Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

And you could use Modifying Existing Damage to do the latter, e.g., via a suitably limited Modular Ability.

Its certainly possible to use them both together (and, aside from point efficiency considerations, there are certainly uses for which one or the other is most straightforward), but there as far as modifying non-innate-attack armed and unarmed attacks, the overlap in what you can do with them is almost total.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

Well, pluralitas, etc. …

I kinda like the powers systems, and everything that tries to institute its own private subsystem really seems rather superfluous, old-school to me. Divine Favor and Psionic Powers both are rather elaborate, yet basically just examples of the core advantages/enhancements/flaw mechanic. RPM has some major ties into the whole structure.
Imbuements seem to me like Chi skills 2.0, never mind being rather specific.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

I like the Powers system as well but I do not really mind new subsystems as long as they fit a need.
My problem with Imbuements is that its too hard to figure out new ones, the whole thing seems rather arbitrary in figuring out costs and penalties.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

And for me, insisting that everything be handled by the Powers system runs into the issue that if all you use is a hammer, everything you run across starts looking like a nail.

As well, there are things that Imbuements do that are difficult or even impossible to do using powers. From PU1:

Ever wanted to give a character the ability to make the longsword in his hand flaming or the arrows from his bow (or bullets from his gun) armor-piercing? For one particular magical or otherwise “special” weapon, this is relatively easy: buy the desired Affliction, Binding, or Innate Attack with suitable gadget limitations from pp. B116-117. But a few fictional heroes are capable of imbuing any weapon of a particular class – perhaps every weapon they use – with special properties. That’s a little more complicated!

The Modifying ST-Based Damage rules in GURPS Powers might seem appropriate at first. That prescription applies the desired enhancements to ST-based damage exactly as if it was a Crushing Attack of the same size, and uses the point cost of just the modifiers as the cost to alter the nature of your barehanded damage. Unfortunately, that system was designed for unarmed, ST-based crushing damage, and is extremely difficult to extend to weapons – especially if they’re ranged, not crushing, and/or not muscle-powered (guns, for instance, have all three problems).

You could still try, of course. You could build the most expensive attack that you’re capable of creating by imbuing a weapon and modifying its stats – the attack with the best damage, range, RoF, etc. Then you could subtract the price of the basic advantage, read the point cost of the modifiers as that of the imbuement ability, and only allow the modifiers to aid weapons that, once imbued, would be no better than this best attack. But that would be a delicate exercise before the game began and tedious in play – whenever you grabbed a new weapon, you would have to do hasty math to determine whether the imbuement pushes it over the line!

RPM may have some major ties into the Powers system; but it's still "its own private subsystem", as you put it — and thankfully so. If RPM was written up strictly according to the rules in GURPS Powers, it would be clunky, to put it mildly. And just bacause Divine Power and Psionic Powers demonstrate that GURPS Powers can do a lot, that doesn't mean that it can do everything, or even that it can do everything well.

I would submit that you're taking a rather narrow view of Imbuements. Yes, they are particularly well-suited to handling chi abilities, due primarily to the fact that chi tends to be a very skill-oriented concept; but that's hardly the only thing they're good for. As a worked example of this, Pyramid 3-12 has an article by RPK that mixes Imbuements into Psionic Powers.

To be fair, the same could be said of Enhancements: if you want to create a new one, you don't have any sort of "Enhancement construction system" to fall back on. The best you can do is to eyeball the cost by using existing Enhancements as guidelines. My premise is that Imbuements are to Skills as Enhancements are to Advantages; so it's no surprise that they share this "weakness".

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

This is true. However there are a LOT more enhancements to work with or extrapolate from. So it is a lot easier to work with.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

True enough. OTOH, how long have Enhancements been around? IIRC, they date all the way back to the first edition of GURPS Supers, sometime back in the late 80s or early 90s; so SJGames has had over two decades to flesh them out. And they arguably date all the way back to the GURPS 3e core book's Psionics chapter, meaning that we're closing in on three decades of development. Imbuements haven't even been around for five years; so of course they're a comparatively immature technology.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

Agreed and others in this thread still like them and they do fill in a few needs even with the new enhancements in this book.
But for now as much as I like the idea I still find it a bit clunky. But then some of the early enhancements were so as well.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

Then make the powers system better. Note that we're talking about this in a thread dedicated to a product aiming to contribute to that.

Sure, you won't ever get a truly homoiconic role-playing system, where everything boils down to one singular mechanic. Also there's the legacy thing, of course.

