Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

[martinl]

It's fairly common knowledge that Combat Reflexes is a great deal, and that this is a deliberate decision that arguably makes the game better.

There are probably other cases in GURPS where this is the case (IQ, DX, weapon bond, etc.), but I'm not asking about those. I'm curious what other GURPS traits you would recost to make the game better. Note I'm not talking changing RAW, just house rule tweaks you think would make the game play better.

I'll start off with SoD, Friends and Companions. I'd be fine with doubling this to -10, simply because I dislike in-party backstabbing.

Another thought: Half value for all negative reaction mods. I am sick and tired of parties where everyone is an outcast or worse, or n-1 outcasts plus a single social munchkin.

[sir_pudding]

Regrowth, obviously.

[ErhnamDJ]

I would lower the cost on a lot of the 'neat' advantages that I would like to take more often and see other people take more often.

Looking through the advantages section, I can pick out a few right now:

Catfall, Common Sense, pretty much all of the little traits robots get, Peripheral Vision, Pressure Support, Regrowth, Sealed, Temperature Tolerance, Unaging.


Things that don't come up very often and that just sit there inactive, waiting for the thing that they do to come up. And that's not always true, like with Peripheral Vision, but I think they cost too much.

I think most of the traits that are used commonly in normal human adventuring are priced about right in comparison to one another, but once you start getting into the weird stuff that's outside the bounds of normal humans, the prices seem too high. It's almost like there's a built-in weirdness tax to keep you from taking them. But those things aren't necessarily weird, and they end up incentivizing super normals in place of weird supers in supers games, and humans over robots in science fiction games. If those things really are weird, I'd rather slap an unusual background on them than have to go through and decide to lower the price on the stuff to be a vampire or a robot or a member of the slime race, since they're very common in this world, or something like that.


Edit:

And those are only advantages. I would completely reprice all of the skills, and most of the economics-related traits as well. I'm not sure on the disadvantages.

Limitations are a much bigger issue, I think, since you can almost completely cripple a hundred point advantage with a -5% limitation. There's very little relation between the price reduction and the drop in usefulness.

I would reduce the price of attributes as they increase in levels--at least with ST, to replace the kludge that is Super-ST, which leaves a lot of dead levels there where ST is way overpriced.

Combine the ST problem with the 'neat' advantage overpricing, and things like vampires and robots are unplayable. Look at the combat robots in Ultra-Tech and the vampires in Horror or Monster Hunters and then compare them to some of the similarly-priced supers templates in Supers. It's ridiculous.

And those robots are useless. Compare them to the weapons available at their tech levels. DR needs the same price reduction as ST--and it needs to be a big one.




I'm not sure if that stuff is the kind of thing you're talking about.

The kind of thing you want sounds more like my skills repricing house rule I use, where skills are sorted into different price tiers. If I wanted someone to take, say, Surgery, I could simply put that into a lower priced tier for that game to encourage players to take it. In the same way, I could make something else cost more. If I didn't want them getting into gunfights, I could make Guns cost more.

I've been working on doing something similar with the spells in Magic. If I didn't want to worry with players tracking food, I could make Create Food very cheap. And if I wanted to make ranged combat still viable, I could make Missile Shield very expensive.

[Dusqune]

Just thinking off the top of my head I know I don't charge for what is usually a fluff trait. E.g., I don't charge for Unaging, but I would charge (maybe not full price) for it if it had the Age Control enhancement on it. Assuming your game isn't generation-spanning,* it's just fluff that says you've been around a while--at most a perk (or possibly an UB...)

On that note, I also don't charge for Unusual Background. I understand it's purpose--to give someone the option to play a slightly-out-of-genre character if they pay a few extra points, but one of the things that drew me to GURPS was the GU--generic and universal. If you can x for y points in one game, why can't you x for y in another? In my mind, either the x fits in the genre or it doesn't, so you can buy it or you can't. GM call.**
I bring up Unusual Background, here, because to me, it is the opposite of what you have described--making a trait cost more to (arguably) make the game better. And to those that use Unusual Background and enrich your games: More power to you.

As for other homebrew discounts... PK's myGurps has some excellent Absorption rules that make it actually worthwhile. Regrowth was a good one mentioned that (I think) is on there too.

Also, I tend to toss free advantages around with the understanding that they can be taken away at any time. A great example would be a Patron that may or may not turn out to be a bad guy--So I don't make the PC pay for them... or, I let them pay for the Patron as insurance that the person(s) they are working for are not going to turn out to actually be the big bad the whole time.

I realize most of my examples are discounting to the point of them being completely free, but that's still a discount!

* And if it is generation spanning then probably everyone would have it anyways, making it an excellent candidate for a "free advantage."

