Reliable Luck

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

But that violates the core rule of Powers: ABC. It is neither Accurate, Basic, or Cheap when compared to Luck with Reliable. If GMs do not like Luck with Reliable, they can just ban it from their games, but they should not try to force players to take an inferior alternative that costs 10x as much in its place.

Force, no, but allow...if they want to allow it and the players want to take it, why not?

[AlexanderHowl]

Because it violates ABC. No ability that violates ABC should really be allowed within a game, especially if it is a replacement for an ability that does not violate ABC. If a GM does not want an ability because they feel it is broken, that is fine, but they should not violate ABC by giving an alternative that costs 10x as much (at that point, they are just quibbling about the cost, which is a violation of ABC). Either ban that type of ability entirely or keep to ABC.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

But that violates the core rule of Powers: ABC. It is neither Accurate, Basic, or Cheap when compared to Luck with Reliable. If GMs do not like Luck with Reliable, they can just ban it from their games, but they should not try to force players to take an inferior alternative that costs 10x as much in its place.

I was waiting for this to be said. If every other way costs 100 pts to do something, and you've found a way to do it for 10 pts, that's a good indication that the 10 pt way is munchkiny, rules laywery or broken. +10 to anything you're rolling, for 7.5 points, once an hour, is clearly one of those.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I was waiting for this to be said. If every other way costs 100 pts to do something, and you've found a way to do it for 10 pts, that's a good indication that the 10 pt way is munchkiny, rules laywery or broken. +10 to anything you're rolling, for 7.5 points, once an hour, is clearly one of those.

One of the biggest indicators I have that Reliable is not supposed to be applied to abilities that have no activation rolls is that if it was intended to work that way, several abilities described in Powers would break the ABC rule. For example, Madness (Powers, p. 143) is an Affliction that uses Malediction, and has multiple levels. If Reliable was allowed on Afflictions with Malediction (which, by the logic used it should be, since Affliction with Malediction isn't enhanced by Accurate, so it must permit Reliable), then buying any additional levels of Affliction to give a bonus to the contest grossly breaks the "cheap" rule, since it would always be far cheaper to load up on levels of Reliable rather than buying another level of Affliction and multiplying the ability's point cost.

Or take Active Camouflage (Powers, p. 151) - Talent adds to Stealth rolls enhanced by Chameleon, so Reliable, if it was allowed on Chameleon, should add to Chameleon's effective level for far cheaper than adding additional levels of the Chameleon advantage itself. Yet Active Camouflage is built based on Chameleon level 3.

I could go on, but the point is, allowing Reliable on advantages without an activation roll, which definitely includes Luck, ends up breaking things, and I very much doubt it was intended to be allowed. As others have pointed out, Reliable saying it "works the same as Talent" is not logically the same as "Reliable can be applied to all advantages Talent can give a bonus to". At best, the wording is ambiguous. But GURPS rules tend to be written with the assumption that the GM will use some logic of their own, and that obviously broken or meaningless constructs will be forbidden. Consider the Accurate enhancement, for example. It doesn't bother to spell out that it's inapplicable to, say, Healing, because the writers assumed the players could figure out that if an advantage didn't have an Accuracy statistic, it didn't apply. Similarly, Reliable, which specifically says "you get a bonus to all rolls to use it", is probably just assuming that people will realize that if you don't roll to use an ability, Reliable is inapplicable.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Culture20

If you allow reliable to add to damage rolls for melee innate attacks as well as the attack rolls...

Who would allow that? Damage is neither usage nor activation and is not effected by Talent.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Because it violates ABC.

So? ABC is not only highly overrated as a concept, it's not even RAW.

No ability that violates ABC should really be allowed within a game, especially if it is a replacement for an ability that does not violate ABC. If a GM does not want an ability because they feel it is broken, that is fine, but they should not violate ABC by giving an alternative that costs 10x as much (at that point, they are just quibbling about the cost, which is a violation of ABC). Either ban that type of ability entirely or keep to ABC.

