[Supers][Spaceships] I/C/D/M Scale and points

[TJA]

Hello,
on GURPS Supers, p18-19 there is a description of "classes" of Supers, their point-totals and scales of combat abilties.

The "biggest" supers class, for example, named "M" from Millenium allows for the following abilities:

Max. dice of Innate Attack or basic swing damage: 15000d
Maximum DR: 50000
Maximum Damage Reduction factor: 10000
Maximum Levels of ST with Super Effort: +28 (+100000)

Such a Super could have up to 3*500d of dDam as used in GURPS Spaceships and is therefor comparable to a Spinal Battery with an Output of 300TJ (see table on Spaceships, p67) and damage type "dDam1".

Quite impressive ... and i like this vision!

But the rules on Supers, p18-19 seem to limit Supers to 6400 points!

With this "little" amount of points, you just cannot reach the above limits on damage dice and DR!
And this, while IT:DR and S-E *are* within the reach of that point-limit:

IT:DR 10000, 600 points
Super Effort +28: 750 points

Is this on purpose?

For 600 points, i can just get 600/5 = DR 120 or between 120 and 360 dice of damage!

I just cannot see how that is constructed in a logical way - despite the fact, that with 6400 points only DR 1280 or between 1280 and 3840 dice of damage can be bought.

Something is wrong - for me, it seems the 6400 points need to be adjusted OR (and i like that better) the cost for damage and DR need to be scaled down like the cost for IT:DR and S-E (both of which do not follow a linear progression as the former two).

What do you think?

How would you handle this situation?

o Limit a player to 6400 points and therefor much "too low" damage or Damage Resistance?
o Increase the point total?
o Change the cost progression?

Thanx for your thoughts ...

[TJA]

Two more calculations:

DR 50000 would cost 250000 points!
This is about 400 times more costly than IT:DR!!!!

15000d of damage would cost between 75000 points and 225000 points (between 5 and 15 points per level).

Just to add those numbers to my above question.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by TJA

But the rules on Supers, p18-19 seem to limit Supers to 6400 points!

Actually, they don't. That's merely the highest category listed, because it's going to be hard to run a continuing campaign where the PCs are at the power level of Superman (the Silver Age one) or Dark Phoenix. But allowing higher power levels is within the GM's discretion.

My current campaign (one session to go!) has PCs built on 1,500 points, and the GURPS mechanics works pretty well for that. I can't guarantee the results of building a character on five times that many points! But if you try it, let us know how it turns out.

Bill Stoddard

[TJA]

I recognise you as the author of Supers :)

But still, from the text the limitation seems to be ment this way:

"To create this kind of lineup, assign players a point value in one of the following ranges:

[...]

High-Power: 1600-6400 points: [...]

[... about I/D/C/M scale ...]

These are in addition to, not instead of, point value guidelines [...]"

That seems to imply, the maximum Super GURPS allows for, is 6400 points and M scale.

But those points are by far not enough to build an M-scale Super with fitting DR or damage.

So, how shall i interprete the text then?


Beside that, DR and damage cost linear while IT:DR and S-E have a logarithmic progression (ten times better every 6 levels).

May that not be the core of the problem?

[Langy]

May that not the core of the problem?

It is. I've personally disliked the scaling of DR and damage quite a bit and think both of them should be changed to logarithmic progressions.

[TJA]

I just tried and found, for example, this "solution":

Pay regular 5 points per level of DR.
After reaching 10 levels (DR10), this cost you 50 points.

NOW, start the same progression as from the Super-Abilities Table (Super, p146) and you end up with DR 50000 costing *exactly* the same as IT:DR 10000 - both of which are the maximum allowed for M-scale.

They cost the same now :)
Everywhere ....

And up to level 100, this cost the same are before in the existing rules!
So, any "getting-cheaper" effect kicks in beyond level 100 - which makes it "safe" for most and more regular characters.

Both cost 600 points (for me, this is a bit low, but i used the existing table, progression and cost).

I think, something similar should be possible for damage cost too!

P.S. It would not be needed to have DR 50000 cost exactly 600 or 750 like the other 2 abilities, but the cost should maybe directly relate to the effects and usability of the Advantage (DR, IT:DR, S-E, damage).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Langy

It is. I've personally disliked the scaling of DR and damage quite a bit and think both of them should be changed to logarithmic progressions.

I seriously considered putting in one form of exponential DR: DR bought as a force shield. It's quite appropriate to the comics to have a character spend FP to supercharge their force shield.

But really, comics supers don't rely on DR all that much. The optimal design is some levels of Damage Reduction, to cut down the magnitude of injury from big attacks, and a decent DR, to keep them from being beaten to death by normal men's fists. DR is there to stop the nuisance attacks.

