Spending Points For Cash

[Phantasm]

Bringing a digression into the proper forum:

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Spending points on in-game effects is exactly what Impulse Buys is about, spending points to find money is pretty quintessentially an impulse buy (and B26 says these points are just spent and don't go on your character sheet; which is something GCA still does wrong, but I digress).

Isn't the logic of the way GCA accounts for these just a means of a) making sure the specified point budget remains true, and b) making sure the cash fields are handled correctly?

After all, there are options in GCA to not show certain traits on the character sheet; I forget, though, whether the "Trading Points For Cash" 'Advantage' has that by default, though.

Given that, I'm not sure it's "done wrong", maybe just not the way people expect it to work, given the differences between a sheet of paper and a computer program for making them?

[ericbsmith]

No, technically he's correct, GCA does it "wrong" in that the points spent for cash are gone, burned in the aether, and the characters point cost is reduced appropriately. In GCA the points are used, and accounted for in the characters point budget, meaning that the characters point cost is not reduced. Unfortunately, this is kind of a limitation of the current version of GCA where there is no real way to do the kind of accounting that is necessary to simultaneously reduce the character's point total and increase their money total while leaving no trace on the character sheet except the reduced point total.

[Bruno]

For what it's worth, I think the RAW interpretation is nonsense and balderdash, and would want a switch to turn the current GCA workings back on as some sort of house rule GDF.

But I also consider character points spent on the other Impulse Buy stuff to still be part of your character point total. You still got them, and when you bought those 8 critical successes you got great use out of them. You can't have those 8 points back any more than points spent on a skill you use 8 times and then never again in the rest of the campaign, so whatever. :)

That's easily tracked with custom advantages.

Actually. GCA has a mechanism for making character points "go away" without creating a line item on your character sheet. It's not hooked up to the money side of things, so you can't do the two actions in one swell foop, but. In your character log, instead of adding a line item adding character points, add a line item subtracting character points. Walla, character point total goes down.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Actually. GCA has a mechanism for making character points "go away" without creating a line item on your character sheet. It's not hooked up to the money side of things, so you can't do the two actions in one swell foop, but. In your character log, instead of adding a line item adding character points, add a line item subtracting character points. Walla, character point total goes down.

That is true, and does work (more or less). What I'd kind of like to see happen in the next version of GCA is a way to do this automatically; turn the "Trade points for money" advantage into a log entry, permanently increase cash, and remove the advantage after it's done. The Character Log still needs a way to directly change the characters cash on hand anyways, since that tends to fluctuate wildly in many games anyway, and not necessarily from character point expenditures.

This would be good for other "token" advantages too; for instance the "Extra Attribute" advantages added in a template could increase the appropriate attribute and then remove themselves from the character after the template is loaded. This can't be too aggressive though; "Extra ST" can be something that's just an accounting mechanism for templates, but it can also be a way of adding Extra ST with enhancements or limitations, and in those cases the Extra ST needs to stay on the character sheet.

[tmedwards]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

This would be good for other "token" advantages too; for instance the "Extra Attribute" advantages added in a template could increase the appropriate attribute and then remove themselves from the character after the template is loaded. This can't be too aggressive though; "Extra ST" can be something that's just an accounting mechanism for templates, but it can also be a way of adding Extra ST with enhancements or limitations, and in those cases the Extra ST needs to stay on the character sheet.

I'm unsure that do-a-thing-and-go-away traits are necessarily a good idea. I understand the idea, but I'm thinking that they would probably overcomplicate the system in various ways. Then again, I'm not Armin, so what do I know. :)

I think this could probably be handled by a tag, something along the lines of inline(yes), where when GCA is generating the trait lists for character sheets it could, optionally, hide all such traits if they contained no modifiers. The traits would still be on the character, they simply wouldn't show up on character sheets normally. They should be available to be seen by those who prefer to see them though, which is why I said "hide" rather than "elide".

[sir_pudding]

If impulse spends counted towards your total they would improve your allies, which seems wrong.

[Armin]

GCA is, basically, a type of accounting app. I don't know about you folks, but my players totally suck at keeping track of points and what they've spent. In my games, having points just go *poof* when used would result in those players becoming very confused about why their point total isn't correct for what they supposedly earned, and then trying to spend those points again. (This frustrates me constantly and to no end, in various ways, in all systems we play.)

In our games, we've always tracked all such expenditures with notes on the character sheet, usually as simple Advantages for various things that would be covered by Impulse Buys ("Healed by Goddess, 5 pts" or whatever).

I personally don't think it's a problem to have such points reflected in allies or whatever--you still earned the points, you still had that experience. But, that's not overly important to the point.

Basically, from an accounting point of view, *poof* is bad, and I'm not going to just have things go *poof* because it messes up the paper trail.

IMO, the correct way to do such a thing is in the Campaign Log, where you can add an entry for negative points, as Emily mentioned. Yes, the Campaign Log should probably be updated to allow for adjusting cash, too.

I can see the case for certain types of traits, when added to the character, doing something and then disappearing, but IMO those traits would be best for doing adds() and creates(), and not things intended to have any value of their own.

[Armin]

Originally Posted by tmedwards

I'm unsure that do-a-thing-and-go-away traits are necessarily a good idea. I understand the idea, but I'm thinking that they would probably overcomplicate the system in various ways. Then again, I'm not Armin, so what do I know. :)

I think it would be doable, using the current systems, without too much trouble, as long as they were basically adds() or creates() kinds of things.

Originally Posted by tmedwards

I think this could probably be handled by a tag, something along the lines of inline(yes), where when GCA is generating the trait lists for character sheets it could, optionally, hide all such traits if they contained no modifiers. The traits would still be on the character, they simply wouldn't show up on character sheets normally. They should be available to be seen by those who prefer to see them though, which is why I said "hide" rather than "elide".

Isn't this basically the existing hide() tag?

Although, for sir_pudding's purposes, such a tag would need to also operate similarly to the ndl() tag that excludes from the disad limit, except that it would exclude values from point accounting entirely. That would kinda make it disappear without losing the paper trail.

[sir_pudding]

FWIW, I would be more than happy with the log handling this stuff. Although in practice I wouldn't see it mattering much, GCA isn't really a useful in-play character tracker (not like HeroLab) and usually I only update characters after adventures anyway, so points impulsively spent during sessions would in practice just "poof".

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Armin

Basically, from an accounting point of view, *poof* is bad, and I'm not going to just have things go *poof* because it messes up the paper trail.

I wasn't really suggesting that they go *poof* and then they're gone. In the case of Trading Points for Cash it would adjust the Campaign Log to remove the points, add the cash, and make a note that points were traded for cash and then it would *poof* away after making the appropriate changes. The points don't really go away, but they are "burned" and logged.

Originally Posted by Armin

I can see the case for certain types of traits, when added to the character, doing something and then disappearing, but IMO those traits would be best for doing adds() and creates(), and not things intended to have any value of their own.

The problem is that there are some traits that cannot be directly addressed in the Template dialogs - namely attributes. When a templates says "spend 30 points on ST, DX, or these Advantages" there is currently no way to adjust ST or DX within the dialog, which is why there are Extra ST and Extra DX advantages to make the adjustments.

Now, on the other hand, since we're talking about the next version of GCA maybe a better way of handling this is to add a way for Template dialogs to directly modify attributes (and account for the points within the template dialog), so that the intermediary advantages aren't necessary. Again, though, we still have the problem of correctly handling Trading points for Cash which shows up in the Template advantages but really needs to be recorded in the Campaign Log.