Is anyone else annoyed by Physical Immunity?

[Sanctaphrax]

Well, if Toughness in general is poorly balanced, then this entire conversation looks a bit silly.

But point taken.

Still, I think that 1 refresh is reasonable for removing the need for sleep. As far as I know, there is nothing in the game that is balanced by the need for rest. So it's basically just narrative.

[ways and means]

Your forgetting general fatigue which a gm can pull on players in any situation or the fact that they are never limited by endurance and so can keep going forever.

[toturi]

The people who don't think the game is balanced play it like it D&D, where everyone makes one piddly attack, and all stats are taken at face value.

In this game, a beat cop can kill a supernatural monster by having enough fate points and/or stacking aspects.

I think the beat cop killing a supernatural monster by having enough FPs + stacking Aspects is taking all stats at face value. Aspects and FPs are part of the character's stats.

[Silverblaze]

@Sanctaphrax: Okay, you have me there. Someone would want to play Superman. I'm pretty sure concepts like that don't have the longevity that a similar concept with some level of toughness instead would.

@Silverblaze: I had some similar thoughts but hadn't really formed them well enough to write down. My basic thought was to do like some other games do and segregate it out into several separate areas and powers associated with those areas. If you wanted to be immune to a bunch of things you'd buy multiple powers.

Agreed...100%

That's how PI should work...a seperate power or powers granting those immunities. 

[Sanctaphrax]

General fatigue has never seemed like an important limitation to me.

I mean, how often do players actually get told, "you need to rest now" for reasons other than clearing stress/consequences?

[sinker]

I guess it depends on how gritty/realistic you play your games. To be honest that's not something I've run into a lot either, but endurance over the long run (not within a scene) is 2/3 of the power. Thus I'd guess that the author felt that is worth 4 refresh (that being 2/3 of the cost of mythic recovery). I'd certainly not say that being able to remove between 1 and 3 mild consequences per scene is worth 1 refresh per consequence.

[Belial666]

General fatigue has never seemed like an important limitation to me.

I mean, how often do players actually get told, "you need to rest now" for reasons other than clearing stress/consequences?

Didn't you put us into a scene where it was hard/impossible to normally rest and you wanted the environment to slowly tire us out? That would have been a good place for Recovery powers to work.

[Lanir]

Not familiar with the game Belial666 mentions but it's been my experience that the ability to keep going or endure harsh environments in a semi-realistic fashion (ie, it saps your resources, etc.) only happens in games when the GM makes a specific challenge of it. I've played characters with higher than normal endurance before in games and it basically just never came up. Even on the rare occasion where I might have engineered some use for it or reminded the GM that we'd been traveling nonstop all day and might be tired, the other players weren't very supportive because it would have felt like they were arbitrarily being penalized because the GM would have never considered it if I hadn't had an endurance trick.

DFRPG handles this a lot better than many previous systems. It's an after the fact roll with penalties based on previous activity levels rather than one of those godawful accounting messes you can occasionally find in other RPGs. But the reality is a lot of people either aren't going to think of it in their games if it's not a specific part of the challenge, or they're going to remember all those old kludges from other game systems and not want to touch it with the proverbial 10 foot pole.

[Tedronai]

Which, when at least one character has spent considerable resources being awesome at exactly that scenario, is what we call Bad GMing (tm).
Kind of like if a character had spent considerable resources on being an awesome sniper...only to find that the campaign was going to consist almost entirely of social interaction, investigation, and close-in brawls.

[Sanctaphrax]

That was based on the lack of a chance to recover from stress, not simple exhaustion. Then again, all of you had some level of recovery. So it made little difference.

On another note, my players have been getting a lot of use out of their Endurance skill lately. I use it as the default defence against environmental attacks.

[Drachasor]

Physical Immunity seems to be both too expensive and too cheap.

If you want something like being immune to lightning, then it seems too expensive.  However, when you are going for a more straight-up immunity to all physical stress, then it is far too cheap compared to toughness (or recovery though I agree recovery has other benefits).

I mean, they peg a Fire Demon, iirc, as having this as a +3 because I guess you'd have to research it is immune to fire or something.  +3 is pretty insanely expensive...that's equivalent to Evocation or Ritual in cost, but the benefit is far smaller.  I mean sure, Fire Immunity would be a bit handy against Harry, but he has lots of other ways of kicking ass.  And heck, even a Pyromancer could still hurt something immune to fire, since that doesn't make you immune to COLD (which is essentially part of fire, at least in the traditional element system).

Overall, it is a problematic ability.  I think it is generally best to consider it a Plot Ability rather than an actual option.