Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Basically, though I would look at it from the other end: People who are not high in an underlying trait tend not to learn the skills associated with it. Being low in DX, as I am, both reduces the motivation to study martial arts, or dancing, or marksmanship, and prevents gaining extraordinary skill levels even if you study hard and for a long time.
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I disagree with you about how humans work (I think it's the other way around: that people who have the motivation to do certain types of activities go on to practice them and become good at them, so your disinclination toward dexterous activities leads to your being poor at them, which then creates a feedback loop where you're bad at it, so you don't do it, and since you don't do it, you continue to be bad at it).
However, I don't think that's really what's in question here.
The question I think we should be looking at is this: what do we want to encourage and what do we want to discourage through the character creation rules.
Your answer is that we should encourage people to build characters in such a way that the resulting characters will occur at statistically the same rates as the people with those traits occur in the real world.
I don't like that answer. GURPS is a generic and universal game. It's not about creating characters at the same rate as those characters occur in the real world; it's about making superheroes, cartoon rabbits, clockwork robots, pulp heroes, magic elves, and whatever else a player can dream up.
I don't think the way humans learn in the real world should determine the incentives I am faced with when creating my cartoon rabbit.
I think instead the character points should be used to balance the usefulness of the traits (with traits of the same price each providing about the same usefulness to characters who have those traits), so that my cartoon rabbit and your clockwork robot will each be about as useful in the adventure when built on the same number of points.
If you instead use character points to measure something else, or to encourage or discourage building certain types of characters, then you create situations where characters built on the same number of points are of vastly different usefulness in the game. And that leads to situations that feel unfair. We see this in the RAW trait pricing where some traits provide much more (or less!) usefulness for a given point cost than others. This becomes obvious if you do a thought experiment where you imagine certain traits (such as Unkillable or Warp) being sold at a ridiculously low cost of one point each. If you buy Warp for one point, and I make a character who doesn't have Warp, it feels unfair to me, because you got to have a much more powerful character than I did.
You could use the point costs to discourage people from making characters with certain traits by making those traits cost much more than the usefulness they provide, but when you do that, it feels unfair. It feels like you got ripped off.
We can do another thought experiment. Imagine the price of Tuba skill was quadrupled while all other trait prices were left the same. The rare person whose character concept includes purchasing the tuba skill might well still purchase the skill. But they're going to feel ripped off. The game is going to feel unfair.
And this is what will always be the result of pricing traits in such a way that they cost more or less than other traits that provide a similar level of usefulness. Either the player who purchases the overpriced trait will feel like they got ripped off, or the
other players will feel as though the game is unfair because someone else got to be Superman while they're left standing on the sidelines as Jimmy Olsen.