That's a nice set of opinions, but it's not how I run my games.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

One of the biggest indicators I have that Reliable is not supposed to be applied to abilities that have no activation rolls is that if it was intended to work that way, several abilities described in Powers would break the ABC rule.

Thank you! My sleep dep brain has been unable to articulate or even derive these points.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

One of the biggest indicators I have that Reliable is not supposed to be applied to abilities that have no activation rolls is that if it was intended to work that way, several abilities described in Powers would break the ABC rule. For example, Madness (Powers, p. 143) is an Affliction that uses Malediction...

Or take Active Camouflage (Powers, p. 151) - Talent adds to Stealth rolls enhanced by Chameleon, so Reliable, if it was allowed on Chameleon, should add to Chameleon's effective level for far cheaper than adding additional levels of the Chameleon advantage itself.

I think it goes without saying that levelled advantages, that gain to-roll bonuses per level, can't take Reliable as a shortcut to get those bonuses.

Luck, however, is a different kind of advantage, so while those are valid arguments, I think a different argument applies.

BTW- Building a +10 to any roll as +10 to IQ/DX/etc is very much Accurate and Basic.

The Cheap argument I can see applied for if you have say 3 builds for an advantage, and they're all in the same ballpark, say +/-30% at the most, then go with the cheapest of those. But if there's a very straightforward build, and a build which relies on integrating several disparate paragraphs of text but comes out at 1/10th the price, I'd say the A+B parts of ABC would win out.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I'd write that up as IQ-base (or DX), then add the other forms as Alternative Abilities with the x1/5 discount. And would Luck not apply to ST rolls?

Even so, +10 with Luck is slightly better than a straight +10, due to choosing the best of 3 rolls, which would be probabilistically a +2 (perhaps? The maths seems impossibly intractable to me).

Luck works out to about +2.5ish (Average roll is going to be 7.99ish, compared to the normal 10.5ish).

I'm a little averse to building it as an alternative ability because it takes one second to ready from DX to IQ or whatever, which limits the ability to affect your rolls as necessary, once per game hour.

I left out ST rolls for two reasons:
-> I forgot.
-> And more importantly, I don't know what an only affects ST rolls limitation would be for ST. Certainly at most 3 points, given Striking ST and HP, which don't have rolls, are worth 7 together.

Note that I need to stick a rider on this that it can't be used to supercharge active defenses by +10 too.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by TGLS

I'm a little averse to building it as an alternative ability because it takes one second to ready from DX to IQ or whatever,

Add Reduced Time or Reflexive?

[TGLS]

Adding reflexive basically erases the limited use limitation in terms of cost, so the total would become 260 pts. If we just ignore the ready requirement, then it becomes 156 pts.

[AlexanderHowl]

Or I can take something like Visualization (Based on Will, +20%; Cosmic, +50%; Link, +20%; Reduced Time 6, 120%; Reflexive, +40%; Reliable +10, +50%) [40] plus Luck (Active, -40%; Cosmic, +50%; Link, +20%; Reliable+10, +50%) [27] and get the approximately the same functionality for 67 points (plus 60 points for Cosmic Talent 4 and 100 points for Will 20 [minus any reductions due to having IQ above 10]) I can use Visualization as much as I like to improve one roll per turn, receiving an average bonus of anywhere from an average bonus of +8 to +24, and I can really focus on it with my luck one per hour, allowing me to take the best of three rolls, with a +14 to my roll from Cosmic Talent and Reliable, which would give me an average of an additional +5 to +16 for that one roll per hour.

So, I can either pay 168 points for an ability that I can only use once per day (not once per attribute per day, but once per day) to give me +10 to any single roll or I can spend 227 points for an ability that gives me between +8 and +24 to one roll per turn (plus an option for using Luck with the ability once per hour for an average of +13 to +40). As a GM, I know which one that I am giving my NPCs, so it would not be fair for me to deny my PCs similar capabilities.