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Old 10-02-2012, 06:56 PM   #51
Anthony
 
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
How's Comfortable Wealth going to look when ST is only five points a level?
Depends on the game. For many games (almost all high tech games, and low tech games that aren't focused on hitting things), comfortable wealth beats +2 ST hands-down.
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Old 10-02-2012, 07:09 PM   #52
ErhnamDJ
 
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Depends on the game. For many games (almost all high tech games, and low tech games that aren't focused on hitting things), comfortable wealth beats +2 ST hands-down.
But he was specifically talking about his game, where:

"I just usually don't look at traits outside of "Melee combat guy", "Blasty/HP-refilling wizard guy", and "Climb stuff and unlock guy".

I actually think Wealth, Status, Reputation and the like are generally not worth buying at all and my only characters to have the first two were template-built..."



Wealth, Status, and Reputation aren't worth buying in his game, and so he's raising the price of them relative to everything else, making them even more worthless.
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Old 10-02-2012, 07:24 PM   #53
simply Nathan
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
Wealth, Status, and Reputation aren't worth buying in his game, and so he's raising the price of them relative to everything else, making them even more worthless.
Or just not listing them in "Approved Advantages/Disadvantages/Skills" for the campaign, and intentionally reducing the cost of admittedly awesome traits that I want to be more common among professional adventurers without being necessarily automatic. I think I'd drop Peripheral Vision to 5 points, Absolute Direction to 1 point (the same as Accessory: Compass), and other things when I thought of them.

Drop IQ to 10/level but make Per and Will independant of it, DX 15/level while still including Speed, I can keep at this all day.
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Old 10-07-2012, 01:10 PM   #54
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

This is going to call back a bit, but since I think it's topical, I'm still going to do it.

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
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.
I was thinking about this situation the other day.

Basically, it boils down to: there are "two economies" in GURPS that characters exist in: the Character Points economy and the Dollars economy. And the exchange rate between them is neither linear, nor fixed, and it's one-way. What happened was, the robot character was not getting the same points leveraging as the humans+gear characters, so effectiveness was decreased in a comparable situation.

And then I thought about the traits that exist between those "two economies", and they're basically, "turn CP into Dollars". Points-for-cash, Signature Gear... and Wealth.

That got me thinking.

What if there was a trait, like "Robot," where you exchanged "regular Character Points" for "specialized Character Points" at a ratio that is not 1:1? Like Wealth, it absolutely goes one way: only from CP to the other, not back to it. And, you can only spend them on specialized traits for "being a Robot".

So for example, you spend 10 or 25 Character Points on "Robot" or "Cyborg", and that gives you 25 or 75 character points to spend on "Robot Traits", at that same non-linear rate (and the rate and what was available might change with TL).

And you could do something similar for "Monster: Vampire", or "Hero", or other packages... Well, that's starting to turn into an alternative accounting system to "Powers".
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Old 10-07-2012, 04:58 PM   #55
Hans Rancke-Madsen
 
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Originally Posted by Dusqune View Post
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...)
Heltesagaerne, my homegrown RPG system is a point buy system like GURPS (though with quite different point costs). Perhaps some of the ideas can be applied to GURPS.

I charge for stats, skills, and advantages according to how useful they're going to be in the specific campaign. I divide usefulness into six categories, from Extremely Useful at full cost to Maginally Useful at 1/6th cost. In a fantasy or historical medieval campaign, for example, most weapons are Very Useful (5/6th). If you want to be able to use Sword, Dagger, and Bow, you pay the full cost (i.e. 5/6th), because they're potentially useful in quite different situastions that are likely to come up quite a lot. But if you already have Sword skill and want to know how to use a one-handed axe too, you only pay 1/6th for the Axe skill (as long as it's no higher than the Sword skill) because that's really only going to be useful if the character can't get hold of a sword but can get hold of an axe.

