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Old 03-16-2012, 12:30 AM   #21
Peter Knutsen
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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Default Re: Curving disadvantages point cost idea

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Originally Posted by Gnomasz View Post
It's an interesting idea. It could scare off some metagamers IMHO. There's one thing I'd add: if a disadvantage seems to be worth less points to you, change the number of points. The values in book are universal, but it doesn't mean that they will fit to your game. For example, my players get only 5 points for Greed(12), because I don't like to mess with PC's the way Greed does.
And it's good for starters, but you should also make sure that those traits are disadvantageous to PC's in game. A GM with reputation of ignoring Disads will have a hard time at character creation.
Yes, GMs can and should change the value of specific disads when the deem it necessary, but as I understand his first post, his problem isn't with specific disads, but rather with the "mass" of disads chosen by som playes. The solution to that problem is indeed something like he has proposed, although I'd opt for a slightly more sophicicated solution myself., one that's even curvier.
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Old 12-14-2013, 08:44 AM   #22
Peter Knutsen
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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Default Re: Curving disadvantages point cost idea

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Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen View Post
For physical and intellectual disads, Sagatafl gives fairly miserly compensation (but linear, although it's not as simple as it sounds); not quite as miserly as in BESM but certainly less than in GURPS and Hero System. Social advantages and disadvantages have their own point category, and so it isn't really possible to saddle one's character with social disads an use the compensatory points to purchase non-social advantages. Not directly and not efficiently, anyway.
I've now added new character creation mechanics for Minor Physical Deficiencies and Minor Mental Deficiencies.

These add MPP and MDP, and the MPP total then converts into a negative aDvantage Point value, so that all the Minor Physical Deficiencies effectively count as one summed-up disad, and likewise with the MDP total converting into a single negative DP value. And of course it's non-linear: The more you take, the less extra you get for it.

That way, if a player wants to say, during character creation, that his character's Concentration ability is somewhat impaired, or that his Mental Bandwidth stat is below average, or that his Casual Perception is rather gimped, or that he has a hard time learning Languages, then he'll get fairly well rewarded for picking that one "capabilitistic quirk", which individualizes the character and makes him more flavourful.

But if he says all four things, about his character, then he won't get rewarded 4 times as much (but instead almost 3 times as much - and less than 4.2 times as much if he says seven things of roughly that severity grade about his character's brain. If you pile up a lot of that kind of stuff, diminishing returns start to hit really hard).

Same with Physical Deficiencies. And the Incompetence Point subsystem, already doing something like that (although also taking into account the so-called Mage Factor stat, that tries to measure the character's supernatural potential), is being renamed to Arcane Deficiencies, and now there's also sub-Attribute sell-downs (each of these four as their own category, each using its own non-linear table).

There are still "real" disads, stuff that's objectively impairing and assumed to affect daily life or adventuring in most situations, such as Deaf, Mute, One Arm, Blind, and many, many others, and those don't use the non-linear system, but instead each have a direct negative DP cost, similar to all the disads in a system like GURPS or Hero System.

(With social disads remaining their own category, negPerks, and likewise psychological disads, Flaws, that makes for a total of 7 disadvantage types, although Arcane Deficiencies will automatically become ignored in non-fantasy campaigns because all characters will have a Mage Factor of zero.)

With the invention of these, "the Minors", I've solved an important character creation mechanics design problem.
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