It's just that to me, imbuements always struck me as a regression to those legacy mechanisms, adding something without a dire need for it. And without a good foundation for engineering your own stuff. I still don't see why it couldn't have been done like e.g. Divine Favor, where you have a introduction that lays down some basic, Powers-based framework and then the rest is special cases. Skills and techniques are heavily used in Psionic Powers, why not something similar?

Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a market for this, and it's much simpler to get something out of a supplement than building your own. Not every group and/or campaign needs to totally embrace powers, as opposed to that four-letter generic system ;)

I just don't want this to be the only solution, it should be possible to build it in a powers-based framework, and some hints on how to do that won't hurt. You don't eliminate Innate Attack from the system because you can do similar things with Magic…

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

I don't see that as an "issue".

That was much more true at the time it was written than it is with PU4, which fairly directly addresses the problems that are identified with using Powers for the purpose at issue

PU4 addresses all three problems.

This was always a somewhat misguided statement; as the specific rules in PU4 recognize, the only aspect of an attack that the cost of enhancement depends on is the damage type and quantity -- since range, RoF, etc., are all controlled by modifiers themselves, they don't impact the cost of modifiers. Insofar as imbuements correspond to adding modifiers to existing attacks, the concerns that PU1 cites, other than damage, are irrelevant to replicating the effects with Powers.

When its just about damage rating, this isn't all that complicated.

For imbuements that work like adding another attack with Follow-Up, these other factors are significant -- or, at least, were when PU1 was written. With PU4 (specifically, with Follow-Up, Universal), this is neatly addressed.

PU4 makes Imbuements into more an issue of preferences in approach than one of doing something that the advantages-and-modifiers system of powers can't handle.

Re: GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements
 

We're not in a thread dedicated to showing the superiority of Enhancements over Imbuements. And the reason why Imbuements were created in the first place was because Dr. Kromm came to the conclusion that the existing Enhancements rules were not up to the task of doing what he created Imbuements to do. As well, the product in question itself mentions that Enhancements and Imbuements are different things designed for differing purposes, and that neither renders the other obsolete.

I do think that the Powers system could theoretically be improved so that you could easily do most of the things that Imbuements cover using it; but it would require a fundamental overhaul of the system that splits Modifiers into two basic types: fixed-cost modifiers that don't depend on the cost of the ability that they're modifying, and percentage-cost modifiers that do, with the latter being the exception (and still problematic with respect to what Imbuements handle). IMHO, that's too radical of a change for GURPS to make.

Just like there's no good foundation for engineering your own Enhancements. And why do we need to wait until there's a "dire need" for something before we address it? Imbuements may not have addressed a huge hole in the system; but they did address a hole in it.

Finally, and this is probably the core of our disagreement, I don't consider the various powers-through-skill mechanisms that GURPS has to be legacy mechanisms. True, I'm not fond of the sometimes ad-hoc way in which the basic notion has been implemented; but that's a far cry from saying that such systems are obsolete and should be discarded. I'd rather go the other direction: establish a general-purpose "superhuman skills" system that's every bit as flexible as the powers-through-advantages system is, and then rebuild the existing powers-through-skill mechanisms using that. If you can get some synergy with the powers-as-advantages system, so much the better.

Consider the case of the guy with a telekinetic ability to guide projectiles in flight, thus granting the equivalent of the Guided enhancement to any firearm he happens to pick up. How would you build that using Powers? In effect, a raw enhancement (Guided) that can be applied to a number of things, many (most?) of which exist outside of the character and thus can't even be addressed as applying the enhancement to an ability.

One proposal has been to use a Modular Ability to mimic the normal characteristics of the gun being enhanced, and then to apply the Guided enhancement to that. Not only is that expensive all out of proportion to the benefit that you would gain from this, but it requires you to declare a cap on how powerful the gun can be. Sure, you could set that cap at the most powerful gun you're going to encounter; but not only does that further inflate the cost, it also can't cope with the appearance of a firearm that's more powerful than what you thought the upper limit was. If the cost of Guided wasn't tied to the number of dice of damage done, it would be trivial to apply it to whatever weapon you happen to be holding; but that isn't the case.

And even if you can get it to work by jumping through enough hoops, it would still be easier to handle it simply by taking the Guided Weapon Imbuement Skill.

I'm not the one who's suggesting taking something away from the system. The way you talk, everything that you deem to be a "legacy mechanism" would ideally be swept away and consigned to the dustbin of history; and the only reason to keep them around is to placate those fans who haven't seen the light about how wonderful the power-as-advantages system is. That way lies HERO.

Personally, I've become allergic to "one size fits all" systems; I prefer a toolbox approach that lets me use whichever system best fits my needs. All I ask is that those systems be reasonably compatible with each other.