Advantages Are Not Utility Priced

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Superman is far more then 1k points though.

Sir_Pudding was replying to this, though...

Maybe, but it's not easy to think of one where the thousand point psi, speedster, and brick can all work together and have their players be happy about how awesome they got to be.

So the question was assuming matching point costs between different types. In that equation, I think a good case can be made that either certain costs need to be changed or bricks get shortchanged.

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

So the question was assuming matching point costs between different types. In that equation, I think a good case can be made that either certain costs need to be changed or bricks get shortchanged.

Yep, if anything I'd say the current cost structure of ST and DR is a bit of an overreaction to the danger that if those things are too cheap then everyone becomes a brick on top of their base concept, which is a real danger when pricing out this stuff, have no doubts on that.

[Anthony]

The problem with advantage pricing, as it occurs in GURPS, is that it doesn't actually work for any plausible theory of design.

Players basically pick which abilities they have based on cost vs utility, but the utility function that is actually used isn't the one implied by this thread. There are basically three components to the utility of an ability:

• Mechanical Utility: the ability permits in-world accomplishments. Traditional combat balance metrics mostly measure mechanical utility. This is relatively computable, though it still has a lot of difficulties. For example, category weighting can be an issue -- if one ability makes you some amount more likely to win a combat encounter, and the other ability makes you the same amount more likely to win a social encounter, are they equal?
• Metagame Utility: the ability gets you attention (or some other desirable result) out of game. Such abilities can often be mechanical disadvantages -- for example, people often treat compulsive behaviors as license to cause trouble, and many social disadvantages (such as Enemies and Secrets) focus attention on the player.
• Role-playing Utility: the ability lets you do things your character should be able to do, even if in practice you will rarely if ever want to do those things, or your ability to do those things is likely to be irrelevant.

GMs, in turn, price abilities for a couple of reasons:

• Setting Consistency: abilities are priced based on how rare they are, or difficult they are to acquire; the objective is PCs who fit the setting. Not very generic (prices generally have to be set per setting), and often results in uniformity of characters.
• Genre Consistency: abilities are priced with a goal towards producing PCs who look the way PCs in that genre actually look, even if this is nonsensical based on world design. Genre consistency usually modifies mechanical or metagame balance -- you start with one or another sort of balance, and then you tweak costs to encourage desirable abilities.
• Mechanical Balance: abilities are priced based on mechanical utility (as above), with a goal of balancing out character capabilities.
• Metagame Balance: abilities are priced with a goal of balancing spotlight time between PCs.

GURPS prices equipment (and, to some degree, skills) based on setting consistency. This basically requires different catalogs for different settings -- what you can buy in a TL 3 fantasy setting is vastly different from what you can buy in a TL 9 cyberpunk setting -- and thus isn't generic. It does, however, work tolerably well for a certain style of game. Stat pricing is more debatable, but it's at least plausible to assume that the overall distribution of stats will be setting-independent.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for advantages, because a given advantage can range from ubiquitous to incredibly rare, and the only available tool for setting-based pricing (unusual background) is one-directional (it can only make abilities more expensive, not cheaper). A cybershell in Transhuman Space can easily wind up paying tens or even hundreds of points for something that in-setting can be had for petty cash. For much the same reason, the prices don't work for mechanical or metagame balance reasons; you can't demand a high price for something that can be had trivially via other means.

[saethone]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem with advantage pricing, as it occurs in GURPS, is that it doesn't actually work for any plausible theory of design.

Players basically pick which abilities they have based on cost vs utility, but the utility function that is actually used isn't the one implied by this thread. There are basically three components to the utility of an ability:

• Mechanical Utility: the ability permits in-world accomplishments. Traditional combat balance metrics mostly measure mechanical utility. This is relatively computable, though it still has a lot of difficulties. For example, category weighting can be an issue -- if one ability makes you some amount more likely to win a combat encounter, and the other ability makes you the same amount more likely to win a social encounter, are they equal?
• Metagame Utility: the ability gets you attention (or some other desirable result) out of game. Such abilities can often be mechanical disadvantages -- for example, people often treat compulsive behaviors as license to cause trouble, and many social disadvantages (such as Enemies and Secrets) focus attention on the player.
• Role-playing Utility: the ability lets you do things your character should be able to do, even if in practice you will rarely if ever want to do those things, or your ability to do those things is likely to be irrelevant.

