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Old 05-09-2013, 12:14 AM   #221
kirbwarrior
 
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
...and I figure out what sort of stuff the character's going to be doing, and I figure out and put into the game interesting drama and challenges for him, then I have done a lot of work.

And then we might start playing the game where things don't work out for the brick.
This is where I get lost. Either you did take into account of the super's abilities or you didn't. Does his niche go unused? Did you build the obstacles too high for his niche? Or is someone else in the party 'wizarding the fighter'*?

In D&D 3.5, it is completely possible and easy to make a wizard still a wizard and be better than the fighter at everything the fighter can do 5 levels behind the fighter. You never, ever hear someone complain their wizard isn't good enough above level 5.
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While I do not think that GURPS is perfect I do think that it is more balanced than what I am likely to create by GM fiat.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:20 AM   #222
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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Another issue I've had is that players just won't take stuff they think is overpriced, even if it's in-genre and they would otherwise take that stuff. In supers games, I don't see any comic book-style bricks, like Colossus or The Thing, who can get hit really hard and hit hard back, because those are too expensive. There are a lot of speedsters and psychics, but the other common type of hero from comic books is missing entirely.

Edit:



When someone sits down to play in a TL 10 game and they try to build a robot and what the game tells them to do is purchase DR 75 (Cannot wear armor, -40%) [225], then that doesn't seem like a good faith effort. That seems like they're being punished for their character concept. It's the same if they want ST 80 (Super, -10%) [630] in their supers game.

I played and ran sevral Supers games and Bricks were pretty common.
I do not think any of them were built with straight DR but I dont see that as a probelm. DR does not model everything.

As for the Tl 10 example I would just build the robot with money like everyone else. Points are for when cash can not buy what you want.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:26 AM   #223
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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I look at it as being two separate games entirely. There's the character creation game, and then there's the actual roleplaying game.

The goal of the character creation game is to get a character you'll enjoy playing in the roleplaying game. You either win that game or you lose that game, and the stakes are pretty high, since you won't find out which you've done until after you've devoted quite a lot of everyone's time to it, and if you lose it could end up seriously jeopardizing the roleplaying game.
Yeah; I tend to agree. And that's why I usually dispense with the character creation game entirely and just let the players make the characters that they want (within the context of the game I plan on running).

Character creation should ultimately be about getting the essentials of a concept down on paper, and making sure that said concept fits into the group of PCs and the game the GM intends to run. Point-buy systems are intended to be a tool to facilitate these goals; but all too often, they become part of the problem. And once the point-buy system is complex enough that it's a game in and of itself, they've almost certainly crossed that line: players are more concerned about what choices will "win" the character creation game instead of what choices best represent the concept they ultimately want to play.

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I want players to be able to understand what sorts of characters they'll be allowed to play in the game, so they can take that into account when thinking up a concept.
The best way I've found to do that has been to put together a few "benchmark NPCs" that are typical of what the PCs are going to encounter in the game, and then make those NPCs available to the players when they're making their characters. I have to make the NPCs anyway, so I'm not doing extra work; and they give the players a sense of what the world is going to be like and what levels of competence are appropriate. The only extra work is the fact that the PC sheets need to be reviewed to catch oversights and/or deliberate abuse; and I use a peer review process among the players to catch that sort of stuff.

In short, don't try to design characters in a vacuum; always provide some sort of context that they players can use to get their character to fit into the game.

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My players usually put a lot of work into their characters and their backstories and stuff. They usually show up with a concept that we discuss and flesh out before the game. I'm not sure how that would work out if the player didn't know what the traits would cost. "I had a cool character idea for a baron, but it turned out I didn't have enough points.
Yeah; I used to have exactly the same issue.

Last edited by dataweaver; 05-09-2013 at 12:30 AM.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:38 AM   #224
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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This is where I get lost. Either you did take into account of the super's abilities or you didn't.
That's going to depend on what type of character it is. If supers are well-known then the world is certainly going to have responded to their existence. If the brick goes into the warehouse to fight the mafia guys, then they're going to be prepared for him. They'll have stuff like pepper spray and armor-piercing rounds. They might start firing a fire extinguisher to blind him.

And so then their abilities turn out to not do what they were expecting in this kind of situation.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:47 AM   #225
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

The problem with a bid system is that it only works for options that multiple people are likely to want; with the huge variety of advantages in GURPS, you can easily have only one person who wants a particular ability.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:48 AM   #226
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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That's going to depend on what type of character it is. If supers are well-known then the world is certainly going to have responded to their existence. If the brick goes into the warehouse to fight the mafia guys, then they're going to be prepared for him. They'll have stuff like pepper spray and armor-piercing rounds. They might start firing a fire extinguisher to blind him.

And so then their abilities turn out to not do what they were expecting in this kind of situation.
If you are expecting the players to follow genre conventions but then you turn around and have the opposition routinely subvert it, of course they are going to feel like their characters aren't good enough.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:53 AM   #227
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If you are expecting the players to follow genre conventions
Yeah, but I'm not doing that and the players know going in that I'm going to try to make as much internal sense out of the world as I can. If I didn't have people act that way, then they'd complain that I'm taking it easy on them.

Besides, police officers carry pepper spray and tasers. There's no way I'm going to have the bad guys firing .38s just so they can bounce off the brick. Not after they've seen the characters in the news, anyway.
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Old 05-09-2013, 12:54 AM   #228
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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The problem with a bid system is that it only works for options that multiple people are likely to want; with the huge variety of advantages in GURPS, you can easily have only one person who wants a particular ability.
There are ways around that (e.g., group traits into related sets and bid on the sets; then refine from there). However, I'm willing to agree that the time and effort that it would take to make it work isn't likely to be worth the benefits it provides. I merely suggested it to encourage people to think outside the box of traditional point-buy systems.
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Old 05-09-2013, 01:04 AM   #229
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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Yeah, but I'm not doing that and the players know going in that I'm going to try to make as much internal sense out of the world as I can. If I didn't have people act that way, then they'd complain that I'm taking it easy on them.
If the players are expecting you to do these sorts of things, why are they surprised (implied by "their stats don't work out as they expected") when you do them?

Something else that I do in my games, based on an old Pyramid article that I read: I run an introductory session designed to give the players a taste of two or three situations that are likely to come up often in the game: a shootout, car chase, diplomatic ball, crime scene to investigate, etc. Then, at the end of the session, I let them revise their characters.

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Old 05-09-2013, 01:10 AM   #230
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Default Re: Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

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Yeah, but I'm not doing that and the players know going in that I'm going to try to make as much internal sense out of the world as I can.
Then why is it a problem that they aren't happy making stereotypical comic book bricks? Of course they aren't, you aren't running a game in which bricks (or costumed superheroes at all for that matter) make any sense.
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