Attribute Costs 3e vs 4e

[Henchman99942]

So, does anyone run 4e games using the attribute breakdown from 3e?

Even allowing for the higher cost for DX and IQ, would not a progressive point cost make more sense that the flat cost? Why the change?

[vicky_molokh]

It's a streamlining to avoid having to use progression tables or formulae.

[Anthony]

Flat cost means you can have templates that include attribute bonuses, where the template has a fixed cost and does not mean some characters pay more for a given attribute level than others.

[ericthered]

Making the game universal. Raised attribute costs are used in many games because they interact complexly with racial templates. It gives you a lot of interesting choices, but it also makes the system less generic. Thus, the generic universal role-playing system has chosen to do without them.

I'll point out the philosophy extends to much more than just attributes. Most gurps traits have a flat cost to add to them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Flat cost means you can have templates that include attribute bonuses, where the template has a fixed cost and does not mean some characters pay more for a given attribute level than others.

You could do that in 3/e. It just meant that a character who had ST 16 cost more than a character with ST 13 and racial ST bonus +3. But the racial ST bonus had a fixed cost, and that was what went into the template.

But in a sense, GURPS stats have an increasing cost. Raising IQ from 10 to 11 costs 20 points, and increases your chance of success on an IQ roll from 50% to 62.5%; that's 1.6 points per +1%. Raising IQ from 15 to 16 costs the same 20 points, and increases your chance of success from 95.27% to 98.15%; that's 7.2 points per +1%. Buying up stats gets steadily less efficient as stats get higher.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by whswhs

You could do that in 3/e. It just meant that a character who had ST 16 cost more than a character with ST 13 and racial ST bonus +3. But the racial ST bonus had a fixed cost, and that was what went into the template.

Not if you want to take a 50 point Guard template with ST+2 and a 50 point Executioner template with ST+3 to play a 100 point Guard-Executioner PC with ST 15. None of that is racial ST.

I try to avoid putting fewer than 4 points in a template's skills for this reason, actually, making them as additive as possible.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Flat cost means you can have templates that include attribute bonuses, where the template has a fixed cost and does not mean some characters pay more for a given attribute level than others.

Originally Posted by whswhs

You could do that in 3/e. It just meant that a character who had ST 16 cost more than a character with ST 13 and racial ST bonus +3.

Read the entire quote. Particularly observe the text in red....

Originally Posted by whswhs

Raising IQ from 10 to 11 costs 20 points, and increases your chance of success on an IQ roll from 50% to 62.5%; that's 1.6 points per +1%. Raising IQ from 15 to 16 costs the same 20 points, and increases your chance of success from 95.27% to 98.15%; that's 7.2 points per +1%. Buying up stats gets steadily less efficient as stats get higher.

Raising your IQ from 10 to 11 increases your success/fail ratio from 1:1 to 1.67:1 (multiplying by 1.67). Raising your IQ from 15 to 16 increases your success/rail ratio from 20.6:1 to 53:1 (multiplying by 2.57). S/F ratio is the primary determinant on what types of risks you can take, not absolute success chance, so buying up your stat is more efficient, not less (realistically, it actually depends on the type of test you're attempting, and presumes no skill modifiers, but raw adjustments to success chance are a very poor measure of utility. My favorite measure is lottery pricing: if character A pays X points, and character B pays Y points, character A's chance of winning a contest should be X/(X+Y). Implementing that with GURPS die rolling winds up with exponential cost).

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Henchman99942

So, does anyone run 4e games using the attribute breakdown from 3e?

Even allowing for the higher cost for DX and IQ, would not a progressive point cost make more sense that the flat cost? Why the change?

Do we remember why the 3e costs were progressive in the first place? I vaguely recall it trying to force a kind of bell curve, but I'm lousy when it comes to statistics. Until the rules for Enhanced ST were added, all traits eventually did have a flat progression: once you hit 18, it is 25 CP/level past that.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Otaku

Do we remember why the 3e costs were progressive in the first place? I vaguely recall it trying to force a kind of bell curve, but I'm lousy when it comes to statistics. Until the rules for Enhanced ST were added, all traits eventually did have a flat progression: once you hit 18, it is 25 CP/level past that.

Weren't they progressive all the way back to Man to Man? It may be a case of "It was the thing at the time".

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Otaku

Do we remember why the 3e costs were progressive in the first place? I vaguely recall it trying to force a kind of bell curve, but I'm lousy when it comes to statistics. Until the rules for Enhanced ST were added, all traits eventually did have a flat progression: once you hit 18, it is 25 CP/level past that.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Weren't they progressive all the way back to Man to Man? It may be a case of "It was the thing at the time".

<checks my old copy of Man to Man> Why, yes, the Attribute costs had remained unchanged since Man to Man. With the exception of ST, which IIRC was re-costed downwords in Supers and then later Compendium I.

IMO there are two reasons to go with the flat cost. The first is that it's just easier to remember the cost progression. The second is that it just works better for stacking templates, whether they are character templates, racial templates, meta-traits, or lenses. You can take any combination of any of those and be sure that the attribute cost remains the same (with the exception of templates which mess with Size Modifier or No Fine Manipulators, and those quickly get annoying and messy).