Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-24993958-20151027072937/@comment-26023629-20151110214821

VedranTheII wrote: @Evravon  It’s simply a matter of perspective. Yes, in a game, you can put rules such as ‘can’t do fatal damage’ or ‘has no friendly fire’ and it can work, but RWBY’s loosely based rules are founded in reality, not games. shoving a bullet IN someone's head is fatal on anyone in reality and RWBY, while in tf2 that only really applies to one class. These kinds of limiters can’t inherently function the way you want them to without watering down semblances till they aren’t useful.

I mean, I love limiters, but how many limiters do you have to put on a semblance before you go “I think the base concept of it was kind of broken…”

Let’s take into account a semblance that manipulates a target’s perception of touch, and only that. General limiters can be aura inherently making it so it costs you more to use than the other one to dismiss, and having 4 other senses to discern reality; these are limiters grounded in reality that work regardless of the type of enemy you fight.

Not being able to fatal damage won’t inherently work as an alternative limiter, because there are multiple ways you can DO fatal damage in the real world. Aside from pain overload, you can cause suffocation by simulating a tickling sensation and making them laugh to death, or give heart attacks by overpumping the body’s movement. So you need a limiter on each.

2 compared to 3 limiters doesn’t sound so bad right? Except the one you made works on all 5 senses. Assuming each of them would require at least 2 limiters on their own, the number of limiters rize to 11. but since it works on all 5 senses that requires more limiters so it you can’t effect them all at once, and then extra limiters so you can’t make an illusion that feels real with what you have, resulting in you having over a dozen limiters on one semblance, just because you wanted it to be able to affect all 5 senses...now what other canon semblance do we have that comes even close to needing that many limiters?

Splitting it into 5, like i sugested, means you can just have the limiters I mentioned while leaving the user able to do ALL the cool stuff I mentioned due to it being more focused. Make one touch manipulating semblance and let it make enemies feel pain; let a sound manipulating semblance throw them off balance with noise. Let a sight manipulating semblances invert their views so when they move their right arm they see the left one moving. All they really need is the cost limiter to make them balanced as the other 4 senses insure a smart person can discern the real from the fake; all this without the need of making an overcomplicated mess in order to give you access to all 5 senses. This is pretty much exactly what I was saying about the last one too. If you need to invent an arbitrary limitation with no grounding in reality, then the idea itself might be inherently unbalanced.

Case in point: what is the difference between making a wall with this power and making the image of a person appear very close to them? You might be altering slightly more photoreceptors to achieve the wall effect, but there are a lot fewer sensory nerves in the eye (vision) than there are in the rest of your body combined (tactile), and if you can affect touch you could easily manipulate that many photoreceptors.

Just like the last one, there's a line of arbitration that's difficult to define; at what point is the line drawn between obstructing vision and altering it? What percent of their sight must be covered before the limit kicks in? How close could this illusory man get? Can you replicate the sound of a gunshot? If so, then why couldn't you just create repeated illusory gunshots to drown out their hearing?

When people see such a blurry line, then naturally want to test it, push it, especially if you were the person who had such a power. We create these worst case scenarios because anyone with an ability like that would want to take it as far as it could go.

That's not the only blurry line here: what constitutes one sense in terms of this ability? As I've mentioned, every sense is actually several senses governing several different types of sensory receptors with specific individualized functions. Touch is at leat 5 different nerve responses, the photoreceptors in your eyes are all dedicated to one color each, etc.

Here's an idea: have aura consumption be based off of the number of sensory receptors they affect.

Eyeballs, noses, ears, and other sensory organs have much higher densities of nerve endings than the rest of the body, so affecting them would mean affecting many more receptors than most other places. This would perfectly limit your ability in a natural way.

For example, they can only affect so many rod/cone cells in the eye at once without overtaxing themselves, meaning that they couldn't fully blind someone but could still mess with them. Plus, given that the density of photoreceptors in the eye is much greater towards the center, it would take more effort to put something in the fore of their vision than at the fringes, further limiting its ability to block vision.

It would naturally prevent the death by shock idea by limiting the number of pain receptors they could stimulate, and it would keep you from affecting several senses at once because sensory organs have such a high density of receptors.

It's a natural limit based off of quantifiable things without any blurry lines or unecessary details.