Unusual Background Pricing

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by ThomasSmith

This leaves me with one question. What happens if campaign events could meaningfully alter the value of a UB?

There are a couple of ways of treating this. First, if you plan for the players' opponents to quickly adapt to and adopt the new abilities, I would recommend not charging an Unusual Background at all. For example, if you're running an "origin of superheroes" game, where the players are being the first superhumans to emerge, but they will quickly be followed by imitators, rivals, and opponents, then charging for an Unusual Background is probably not necessary.

Second, if the advantage of the Unusual Background is lost because of player actions, you can treat it like any other advantage lost through play: the points are lost, and you don't get a refund. If someone is playing Professor Blink, who has invented the only teleportation device in the world, and then goes on national television and explains how it works, with detailed charts, they have only themselves to blame when the campaign world develops teleportation and anti-teleportation defenses.

Finally, if the advantage of the Unusual Background is lost because you, as a GM, change your mind about how uncommon the advantage should be, I'd recommend giving points back to the player(s) with the UB, to make up for their lost advantage. If you're running a game of conspiratorial intrigue, and someone has paid 25 points to be a fully-trained mage where all the other characters are misinformed mundanes, and then you decide that everyone is having the most fun fooling about with the magical aspect of the campaign, and open up magic to everyone, the player who started as a mage really deserves something for their early investment. You could explain it as their greater experience with magic allowing them to more efficiently use the new magic powers everyone is being granted.

One important thing to note, as well, is that if all the players in your campaign have the same Unusual Background, it's probably not worth worrying over how much the Unusual Background costs. Point costs are a tool to balance between players more than anything, so if all players have access to the same advantage, paying a surcharge for it is somewhat pointless. Unusual Backgrounds really only need to be costed out precisely when only some of the players are taking them.

[davidtmoore]

One thing that's not been mentioned is the converse-UB.

Generally speaking, UB is a "tax" on a cool power; as a GM, I want to discourage PCs from having access to this power or special option, so I'm going to charge points for it and let you decide whether the points are worth the benefit (keeping in mind that the points don't actually provide you with anything; just the right to spend more points on something I'd otherwise forbid). The value I set it at is basically defined by how strongly I want to discourage it, without actually banning it. In an occult horror game where I decide I'm open to people being "in the know" but really want to seriously handicap players who are, I might set it at 50 points or more for access to the relevant skills, but in a cyberpunk game where I want most people to have slightly unreliable "first generation" cyber and to limit people with more reliable "second generation" cyber, I'd probably call that 10 points for the better kit.

But in a Supers or Psionics game, the assumption is very often that the entire party are supers or psis. Clearly I'm not trying to discourage anything here; I want my players to have these powers. So why am I still charging UB? Because I want to reward players who take the hard route and go without. A 500-point Supers game where powers require a 50-point UB is better described as a 450-point Supers game where "super-normals" get a 50-point bonus. In that case, you're not setting the cost of the UB based on how disruptive that power would be or how much you want to discourage it; you're setting it based on how much of a handicap you feel not having that power might be. In that case, the UB might actually cost more than it would otherwise.

[Azinctus]

An excellent and informative thread. Thanks Pederson and Moore.

[Desthro]

It does depend... but there are a ton of guidlines that can be used, I for one prefer a real simple yardstick that borders on how common something is, which can be found in any manner of places in the GURPS Basic. I then price the UB cost as a percentage of the advantage cost after Enhancements but BEFORE limitations. This is to prevent abuse on a power that should be incredibly incredibly valuable... like the above Warp example, let's say you take enough limitations to make it -80%, that's 20 points. But it STILL fits the "nobody has it" category, so you pay the UB at full cost.

So for an advantage that costs say... 50 points, if it is incredibly rare and so unusual as to strain reason, then it costs +100%, so UB is 50 points. In a different setting, if it's really common, but not everyone can have it, +10%, or 5 points.

Just make sure you don't fall into the pit-trap of letting players snark you on your points!!