10-02-2012, 06:56 PM | #51 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
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10-02-2012, 07:09 PM | #52 | |
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
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"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.
__________________
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." —Isaac Newton, Optics My blog. |
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10-02-2012, 07:24 PM | #53 | |
formerly known as 'Kenneth Latrans'
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Wyoming, Michigan
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
Quote:
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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Ba-weep granah wheep minibon. Wubba lubba dub dub. |
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10-07-2012, 01:10 PM | #54 | |
Join Date: Sep 2011
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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.
Quote:
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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10-07-2012, 04:58 PM | #55 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
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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. Hans Last edited by Hans Rancke-Madsen; 10-07-2012 at 05:12 PM. |
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10-07-2012, 08:16 PM | #56 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
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10-07-2012, 08:24 PM | #57 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
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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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10-07-2012, 09:01 PM | #58 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
Quote:
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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10-07-2012, 09:15 PM | #59 | |
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
Quote:
__________________
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." —Isaac Newton, Optics My blog. |
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10-07-2012, 09:23 PM | #60 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Challenge: Deliberately Miscost a Trait
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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Tags |
house rules, overthinking, point cost, shameless manipulation, splitter |
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