02-05-2017, 12:24 AM | #61 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
The problem with having inside information to the CIA is that it comes with a substantial downside. Unless you laid out the points for a security clearance making use of your contact is generally going to be a crime for both of you. Also of course if his position gives him greater access to information and equipment he can use to help you, his effective skill goes up.
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02-05-2017, 06:40 AM | #62 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
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02-05-2017, 12:03 PM | #63 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
This assumes that every character concept is appropriate in every campaign (and probably that you have infinite points too). In most games you aren't going to be able to be the boss of the Jersey mob, a Chinese bureaucrat, both a CIA and an FSB agent, the CEO of Nokia, an Interpol agent, and a doctor with a discreet local practice all at the same time. You might however be a person with all of those contacts.
Last edited by sir_pudding; 02-05-2017 at 12:13 PM. |
02-05-2017, 04:38 PM | #64 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
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In any case, though, I'm definitely feeling that any Patron who can provide the sort of significant social pull and connections that are inherent to a Contact should be taking the +50% enhancement for Special Abilities. So the comparison is not "one very powerful wizard who can provide social favours and personal power" for the Patron, it's "one very powerful wizard who can help you with their own spells and supernatural abilities, but isn't socially connected enough to allow for significant favours. If you want the wizard who can do both, you'd be paying 90 points, not 60. Quote:
This greatly nerfs Contacts, and I wouldn't do this. A Contact should provide their information. As long as the player behaves reasonably with it (e.g., doesn't go on the national news and says "General X said that the lights in the sky were definitely aliens"), then the character and the Contact aren't going to suffer serious consequences for being used. At worst, I'd say that some results for lower reliability could be interpreted as the Contact being punished for leaking info, rather than betraying you. |
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02-05-2017, 04:50 PM | #65 | |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
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02-05-2017, 05:05 PM | #66 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
Yes, that's precisely what I was saying. Not being willing to provide illegal information or favours, which is what David Johnston2 seemed to be suggesting, would be the nerf.
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02-05-2017, 07:35 PM | #67 | |
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: South Dakota, USA
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
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You have an associate who provides you with useful information, or who does small (pick any two of "quick", "nonhazardous", and "inexpensive") favors for you.As long as the information request or favor is still "quick" and "inexpensive", they can risk something hazardous, like breaking the law. Word of GM handles whether or not breaking the law is hazardous; one of the reasons I believe that 1 CP added to Contact base cost ought to not just be for supernatural means of gathering information, but instead represent any unusually potent capabilities. Someone capable of skirting or flat out breaking the law with little to no consequence would be such a feature. Basically, this is the Special Abilities Enhancement for Patrons but highly simplified. Huh, blew all my time addressing just this one point. I reserve the right to comment on some of the other prior comments at a later date. ;)
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02-05-2017, 09:23 PM | #68 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
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Perhaps the most valuable thing about having a contact with a skill rather than the skill yourself is that the contact can be using his skill while you are attending to other business and using facilities that aren't necessarily mobile, like an office in the CIA, or a workshop. |
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12-28-2018, 08:55 PM | #69 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
In my newest campaign, one PC is a former Detective Sergeant of the New Orleans Police Department, the son of a senior Captain and possessed of a wide acquintance within NOPD. I bought this as a Contact Group, which even without Completely Reliable (which might be reasonable, as the character still wears a badge as a sheriff's deputy elsewhere) came to 100 points.
This highlighted a problem I've always had with Contacts. They are wildly, astronomicaly overpriced. New Orleans is one city in a campaign area which covers much of the Gulf Coast and the entire Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The PCs don't live there and will visit it about as often as any of a couple of dozen destinations they might pass through. NOPD might still be a useful contact in adventures set elsewhere in the US, though much less so than in the Big Easy, but in adventures set abroad, in the Caribbean, they have essentially zero chance of providing any type of help on an adventuring time scale, considering how long it takes to receive an answer to the simplest thing through inter-agency cooperation at the international level. Most of all, however, spending one hundred points on individual Allies would get the 1,000 point preternatural Monster Hunter PC a whole lot of capable Allies, who are automatically loyal without a tripling of the point cost and don't actually need to adventure with the PC, being perfectly capable of staying at home, working in the NOPD (and the Louisiana State Police, federal agencies, military, Coast Guard, etc.), and prociding the lesser services of favours and information. It's really weird that having a friend who only provides minor favours and answers questions is not a Limitation on the Advantage that allows you to have a friend who'll do anything for you, even risking his life, but instead is a whole new trait that costs a lot more.
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12-28-2018, 10:50 PM | #70 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#30): Contact Group, Contacts
As suggested upthread, the first fix to consider is making the highest rank of Reliable be the x1 version, then lower ranks have smaller fraction multipliers (or just make them Limitations).
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Tags |
advantage, advantage of the week, contact group, contacts, week, [basic] |
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