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.

[David Johnston2]

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.

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?

I disagree with the fundamental philosophy that package deals should never be offered to the players. So for me the real question is, "Is this deal actually causing a problem?" And that would be a no. I have never dealt with defensively minded players. They were more interested in increasing their character's ability to do stuff than they were in messing with their character's ability to endure stuff. So I've never seen a need to mess with the price of a stat nobody has cranked anyway.

[Anthony]

I think a significant part of the issue with the cost of HT is that basic speed probably isn't worth [20], and fatigue isn't worth [3] unless your character is built around high fatigue cost powers (which basically means 'mage'). If we cut basic speed to [12] and fatigue to [2], the [5] for everything else looks a lot more reasonable.

[Balor Patch]

I've never seen evidence that players buy up lots of HT so the current price is probably right. I could probably come up with a theory to support that but to what end?

[spacemonkey]

I think it's cheap for the same reason combat reflexes is. You're typically making an adventurer that you want to survive, not an exact technical/idealistic reproduction of your concept. Investment in survival should be cheaper than investment in utility, offense, mobility, etc, because you need survivability regardless of role.

Originally Posted by Kromm

Yes. CR is cheap; ED is about right. We know. We don't care. We did this on purpose so that starting PCs could cheaply acquire good defenses and not die all the time.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by MagnetoHydroDynamics

What do you think?

One important difference between HT bought as a whole and its various subcomponents is that it's RAW-legal to apply Limiations to the subcomponents. For instance if I'm building a ki-using Eastern monk or a self-enhancing psionicist, then I can buy huge stacks of Hard to Subdue, or Hard to Kill, or other HT-related traits, at a reduced cost and with one or sometimes several very simulatively flavourful Limitations applied to them.

That said, from what I've read on here, HT is underpriced simply in terms of how much it aids character survival. Raising the cost to 15/lvl might be a good idea, combined with making Hard to Kill a bit costlier too.

I imagine that the reason for the inclination, during the 3Er->4E update phase, to make HT cheap, is that HT is passive in nature, so even high HT doesn't have the same coolness favour as powerful active-use traits, including very high DX or IQ and the effects that come from having very high DX or IQ.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That said, from what I've read on here, HT is underpriced simply in terms of how much it aids character survival.

Underpriced compared to what? IQ? Combat Reflexes? High Pain Threshold? HT is one of the 'good' abilities, but it's hardly the only one. As a general rule of thumb, any ability introduced before sometime early in 3e (I think it was Aliens that renormalized cost/value ratios) is more cost effective than anything introduced later.