so the game i'm working ( www.seedrpg.com ) has bunches of little powers and abilities.

i have realized now that most of the abilities are "once per episode" or "single use" abilities. now plenty of games use this type of rules text but i have started to feel that it may be poor design.

this kind of power is really hard for some players to use, either because they worry that they may need to save it for later or simply that having a rule that is only used once a session is easy to forget.

how do you feel about single use powers?

I never paid any attention to those single-use powers in RPGs.  They seemed pointless to me.  And I always forgot they were there.

The first example that comes to mind, for me, is D&D.  Actually, both old-school and 4th.  "Old-school" here refers to every edition before fourth, because to my knowledge they've all had spell preparation rules.

If you're not familiar (and I imagine you probably are, so if so, skip this paragraph), classes like the wizard and cleric had to sit down each morning in game and "prepare" spells.  They had a big honking list (a spellbook in the former case, or every freaking divine spell in the game in the latter), and chose X number of spells at each "level".  You could use each spell you prepare once (though you could cast the same spell multiple times if you prepared it more than once), and then it was gone until the next day.  There was a certain level of prediction and guessing involved, and it was hard to pin down an exact set of spells you wanted; usually, there was a core group that you always took and the rest went neglected, or you took them in case of emergency and they sat unused on your character sheet.

D&D 4th included powers with varying "cooldowns" -- at-will, 1/encounter, and 1/day.  If you're paying attention, you should close each day with all or most of your daily powers used, because if you don't, you're not fighting at your max potential.  But there's not really anything to enforce that.  If you don't use your Weakening Fire Arrow daily, you're probably not too much worse for wear.

Honestly, if you're going to include 1/episode powers or what have you, make them awesome.  If you want people to use them, it might be a good idea to enforce that in play; make it a (relatively) bad idea not to throw your episodic power at some point, or at the climax.  If they're all one-off powers that give you slight advantages, just make them at-will use, or have a pool of energy or mana or something to draw against.

Of course, this is all general guidance starting with a game from scratch.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the smattering of one-off powers reinforces your design goals in your game, or not.  Why does it make sense?  Are there things that have given you doubts?  What alternate methods (if any) have you considered or tried?

If they can actually fail then you'll see the player start to look at his character sheet hard, looking for a way out of that next time.

But I've really noticed alot of play where people aren't using power to avoid failing, they just use powers cause they just seem to be the right one/whim, as gameplay never really presses them toward any failure. And the once per day ones, it never seems the right one at the time.

I was thinking that you were going to be even more extreme when I saw the title "Single Use Powers"...

My thoughts were powers that you wrote down on a scrap of paper attached to your characters sheet, but which were actually physically ripped up or burnt when you used them. You pay for the cost to acquire the power in XP or certain in game events...then you get the power to use once and once only.

A bit like some of the D&D versions for creating artefacts, or immensely powerful spells that cost a permanent amount of XP to bring into play.

There are games that push things to this extreme, so I seriously don't think a "Once per day" restriction is too harsh.

V

The original reason I made the powers single use is because they were too awesome to have all the time. another reason was I wanted to mimic how in a story or episode of a TV show they hit a character point once per episode and usually move one and don't address that character aspect again. like it's really rare for sailor moon to transform twice an episode.

Like the sniper scope for the rifle. It gives a re-roll once an episode. This is mostly because I wanted that item to be a part of the story once per episode, and that Re-Rolls are really strong in this system.

I guess the game is structured enough so I don't run into the problems of scalable resources, like you have a daily power but that balance can be broken if you fight 10 times before you sleep. Episodes are very defined (down to the number of turns they take to play even) so i think that evens out a bit of the pensive psychology.

Maybe they are not used enough because they are hard to see visually? like on the actual game cards they dont stick out enough? when i finish the redesign I will post some pictures.

Maybe some player's not using them is not a big problem? it seems like the player who are interesting role players use them the least, like they dont really need it to bring up something interesting.

