RIP Techniques, Long Live Perks?

[Peter Knutsen]

How would (or could) these be used to represent a character who has the ability to compensate for only improvised equipment, MacGyver-style? How broadly can the concept of Perks-as-Techniques be applied to this?

[dataweaver]

Try this: Keep Techniques as they are in most respects, particularly in terms of "default level" and "maximum level"; but ditch the existing pricing scheme entirely. Instead, taking a Perk for a given Technique lets you operate at its maximum level instead of its default level, or at (trait+3) if it has no maximum.

(Inspiration for this idea: the "Style!" Wildcard Skills from Martial Arts, which do this for every Technique in their associated Styles free of charge. It also has the virtue of being equivalent to what was done to Off-Hand Weapon Training.)

Note that the distinction between "Average Technique" and "Hard Technique" goes away under this approach. I'm OK with this; but if you want to keep it, you can charge 2 points to master Hard Techniques and 1 point to master Average Techniques. As well, this approach effectively adds a cap of (trait+3) to all Techniques that currently lack caps. That's also fine with me; but if you want to keep them "capless", apply leveled Perks: the base level lets you use the Technique at (trait+3), and every point after that gives you a further +1 (stacking +3s would quickly get ridiculous).

If you want to salvage the current feature where Techniques can have ratings that fall somewhere between minimum and maximum, bring back fractional point accounting and charge either a quarter-point or a half-point per +1 in a Technique (say, quarter-points for Average Techniques and half-points for Hard Techniques). This would be instead of the above Techniques-as-Perks pricing system, of course.

Personally, I prefer the approach outlined in the first paragraph above: the point-accounting is simpler. The main drawback of it is that all (Average) Technique Perks cost the same, whether the difference between default and maximum is one level or six; but as long as you stick with whole points, you'll always have that problem to some extent.

EDIT: And now I'm picturing the effect that this would have on things like Ritual Magic. As things stand, the Resurrection spell is ridiculously overpriced (it's got, what, a -52 penalty to buy off?) — but the above system goes way too far the other way. This Techniques-as-Perks system assumes that all default penalties will be in the single digits, and that most will be -5 or less. Personally, I tend to think that Techniques with double-digit penalties are ill-advised, and my preferred solution would be to find alternatives to them.

[Mailanka]

Don't forget Hands-Free perks, which seem to have crypto-replaced the Hands-Free Riding technique (I've seen no official word on it, but Hands-Free things do everything Hands-Free riding does)

Originally Posted by Dammann

Perks within a Martial Art Style are supposed to be limited in number, though, based on the points spent on skills and techniques. Turning techniques into perks upsets this mechanism. Otherwise, the pricing looks about right.

Would it? Many people already institute house-rules where you gain "free" techniques with skill points, reflecting the notion that increased skill increased breadth of capability. You could keep the economy in place, and it means that a master martial artist has a broader technique than the novice. Looks win-win to me. Plus the lower pricing means you can get more than just a 1-2 techniques before it becomes a waste of points.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

EDIT: And now I'm picturing the effect that this would have on things like Ritual Magic. As things stand, the Resurrection spell is ridiculously overpriced (it's got, what, a -52 penalty to buy off?) — but the above system goes way too far the other way. This Techniques-as-Perks system assumes that all default penalties will be in the single digits, and that most will be -5 or less. Personally, I tend to think that Techniques with double-digit penalties are ill-advised, and my preferred solution would be to find alternatives to them.

I have no idea whether some spells should qualify anywhere from Very Easy to Very Hard. And there is no reason the system can't be open-ended (in terms of maximum number of levels buyable, for certain traits). It's just that I didn't bother writing it up, just like the skill table.

[cbower]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I have no idea whether some spells should qualify anywhere from Very Easy to Very Hard. And there is no reason the system can't be open-ended. It's just that I didn't bother writing it up, just like the skill table.

For one campaign, I assigned a diffculty other than Hard to quite a lot of spells in Magic. In my experience this made bookkeeping for PC and NPC mages an incredible hassle. It's easy to remember that the 100 spells Foozle the Mostly Omnipotent knows are all at 18 except for a few he's specialized in, but it's more annoying when 10 are Easy, 40 are Average, 45 are Hard, and 5 are Very Hard and you can't easily recall which is which.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Greetings, all!

With the appearance of such perks as Efficient, Off-hand Weapon Training, Armour Familiarity, Dirty/Drunken Fighting, Call of the Wild, Hyper-Specialisation etc., I got thinking:

Maybe Techniques are a dead-end idea? Overall, Techniques suffer from the requirement to pigeon-hole them into Average/Hard and providing exactly +1 to a subset of skill rolls per point (exception: first level of Hard ones), and the fact that they generally discourage any special effects (e.g. what Convincing Nod does).

Perhaps it would be more flexible to replace with a special sort of leveled perks (I'm calling them Technique Perks for now). They would not be limited by the 1 Perk Per 10 Points rule for combat ones

If they aren't limited by the limits that apply to other perks, and they are special in the rest of their mechanics, why pretend that they are perks at all? Why not just continue to call them techniques, and describe the pricing with two parameters, the "initial cost" that is the cost per level of either the first +1 or for the first full CP expended (the latter if the initial cost is less than 1), and the "level cost" for each subsequent +1. Techniques that provide additional special "flat" benefits would, all other things being equal, have a greater initial cost.

