Quote:
Originally Posted by copeab
Then you change the cost to match the value in your specific setting.
|
As
Power-Ups 9: Alternate Attributes points out, when you change the price of one thing, it can affect the price of a lot of the other things. I think it's likely that most folks today at TL8 are no better at taking a punch to the face than people in the distant past were. If you change the point cost of DR, then you should change the cost of ST and Innate Attack to match, right? Since Innate Attack is too expensive when compared to the damage of a pistol or a laser or blaster? And why not change the price of everything that can be mimicked with some kind of cheap and easily available technology? Soon you're playing 100% houserules and not a game that anyone on these forums would recognize as anything close to the standard GURPS at all - which, if that's what you're into: groovy. Go for it. Change the prices of everything to suit your particular game.
That said, I think the balance of the advantages in GURPS is impressive, and the OP asked for thoughts. My thought is that this is not really a problem with the pricing of advantages such as DR (again, TL10 guys in a "standard" game shouldn't, it seems to me, be impervious to punches to the face just because somebody has invented high-impact plastics that can be formed into cheap armor) but rather a problem related to how your game handles gear, a topic that has been pretty widely discussed on these forums in the past. Gear at higher TLs is better, and wealth is correspondingly a more valuable advantage at higher TLs because of that. Just because these things change with TL doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to start changing the price of advantages (again, Power-Ups 9 notwithstanding).
If a pistol is a cheap way to outclass a lot of points somebody spent on an Innate Attack, then you can either lower the cost of Innate Attack or you make characters pay character points in order to buy a pistol and model the pistol as a gadget-based innate attack, right? Should a PC have to pony up some CP on short notice in order to be able to pick up a pistol dropped by a bad guy and start attacking with it? I don't think many people would want to do that in their games. So why make DR less expensive just because I can buy a flak jacket? It seems to me that this solution of changing point costs creates more problems (while destroying verisimilitude) than making somebody buy a pistol with character points.
If anything, I think DR should be more expensive. A half-inch thick iron bar has DR 6. Basic (non-hardened) DR 6 is 30 CP, well within reach of most starting PCs in any type of game, if the GM allows them to buy it. In that game world, people whose
faces are as hard as
iron bars (!) should be about as common as, say, people agile enough to be trapeze artists....
But I get that other people's assumptions about game play may be totally different than mine.