[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's inconsistent with my experience.

It's a fascinating topic, and one I would love to delve more deeply into, but I don't want to derail this thread. Perhaps we could take that discussion elsewhere.

I will say that I think your experience is compatible with my undestanding of human learning.

Yes, but you know, if traits are priced unfairly, and you change them to be priced fairly, the people who benefited from the unfairness will also feel ripped off. So people being unhappy isn't a valid metric.

And I would make the same argument once the game has begun. If there was some typo in the book and the characters purchased Warp at one point or Regrowth at forty, then it's too late to change it. But we should definitely change it before we make characters in the next game.

If you don't make changes that make people unhappy, you can never change anything—either making skills relatively cheap, as this thread originally proposed, or making them relatively dear, as I suggested, will result in unhappiness.

Your argument would entail that all those changes were illegitimate. I think that's too strong a conclusion.

I'm sorry. I don't follow.

Your tuba example is also kind of silly, in that it posits a change in exactly one skill. Obviously if you change one skill, but leave all the other skills the same, you're going to have a lack of balance. But that same argument doesn't necessarily apply if you change ALL skills in comparison to ALL stats.

It does apply, because those traits are also compared to the other traits. Tuba (or almost any other skill) at 12/level is still overpriced in what it provides in comparison to Charisma or Mind Reading or Regeneration or any other trait.

Of course this was a new campaign, but you normally WOULD change a basic rule between campaigns, right?

Of course. I wouldn't suggest having the players remake their characters in an ongoing campaign. If I wanted to change some of the trait prices, I would do so at the beginning of a new game.

I would like the world's greatest mathematician to be John von Neumann, or Archimedes, and not some random bloke with IQ 10, let alone 8.

I find this exceptionally difficult to unpack and respond to. It involves what way you think the GM ought to encourage players to play the characters they feel are most appropriate for their games, and when the GM should allow the players to play things that they, the GM, wouldn't necessarily find the most interesting or appropriate.

I prefer to achieve that goal (if I ever have that sort of a goal, which I rarely do) by explicitly telling the players what sort of characters I'm looking for and what isn't appropriate for the game. I would prefer not to do so by using the character point pricing, since that leads to the undesirable effects I've outlined in my other post, where players feel that they've been ripped off or that other players' characters are unfairly more powerful than theirs.

"Play what you will, but pay what it's worth," is the trait pricing maxim I would employ. The characters are going to base their purchasing decisions on the worth of the traits; I think they should be priced accordingly to keep from ripping people off, making them feel bad, or unduly favoring some traits over others.