Three suggestions for balancing the ability creation system

[Kitsune]

I'm seeing tons of abilities people are creating where the drawback is lowering a power type they don't use. This lets them make abilities that are way overpowered. If not for the 30 AP cap per round it would be possible for several characters I've seen to go infinite as their abilities generate more AP than they cost and then grant them another ability of similar type.

So why does this bother me? If people want to make unbalanced character that's their business, right? Well, its clear that the people who built these OP characters put a lot of time and work into them. I'd like to use them but with even one of them I can wipe the board on the first round. Meanwhile my character I made (non-cheesy) stands around doing nothing because the battle is always over before he gets a turn.

I think three things need to be done for balance purposes:
1 No ability should be able to give more AP than it costs. See Mox stones in MtG for why this is broken.
2 A limitation on an ability that reduces something needs to be something that at least one of the character's abilities relies on, or a defense.
3 Abilities given by other abilities should not become active until the next round. This would prevent the infinite loop combos.

[Mavrickindigo]

I could see making that one change could break a lot of things to be unusable, which may break games that require the character to work.

[Kitsune]

Originally posted by TikTikKobold:

I could see making that one change could break a lot of things to be unusable, which may break games that require the character to work.

No need to verify old characters. The change could just apply to new creations.

[Mavrickindigo]

Originally posted by Kitsune:

Originally posted by TikTikKobold:

I could see making that one change could break a lot of things to be unusable, which may break games that require the character to work.

No need to verify old characters. The change could just apply to new creations.

just means that a lot of old abilities would still work on the old system, probably? I don't know how that would work if the system itself is changed.