[dfinlay]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

It's not a bad idea per se (sort of like the 'buckets of points' system in one of the Pyramid articles), but I usually go with a simpler revision, which is to remove the concept of Hard techniques, and give all current Hard techniques a further -1, thus keeping point-costs the same.

Yeah, this simplifies techniques a bit but it doesn't seem like it would really achieve any of the goals I was trying to do (encourage characters to have several techniques and get rid of the really breakpointy tradeoffs between techniques and skills).

Originally Posted by GWJ

I was thinking about something similar some time ago, but I abandoned this, because of one important thing: techniques ARE something to distinct 2 skilled martial artists. Because of this cap for "optimal deal". If there is two players with nearly identical characters and they are some free points yet, they can make their characters different by purchasing techniques. Simply you are much more efficient with one or two "flag-moves" than others. And other player is more efficient with other "flag-moves".

It's not clear to me how this is an argument against this system.

Originally Posted by GWJ

And this is working great in my campaigns. When my players had "free techniques" from their styles, that was just freakish. Simple there was no sense to do this, and if you have whole list of techniques, this is really bog down your game. After that we was liked and returned to "original techniques system" RAW ;) 1-3 techniques at most. Think about this, maybe you too will notice what is purpose (IMO) of this optimum-limit ;)

I have no idea what you are saying about no sense or freakishness.

As for bogging down the game, do you mean during character creation or play? It definitely makes character creation take longer (maybe 20% longer, I would say), but doesn't seem to slow down play much at all. I have players keep track of their own techniques and we write techniques directly under skills, so when they look up their skill levels, they just glance slightly downwards and see if any techniques apply. Occassionally, I have to field a "Do I get the anti-demonic bonus on my exorcism?" or the like, but usually, there's no real slowdown.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

The real knock on a system like this is that it turns techniques from something you choose to do to something you HAVE to do. If you get a point in an unarmed combat skill, you must then allocate your Technique Points. It's a barrier to fast play, because if you just throw down (say) Judo at DX+2 and Karate at DX, for 12 and 4 points, respectively, you have 32 Technique points, which can be used to (roughly) offset -10 in penalties from various stuff.

That's a big delta (of course, it's a BIG point expenditure) in ability if you just want to get on with it.

Note that the first two points don't give TP, which helps a lot with all those small skills that people throw down. In your example, it would still be 24 TP, though. Usually, characters in my games have 5 or so skills they need to spend TP on, so I find it isn't usually that bad in practice.

That said, it definitely slows down character creation (as I said above, by about 20-25% in my experience). I'm fine with that since I generally play longer ongoing campaigns, but I definitely wouldn't want to use it for, say, a convention game or even a game with people who weren't used to GURPS.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

That being said, the basic concept is sound, though my preference would be to take those 32 build points and be able to allocate them to ALL aspects of a skill, including the basics. That would ideally mean that if you just say "forget it, it all goes into my primary skill!" you've lost nothing. You're a well-rounded and non-specialized fighter. If you do shift around, you give something to get something.

Yeah, I can see the appeal of this, but it does defeat part of the point of this system, which is getting rid of the breakpoints that prevent people from taking several techniques. If you can just trade in TP for skill, getting techniques whose total value per level is more than that amount just becomes suboptimal.

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Another thought would be to use something like the Dabbler perk to purchase techniques (if we're reducing the effective price of techniques, anyway. That's pretty close to what the OP does, but it's optional, rather than feeling required.

Again, the point of what I did wasn't to make techniques cheaper (which you could definitely do with that), it was to make buying skills better (and more interesting) as well as to get rid of those breakpoints for multiple techniques.

Originally Posted by Calvin

The group I'm in runs two games concurrently. The house rule we adopted was that all techniques are average (hard ones don't get made any more expensive). Additionally, in TL5+ melee techniques are half price. Those two together work fairly well, and the technique buff helps melee vs guns to some extent. Mostly in the way that it makes combos easier. Combos to disarm enemies with guns for example.

While I can see making melee techniques cheaper relative to ranged, discounting them relative to everything else seems odd. In my experience, players are already far more likely to buy techniques for their weapon skills than for things like Singing, Cooking, Merchant or Navigation (which I very rarely saw before adopting this system).