House Rule: Fixing 'High' Attributes?

[evileeyore]

One of the things about GURPS attributes that bugs me is that once it becomes cheaper to just raise a stat than the individual skills... the character begins to become better at everything connected to the attribute, not just those skills.

As a GM (and to some smaller degree) as a player this annoys me. To this end I propose and (and ask for commentary on) two possible house rules:


So I'm proposing "The Skill Rule of 16": When buying and defaulting skills attributes are capped at 16.

This actually gives Talents a place to shine and stops the obnoxious "With IQ 20, I have almost every skill at 14-16 for 'free'."


Your opinions? Will this break things? Will it solve my issue or am I missing something fundamental?

[Flyndaran]

There's already the rule of 20. Lowering it to the still obscenely high 16 shouldn't break anything, in my opinion.

[David Johnston2]

Or you could just not let people buy attributes (except ST) higher than 16.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Or you could just not let people buy attributes (except ST) higher than 16.

That's avoiding the problem rather than fixing it.
Kind of like suggesting setting a campaign in the desert to avoid broken swimming rules.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

There's already the rule of 20. Lowering it to the still obscenely high 16 shouldn't break anything, in my opinion.

That rule only stops the defaulting, not the purchasing of skills from extraordinarily high attributes... though I've only ever seen ST and HT go above 20, due to "can't buy stats higher then 10 more than racial start".

And I've never seen ST or HT abused like IQ (and to s slightly lesser degree) DX get 'abused'.

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Or you could just not let people buy attributes (except ST) higher than 16.

That also (kinda) works. And then I have grumpy players that kvetch at every opportunity.


Granted I put this rule into place and I know I'll hear plenty of grumblings from the primary pair of munchkins. And whining that the guy who likes to play 'barbarians' can still buy up ST and HT.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Your opinions? Will this break things? Will it solve my issue or am I missing something fundamental?

It sounds as if you're contemplating a world simulation change, as opposed to imposing limits specifically on what the players may do during character creation.

But if you're doing that, why not also cap DX, IQ and HT at 16, in the sense that "no Human can be higher than that, without the intervention of futuristic technology or powerful magic"?

Or actually, impose the cap (world-wide) instead of the rule-of-16. Because then you're still able to simulate the fact that certain non-Human species can be superior to Humans in that they may have a cap of 17 or even 18 for DX or IQ (or HT), sometimes in exchange for a lower cap on something else.

Talents would still let character exceed those caps, in the way you've outlined.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That's avoiding the problem rather than fixing it.
Kind of like suggesting setting a campaign in the desert to avoid broken swimming rules.

Avoiding-rather-than-fixing is a widespread tradition among GURPS GMs.

[Anthony]

I'd recommend solving the problem by just changing the price of attributes, probably in a nonlinear manner. To be RAW-legal, just tack it on as an unusual background.

[Kalzazz]

I have seriously considered say this for DX/IQ based on 3e

11-13 10 per level
14-16 15 per level
17-18 20 per level
19+ 25 per level

GURPS in skills makes it cheaper to dabble some in a lot of skills than to specialize . . . . you can make a big jump from default to 1pt level in 4 skills for 4pts, but only 1 point jump in 1 skill for 4 points after it already has 4 points in it

So this way it would encourage some dabbling in DX or IQ even if it wasn't your focus! Much like 3e did

I might even do things like bring back the idea of '+1/+2 to Guns for having IQ 11/12' as an inducive for DX based people to dabble in IQ, and vice versa

If you want to really make it painful and unpleasant to get high stat levels, but want to encourage stat dabbling, I've considered

11 10
12 20
13 40
14 80
15 120 etc pattern for DX/IQ, to mimic the Skill cost pattern. But that seems like overkill

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Your opinions? Will this break things? Will it solve my issue or am I missing something fundamental?

Not really, it just changes the maximum value everybody buys their attribute up to, and 16 is still quite high. It may help some, but the only real fix for this sort of thing is to not have attributes modify skills, or at least have the modifier be so small it's nearly negligible.

Some games do that - FUDGE totally divorces them, Chaosium BRP systems mostly use the negligibly small modifier versions - and it works fine. But while you sometimes see it proposed for GURPS (usually as some (or all) skills are based on 10 or 12) it's quite a radical change.

And of course if you are leaving in Talents, well, all IQ or DX are as skill modifiers are 20 point Talents. A slightly different game design could've called each non-overlapping Talent an attribute, so have you done anything but move the problem from the attributes to those Talents?