Thoughts on powercells

Today I have been playing around with the rules for backgrounds and the concept of powercells caused some issues. Two aspects of powercells in particular were potentially problematic but I hope I have managed to sort them both out...

Under the original rules, powercells were ancient pieces of technology that powered everything that used advanced technology. They were linked to the Gate network in that they stored and channelled gate energies. While new devices that used them could be created easily enough, the method to create powercells themselves was lost. This meant that what powercells existed were all that ever would exist and they were all so old that they were inefficient - most of them only managing to power a device for one use before burning out and needing to be recharged.

This allowed there to be a limit on the use of devices, especially the powerful and potentially game breaking energy weapons - you had one shot per powercell. It also meant that 'the powercell' could be used as the basis of a currency because they were a fixed, non-renewable resource. Therefore, in those cultures that used barter, prices of things were expressed in terms of 'powercells' and there was an exchange between that and the other currencies.

Under the old rules, characters had 12 points to spend on backgrounds and powercells cost 1 each.

Now, under the new rules I have decided to keep the system the same for backgrounds as it is for skills which means that you only get 5 backgrounds. Under this sytem it is clear that 1 powercell per point is far too expensive and most players will probably be torn between gaining extra rank or reputation or a legacy or facility and getting extra shots for their flangy weapon... which also has to be purchased from that smaller pool of points. So, to resolve this (hopefully - and comments are requested to see what people think of this) I have decided to allow 4 powercells per point. This is a massive increase in the number available, especially when you add in the second point I am going to talk about next...

The second issue was based on in game actions. At the end of the last campaign, the gate network was made more efficient due to the choices the players made (which are FOIPy for various reasons). It therefore stands to reason that if the gate network is working better then the powercells are also going to be working better... Therefore, powercells are now capable of holding more energy and recharging quicker.

I decided to go with double the amount of energy stored which means that powercells will power a device twice where they used to power it once. Potentially this means a starting character could, in theory, begin with an energy weapon doing through damage (1 background point) and 16 powercells giving them 32 shots before they need to recharge their cells. That is quite a lot but I think that it is fine because many won't get so many (preferring to spend points on other things) and even if they did single through is not as bad as double through or triple through (each costing 2 and 3 of the background points respectively). Though I may consider tweaking these numbers a little to see what works.

As for recharging, under the old system powercells recharged overnight if you were by a gate (i.e. there was a gate phys rep on site). In other words, no matter when you used your powercell, it would have charged by Time In the next morning (made it easier than having to count and keep track of every hour since it was used...) which basically gave you one use of each powercell per day. If not near a gate they took a week to recharge (effectively meaning once per event). The change I have decided to implement here is to say that the cells recharge overnight no matter where you are (whether there is a gate phys rep on site or not) unless there is some IC situation which prevents it. You can also achieve faster recharging (an hour) if you leave the spent cells exposed to the gate radiations. This means leaving them lying on the ground within half a metre of the gate and not covered by anything. There is potential there for players to have to either risk losing their cells to thieves or stand guard over them while they charge...

Anyway, these are my main thoughts on powercells at the moment. Any comments or suggestions?