GMs, in turn, price abilities for a couple of reasons:

• Setting Consistency: abilities are priced based on how rare they are, or difficult they are to acquire; the objective is PCs who fit the setting. Not very generic (prices generally have to be set per setting), and often results in uniformity of characters.
• Genre Consistency: abilities are priced with a goal towards producing PCs who look the way PCs in that genre actually look, even if this is nonsensical based on world design. Genre consistency usually modifies mechanical or metagame balance -- you start with one or another sort of balance, and then you tweak costs to encourage desirable abilities.
• Mechanical Balance: abilities are priced based on mechanical utility (as above), with a goal of balancing out character capabilities.
• Metagame Balance: abilities are priced with a goal of balancing spotlight time between PCs.

GURPS prices equipment (and, to some degree, skills) based on setting consistency. This basically requires different catalogs for different settings -- what you can buy in a TL 3 fantasy setting is vastly different from what you can buy in a TL 9 cyberpunk setting -- and thus isn't generic. It does, however, work tolerably well for a certain style of game. Stat pricing is more debatable, but it's at least plausible to assume that the overall distribution of stats will be setting-independent.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for advantages, because a given advantage can range from ubiquitous to incredibly rare, and the only available tool for setting-based pricing (unusual background) is one-directional (it can only make abilities more expensive, not cheaper). A cybershell in Transhuman Space can easily wind up paying tens or even hundreds of points for something that in-setting can be had for petty cash. For much the same reason, the prices don't work for mechanical or metagame balance reasons; you can't demand a high price for something that can be had trivially via other means.

This is very true. Cyberpunk is the biggest example of this i can think of. Compare the value of armor you can buy if you spend 10 points on Wealth to the value of armor you can buy if you spend 10 points on DR and you see a huge disparity.


In addition, as someone mentioned earlier - yes you can have challenges based on drama and role playing and not brute force, however, smarter players will be able to build stronger characters and successfully navigate the drama and role playing.

In Lois and Clark it worked because it was a narrative - the writers of the show deliberately made Lois the one to put things together and not Clark. If it were an RPG, there would be nothing stopping Clark from solving all the problems and Lois just doing...well, nothing really.

[dataweaver]

On the show, it wasn't just because "it was a narrative"; Clark generally had good reasons not to go barging around and powering his way through all of the challenges: often, the main challenges took the form of figuring out who he should go after in the first place (the "investigative reporters" part strongly implied puzzle solving; and while Clark's super-senses occasionally came in handy there in terms of finding clues, they didn't help him at all in terms of figuring out what those clues meant); and even when they didn't, Clark had character motivation reasons to restrain himself: he could have won Lois' adoration in episode 1 by taking off the glasses, but that would have completely defeated the point of trying to get Lois to fall for Clark, not Superman.

And on the wider stage, Superman was hampered in his efforts to stop Luthor by a desire to bring him to justice through the courts: he could have ended Luthor's threat at any time by busting into his tower and tossing him out the window; but that would have gone against everything he believed in.

In short, it wasn't just writer fiat that allowed Lois to have such a prominent role on the show: there was also the nature of the challenges and the personalities involved — which, if roleplayed*, could lead to similar results in an RPG.

Granted, this approach wouldn't work with the stereotypical group of "dungeon crawler"-mentality PCs. But then, that's where the aforementioned social contract comes in: if your players are dead set on solving all problems by brute force and aren't interested in restraining their characters for reasons of the characters' values, then obviously something like Lois & Clark or Smallville isn't going to work. OTOH, if the players are on board with the notion that violence isn't always the best answer (even if it seems so in the short term), then something along the lines of one of these shows is totally doable.

And frankly, designing RPGs with dungeon-crawler mentalities in mind is a losing proposition. Certainly, there's a place for such a thing; otherwise, the Dungeon Fantasy series wouldn't be the success that it is. But it's not something I recommend baking in to the core assumptions of the game; especially when the game is supposed to be Universal. You need more emphasis on encouraging other styles of play. In GURPS, Impulse Buys and You Might Have a Point There provide a good start for this sort of thing. This, rather than character creation and advancement, is what I use points for in my games.

* By "roleplay", I mean making decisions for your character based on what he values and how he thinks, not just what he can do.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Granted, this approach wouldn't work with the stereotypical group of "dungeon crawler"-mentality PCs. But then, that's where the aforementioned social contract comes in: if your players are dead set on solving all problems by brute force and aren't interested in restrainng their characters for reasons of the characters' values, then obviously something like Lois & Clark or Smallville isn't going to work.

There is a reason I didn't limit my comments about mechanical utility to combat utility. Superman has a vast variety of non-combat powers which he routinely forgets he has (he's actually a good example of why game systems that require expenditure of a resource to activate abilities can work -- Superman always has X-ray vision, but he frequently doesn't use it even when it would be useful).

