Question about Phasing Power

[ElFailzalot]

It's balanced very well, not in the 'everything is equal' sense that most often comes with the word 'balanced' but in the 'everything can be countered' sense.

I'm bringing this up again, because it illustrates in one sentence what I'm about to try and point out in more detail.


A laser gun, a flintlock pistol and a bazooka are all the same. Yes, okay, they sure are. Fundamentally, they all do the same thing, shoot at range and make things hurt. When it comes to phasing, that suddenly isn't the case. Right? .....uh, yeah, kinda. In order to keep the power balanced, it has downsides, just like every other power. The other powers all have the same effect regardless of move descriptions because...that's their intended purpose. You're still there, just moving quickly/disappearing and reappearing somewhere else/whatever instead of turning into a ghost. The powers work differently, that's how it's intended.

See, that's cool. That's fine, in those original canons where those things happen. Except that's deliberately not the case here, because Omni (the character, and the person who made the site) said otherwise.

And no, players shouldn't have to consider buying an entirely new move to counter one specific power. Because they don't have to. Use your environment. Wait out for them to unphase and try to attack you. Run away. Get creative, and don't just beat your face against a wall, or explicitly buy moves to counter one specific scenario that is, as said, not very used.

And yes, sure, like you said, someone who uses fire with all their moves can damage someone who's phasing at all times. If they can hit them. Just like fighting someone who's not using phasing. And anyone who's fast enough to effectively use the 'almost instantaneous' part of phasing as a real attempt at defense is probably going to be more than fast enough to effectively dodge conventionally, and use more energy conservative measures in the first place. Especially against someone who has the capacity to damage them either way.

And yes, again, in all other cases a bolt of lightning, or a spear of rock, or a fireball, or a gust of wind or a bullet or a thrown javelin or a beam of focused light are all the same, and their effects are more or less mechanically identical. Great, super, none of them are any stronger over the other, none of them have any specific advantage over any of the other moves. They're all ranged things that hit and do something, usually painful, to the thing they hit. Hey, sometimes that might be something incorporeal that they just pass through. That's just a fact of the omniverse, and a part of the balance of it. Some people are going to be able to ghost through certain attacks and objects and exhaust themselves to gain that slight advantage, some people are going to be able to damage them regardless of whether they ghost or not.

Nothing is perfect, everything can be countered.