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Old 11-27-2017, 04:45 AM   #1
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default GURPS and Hero System: modifying powers

GURPS has a very simple system for applying modifiers: they're priced as percentages of the basic cost of an advantage.

Hero System has an ingenious set of arithmetic for making stacking lots of enhancements onto a power progressively more expensive. For a long time, I thought that this was a all-round better method, at least in theory.

Today it dawned on me that the Hero method is better, if the baseline versions of powers represent the desired style of play. If they don't, there will be a contradiction between desired style and cost-effectiveness. This may be part of the reason that Hero System is so centred in its original genre of four-colour superhero gaming, and why doing other genres with it always feels a bit artificial, at least to me.
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