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Old 07-23-2020, 03:56 AM   #22
RogerBW
 
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
Default Re: Alternatives to GURPS? Other tabletop RPGs to try?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
powers in GURPS are priced to discourage people from taking them, whereas most settings that use powers envision most PCs having powers, meaning they should be priced to encourage powers
I think there's an assumption in GURPS that your stuff will be taken away sometimes. It's cheaper in points for me to buy a gun and be reasonably competent with it than to buy a power that will work like a gun in terms of range and damage and so on, but the actual gun won't always be available to me because I'm in a place with weapon laws, trying to be sneaky, imprisoned and stripped of gear, etc. (And if I take a power-modifier discount on my gunlike power, that's also an explicit acceptance that sometimes I'll be meeting a power neutraliser of some kind.)

This is fine, but it does run into the problem that you find yourself thinking "I could spend 100 points on powers, or I could spend them on being so rich and charismatic that everyone will just do what I want anyway". Thus the bandage of point pools: of your 200 initial points, 100 must be spent on powers, and the rest may be spent on anything you like including more powers.
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