Cost of HT.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by MagnetoHydroDynamics

Essentially, barring GM fiat, every point you want to put into Hard to Subdue, Hard to Kill, and even some Resistances, are better spent buying HT.

Unless that's all you want. After all, 2 points for Hard to Subdue is much cheaper than 10 points for +1 to HT. Yes, there are lots of advantages to the latter, and if you want a few more ("I want +1 Hard to Subdue and +1 fatigue. You know, I might as well just get +1 HT too"), it makes more sense to get the whole thing. But this is no different from techniques + skills. A given skill, like Broadsword, has tons of techniques: Targeted attacks to the neck, feint, disarm, retain, shove, etc. You're better off buying more sword skill than you are buying all the techniques. In fact, buying more sword is always better than buying more than 2 or 3 techniques. But sometimes, all you want is one small aspect of your skill. Say, you just want to be really good at Feint. Then it's a great deal to just buy technique.

The same applies to HT. Or frankly most of the attributes (too many IQ skills, and it just makes more sense to buy more IQ)

[hal]

Originally Posted by Xplo

It could be more realistic in some ways to eliminate HT as a normal attribute entirely, and replace it with something like the Fit/Unfit traits; here "Tough" might have the same effects on KO and death checks as HT 11, and "Very Tough" would be HT 12, and that would be the end of it.

Of course, when you do that, you eliminate a lot of potential builds for unrealistic humans and nonhuman characters. So it might be better to keep HT as is, and set a cap at 12 instead, for realistic humans. HT 13+ would be reserved for monsters, robots, and action heroes. And in this case, perhaps the low cost of HT is fine since you do want to encourage those characters to have appropriately high HT rather than spending those points on other traits instead!

<snipped stuff>

If so, then sure, mark it up. 15/level sounds reasonable to me. If you're not having any problems, might as well leave it as-is.

The thing I miss is the original method in GURPS where the stats closest to 10 were cheaper than the stats further from 10. In addition, I've noted that certain things are priced high enough that my players never purchase the advantages involved.

In addition?

When advantages costs in the realm that you need some 400 points to buy/create a decent character - what happens when you have someone (a player) who decides to spend the extra points on the "cheaper" stuff. Case in point? Why not buy extra-ordinary luck instead of a single use advantage that is priced at 80 points - or a multi-level advantage that isn't really useful until you spend 100 points in it? Why not buy up attributes of +4 IQ instead of an 80 point advantage?

GURPS kind of stinks in that department (in my opinion). For every advantage someone says is priced just right - someone else will say "hey, this isn't priced right". Isn't that what caused GURPS 4e to depart from GURPS 3e in the first place - people complaining that things were not properly priced?

In the end, the relationship between character points (Money) and advantages (goods) turns into a minor economics issue - are things priced sufficiently low for the purchaser to consider it worth the expenditure of "coin"? Are things too cheap? Are things way too expensive?

As it is, I tend to play a version of GURPS that is kind of GURPS 3.5. It is basically GURPS 4e with GURPS 3e stuff bolted on. I really dislike GURPS PSIONICS for 4e, because it is too pricy to have a decent Psionic character. It makes it difficult for a Psionic character to integrate well with a non-psionic character UNLESS you give the Psionic character's player the extra points needed, and keep the non-psionic character's player at a lower budget. If that is the case, then simply make the psionics cheaper so that you CAN more easily integrate two different styles of characters!

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by hal

The thing I miss is the original method in GURPS where the stats closest to 10 were cheaper than the stats further from 10.

This doesn't change the problem that for a sufficient number of skills, increasing stats is cheaper than buying skills. Our group had exactly that observation about 3e, before 4e was even conceived. And of course 3e skills went up to 8 points/level in some cases, making DX that much more appealing that much sooner.

There is no price for stats that will resolve that issue; all you can do is move the crossover point.

It's a trivial change to houserule a tiered system if you're that fond of it -- just grab the 3e chart if you don't want to have some other progression -- but you'll still see players pumping up their stats instead of their skills once they have enough skills.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

There is no price for stats that will resolve that issue; all you can do is move the crossover point.

Well, it's possible to have a curve such that there will always be some point where it makes sense to raise the skill instead of the stat, but that requires escalating cost with no limit.

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by hal

I really dislike GURPS PSIONICS for 4e, because it is too pricy to have a decent Psionic character. It makes it difficult for a Psionic character to integrate well with a non-psionic character UNLESS you give the Psionic character's player the extra points needed, and keep the non-psionic character's player at a lower budget. If that is the case, then simply make the psionics cheaper so that you CAN more easily integrate two different styles of characters!

