Quote:
Originally Posted by Skarg
I tend to prefer to actually have a steeper curve than 3e did. In particular, it provides a way to naturally and smoothly make really high attributes extremely difficult to attain, which both makes more normal characters more attractive and frequent, and reduces contact with extreme values which tend to be tricky to deal with, and mitigates the "it's cheaper for me to buy up the attribute than raise all my main skills, and also raises my IQ and defaults" issue,
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Note that this actually happens anyway: You get less for your points with each increase of a stat.
GURPS has a bell-curve. A stat of 10 will roll successfully (assuming no modifiers) ~50% of the time. An increase of decrease of 1 point changes this by +/- 12.5 percentage points, which means you're getting about +/- 1 percentage point for 2 character points. From 11 or 9 to 12 or 8, you're getting a change of +/- 12 percentage points, then from 12 to 13 or 8 to 7, you get a change of about 9 percentage points, and so on until you get to the extreme end, where you're paying 20 points to fuss over half-percentage points.
A +1 increase to a stat might always cost the same (20 points), but what you get for your points drops off with each point.
To give it a scaling cost
as well is double-dipping. Say that it costs 10 points to go from 10 to 11, then 20 points to go from 11 to 12, and 30 from 12 to 13, and so on. Going from 10 to 11 gives you a +12.5 percentage point increase for 10 points, which is 1.2 pp per cp. Now, 11 to 12 costs 20 points for +12 pp, or a little better than 1 pp per 2 cp. Then 12 to 13 is 30 points for +9 pp, which is about 1/3rd a pp for a cp, and so on, until you're spending 100 points to go from 19 to 20, for 0.5 pp, which is a joke. Going to 11 or 12 is a no brainer, but going any higher than that swiftly becomes a mistake and skill begins to trump all. You get a lot of characters with 11s and 12s, and few with any other trait (which is honestly what I saw in GURPS 3e).
The reverse creates an even worse situation, where you're getting more points for losing less competence. Consider that going from attribute 4 to attribute 3 would give you 100 points, but only reduce your chances of success by a fraction. So if you really don't care about a stat ("Ogg SMASH!") then you really, really benefit from flooring it as much as possible.
So you'd end up with very, very average characters occasionally differentiated by someone who is as astonishingly bad at something as possible. And, for your troubles, you also get a system that's less simple than the one in place.
No, I think I'll stick with flat attributes.