I've just come up with another question!
Is it possible to pay more than necessary in order to get the Effects you buy to work how you'd like them to?
For example, if I wanted to give a character an Ability that represents their armour, I could give them, let's say, Ongoing Protection 3... but if I also wanted that character to have a Protection 5 shield, according to the discussion I had in this thread previously, there's not really any reasonable way of doing that, since it would mean paying €500 for the shield and €600 for the armour, and €300 of that would be completely wasted...
But, what if instead of buying two separate Abilities called "Armour" and "Shield", I purchased one Ability called "Armour & Shield", and that Ability was Ongoing Protection 5, but the description said that the armour part was actually was only as strong as Protection 3? Would that be allowed? It still costs €200 more that buying them separately and not giving the shield Ongoing... but honestly, in this case I wouldn't even mind, because without Ongoing, Effects aren't supposed to last longer than a few seconds, so technically (even if no judge would ever actually rule it this way) shields shouldn't be able to block attacks that go on for more than a few seconds (e.g. a flamethrower).
To be clear, doing it this way would not give this hypothetical character any sort of narrative or mechanical benefit that a character in ordinary Ongoing Protection 5 armour would not also have.
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Another fantastic example of why this should be allowed is Minions.
In the rules it states that all Minions in a mob must have the same Abilities... and I'm not saying that should be changed or anything... however, it would be a great help if we could purchase Minions with multiple Abilities and then, for narrative purposes, restrict them to using only one (or two, or three, etc.) of those Abilities. Here's an example of what I mean:
Buying 100 Minions with a Removable Damage 2 Ability (e.g. a normal sword) and a Removable, Ranged, Finite Damage 2 Ability (e.g. a bow and quiver of arrows) would cost:
• Minion (300) + Damage 2 (200), Removable (-100) + Damage 2 (200), Ranged (100), Removable (-100), Finite (-100) @ Mob Modifier (x7) = ₡3,500.
[(300 + 100 + 100 = 500) x7 = 3,500] = 3,500
However, buying 50 Minions with only one of those two Abilities, and 50 with only the other of the two would cost:
• Minion (300) + Damage 2 (200), Removable (-100) @ Mob Modifier (x6) + Minion (300) + Damage 2 (200), Ranged (100), Removable (-100), Finite (-100) @ Mob Modifier (x6)} = ₡4,800.
[(300 + 100 = 400) x6 = 2,400] + [(300 + 100 = 400) x6 = 2,400] = 4,800
If necessary, when buying Minions, I would just choose to make all of my Minions super-awesome dual wielders, rather than spending extra Coins in order to make them worse than they'd be if I gave them all extra gear... however, for narrative reasons, it would be nice to be able to make them less elite, so I'd like if we could choose for them to have access to only some of the Abilities purchased for them.
This doesn't just apply to simple things like weapons, of course. For a mere ₡1400, I could give 100 Minions the ability to cast a minor healing spell (excluding the base cost of the Minions)... though in practice I might only want to make a few of them actually be able to use this Ability... unless I was building an army of Paladins, I suppose.
I personally wouldn't mind paying an inflated cost such as that if it meant avoiding the excruciatingly immense costs of purchasing Minions in mobs lower than 100, even if I wasn't actually ever going to make full use of having numerous different Abilities on each and every one of my Minions.
Allowing Effects to work this way would really open up a lot of possibilities... and not allowing Effects to work this way will be guaranteed to result in minmaxing (from me, specifically)... 'cos there's no chance in hell I'm spending an extra ₡1.3k to get something worse than I could get by spending less.
