.  As was mentioned above,most players would reload rather than be stuck with a long term/permanent crippling attribute unless there was no other way around it.    tj963 