Cost of HT.

[MagnetoHydroDynamics]

MyGURPS' house ruling to have Will and Per be separate from IQ states:

Both Per and Will are their own attributes. They start at 10, and can be raised or lowered for 5 points/level. IQ is unchanged, at 20 points/level.

This is a big change, but an important one. As written, if you lower your character's Per and Will, you'll see that IQ (just IQ by itself) costs 10 points/level. Compared to the price of Talents, Magery, and even skills, that's just too little. Now that mental skills cost more per level, it's unbalancing to make IQ cost less.

In addition, it makes themetic sense for Will and Perception to be divorced from IQ. Intelligence certainly doesn't affect alertness -- look at any animal to see that. And your strength of will isn't related to how smart you are, otherwise nerds would intimidate jocks, not the other way around.

This does slightly change the cost of building characters, so you'll want to mentally add about 10-15% to the starting character points suggestions in the books.

(Note that Affliction (Attribute Penalty, IQ) no longer reduces Per and Will. Instead, the Attribute Penalty enhancement may be bought for each at +5% per level. Similarly, Steal Will and Steal Per are +100% enhancements for Leech.)

This is a very interesting reasoning, and I agree with it a lot.

And it got me thinking.

One point of HT is 10 CP. Of those, 5 CP go towards +0.25 Basic Speed, and 3 CP go toward +1 FP. This leaves the "bare" cost of HT at 2 CP/Level. I.E. the same as Hard to Subdue/Kill.

Essentially, barring GM fiat, every point you want to put into Hard to Subdue, Hard to Kill, and even some Resistances, are better spent buying HT.

HT is used in a number of skill rolls, and resisting just about any bad thing that isn't psychological. Even without the FP and Basic Speed, it is still incredibly useful.

Therefore, I propose that HT should be 15 CP per level. You get a lot of bang for your buck in just raw HT rolls, and 7 CP per level serves to justify it.

What do you think?

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by MagnetoHydroDynamics

Essentially, barring GM fiat, every point you want to put into Hard to Subdue, Hard to Kill, and even some Resistances, are better spent buying HT.

First, the points are only better spent buying HT if you also want some Basic Speed and FP. Which, often you do, but it's worth noting.

Second, Douglas Cole (I think) wrote an extensive treatise on how underpriced HT is, but I'm having a devil of a time searching his blog, so maybe he'll drop by and link it.

[vicky_molokh]

I think there's some more analysis that might be relevant.

[Xplo]

HT represents many things, such as:

- ability to resist poisons and disease
- cardiovascular fitness
- resistance to the qualitative effects of injury, other than being slowed (which can be considered as being more homogenous or having more redundant organ systems)

It's this third one that really stops making sense at higher levels. (Anesthesiologists would probably cry foul at the first one, too.) There's really no way a realistic person could ever have such a robust physiology that they can take two or three times as much damage before dying as another realistic person of the same general size and composition. (And before you say, "injury effects are highly variable!": yes they are, but not because people are built differently.) Likewise, what knocks one person out could allow another to limp along for hours - but this seems to be more a function of luck more than physical composition or willpower.

It could be more realistic in some ways to eliminate HT as a normal attribute entirely, and replace it with something like the Fit/Unfit traits; here "Tough" might have the same effects on KO and death checks as HT 11, and "Very Tough" would be HT 12, and that would be the end of it.

Of course, when you do that, you eliminate a lot of potential builds for unrealistic humans and nonhuman characters. So it might be better to keep HT as is, and set a cap at 12 instead, for realistic humans. HT 13+ would be reserved for monsters, robots, and action heroes. And in this case, perhaps the low cost of HT is fine since you do want to encourage those characters to have appropriately high HT rather than spending those points on other traits instead!

The other alternative is to change the way KO and death work to make HT more linear. Maybe you automatically pass out at -HPx1 and automatically die at -HPx4, with each point of HT adding 1 to each of those multipliers. Or maybe you still get to roll to stay awake and alive when you reach those thresholds, but you're rolling against a 10, modified by separate Tough advantages as described above.

. . .

Anyway, coming back to the subject of pricing HT as it works in RAW: are your players buying too much HT? Is it breaking the game or your suspension of disbelief? If so, then sure, mark it up. 15/level sounds reasonable to me. If you're not having any problems, might as well leave it as-is.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Xplo

It could be more realistic in some ways to eliminate HT as a normal attribute entirely, and replace it with something like the Fit/Unfit traits; here "Tough" might have the same effects on KO and death checks as HT 11, and "Very Tough" would be HT 12, and that would be the end of it.

Of course, when you do that, you eliminate a lot of potential builds for unrealistic humans and nonhuman characters. So it might be better to keep HT as is, and set a cap at 12 instead, for realistic humans. HT 13+ would be reserved for monsters, robots, and action heroes. And in this case, perhaps the low cost of HT is fine since you do want to encourage those characters to have appropriately high HT rather than spending those points on other traits instead!

<snipped stuff>

If so, then sure, mark it up. 15/level sounds reasonable to me. If you're not having any problems, might as well leave it as-is.

The thing I miss is the original method in GURPS where the stats closest to 10 were cheaper than the stats further from 10. In addition, I've noted that certain things are priced high enough that my players never purchase the advantages involved.