If the campaign is set in Egypt in the 1930s, Egyptology costs full price while Sinology costs 1/6th. Rifles, handguns, and knives are at 5/6th cost but swords are only 4/6th).

I have a list of default usefulnesses for half a dozen standard campaign types (e.g. SF, Fantasy, Swashbucklers) and before a campaign I go through the list and change a handful of them to conform to the campaign.

It works very well.

I should add that once a character is designed, points are no longer used. Advantages and disadvantages are added as the events of the campaign dictate and skill improvements depend on how difficult they are to learn. So in the Pulp campaig in Egypt mentioned above, improving Egyptology and Sinology would cost the same efforts.


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Last edited by Hans Rancke-Madsen; 10-07-2012 at 05:12 PM.
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Old 10-07-2012, 08:16 PM   #56
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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While I agree that getting rid of the cinematic skills like Breaking Blow, Power Blow, Invisibility Art, and others in favor of more accurate point cost system that doesn't fix the problem that a normal built with 500 points (that cannot buy abilities marked exotic) will be outclassed by a super built using exotic traits. UBs can help balance that gulf by effectively giving the normal more points.
Yes. UBs can serve to make a non-superpowered PC a feasible choice in a superhero world, thereby serving to increase the variety among the PCs, relative to if UBs had not been used that way.
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Old 10-07-2012, 08:24 PM   #57
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen View Post
If the campaign is set in Egypt in the 1930s, Egyptology costs full price while Sinology costs 1/6th. Rifles, handguns, and knives are at 5/6th cost but swords are only 4/6th).

I have a list of default usefulnesses for half a dozen standard campaign types (e.g. SF, Fantasy, Swashbucklers) and before a campaign I go through the list and change a handful of them to conform to the campaign.

It works very well.

I should add that once a character is designed, points are no longer used. Advantages and disadvantages are added as the events of the campaign dictate and skill improvements depend on how difficult they are to learn. So in the Pulp campaig in Egypt mentioned above, improving Egyptology and Sinology would cost the same efforts.
That way, you're strongly encouraging your players to consider how the cost of some traits change after gamestart. "If I want this, I ought to grab it during character creation, because picking it up later will have a high opportunity cost."

It's like there are two different worlds, with very different physics. The world of character creation, and the world of actual play (or post-gamestart).
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Old 10-07-2012, 09:01 PM   #58
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Originally Posted by daniel_gudman View Post
Well if you really want to push the boat out...

Just tell the players to build a "master swordsman", or a "journeyman mage", or "somebody that would fit in with the cast of Sliders". Without a point total.

Never mind the points, just have everybody model their character concept. Before you even add two numbers together, make sure there's agreement on the "description" of the character that will in turn be modeled by the points.
That approach gets you stick figures, not individuals.

It is characteristic of primitive systems such as AD&D that the game-mechanical aspects of a newly created player character can be defined completely using only a couple of square inches of paper, whereas in sophisticated systems such as GURPS, BESM or Ars Magica, you're going to need something like at least 1/6 of a sheet of paper (i.e. several dozen square inches).
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Old 10-07-2012, 09:15 PM   #59
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen View Post
That approach gets you stick figures, not individuals.

It is characteristic of primitive systems such as AD&D that the game-mechanical aspects of a newly created player character can be defined completely using only a couple of square inches of paper, whereas in sophisticated systems such as GURPS, BESM or Ars Magica, you're going to need something like at least 1/6 of a sheet of paper (i.e. several dozen square inches).
I don't think you have that right. What I think he's saying is that he wants everyone to work up their character's background first, and then create the regular detailed character sheet based on that.
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Old 10-07-2012, 09:23 PM   #60
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait

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I don't think you have that right. What I think he's saying is that he wants everyone to work up their character's background first, and then create the regular detailed character sheet based on that.
But he passes judgement on a stick figure fully describable on 2 square inches of paper. If he says no, that stick figure never becomes an individual. When he says no, he's performing a character concept abortion.
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