The cost progressions you proposed would then be:

Very Easy => (1/2, 1/2)
Easy => (1/2, 1)
Average => (1, 1)
Hard => (1, 2)
Very Hard => (2, 2)

But there's no reason that a technique that provided a more substantial initial benefit along with the first +1, which benefit didn't really increase with level, and was otherwise similar to an Average technique couldn't have a cost progression of (5, 1), for instance

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

If they aren't limited by the limits that apply to other perks, and they are special in the rest of their mechanics, why pretend that they are perks at all? Why not just continue to call them techniques, and describe the pricing with two parameters, the "initial cost" that is the cost per level of either the first +1 or for the first full CP expended (the latter if the initial cost is less than 1), and the "level cost" for each subsequent +1. Techniques that provide additional special "flat" benefits would, all other things being equal, have a greater initial cost.

The cost progressions you proposed would then be:

Very Easy => (1/2, 1/2)
Easy => (1/2, 1)
Average => (1, 1)
Hard => (1, 2)
Very Hard => (2, 2)

But there's no reason that a technique that provided a more substantial initial benefit along with the first +1, which benefit didn't really increase with level, and was otherwise similar to an Average technique couldn't have a cost progression of (5, 1), for instance

First is because your way of doing it involves half-points, which were deliberately ditched during the 3e->4e upgrade. Second, because they need not always be skill-limited. Efficient is skill-specific, but Patience of Job is universal. Making the latter leveled is one of the things doable this way (as an examle). Second, the limit on Perks actually only applies to combat style perks. But there are non-combat techniques.
Finally, in some cases they might provide other benefits. Such as the Resourceful Brewer perk for an (al)chemist, which would, e.g., reduce the amount of materials required by 2% per level (to some limit).

In general, I currently see Technique like a neat but extremely rigid concept, and too often priced suboptimally or unevenly.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Second, because they need not always be skill-limited.

There's no reason the base has to be a skill, the effect is the same (as with existing techniques.)

If you mean they need not always have a base score, then, essentially, I think that the core problem with your idea is that you are trying to lump together in one class of mechanics things that have no real unifying concept -- they are essentially just arbitrary leveled advantages, and there is no reason to create a new class of abilities (and certainly no reason to tie them either to the idea of techniques or the idea of perks) to have that, and once you've taken on an issue as amorphous as you have, trying to wedge coverage of it into a small number of cost progressions is excessively limiting.

[dataweaver]

vicky_molokh: Frankly, I have trouble seeing a reason for two difficulty levels, let alone five. As well, part of the reason why Techniques don't see more use is because one point for +1 to a single action is expensive when skills top out at four points for +1 to everything they do. The most I'd be willing to charge would be one point for a +2 to a single action (what you have as "Very Easy"); and I'd prefer something closer to one point for a +4 to a single action for average techniques. Charging half as much as a skill would cost (as with your Hard and Very Hard pricing schemes) takes things in the wrong direction, IMHO.

Take a look at Off-Hand Weapon Training: it went from being a Hard Technique costing 5 points to buy off a -4 penalty in Basic Set to being a one-point Perk that does the same thing in Martial Arts. That's the reason why we've been getting new Perks instead of more Techniques: it's hard to justify charging more than a single point for what they give you.

More generally, Techniques generally work fine as is, right up until you get to the pricing structure. And I'd hate to lose all the hard work that went into Martial Arts just because the pricing is defective. Thus my "Style!"-inspired counterproposal (which is what I was referring to in that last paragraph that you quoted): it's simpler to use (the whole pricing structure can be summarized in a single sentence), has prices more in keeping with what you get, and does so with a minimum of reinventing of the wheel. Really, what GURPS needs most right now is simpler solutions (i.e., fewer fiddly bits), not more elaborate ones.

And the point of my final paragraph above is that the counterproposal only starts to break down when you start getting into double-digit differences between the default and maximum levels — something that's vanishingly rare among the Techniques found in Basic Set and Martial Arts (or even in the Path/Book Magic system in Thaumatology), but all too common among spells converted over to the Ritual Magic purchasing scheme. And again, my contention is that the fault there lies with the way the conversion process produces such massive penalties: there's a reason why default penalties rarely exceed -5 or so everywhere else in the system.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

First is because your way of doing it involves half-points, which were deliberately ditched during the 3e->4e upgrade.

Not every decision that was made during the making of 4e was a good one. IMHO, ditching half-points was a mistake, as it severely compromised the price structure for Techniques. That said, you'll note that my main counter-proposal doesn't use half-points. I'm merely noting that you can't have it all: you'll have to choose one of using fractional points, skipping levels, or overpricing Techniques.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Second, because they need not always be skill-limited. Efficient is skill-specific, but Patience of Job is universal. Making the latter leveled is one of the things doable this way (as an example).

Note that "leveled Perks" are already quite doable without adding a layer of complexity in the form of difficulty ratings.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Finally, in some cases they might provide other benefits. Such as the Resourceful Brewer perk for an (al)chemist, which would, e.g., reduce the amount of materials required by 2% per level (to some limit).

Note that there's nothing preventing Techniues from providing other benefits; just not at their default level: you would have to invest points in them. I can't think of any examples of such right now; but Techniques are Skill-like, and there are skills that do this sort of thing (such as the bonus damage you get from Karate).

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

In general, I currently see Technique like a neat but extremely rigid concept, and too often priced suboptimally or unevenly.

I'm not so sure about the "extremely rigid" point; but I definitely agree tat they're priced suboptimally.

[Langy]

I like the idea of having Hard techniques be just 1/level, Average techniques at 1/2 Levels. Another thing I like is making it so Style techniques are cheaper - would actually add a reason to use styles. May just do one or the other.