Quote:
Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw
The difficulty of pricing traits based on how useful they are is that you have to re-price them based on the setting being used.
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You don't have to. GURPS doesn't. You would get better prices if you did, but that doesn't mean you can't make some assumptions and then come up with something. That's presumably what the authors did when they made Warp cost more than Mind Control, which in turn costs more than Doesn't Eat or Drink.
Further, you also have to think about the effect rather than the method. The effect of the prices is that players purchase traits that they expect will be more useful for their cost and avoid traits that expect will be less useful for the cost.
It doesn't matter how you came up with your prices, those are the incentives that you create. If you have a non-utility pricing method that gives Extra Mouth a cost of 40/level, no one will buy it. It's the same if you give Games skill a price of 10 level, then 20 level, then 40 level, and so on.
The method for pricing the skills doesn't matter to the players. They choose what they purchase based on the utility of the trait they get, not based on the method used to determine the price.
What happens you make the trait prices out of wack with the utility provided by the traits is that the players contort their characters around the overpriced or underpriced traits. They choose not to play characters with concepts that would employ the overpriced traits, and instead choose to play the characters with concepts represented by the underpriced traits.
If Warp cost only a single point, you'd see a huge surge of interest in characters who can teleport. If all the combat skills were raised to 50/level, you'd see a huge surge of interest in diplomat characters.
And while someone might spend two hundred points on four levels of knife at 50/level, they'd feel like they got ripped off when they did it.
I like having the goal that players get to play what they want and not feel like they got ripped off when they do so. The way to do that is to price the traits based on utility.
Yes, I agree with you that different traits are worth different amounts in different sorts of games (something the rules already sort-of take into account with the variable pricing of things like Resistant), that doesn't make the alternative pricing methods look better.
I think you could come up with prices for the traits that are decent in most games, use those in every game, and have something that works out okay in most games. There would be issues, but choosing to base the prices on something other than trait utility won't solve them; that would exacerbate the problem.
I personally support having a set of prices for different kinds of games (look at the cost of the armor on the combat robots in
Ultra-Tech if you want to see an example of why this is needed), but the next best alternative is to give the traits prices based on their expected utility in a way that would cover as many games as possible, while acknowledging that this method isn't perfect. There just isn't a price for DR that's going to work in a low-tech game and an ultra-tech game. As long as you give the same price in both games, that's going to be a problem; it doesn't matter what method you used to come up with that price. It will always be either overpriced in one setting or underpriced in the other. This is a completely separate issue. Though it does apply to the costs of the skills as well.
If I were given a time machine and put in charge of the game, I would have a set of default prices in the Basic Set, and then in the genre books, I would give a list of suggested changed prices for that genre. The book dealing with science-fiction could give suggested changes in prices for science-fiction games, and so on. That seems a workable method to me.