[dataweaver]

Right; but my point is that even if Superman does ruthlessly exploit his Penetrating Vision, that's not necessarily a show-stopper: just shift the focus from finding clues to recognizing and interpreting them. Just like his tremendous physical capabilities mean that you should shift the focus from winning fights (no drama in that with his powers) to figuring out who to fight and when.

Indeed, the advent of the Internet takes a lot of the oomph out of Penetrating Vision: secrets that used to be kept on documents in hidden safes are now stored in digital form. A recent Pyramid article made some interesting points about how Kirk and Khan never met in person in Star Trek II: telecommunication makes it possible for one's enemies to taunt or threaten him without him being able to track them down or retaliate. There are all sorts of ways to keep Superman's powers from derailing the plot without resorting to convenient ignorance of them.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Right; but my point is that even if Superman does ruthlessly exploit his Penetrating Vision, that's not necessarily a show-stopper: just shift the focus from finding clues to recognizing and interpreting them. Just like his tremendous physical capabilities mean that you should shift the focus from winning fights (no drama in that with his powers) to figuring out who to fight and when.

Indeed, the advent of the Internet takes a lot of the oomph out of Penetrating Vision: secrets that used to be kept on documents in hidden safes are now stored in digital form. A recent Pyramid article made some interesting points about how Kirk and Khan never met in person in Star Trek II: telecommunication makes it possible for one's enemies to taunt or threaten him without him being able to track them down or retaliate. There are all sorts of ways to keep Superman's powers from derailing the plot without resorting to convenient ignorance of them.

His super-hearing is arguably more problematic, since it could both make him massively more effective in both jobs/identities, yet at the same time it could result in him running himself ragged dealing just with the domestic cases he happens to overhear without even trying to. I mean, he probably tries to tune out private moments in all the apartments and homes in whatever city he happens to be in, but I would assume that he is listening for screams and crying... and if he hears somebody screaming for help or in pain, he's not only justified but probably morally obligated to intervene, whether a normal person could have heard it or not.

[dataweaver]

His super-hearing is a mixed blessing. He can hear everything happening in Metropolis: can you say "sensory overload"? He almost certainly has to filter out most of what he hears. And on the show, his super-hearing was used against him on several occasions to lure him into a trap or away from their real agenda: even with his superspeed, he can't be in two places at once.

And consider that latter point in more detail: Metropolis is a big city. In all likelihood, there are probably half a dozen muggings, break-ins, and domestic disputes happening at any given time. Even with his powers, Superman can't be everywhere at once; he needs to prioritize.

Heck, domestic disputes are a perfect example of a problem that Superman can't solve through brute force: rescuing a wife from an abusive husband is trivial for him, but stands a good chance of getting him attacked by the wife. Not that she can hurt him; but still…

And besides, Superman doesn't want people to depend on him too heavily: not only does it put an extra burden on him, but it also diminishes ordinary people by discouraging them from putting forth their best effort. Metropolis still has police and firefighters for a reason. That leaves him in a precarious position of deciding when to intervene and when to let things be.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Besides, police officers carry pepper spray and tasers. There's no way I'm going to have the bad guys firing .38s just so they can bounce off the brick. Not after they've seen the characters in the news, anyway.

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Maybe, but it's not easy to think of one where the thousand point psi, speedster, and brick can all work together and have their players be happy about how awesome they got to be.

Bricks are bad. I'm not even talking about in gurps. I have yet to see a super brick be even good compared to the rest of the team. They only work in genre or if they have secondary powers that shore them up. A brick, no matter how strong, loses in the rock-paper-scissors game to most other supers. But an indestructible, undying brick is a completely different story.

But we don't want that in gurps, or in gaming. Other games let the brick brick-out as hard as he can. Gurps happens to not work well with it. The big thing with making bricks work is;

A) Let bricks use genre convention to their liking
B) Don't play a brick. Play a related trope, such as The Hulk

And this has nothing to do with point totals.

As for point totals, if your game has infinites, then price things according to the pricing of infinite, otherwise price them according to something that works in setting. More so than inappropriate pricing of traits is the wonky effect money has on things.

EDIT: What I meant about taking his abilities into account is; either you are building the world around the fact that the brick has (say) ST100 and DR100, or you are building the world around something else, such as reality. Either you are completely taking into account the brick has very specific numbers and are giving challenges for said numbers, or you are building a world, and the brick is hoping he is usable in said world. As for the 'solving problems out of awesome', it really sounds like you and your players are thinking in different directions.