What's my counterpoint for this observation about advantages/disadvantages?

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

CP are a completely meta game construct, and have nothing to do with realism or the internal logic of the setting. It has to do with players, fairness, and trying for interesting tradeoffs in character design,

This. Right here. The key feature that having character point budgets gives you is that all the players have equal access to all of the abilities in the game. Everyone could be a Multimillionaire, or everybody could be ST 20, or everybody could be the most amazing acrobat in the world. But on a limited CP budget you have to make choices and decide which of those are more important to the character concept you want to play.

If your character is somehow going to be all three of those you are, quite simply, going to need more points. Which either means the GM has to give you more points than everybody else (which breaks the fairness part) or he needs to give everybody more points (which the GM may not want to do).

[ericthered]

And you seem to have sold your player on simulationism. That's fine, just let him know that sometimes you intentionally let go of simulationism for the sake of gameplay. Point values are an example of that. Kind of.

As an aside, I am currently running a game where I didn't charge players for their social position, and then told them to choose important people in a community. That's another approach. But its not the default approach, and I did it because I wanted the players to not angst over how much to pay for their social privileges. Its working fine, mostly because what they could choose from was constrained by the setting.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Lord Dynel

Player: My point is that just because I'm filthy rich, I can't be as capable as the random guy down the street, or the other PCs, or I have to have things wrong with me?

Not the random guy down the street. Because if you built the random guy down street with points you'd probably be building him on 50 points, not 150.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Lord Dynel

Player: My point is that just because I'm filthy rich, I can't be as capable as the random guy down the street, or the other PCs, or I have to have things wrong with me?

Perhaps your player doesn't realize that being Filthy Rich is also a capability? So that Filthy Rich character is more capable than the random guy down the street.

[Lord Dynel]

Thank you, everyone, for your input (and my apologies for not responding and thanking you sooner!)

I had another GURPS conversation with the guy. I'm convinced (or willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least) that his concerns/observations weren't self-serving. He claims "genuine concern" for balance, or what he claims is "too much balance...when I have to have 50 points of bad stuff on my character sheet just to be rich, when real life doesn't consider these zero sums." When I brought up his own point he made about the "random guy down the street," I reminded him that the "random guy" wasn't a PC, that he was a normal person (I'll bring that point back up in a second). The abstract nature of the character points means that, during character creation, there has to be that give and take to assure balance. I told him he could be "filthy rich" but he either won't be capable in other areas or he'll be burdened with disadvantages, and while that may not truly reflect reality it keeps a balance with the other PCs

Eventually I tried to explain it using points that were alluded to upthread - that people in "real life" are made up of different point values. Our mailman might be a 40-point character, while the cashier at the grocery store might only be a 10-point character. The police officer that lives a couple doors down from me is probably a 90-point characters. While just making up characters based on each players concept/idea would be more realistic (and CP value would be all over the place!), fitting all PCs into the 150/-50 frame means more balance for game purposes.

[JMason]

Originally Posted by Lord Dynel

Thank you, everyone, for your input (and my apologies for not responding and thanking you sooner!)

I had another GURPS conversation with the guy. I'm convinced (or willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least) that his concerns/observations weren't self-serving. He claims "genuine concern" for balance, or what he claims is "too much balance...when I have to have 50 points of bad stuff on my character sheet just to be rich, when real life doesn't consider these zero sums." When I brought up his own point he made about the "random guy down the street," I reminded him that the "random guy" wasn't a PC, that he was a normal person (I'll bring that point back up in a second). The abstract nature of the character points means that, during character creation, there has to be that give and take to assure balance. I told him he could be "filthy rich" but he either won't be capable in other areas or he'll be burdened with disadvantages, and while that may not truly reflect reality it keeps a balance with the other PCs

Eventually I tried to explain it using points that were alluded to upthread - that people in "real life" are made up of different point values. Our mailman might be a 40-point character, while the cashier at the grocery store might only be a 10-point character. The police officer that lives a couple doors down from me is probably a 90-point characters. While just making up characters based on each players concept/idea would be more realistic (and CP value would be all over the place!), fitting all PCs into the 150/-50 frame means more balance for game purposes.

That's a pretty good way of looking at it.

And it's not a "zero sum" game... it's a 150 sum game ;-) So if you want a character that has 200 points in capabilities (as defined by GURPS point values) you have to take -50 points in deficiencies.

[Anaraxes]

If you want realism (or "realism"), you could always roll for traits randomly. Want to be rich? Well, get out the percentile dice, because there's only a 1% chance that you're in the 1%. Similarly for all your other traits. Mostly likely, you'll work out to just an average normal (25 points, lets say) while the point-buy players are at 150. Or you might get the low end of the bell curve, just as likely as the high end.

If the player winds up in the situation of being overshadowed by all the other characters with nothing to offer, it might make the meta-game fairness point more obvious. Also the point that RPG heroes aren't (usually) randomly selected from the general population, so observations about that population aren't really relevant.

[sir_pudding]

Having lived through the 80s the result of that is the player with notebooks full of randomly generated characters until they finally managed to roll all 18s. No thanks.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Having lived through the 80s the result of that is the player with notebooks full of randomly generated characters until they finally managed to roll all 18s. No thanks.

When I was in the 80s, no one allowed to make a character without a GM watching and you weren't allowed to re-roll if you didn't like what you got...so no notebooks fool of randomly generated characters. Just that one chance right then in that moment. Well, and then after your character died, the next one chance you got...or a 2hp 1st Level Magic-User? That's cool. Then that one died and you went back in for another randomly generated character.

It was so fun.

I'm being sarcastic about the fun part.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Having lived through the 80s the result of that is the player with notebooks full of randomly generated characters until they finally managed to roll all 18s. No thanks.

I calculate the probability of that happening is either 9.85 × 10^-15 or 1 (for a cheating player).