Super-Effort on Innate Attacks?!?

[TJA]

ST, Binding, Control and Telekinesis and some other Advantages can make use of Super-Effort.

But what about Innate Attacks?

Damage from ST can be greatly increased by using Super-Effort ...

For increasing Innate Attacks, you need to buy more levels - and can never reach the damage possible with ST and Super-Effort.

This way, an M-scale Super can reach 15000d quite easy.
But he can never reach DR 50000 with the same points or make 15000d damage with an Innate Attack.
Somehow, ST seems to be prefered ...

Is that right and intended?
Did i missunderstand something?
Why is ST so much "better" than Innate Attacks?

[baakyocalder]

There is a 'godlike extra effort' on Powers 161 that allows one to burn large amounts of fatigue for extra power.

Damage Reduction scales at the same rate as Super-Effort for ST. See Supers 146. Since DR had Hardened in GURPS 3e Supers 2nd edition, Damage Reduction is likely the replacement.

[TJA]

Thanx for the reference!
I read that page ...

Extra Effort and Godlike Extra Effort both can affect Damage (for Innate Attack), Level (for Affliction, Control, Create, Leech, Obscure, ...), ST, TK and Top Speed. Also, both are QUITE limited by Fatigue ...

Super-Effort seems only to be useable for ST, Binding, Control and Telekinesis and some other Advantages, as i wrote above.
Thus, the few Advantages useable with Super-Effort have an advantage (hehe) over other abilities of Supers!

I just want to make sure that i did not miss something - if i did not, this seems to be a bug in the system, IMHO.


About DR and IT:DR, they are not quite the same - also, the power levels for Supers (Super, p19) allow for tenfolds of Damage, Damage Resistance AND Damage Reduction for each and every scale.

DR 50000 cannot be reached within 6400 points without any Super-Effort-like rules. Contrary to damage from ST or to Damage Reduction ...

That made me wonder - it feels like a gap in the game system to me.

:-O

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by TJA

Thanx for the reference!
I read that page ...

Extra Effort and Godlike Extra Effort both can affect Damage (for Innate Attack), Level (for Affliction, Control, Create, Leech, Obscure, ...), ST, TK and Top Speed. Also, both are QUITE limited by Fatigue ...

Super-Effort seems only to be useable for ST, Binding, Control and Telekinesis and some other Advantages, as i wrote above.
Thus, the few Advantages useable with Super-Effort have an advantage (hehe) over other abilities of Supers!

I just want to make sure that i did not miss something - if i did not, this seems to be a bug in the system, IMHO.


About DR and IT:DR, they are not quite the same - also, the power levels for Supers (Super, p19) allow for tenfolds of Damage, Damage Resistance AND Damage Reduction for each and every scale.

DR 50000 cannot be reached within 6400 points without any Super-Effort-like rules. Contrary to damage from ST or to Damage Reduction ...

That made me wonder - it feels like a gap in the game system to me.

:-O

If you want everything to be logarithmic in a like manner, it's probably best to just scrap the Super-Effort rules and just make ST, DR, Innate Attack, etc. bought at a logarithmic basis. The formula for the Size/Speed/Range tables is good for this (2,3,5,7,10,15,20, each 6 levels gives you x10 actual value). Set the cost for ST at 50 CP per level jump, prorated for inbetween values, and you don't even change the 10 CP per point of ST value for ST 11-20 for normal humans. Tinker with the 'per level' costs for DR and Innate Attack and TK till you feel they balance well vs. ST and Damage Reduction. For example, maybe you want to keep Crushing Innate Attacks at 5 CP/die up to 20 dice (100 points), then advance logarithmically, so for each 50 CP additional you go up a level (30d, 50d, 70d, 100d, 150d). DR would work well on the same scheme as well.

[Bruno]

I believe the decision regarding Innate Attacks not having a Super Effort modifier was based around the fact that they're already quite "effective" per level - once you get around ST 30 or 40ish you need 10 levels of ST for 1 die of damage boost (the thing that players tend to obsess about the most). You only need ONE level of Innate Attack (quite reasonably priced) to get the same benefit.

Buying just Striking ST, that's still 3-6x as expensive as Innate Attacks can get you (based only on the dice of damage received, not counting the other things that Striking ST counts on such as weapon MinST and ignoring the way that you can get improved weapons to help enhance your damage).

So you can actually fairly replicate the effects of Super Effort on an Innate Attack just by buying 10-20 levels normally, and then your extra couple of hundred levels with "Costs 1 FP". Someone did the calculations on the break even point between the two during the Supers playtest - I don't have the emails here at work, but I seem to recall it required a LOT of Strength to get there.