I honestly don't know why you think this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I don't see why. Would you be kind enough to post a psion and a non-psion built on the same number of points, say, 150 with a disad cap of 50? Obviously it's hard to evaluate the utility of psionic powers against mundane skills and abilities, but my hope is that, working within RAW, we can bring their power levels into rough alignment. Unless the mundane's build features high HT, it might be most appropriate to do this in a new thread.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

This doesn't change the problem that for a sufficient number of skills, increasing stats is cheaper than buying skills. Our group had exactly that observation about 3e, before 4e was even conceived. And of course 3e skills went up to 8 points/level in some cases, making DX that much more appealing that much sooner.

There is no price for stats that will resolve that issue; all you can do is move the crossover point.

That's true as far as you go, but you're talking about a false economy. The only skills that matter are the ones that you use, and the only skills that matter a lot are the ones that you use a lot, or where the stakes are very high.

For instance, you could go through an entire campaign and never use more than, say... 6 IQ skills. Maybe other characters share the load, or maybe it's just not a very brainy campaign or the GM's not very imaginative. And once you pick a number here it's fairly trivial to find a cost for IQ that makes buying more IQ for that character a worse deal than buying skills. Make reasonable generalizations about characters and you can pick a "correct" price for IQ based on its utility.

Of course, the players don't know which skills they'll need in advance, so they're willing to pay more for IQ than it's really going to be worth, to hedge their bets. But that only affects its value _to them_, not its utility.

A player willing to gamble with lousy defaults or coordinate with other players to spread competence around (emergent, player-driven niche protection!) can potentially save a lot of points here.

I tend to think that the correct cost for IQ and DX is around 25-30 points. Certainly, if you have more than 7 skills you want to raise, buying more attribute is still a better deal... but the higher the attribute cost, the more players will notice that they're spending a lot to get better defaults, and the easier it is to rationalize that if they're good at this many distinct skills, maybe they really should explain it with a high attribute.

...But this is IQ and DX, which both have added effects but are primarily useful as skill pumps. Their economy is rather different from that of HT, which is primarily useful for reasons other than pumping skills, and causes entirely different headaches.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Xplo

The only skills that matter are the ones that you use

For instance, you could go through an entire campaign and never use more than, say... 6 IQ skills.

True, but that number is strongly setting-dependent. Earlier today, I was trying to count the skills for a starship engineer. If you want a Trek type that can use and maintain everything on a ship, as well as invent new uses, then there's over 20 Engineering/Mechanic/Electronics/Ops/etc skills. So the price for IQ ought to be over 100/level to force players into useful skill purchases.

There's no one correct price by this reasoning, but you can only print one number in the book.

It would be nice if the prodigious novice and the grizzled veteran with equal skill levels had the same CP cost, which would also also entail more or less equivalent other benefits. (The prodigy gets better attribute rolls, faster advancement given a 1/2/4 skill progression, and so on, while the highly-trained average-stat character doesn't get much, although 4e threw him the bone of skills floating to other attributes.) But I don't know how such a system would work while keeping reasonable expectations of what those attributes and skills mean.

(It'd be easy if you just bought nothing but end-result mechanics, and the attribute/skill tradeoff were just flavor text. But that means attributes and skills don't really exist, just "success percentages" or whatever they'd be called.)

[hal]

Originally Posted by McAllister

I honestly don't know why you think this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I don't see why. Would you be kind enough to post a psion and a non-psion built on the same number of points, say, 150 with a disad cap of 50? Obviously it's hard to evaluate the utility of psionic powers against mundane skills and abilities, but my hope is that, working within RAW, we can bring their power levels into rough alignment. Unless the mundane's build features high HT, it might be most appropriate to do this in a new thread.

That will take a different thread to be sure. That would hi-jack THIS thread...

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

in the book.

It would be nice if the prodigious novice and the grizzled veteran with equal skill levels had the same CP cost, which would also also entail more or less equivalent other benefits. (The prodigy gets better attribute rolls, faster advancement given a 1/2/4 skill progression, and so on, while the highly-trained average-stat character doesn't get much, although 4e threw him the bone of skills floating to other attributes.)

Personally, I don't think it would be nice for mediocrities to be just as qualified to be omnicapable polymaths as the actually gifted.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

True, but that number is strongly setting-dependent. Earlier today, I was trying to count the skills for a starship engineer. If you want a Trek type that can use and maintain everything on a ship, as well as invent new uses, then there's over 20 Engineering/Mechanic/Electronics/Ops/etc skills. So the price for IQ ought to be over 100/level to force players into useful skill purchases.

Trek is an example that, if anything, suggests to me that the typical person has higher IQ than whatever hypothetical everyman is the GURPS default. I mean, they've got young men and women in the Academy readily learning superscience. In which case, you might prefer that people buy multiple levels of IQ and treat skills almost like techniques since that seems to be more true to the setting.

For that matter, the Trek engineer might just have Engineer! - which is cheaper than IQ.

And it could be argued that they would only buy a fraction of those skills, and handle the rest with defaults; interskill defaults lead to growing rather than diminishing returns once you get up to +5 or so, and it's sometimes better just to buy one skill up as high as you can before your GM vomits.