[Supers][Spaceships] I/C/D/M Scale and points

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Langy

It is. I've personally disliked the scaling of DR and damage quite a bit and think both of them should be changed to logarithmic progressions.

I seriously considered putting in one form of exponential DR: DR bought as a force shield. It's quite appropriate to the comics to have a character spend FP to supercharge their force shield.

But really, comics supers don't rely on DR all that much. The optimal design is some levels of Damage Reduction, to cut down the magnitude of injury from big attacks, and a decent DR, to keep them from being beaten to death by normal men's fists. DR is there to stop the nuisance attacks.

I'm less enthusiastic about Innate Attack, mostly because it's so much cheaper than ST. Spend 100 points on ST and you get +10 ST and +1d damage, with no range! Spend that same 100 points on Crushing attack and you get +20d damage, with a fairly good range. I'd also note that most comic book supers—which is what GURPS Supers was trying to model—do not have ranged blasts that totally annihilate their foes; it's rare to see a blaster in the same damage class as the Hulk, for example.

If you want to stay within that structure and do mega blasts, buy Ultrapower and a healthy battery of Energy Reserve to support it. That will let you get off two or three "nova blast" effects. Note that Ultrapower is not restricted to a fixed upper limit of effect!

If I could have redesigned the GURPS rules for attack and defense powers from the outset, now, I might have done things differently. I really do like uniform scaling rules under which the flea and the apatosaur, or Dream Girl and Superman, fit on the same scale. But that would take more radical changes than GURPS 4/e made. So I tried to do a good fit to the kind of supers that appear in most comics. If you think you can come up with a conceptually neat unified rule that goes beyond that, more power to you.

Bill Stoddard

[naloth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I seriously considered putting in one form of exponential DR: DR bought as a force shield. It's quite appropriate to the comics to have a character spend FP to supercharge their force shield.

I've experimented with this and it works pretty well. There are a few super concepts such as force fields (Invisible Girl/Woman) and super energy absorption (DR w/Absorption) that don't work well with IT:DR.

I'm less enthusiastic about Innate Attack, mostly because it's so much cheaper than ST.

While that's true on the lower range the first post quite accurately points out that a blaster will be massively outclassed by SuperST in the C/M scale point range.

I'd also note that most comic book supers—which is what GURPS Supers was trying to model—do not have ranged blasts that totally annihilate their foes; it's rare to see a blaster in the same damage class as the Hulk, for example.

Of course, the Hulk doesn't throw punches that can totally annihilate his foes either. It's certainly in genre to have ranged attacks in the same damage range as melee damage. It's not even hard to come up with blasters that have the same damage class as the Hulk.

To that end I've also used Super Effort less impressively for Innate Attack. The fundamental problem here is that there isn't a good value that works for every Innate Attack type. The difference in base costs and the number of other modifiers makes this a complicated problem. Basically you can re-write Innate Attack to get a satisfying, reasonably fair way to scale it like ST but it take a lot more than a tack on enhancement.