How you can handle these rare powers will vary depending on your particular design approach and the reason why these rare powers are important.  Here are a few ideas or concepts which might potentially be useful to you;

1)  How much flexibility do characters have with regards to their single-use power?  If a character only had a sniper rifle power and lost their rifle, would they be SOL for the rest of the session, story or campaign? 

2)  Are there potentially a selection of _different_ single use powers available?  Sniper rifle, healing or extra XP for instance, but you can only use one power one time per session?  This would make it much less punishing if a character is unable to use their special power. 

3) How much of an aspect of tactical planning and preparation is there in the game?  AD&D had that to a great extent in the early editions, hence the spell memorization.

4)  What if you could only use the power if certain narrative conditions occurred?    "You can only turn into a werewolf if all of your companions are incapacitated" or "You can only use your sniper rifle on someone who has hurt you or someone you love."?  That would be a way to limit things within the scope of the story. 

5) What if you had no limit to the number of times the power was used, but you had to sacrifice something.  Perhaps it takes you an extra round to fire the sniper rifle?  Perhaps the first shot takes one round, second takes two rounds, third takes three etc.  Withhold the lesser uses of their powers in compensation. 

6) What if there was some kind of currency resource, plot points or karma or something of that ken.  During gameplay, characters will gain some of this resource.    They can spend X resource on using one of these special powers.  If a character goes three sessions without using their power, they might be able to use it three times in one session in compensation. 

Just some random ideas; I hope some of them are useful.

In my game BARBAREN!, you can use XP to buy "burn upon use" powers which give you an edge in combat or woeing. The trick is to write them on the character sheet right next to the relevant combat scores (or, in my case, woeing scores, too). Out of sight, out of mind. They should have telltale names and, aside from the mechanical advantage, should somehow make the fiction more interesting or colorful.

Also, what Callan said: You need to apply some pressure before these powers get used.

- Frank

another reason was I wanted to mimic how in a story or episode of a TV show they hit a character point once per episode and usually move one and don't address that character aspect again. like it's really rare for sailor moon to transform twice an episode.

This makes me think of certain "powers" in Company of Heroes, specifically the difference between Off Map Artillery and Registered Artillery.  Both of them have a cool down, and both have a resource cost, so these two conditions have to be met for you to use them.  But Off Map Artillery can be used any time, on any bit of terrain you can see; while Registered Artillery can only be used on one of your own buildings.

The primary use of Registered Artillery, therefore, occurs when an enemy unit is capturing one of your strategic points; you can bombard them and hopefully prevent the capture.  This is is essentially similar Jason's narrative conditions proposal.  Because its use is (usually) specific to this situation, if you have the power in hand there is no reason not to use it when the specific situation occurs - you can't use it any other time.  Off Map Artillery, on the other hand, may tend to be kept in hand precisely because it is more flexible and it may be more important to use it later, such as to plug a breach.

Thus, the more situationally specific a power is, the more likely it is to be used when the opportunity presents itself.  The more flexible a power is, the more likely it is to be preserved in case of need.

Single Use prevents abuse I suppose. Somethings like portals or turning things into gold I can get that.

I would put some entropy on powers. The more you use a power the less effective it gets.
-1 for each use in an episode and this effect stacks.
By turn ten the power would be diminished and loses its polish for that episode.

It would not hurt to have both.

@CKelm  That's not a bad idea.  Vince Baker's semi-alpha-game-thing Storming The Wizard's Tower has spells that suffer entropy with each use -- each time they're cast, you need to assign one additional hit on the dice pool roll to prevent a miscast.  You're not obligated to spend hits on preventing miscast, but if you don't, something bad might happen.  So you can use them I think as many times as you want, but the more they're used, the less effective they are OR the more likely they are to backfire spectacularly.

I'm not sure what costs make sense in the existing currency of your game, but something like increasing the difficulty or decreasing the effect of a power used multiple times, per CKelm, might not be a bad call.