Guide Vortigaunt Powers

[Smarmy]

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In our setting we want vortigaunts to be more powerful that traditional HL2 RPs. As such we’ve decided to make them strong. As a result it’s important to understand that vortigaunt powers come with a cost. If your vortigaunt over uses their power they may lose connection to the vortessence and be unable to use their powers either temporarily or permanently. This document will be explaining some of those dangers. Keep in mind it’s very hard to dictate these costs through text alone and without context of the RP situation. While you’re roleplaying staff members will be using /pev to better give you an understanding of how your vortigaunt is fairing.

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Connection to the vortessence.

In our canon the connection to the vortessence can be disabled with radio jammer like devices. Your vortigaunt should be able to tell there’s one in effect. They must work with everyone else to find a way to disable it before they can use their powers. This is part of balancing how strong we will make vorts, and should lead to better RP.

As a vortigaunt you have connection to the vortessence. This is a magical like power that can do a wide range of things. Further below we’ll give a greater understanding of what we’ll allow you to do. However, it’s important we first talk about the IC consequences of over use of the vortessence.

Consider your connection to the vortessence to how tired you are. The more you use it the harder it’ll be to do other things. In real life if you push too hard while too tired it could permanently injure you. We want that to be absolutely clear in using vortigaunt powers. If you push yourself to the limits a few things can happen. One, your vortigaunt becomes physically ill for an extended amount of time to the point of extreme disability. If pushed far enough one might be permanently disabled, or even die. Two, your connection to the vortessence may be disabled. For an extended amount of time you’ll be unable to use your powers. In extreme cases you will never be able to use said powers again. Just like in the first example you may also have your character die.

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Healing.

Your vortigaunt should be able to take care of wounds like a normal doctor can. This shouldn’t be straining unless used constantly for an extended time over multiple people. You’re welcome to risk harm to your vortigaunt by making your healing more powerful. At the most extreme you’d be able to trade your character’s life for someone else. Do note, this isn’t always possible based on the type of injury and you’d have to ask staff before doing this. We want to give you access to do this to create a tragic tail of self sacrifice.

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Vort Beams.

While your powers will be compared to a gun here it’s important know they’re still mechanically different. For example, you will instantly cauterize wounds, and fry eletronics with easy where a gun will not. At little cost you should be able to be no functionally different than a shotgun in lethality. Once you go past 4-5 uses of this expect your vortigaunt to struggle. If you really want to risk your vortigaunts safety you could even disable a heavily armored unit like an APC or other combine cyborgs. Expect to be unable to use your vortigaunt powers for an fair amount time merely just doing this once. At its peak you’d not only disable them, but burn them to a crisp. Expect your powers to be severed and severe disability to do basic tasks.

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Telekinesis.

For balancing reasons we can’t let you use this directly in pvp. It would be the ultimate killing machine. Reliably you should be able to use telekenisis on targets similar to the weight of your vortigaunt. Lifting something double the weight of your vortigaunt would likely incur great risk. At peak you could potentially lift something four times the weight of your vortigaunt, but guarantee your character severed from the vortessence. Keep in mind the further something away is, the greater the difficulty in doing so.

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Animal/plant connection.

In some canons Vortigaunts have the ability to control other xen creatures using the Vortessence. We want to avoid this as it makes it hard to run events with xen creatures. You do not have the power to control other xen creatures, for example, antlions.

Vortigaunts have the ability to translate their words into thoughts another animal can understand using the vortessence. One should NOT expect an animal to be easily reasoned with. Other animals are of varying and often lesser intelligence. If you want to have cordial relationships with a xen animal you’ll have to coax it, and convince it. You should consider this as having a greater ability to express your emotions to another animal.

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Teleporting.

Immediately there is the stipulation that you must ask a staff member before using this. We want to give you agency to be creative, but a power this reality destroying can quickly ruin a story. For example, a risky long distance teleport to the middle of nowhere would require us to set up a new map and potentially toss out story lines. We largely intend for teleports to be well planned parts of stories, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them on the fly. We’d prefer you use them in well thought ideas where you worked with other players to mitigate the risks.

You cannot teleport to where an active vortessence jammer is.

All teleporting can easily be detected by the combine. There is an extended time requirement for one to initiate the teleport. The faster you want it done the greater your risk is. If you do something incredibly fast expect to face total severance or you might even end up on the xen plane. The safe teleport should take about 30 minutes of IC time to complete. We can cut down on this for the sake of narrative convenience if needed.

Because we want teleporting to be used sparingly the upfront cost for the most basic of uses will be high. If you use your teleporting as a last result to escape combat expect the extremely high likelihood of total severance with the vortessence. This isn’t to punish you, it’s to show truly how desperate and dire things were. Being able to skirt out of every dangerous encounter with teleporting would ruin a lot of the fun.

We will have the cost of using well planned our narrative uses of teleporting be dramatically lower. All teleports will largely diminish one’s capacity to use the vortessence for a couple of hours. The more things and people you’re bringing, and the longer the distance you’re going will cause more of an impedance on your connection to the vortessence. The longer the distance you’re teleporting expect the teleport to have much less precision. It will also be more difficult if one has not already been there in person.