Super-Effort on Innate Attacks?!?

[TJA]

Originally Posted by Bruno

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.

Thanx for the reminder (i realy forgot already) and for the other information ...

[TJA]

Originally Posted by 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.

I just noticed, that the Power scale for Supers have difficulties to be reached:

An M-scale Super should be restricted to 6400p and still able to reach 15000d, DR 50000, I:DR 10000 and/or Super-Effort +100000

I:DR 10000 and Super-Effort +100000 can be payed for with 6400 points.

But an IA of 15000d or DR 50000 just cannot, from what i can see.

This does not feel like a system of rules that fit together - at least to me :)

But reading other topics, i can now remember, that this is an old discussion.

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

I would have LOVED that!!!

What do you think about the solution above?
"Adding linear cost for each doubling of effect" for Attributes and leveled Advantages?
This could leave the first 10 or 20 levels untouched and still allow for high-end characters ...

[TJA]

Originally Posted by Anthony

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.

I do not understand - 200d against 4500d?!?
Should´t that 120d Pi against 200d Pi- (multiplied by 10)?
What am i missing?

Originally Posted by Anthony

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.

Uhh.
M-scale for 1800 points would include WHAT exactly?!?
Full 15000d, DR 50000, I:DR 10000 and SE ST +100000?
It seems, i missunderstand you again :-/

[TJA]

And another old topic, that may be worth mentioning:

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=1915

Full of similar ideas, examples, tables and rules.

I also like tbones table:

ST 10 costs 0 pts
ST 15 costs 50 pts
ST 20 costs 100 pts
ST 30 costs 150 pts
ST 50 costs 200 pts
ST 70 costs 250 pts
ST 100 costs 300 pts

and the later discussion and calculations.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by TJA

I do not understand - 200d against 4500d?!?
Should´t that 120d Pi against 200d Pi- (multiplied by 10)?
What am i missing?

The part where super-effort uses reverse lookup on the range/speed chart. +12 on the size chart is 200 yards, +20 is 5,000 yards.

Originally Posted by TJA

M-scale for 1800 points would include WHAT exactly?!?

It would mean that each of your hit points would actually be an M-HP, each of your points of DR would actually be a point of M-DR, etc.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by TJA

And another old topic, that may be worth mentioning:

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=1915

Full of similar ideas, examples, tables and rules.

I also like tbones table:

ST 10 costs 0 pts
ST 15 costs 50 pts
ST 20 costs 100 pts
ST 30 costs 150 pts
ST 50 costs 200 pts
ST 70 costs 250 pts
ST 100 costs 300 pts

and the later discussion and calculations.

This is basically what comes out of my suggestion up-thread as well, only you can apply it to other things as well. I think using the Speed/Range Table's progression as a unified mechanic as much as possible makes sense.

So, for ST, DR, Innate Attack (Burning or Crushing, anyway), it could look like this (table starts at value 20 because regular costs are used below that point):

ST/DR/IA(B/C)/TK Cost(pts) Damage Reduction
20 100 /4
30 150 /10
50 200 /20
70 250 /50
100 300 /100
150 350 /200
200 400 /500
x10 +300 divide by 100 more

The costs don't work out as neatly in 50 pt chunks for other forms of Innate Attack; one could just make the chunks enough to buy 10 regular levels, or you could always make Cutting, Impaling, etc. into enhancements rather than different base costs. And of course you can always prorate costs for inbetween values.

[naloth]

I've had less success using SE on Innate Attacks for many of the reasons that Anthony lists. Basically you would have to restructure the advantage to make it "fair". (Not that I really think that's a bad thing. You can abuse the less expensive versions of IA to create some broken abilities.)

I have had good results using SE on DR*. For DR that has lots of modifiers (like a Force Field) it works much better than building an Innate Attack w/Wall and gives you a pretty fair cost.

*Use = Either works against one damage roll (only vs attacks you know about, no action needed costs 1 fatigue/hit) <or> can be maintained (up to 1 min/fatigue) if you do nothing else but maintain the SE DR.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Anthony

A proper way of pricing things would probably eliminate super-effort and allow you to buy scale as an independent advantage.

This came up and was shot down during the SUPERS (and IIRC the 4e) playtest.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by TJA

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

This was partially because establishing fair universal pricing for huge DR values requires establishing the commonality of huge damage values across all generes served by GURPS, which was beyond the scope of SUPERS' playtest. IT:DR and other features were deemed "close enough", since the only thing huge DR values do that they don't is to make a subject totally unaffected by indefinite volumes of attacks at that level, which was deemed not necessary to the SUPERS genre, and borne out by the lack of any prominent counterexamples.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

This came up and was shot down during the SUPERS (and IIRC the 4e) playtest.

I know it was shot down in the supers playtest (I have no information about the 4e playtest), but the reasons for doing so seemed to have more to do with 'we already have a hammer, and that problem looks adequately like a nail' than with a specific philosophical objection.