Re-calibrating Attribute Costs

[mburr0003]

Arcanjo7Sagi, I'm splitting my responses to you out only because I hit the character limit and I responded more to you than any other individual.

Originally Posted by Arcanjo7Sagi

If stats cost too much and the starting score is high to compensate, then problems begin to arise when a player simply decides to spend those points to be hyper-competent in a single skill.

Sure, but I'm not worried about that here and now. Besides, in those cases, "cap on skills above X" where X is a ludicrously high number is fine. I'm also in those cases willing to use Bucket O' Points and others options to limit things.

But, I'll let you in on a secret, I'm not worried about stupidly high single or paired skill levels. Johnny One-Skill is never a problem for me. Not even Dr Kromm's Zombie spell of 50 would be an issue in a game where vanilla magic was allowed.

I run Action! games, so stupidly insanely high skills are perfectly fine. Now, I will grant you, yes, it does need to be considered and thoughts on "but what about everyone else" needs to be addressed... but then I find anyone who has problems with skills above 20 are already probably implementing Skill or Attribute Caps (or both), or they'd be parsimonious with points anyway. Or using Templates which also neatly sidesteps the "but what if extremely high skill".

Here the idea is of a higher DX...

DX is literally never a problem.

Let me restate the problem: IQ 18+ PC and IQ 12 broadly skilled PC. The second one gets stepped on all over the place unless the second one spends far more points in skills than the prior did in IQ alone. But yet, I would like to be able to let them both coexist in a party without having to resort to "Just don't step on the other PCs niche, m'kay".

Now, I could see a "low DX broadly weapon skilled PC gets stepped on by DX 18+ PC" as being a problem, and I'm also considering that as part and parcel with this "What about rejiggering Attribute costs" question, so consider DX (and to a far lesser degree HT) also needing to be addressed.

I understand that simply increasing the cost of attributes may sound like a simple solution, but we have to remember that they exist alongside a whole set of other elements that make up the system.

Ahem:

It's the next step that becomes more untenable; change the cost of the Advantages and Disadvantages that should be changed relative to the cost of Attributes.

And really, I need to back up a step further... because once you start tinkering with Attribute costs... you need to look very hard at starting Character Point allotments.. and woooo. It's a bit of an interconnected nesting problem.

I'm pretty sure I understand that concept, would you like to help address it?

Originally Posted by Arcanjo7Sagi

That's why I think Power-Ups 9, Alternate Attributes, is worth a read.

It was. If there is something specific from it you think is highly relevant, please mention it. If you think this isn't an endemic problem (I do) but a "genre assumptions" problem (it might be), I'm happy to have that discussion as well.

Or make WildCard Skills more attractive.

I personally find Wildcard skills to be garbage. Okay, wait... not 'garbage', but a solution to a problem that is not being addressed here". If the problem was "how can one player raise 12 skills from two or more attributes in a manner that's inexpensive and we absolutely aren't using Talents" then sure, Wildcard Skills are great. That's not the problem, I love Talents, I wish they were cost viable versus Attributes, but they aren't. The only way Wildcard skills are better than just raising an Attribute is when you only want 12 "thematically focused" skills to go up together or they're from more than one Attribute.

I almost never see that outside of fairly focused PC builds and that's what we have Talents for.

In the quoted passage, 80 per level would be way past that point, but perhaps something between 40 and 50 might be acceptable - again, depending on the type of game.

Yes, jumping from 20 points per level to 80 might be a bit much and only doing it for one PC because they "have 20 or more skills in that one Attribute"... yeah. That's wrong, on a few levels.

But, establishing from the start, for everyone, that Attributes will incrementally increase (or are just flatly more expensive), is another thing.

I tend to see more specialist characters than generalist characters.

We have different groups. In fact, my Players prefer GURPS because it allows for something most other systems do not: Making generalists who don't suck.

Originally Posted by Arcanjo7Sagi

It could be an interesting solution for less cinematic games. Generalist hyper-competent characters become much more costly to make.

That's an interesting take. It doesn't address my problem, but it's an interesting take. It does make higher skills far more expensive, which would inflate the value of buying Attributes on broad generalists... which I'm already finding is a problem with the current system.