Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruno
Just a drive-by note about mixing things up with the other books - werewolves, and to a lesser extent vampires, owe GURPS a ludicrous amount of points. Werewolves are the worst offenders by far, having an unpriced advantage of default 10 rage points which can be spent for one-or-many extra actions per second, never mind everything else you can do with them.
This was a point where pentophilia ganged up with decimal-obsession and the conversion just went septic; werewolves in the original never got that many rage points by starting, and definitely couldn't have 15 or 20, and still only spent them 1:1 for extra actions. I understand the urge to have all starting stats at 10 in a very GURPSy way, but scaling up the starting Rage should have resulted in proportionately scaling up the cost for an extra action, and charging Werewolves for the extra advantage needed to actually use rage points on those actions anyways.
If I am proud of nothing else in my playtesting with SJG, it's proposing and campaigning for the GURPS In Nomine conversion avoid trying to rescale spendable resources to be ten-centered.
Vampires didn't exactly avoid the problem either, but at least they weren't getting ATR for free. Watch out for this sort of thing lurking around in the Mage stuff too; I haven't looked at the mechanics in GM:tA lately, so I can't point at anything specific and intone "Beware! Bewaaaaaare!". Just kind of a general heads-up :)
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Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out for that. I remember seeing you (or someone else) mention this issue with GURPS: Werewolf before. If I ever get around to werewolves and vampires as PCs, I'll keep an close eye on it.
As far as mages go, I haven't run across anything that they get for free, although some of the costs in G:MtA are a bit out of line with standard GURPS costs. Dream, for example, is essentially a version of Modular Abilities that costs 3 per level. When I worked out as best I could how much it would cost to recreate, it came out to 13 per lvl. Spheres actually cost more than equivalent realms from Thaumatology work out to, and Avatar costs more than Raw Magic Store.
Mages' spendable resource is quintessence, which gives +2 to skill for casting per point spent, which can be a big deal, but isn't all that exploitable. It also doesn't come cheap. Each 10 points spent on the Node advantage in G:MtA gives one point of quintessence per month. Anything else has to be found, stolen, fought for, etc. -- until a character has Prime sphere at level 5 and can recharge his or her Avatar outside of a node.
It may be that Mage escaped the worst of the WoD GURPSification problems. It didn't introduce a new stat, treating most of the WW traits as leveled advantages instead.