I'm less enthusiastic about Innate Attack, mostly because it's so much cheaper than ST. Spend 100 points on ST and you get +10 ST and +1d damage, with no range! Spend that same 100 points on Crushing attack and you get +20d damage, with a fairly good range. I'd also note that most comic book supers—which is what GURPS Supers was trying to model—do not have ranged blasts that totally annihilate their foes; it's rare to see a blaster in the same damage class as the Hulk, for example.

If you want to stay within that structure and do mega blasts, buy Ultrapower and a healthy battery of Energy Reserve to support it. That will let you get off two or three "nova blast" effects. Note that Ultrapower is not restricted to a fixed upper limit of effect!

If I could have redesigned the GURPS rules for attack and defense powers from the outset, now, I might have done things differently. I really do like uniform scaling rules under which the flea and the apatosaur, or Dream Girl and Superman, fit on the same scale. But that would take more radical changes than GURPS 4/e made. So I tried to do a good fit to the kind of supers that appear in most comics. If you think you can come up with a conceptually neat unified rule that goes beyond that, more power to you.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

I'm personally fond of a 'scale' advantage. At level 1, your HP become dHP, your damage becomes dDam, your DR becomes dDR. At level 2, increase to c, at level 3 increase to m, and so on. Based on other scaling for the game, I'm inclined to eyeball that at about 500 points per level (you can go with 600 to fit the range/speed chart, but I see little need for scale 1.5, 3, or 7; at 500 points for x10, scale 2 would be 150 points, scale 5 would be 350).

The advantage of this is that it avoids certain point problems that pop up with log scaling on individual powers. Let's scale Super-Effort on Innate Attack is +400%. Now, lemme buy a 600 point attack.

Small Piercing Attack: 3 pt/die, +400%, 15/die, so 40d. With EE, becomes 10,000,000d6 pi-
Piercing Attack: 5 pt/die, +400%, 25/die, so 24d. With EE, becomes 20,000d6 pi
Huge Piercing Attack: 8 pt/die, +400%, 40/die, so 15d. With EE, becomes 700d pi++.

I am having trouble thinking of a situation where 700d pi++ is remotely balanced vs 10,000,000d6 pi-.

[Refplace]

I always liked a scaling power rule myself though never worked out a method that fit perfectly.
I initially charged a UB for a multiplier on most attacks which was available for some Supers but not all.
Now I would possibly do it as a tiered Cosmic Enhancement.
Cosmic Power (Scaling) 0 = Normal Damage
Cosmic Power (Scaling) 1 +50%=*3 Damage
Cosmic Power (Scaling) 2 +100%=*5 Damage
Cosmic Power (Scaling) 3 +150%=*7 Damage
Cosmic Power (Scaling) 10 +500%=*100 Damage
Cosmic Power (Scaling) 16 +800%=*1000 Damage
based off the chart in Supers p146.
Each level of this enhancement is +50% and using it costs 1fp for an active power, no cost for a passive power. This gives an edge to defensive powers which I prefer.
It also provides an easy method of turning it on or off since you have to ramp it up by spending Fp to do the more impressive damage.

It thus meshes well with the other multiplicative enhancements and modifiers and gives a reasonable granularity for scaling.
It tends to keep dice down in some cases for normal attacks so you have less sloppy kills, it needs to be more of a intentional thing.
Its expensive but I am quite happy with that too and like the enhancement on ST and other abilities it is less useful if you have low power levels, though not as negatively impacted.
And in some ways since it is cheaper then just assigning many thousands of points to a Super its more controlled by the GM and likely to have less of the bloat in other abilities that throwing all those points at a character would tend to get.

I think its pretty simple and clean but it still doesn't really ring my bell and I am not sure what its missing or what would be better.
I also like it better then the Super Effort enhancement because its more granular but your mileage may vary.

[naloth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I seriously considered putting in one form of exponential DR: DR bought as a force shield. It's quite appropriate to the comics to have a character spend FP to supercharge their force shield.

I've experimented with this and it works pretty well. There are a few super concepts such as force fields (Invisible Girl/Woman) and super energy absorption (DR w/Absorption) that don't work well with IT:DR.

I'm less enthusiastic about Innate Attack, mostly because it's so much cheaper than ST.

While that's true on the lower range the first post quite accurately points out that a blaster will be massively outclassed by SuperST in the C/M scale point range.

I'd also note that most comic book supers—which is what GURPS Supers was trying to model—do not have ranged blasts that totally annihilate their foes; it's rare to see a blaster in the same damage class as the Hulk, for example.

Of course, the Hulk doesn't throw punches that can totally annihilate his foes either. It's certainly in genre to have ranged attacks in the same damage range as melee damage. It's not even hard to come up with blasters that have the same damage class as the Hulk.

To that end I've also used Super Effort less impressively for Innate Attack. The fundamental problem here is that there isn't a good value that works for every Innate Attack type. The difference in base costs and the number of other modifiers makes this a complicated problem. Basically you can re-write Innate Attack to get a satisfying, reasonably fair way to scale it like ST but it take a lot more than a tack on enhancement.