In addition?

When advantages costs in the realm that you need some 400 points to buy/create a decent character - what happens when you have someone (a player) who decides to spend the extra points on the "cheaper" stuff. Case in point? Why not buy extra-ordinary luck instead of a single use advantage that is priced at 80 points - or a multi-level advantage that isn't really useful until you spend 100 points in it? Why not buy up attributes of +4 IQ instead of an 80 point advantage?

GURPS kind of stinks in that department (in my opinion). For every advantage someone says is priced just right - someone else will say "hey, this isn't priced right". Isn't that what caused GURPS 4e to depart from GURPS 3e in the first place - people complaining that things were not properly priced?

In the end, the relationship between character points (Money) and advantages (goods) turns into a minor economics issue - are things priced sufficiently low for the purchaser to consider it worth the expenditure of "coin"? Are things too cheap? Are things way too expensive?

As it is, I tend to play a version of GURPS that is kind of GURPS 3.5. It is basically GURPS 4e with GURPS 3e stuff bolted on. I really dislike GURPS PSIONICS for 4e, because it is too pricy to have a decent Psionic character. It makes it difficult for a Psionic character to integrate well with a non-psionic character UNLESS you give the Psionic character's player the extra points needed, and keep the non-psionic character's player at a lower budget. If that is the case, then simply make the psionics cheaper so that you CAN more easily integrate two different styles of characters!

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by hal

The thing I miss is the original method in GURPS where the stats closest to 10 were cheaper than the stats further from 10.

This doesn't change the problem that for a sufficient number of skills, increasing stats is cheaper than buying skills. Our group had exactly that observation about 3e, before 4e was even conceived. And of course 3e skills went up to 8 points/level in some cases, making DX that much more appealing that much sooner.

There is no price for stats that will resolve that issue; all you can do is move the crossover point.

It's a trivial change to houserule a tiered system if you're that fond of it -- just grab the 3e chart if you don't want to have some other progression -- but you'll still see players pumping up their stats instead of their skills once they have enough skills.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

There is no price for stats that will resolve that issue; all you can do is move the crossover point.

Well, it's possible to have a curve such that there will always be some point where it makes sense to raise the skill instead of the stat, but that requires escalating cost with no limit.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

This doesn't change the problem that for a sufficient number of skills, increasing stats is cheaper than buying skills. Our group had exactly that observation about 3e, before 4e was even conceived. And of course 3e skills went up to 8 points/level in some cases, making DX that much more appealing that much sooner.

There is no price for stats that will resolve that issue; all you can do is move the crossover point.

That's true as far as you go, but you're talking about a false economy. The only skills that matter are the ones that you use, and the only skills that matter a lot are the ones that you use a lot, or where the stakes are very high.

For instance, you could go through an entire campaign and never use more than, say... 6 IQ skills. Maybe other characters share the load, or maybe it's just not a very brainy campaign or the GM's not very imaginative. And once you pick a number here it's fairly trivial to find a cost for IQ that makes buying more IQ for that character a worse deal than buying skills. Make reasonable generalizations about characters and you can pick a "correct" price for IQ based on its utility.

Of course, the players don't know which skills they'll need in advance, so they're willing to pay more for IQ than it's really going to be worth, to hedge their bets. But that only affects its value _to them_, not its utility.

A player willing to gamble with lousy defaults or coordinate with other players to spread competence around (emergent, player-driven niche protection!) can potentially save a lot of points here.

I tend to think that the correct cost for IQ and DX is around 25-30 points. Certainly, if you have more than 7 skills you want to raise, buying more attribute is still a better deal... but the higher the attribute cost, the more players will notice that they're spending a lot to get better defaults, and the easier it is to rationalize that if they're good at this many distinct skills, maybe they really should explain it with a high attribute.

...But this is IQ and DX, which both have added effects but are primarily useful as skill pumps. Their economy is rather different from that of HT, which is primarily useful for reasons other than pumping skills, and causes entirely different headaches.

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by hal

I really dislike GURPS PSIONICS for 4e, because it is too pricy to have a decent Psionic character. It makes it difficult for a Psionic character to integrate well with a non-psionic character UNLESS you give the Psionic character's player the extra points needed, and keep the non-psionic character's player at a lower budget. If that is the case, then simply make the psionics cheaper so that you CAN more easily integrate two different styles of characters!

I honestly don't know why you think this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I don't see why. Would you be kind enough to post a psion and a non-psion built on the same number of points, say, 150 with a disad cap of 50? Obviously it's hard to evaluate the utility of psionic powers against mundane skills and abilities, but my hope is that, working within RAW, we can bring their power levels into rough alignment. Unless the mundane's build features high HT, it might be most appropriate to do this in a new thread.

[hal]

Originally Posted by McAllister

I honestly don't know why you think this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I don't see why. Would you be kind enough to post a psion and a non-psion built on the same number of points, say, 150 with a disad cap of 50? Obviously it's hard to evaluate the utility of psionic powers against mundane skills and abilities, but my hope is that, working within RAW, we can bring their power levels into rough alignment. Unless the mundane's build features high HT, it might be most appropriate to do this in a new thread.

That will take a different thread to be sure. That would hi-jack THIS thread...