In short, Innate Attack didn't get a Super Effort enhancement because the enhancement was intended to alleviate a perceived imbalance between ST and Innate Attack in the first place.

[whswhs]

What Bruno says is mostly true. It's also the case that if you take Godlike Extra Effort, you can spend 10 FP and get +50% to output on Innate Attack for each -1 to a Will roll. So you can build a "big gun" character who can make a fairly monstrous attack in an emergency. Or you can give him an Energy Reserve and let him do several monstrous attacks. Given that Innate Attack is pretty cheap to start with, this lets you create human artillery pieces without the Super-Effort rule.

Likewise, Damage Resistance is pretty cheap, and Damage Reduction even more so. It's entirely manageable to get a character with Damage Reduction (50), which will cut any attack with a human weapon down to a couple of points, and then buy a few points of Damage Resistance so they can't be beaten to death by an angry mob, one point of injury at a time.

It's not the way I would have done it if we could have redesigned GURPS from the ground up; I would have looked more for a uniform exponential scale for everything. But if you look at the source material, it actually doesn't work all that badly at approximating it.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

One problem with super-effort on innate attacks is that the pricing winds up completely screwy, because not all innate attacks cost 5/level.

Using normal attacks, it's a reasonable supposition that a 12d Pi attack and a 20d Pi- attack are equally valuable, and both cost 60 points. However, apply super-effort (say, +400%) to each (increasing cost to 300) and we're comparing 200d Pi to 4,500d Pi-, and that's quite obviously not equivalent value.

A proper way of pricing things would probably eliminate super-effort and allow you to buy scale as an independent advantage. Some back of the hand calculations suggest one step on the range/speed chart should be about 100 points for everything, or 40 points for a single category of effect (attack, defense, lifting), meaning D-scale is 600 points, C-scale is 1,200 points, M-scale is 1,800 points. For comparison, buying IT(DR), Cosmic (+50%), plus ST(Super, Cosmic, Reduced Fatigue Cost, +370%) costs 84.5 points for one step.

This does trip over the general problems with the relative costs of ST vs Innate Attack, but that's hardly a new problem.

[Mark Skarr]

Unless you're at M-Scale, I recommend against it. If you're at M-Scale, I don't really see what it's going to hurt. You're already playing with huge numbers and you still have a damage cap.

We used Super Effort for MonkeyFist's character Knack's Create Dynamite ability. He can create about a 3d stick without using Super Effort, or a 15d stick with Super Effort. It works well and isn't unbalanced.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Someone did the calculations on the break even point between the two during the Supers playtest - I don't have the emails here at work, but I seem to recall it required a LOT of Strength to get there.

If you're just applying the +400% to striking ST, and comparing to a generic crushing attack, it's at 16 levels (101d thrust, 400 points). Instead applying the +300% to ST, it's at 18 levels.

That's actually a pretty thin band; super-effort is strictly inferior to the normal stat until you have 8+ levels.

[TJA]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

If you want everything to be logarithmic in a like manner, it's probably best to just scrap the Super-Effort rules and just make ST, DR, Innate Attack, etc. bought at a logarithmic basis. The formula for the Size/Speed/Range tables is good for this (2,3,5,7,10,15,20, each 6 levels gives you x10 actual value). Set the cost for ST at 50 CP per level jump, prorated for inbetween values, and you don't even change the 10 CP per point of ST value for ST 11-20 for normal humans. Tinker with the 'per level' costs for DR and Innate Attack and TK till you feel they balance well vs. ST and Damage Reduction. For example, maybe you want to keep Crushing Innate Attacks at 5 CP/die up to 20 dice (100 points), then advance logarithmically, so for each 50 CP additional you go up a level (30d, 50d, 70d, 100d, 150d). DR would work well on the same scheme as well.

I never realy like Super-Effort - it just does not feel like "ST that needs FG to be used", but more like "You can strain yourself a bit to incredibly multiply your ST".

Such discussions about logarithmic scale are not new, as seen here:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=25767

There i already suggested something like "let cost stay normal till level 20 and then multiply cost for each doubling of effect" ...

Using the Size / Distance table is valid as well, of course.

ST/HT: +10, 100p; +20, 200p; +40, 300p; +80, 400p; ...
IQ/DX: +10, 200p; +20, 400p; +40, 600p; +80, 800p; ...

And this way for all leveled Advantages too.