** Actually, I just thought of using UB as a tax for gamebreakingly powerful abilities. "Can I buy the MUNCHKIN innate attack?" "Sure, with a 500pt UB."

[mlangsdorf]

There's not a lot of instances where I charge Unusual Background, but I did let someone play a shape-shifting dragon in an otherwise somewhat low powered Wuxia game. Being able to wander around as a ST25, DR7 "little old man" could have made him massively overpowered compared to the other PCs. 50 or so points of Unusual Background forced him to cut his DX and IQ enough that he just wasn't as skilled as everyone else, and couldn't steal their thunder. He still had a role as "little old man who can't be hurt or moved", which is a great role in Wuxia, but he wasn't also "unstoppable killer" or "the big brain" or anything like that.

One trait that I constantly reprice is Contacts, which I think I terribly overcosted in the basic set.

Peripheral Vision is an interesting case. It's totally worth 15 points for melee combatants, but low tech helmets make it worthless by imposing Tunnel Vision. So should people get a discount for it?

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

One trait that I constantly reprice is Contacts, which I think I terribly overcosted in the basic set.

Oh! I had forgotten about that one. It's so expensive that it escaped my thoughts entirely. It got listed in my brain under 'do not think about.'

The few times I've considered taking it, it has been so costly that I had to change my character concept. It would have been nice, but not that nice.

Peripheral Vision is an interesting case. It's totally worth 15 points for melee combatants, but low tech helmets make it worthless by imposing Tunnel Vision. So should people get a discount for it?

I don't know if it is often worth that much. I think sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. The higher the point total, the more worthwhile it looks. But in a seventy-five point game, I don't think I would ever take it. Maybe if it cost half what it does.

That's why I mentioned it. It's something I think of as being 'neat,' whereas other things are 'necessary.' To even play a character, you have to get your attributes set, and you have to have your skills that match your background. But I've never had Peripheral Vision as a character's defining quality, and when I write it down as something I want, it always gets cut. It's hardly ever even close. Maybe it's just something I personally don't value as highly as other people, but I've never seen anyone else take it either.

I'd probably consider lowering the price to ten points to see if anyone bites.

I also think it's possible that it's a casualty of other traits being undercosted, namely Combat Reflexes and skill increases for combat skills. If you're going to pour a ton of points into combat abilities, those are the things you get. My players always purchase combat skill and Combat Reflexes and ST and HT and Extra Attack first. Then they purchase other things, like Peripheral Vision. It's useful for a melee combatant, but not as much as those other traits--not for the same number of points as you could get from those others. So to get people to take it, I think the price needs to be lowered. Or the price of those other things needs to be raised.

I don't see Peripheral Vision being worth the difference between having skill 12 and skill 16.

[Anthony]

I would tend to reduce the price of almost any trait that can be mostly replaced by gear, because the point value of such a trait is really just equal to the point value of "doesn't have to buy and carry item X".

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I would tend to reduce the price of almost any trait that can be mostly replaced by gear, because the point value of such a trait is really just equal to the point value of "doesn't have to buy and carry item X".

Yeah. That's another issue with playing robots. I made a combat robot--sank all my points into robot stuff--and then the other players put some points into Wealth and then had powered suits that replicated things that cost me a ton of points. Only for way fewer points.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

One trait that I constantly reprice is Contacts, which I think I terribly overcosted in the basic set.

I've gone for very cheap Contacts in Sagatafl too, but that's combined with emphasizing that each Contact is a named individual in a specific location. If your adventuring life (or any other kind of life you may be living) makes you move away from that location, you can't use that Contact any more, unless he has a Correspondance trait (in which case you can communicate with him by mail - medieval mail is slow). Also your enemies (spelled with "E" or "e") are perfectly capable of intimidaing or killing your Contacts, if they find out about them. That's the nature of most social advantages (and disads), and it seems to me that GURPS doesn't take that nature sufficiently into account.

Another thing Contacts do, is they tie the player character to the world, by making him start the game actually already actually knowing actual people. That alone has a lot of value, and is a good argument for making Contacts cheaper.

Alternatively, instead of making Contacts cheaper, you can give each PC a special pool of points that can only be used on Contacts, so that everyone has at least a couple, and if you want more you can buy them with your normal points.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Dusqune

* And if it is generation spanning then probably everyone would have it anyways, making it an excellent candidate for a "free advantage."

You could have a generation spanning game where some players actually played generationally, retiring PCs and taking up new ones.

At that point the power level of longevity advantages depends heavily on how you're deciding point totals for the new generation, though.

Originally Posted by Dusqune

** Actually, I just thought of using UB as a tax for gamebreakingly powerful abilities. "Can I buy the MUNCHKIN innate attack?" "Sure, with a 500pt UB."

That is of course one of the standard uses. Though truly game-breaking rather than merely game stressing abilities are probably better banned outright.