Quote:
Originally Posted by ravenfish
I suspect that at least a portion of the motivation for Alternate Abilities is that many of GURPS's exotic and supernatural abilities are badly overpriced for the benefit they give compared to spending equivalent points on skills and attributes.
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Additionally, many abilities scale in power in power exponentially with the number of points spent on them, which means that the cost of your most expensive ability is often a better gauge of power than the cost of all your abilities put together.
The two places I see power creep in gurps are in Alternate abilities, and in RPM. I generally don't mind it in alternate abilities, because of the overpricing of some traits (your point) and because the pricing produces a fairly good prediction of character power (my point).
But I do think that Alternate abilities was not originally intended to be used that way, and people have warped it beyond its intent. It don't think that's a bad thing though, because it results in extra abilities for PC's that are fun without being broken.
I remember being very resistant to ideas like sorcery and divine favor giving the discount to such large and diverse groups of abilities until I saw the rule in play and realized that its a better predictor of character power than the traditional accounting. Now I long for a way to use the discount on passive abilities that don't stack.