Consensus on Respond In Kind (too good?)

So, recently, one of the things that’s come up in my games has been the “Respond in Kind” reaction from the Multiverse.

The exact phrasing as presented in the book I have is

When you are hit with an Attack at close range, the attacker also takes damage equal to their effect die.

Now, on the face of it, this seems very powerful against a stronger opponent. Say your opponent hits you with a D10 effect die (but only rolls a 2). You take 2 damage and send 10 back their way. You can bypass the reaction by staying at range, but it seems like a brutal hard lockdown on a melee fighter.

The other read I could take on it is that “whatever damage they rolled against you, you do back” which is a bit less consistently useful, but does mean that someone rolling high melee damage still risks a nasty backlash, but isn’t a case where the reaction effectively is just too risky to bother dealing with, since rolling 2 on your d10 doesn’t do plink damage AND get your face smashed in.

Anyone had experience with this one in their games?

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My reading of the ability is that you deal damage equal to the amount of damage you took. You don’t use the die’s max.

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There’s a third interpretation, which is that “damage equal to the effect die” would be the number on the die, but not any modifiers to that die. This may be the intent, because there are easier ways to phrase it otherwise. But it’s also not quite correct, since modifiers change the value of the effect die. (Which is also not quite correct, but the rules pretend it is.)

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I’m going to give a fourth interpretation!

My read was that the damage you dealt was equal to the final result on the effect die (number rolled plus any bonus or penalty), so if you had armor or someone was Defending you, but you still took damage, you reflected the pre-defense amount you would have taken.

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Agree, that’s what the rules seem to suggest if taken literally.

So, the effect die is what the attacker is getting back. In the context of the rules, ‘the effect die’ is relatively consistently ‘the face value of the respective roll, including modifiers’.

Modifiers on the attacker’s side (boost, hinder) change the effect die, so those would also apply.

Modifiers on the defender’s side (defend, dmg reduction) have no influence on the effect die, so they don’t apply.

This differentiation makes the ability slightly more powerful than e.g. ‘Reactive Field’ from the Training Power source, especially when paired with permanent dmg reduction.

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The wording on how you’re attacking also might matter. Reactive Field triggers off any “nearby enemy”, whereas Respond In Kind requires “an attack at Close range.”

I don’t have my book in front of my, but I believe that “Close Range” requires you to be in actual melee, while “nearby” only requires them to be, well, nearby, and can let you respond to ranged attacks that aren’t too far away.

There’s also the fact that Multiverse gives you a worse tradeoff for not having a Green power - Training gives you an Archetype die at d8, while Multiverse gives you a Power die at d6. In terms of flexibility, they’re pretty similar - Training gives fewer power options, but adds a bunch of Quality options - but the d6 is less generally valuable.

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