Skills and Techniques are too expensive

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

You start assigning prices to traits you want or expect to see purchased frequently, like Attributes and Skills, and move along from there as whswhs outlined. Comparing things, playtesting, etc, till you found a range of prices that suit the needs of the game.

.....and after that come the revisions. I can remember when Unaging cost 60 pts and Longevity 40. Obviously those have been rediced in cost a couple of times.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I'lll grant I tend to run 'fantasy' and 'post-apoc' more than 'Surf Beach High', but I suspect that whswhs might actually surprise you with how often non-combat skills are more important in his games than combat skills are.

In my current fantasy campaign, one of the PCs, Hanno, oiginally built on 200 points, has one point invested in a combat skill: Brawling-11. The player says that he only learned that because his manservant insisted that he learn some basic self-defense moves; Hanno doesn't like to fight. He's also the character who is in most danger of making the other characters irrelevant in any given situation, from bargaining with the Seafarers' Guild to predicting the weather the ship is likely to encounter.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That means either splitting skills up more narrowly and fussily (with more arguments over "Do you use Streetwise or Urban Survival to do X?"), or having characters able to start with twice as many skills, which will give you more overlap in skill sets and make it harder to have distinctive niches.

On the 'overlap': I'm actually generally fine with this. I prefer for the Five Man Band to have some overlap, so when one person goes down, the party hasn't completely lost the ability to do that person's One Big Thing (like healing or fighting or talking).

On 'distinctive niches': I've found that high Attributes are the fastest weak 'niche' killer of them all. However this only tends to come up when you've got smaller parties and Players are trying to cover multiple niches, so everyone has a Primary and Secondary niche. I've found high Attributes means the guy with a high Attributes covers a lot of secondary niches, even if they don't mean to.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

.....and after that come the revisions. I can remember when Unaging cost 60 pts and Longevity 40. Obviously those have been rediced in cost a couple of times.

Oh aye.

[AlexanderHowl]

GURPS really has too few attributes for weak niche protection (strong niche protection still occurs with advantages and skills). After all, the conman, strategist, and wizard all benefit from high IQ.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

You start assigning prices to traits you want or expect to see purchased frequently, like Attributes and Skills, and move along from there as whswhs outlined. Comparing things, playtesting, etc, till you found a range of prices that suit the needs of the game.

Assigning them prices based on what? How would you determine whether Speak Underwater should cost more or less than Unkillable 3?

If not some subjective assessment of usefulness, what method do you employ to determine these prices?

You say you start by assigning prices to traits you expect to see purchased frequently, but you don't offer any method for determining that price. All you say is "start by giving things prices."

I'm asking how you determine those prices. How would you determine which costs more out of ST, Deep Sleeper, or Wealth (Filthy Rich)?

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Traits have no actual existence; they exist only in an imagined reality. So you could assign any value you liked to any one trait, and it could not be said to be "right" or "wrong."

You might say that there's no right or wrong way to bake a cake either, but mixing in a bunch of mercury and burying the batter on Pluto isn't going to get you a cake.

"Right" and "wrong" in this case would be prices that do or don't fulfill your design goal.

I can't think of many design goals that would be fulfilled by charging sixty points for Unaging, for instance.

I'm trying to get at what the design goal is when choosing the trait prices. If we're not trying to price them according to their perceived utility, then what method could we possibly use?

If we were to rate all the traits on a utility scale from 1 to 100, what reason would we have to give some traits a price that deviates from the prices of traits of relative utility?

If we gave Unaging a utility of 2, what reason would we have to give it the same price as a trait with a utility of 60?

The only answer I can come up with is that we're trying to discourage people from building characters with those traits.

You can say, "I want to discourage players from making unaging characters," and price the traits accordingly, but that seems at odds with the design goal I would expect (and desire) from my universal and generic game.

The only way I can see to neither encourage nor discourage certain character concepts is to price all the traits according to their perceived utility. If the traits were priced thusly, then each person would be incentivized to play their desired character concept. That seems the appropriate design goal for a universal and generic game.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

"Right" and "wrong" in this case would be prices that do or don't fulfill your design goal.

I think that's a fundamental misconception of the situation.

If you are creating a new game, you may well have a single design goal, and you may optimize every element to serve that goal. But GURPS is not a new game. It's in its fourth edition, which is now in its second decade. It was not designed all at once, but picked up new traits over many years. And the costs of those traits were adjusted at one time and another, often reflecting perceived dissatisfaction with earlier versions. The result is not a logical order, but more an evolutionary one, like the common law. Thinking of it as "designed" is likely to lead to misunderstanding.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

And the costs of those traits were adjusted at one time and another, often reflecting perceived dissatisfaction with earlier versions.

In that case, each instance of assigning a price was an act with the design goal of "resolve my subjective dissatisfaction with this particular price."

Which I think is a poor design goal--one likely to lead to trait prices that create all sorts of unintended undesirable consequences.

This is how we get prices that (almost) no one is happy with. It's how something like Unaging ends up at sixty points. If we had some coherent design goal that we used to determine the prices (which is what I'm proposing we do to determine when traits are over- or underpriced), then we could use that instead of having an author make up a price that they like with no particular goal in mind other than "make up a price that I like."

Without such a goal, all we're left with is our subjective preference. Maybe some people liked Unaging being sixty points because it meant their players never purchased that trait. If that person had been in charge of determining the trait price, they wouldn't have seen anything wrong with it and would have left it alone.

If, on the other hand, the person in charge of determining the prices had been using a sensible design goal (such as neither discouraging nor encouraging certain character concepts for a game that's supposed to be generic and universal), they could have looked at the pricing options and picked a price that would achieve that goal.

Otherwise you end up inadvertently encouraging or discouraging certain character concepts. If the goal had been to discourage people from playing unaging characters, sixty points was a fine price.

So, again, I think this is all a question of what the design goal should be.

In my view, the question of whether a trait is overpriced is the question of whether the trait costs more than it would need to cost to achieve the design goal.

If we want to talk about trait prices, I think the focus should be on the design goal we're trying to achieve.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by hal

I still miss the tiered pricing for attributes the further you got away from 10. I still think it was a bad idea to cap the increased cost of skills at 4.

Remember that only physical skills were capped at 8. Mental skill were capped at 2 (4 for M/VH skills). Even without the Eidetic Memory point crock mental skills were insanely cheap, while the poor old warrior types had to invest vast amounts of points into their skills.

[AlexanderHowl]

I do not really think that skills are too cheap. It is easy enough to disable a character so that their skill levels do not matter (ecstasy, paralysis, sleep, etc.), while attributes tend to matter regardless of the circumstances because they can resist powers (though attribute penalties cause problems). Even in high value campaigns, it is easy enough to introduce an enemy for which having Broadsword-35 is a exercise in futility (for example, a ghost that causes ectasy as a side effect of a toxic attack will make quick work of a fighter with Broadsword-35 unless he or she possesses ghost touch and can reach the ghost).