GURPS Meta-Tech

[whswhs]

Looking at the Appendix, I see that the cost of Excalibur (sword and scabbard together) is $293,056,800. Since starting wealth at TL3 is $1000, Arthur would need to have Multimillionaire 4 to be able to afford Excalibur. That would cost him 150 character points, and is perhaps a little hard to reconcile with the kind of society he rules or with the way he presents himself. It's the most extreme case, but several other meta-tech items seem quite expensive. Are player characters supposed to buy the high levels of wealth that enable them to afford something that costs that much? What if the character concept is "a poor person who has this one extraordinary possession"?

I suppose there are other ways to acquire such an item. I don't think Signature Gear will work: At TL3 each point of SG gives you $500 worth of gear unrelated to your wealth level, which would cost Arthur's player 586,114 character points. Maybe the Lady of the Lake could be equated to a 20-point Patron with assets at least 100,000x starting wealth: That would get her up to $100,000,000 dollars or more.

I'd like to just say "for a unique item like that, ignore the $ cost," but that doesn't seem to work well: It makes it impossible to take account of either the item's origin or its cost factors. I don't really want to use a system while throwing out its core assumptions.

[nudj]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Looking at the Appendix, I see that the cost of Excalibur (sword and scabbard together) is $293,056,800. Since starting wealth at TL3 is $1000, Arthur would need to have Multimillionaire 4 to be able to afford Excalibur. That would cost him 150 character points, and is perhaps a little hard to reconcile with the kind of society he rules or with the way he presents himself. It's the most extreme case, but several other meta-tech items seem quite expensive. Are player characters supposed to buy the high levels of wealth that enable them to afford something that costs that much? What if the character concept is "a poor person who has this one extraordinary possession"?

I suppose there are other ways to acquire such an item. I don't think Signature Gear will work: At TL3 each point of SG gives you $500 worth of gear unrelated to your wealth level, which would cost Arthur's player 586,114 character points. Maybe the Lady of the Lake could be equated to a 20-point Patron with assets at least 100,000x starting wealth: That would get her up to $100,000,000 dollars or more.

I'd like to just say "for a unique item like that, ignore the $ cost," but that doesn't seem to work well: It makes it impossible to take account of either the item's origin or its cost factors. I don't really want to use a system while throwing out its core assumptions.

You could just separate the wealth necessary for the item and the wealth for the character. Just interpolate the wealth table to get the exact cost. I think Kromm did this in thread long ago and also used it for a logarithmic price for signature gear as well.

Here it is

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...563#post750563

[LoneWolf23k]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Looking at the Appendix, I see that the cost of Excalibur (sword and scabbard together) is $293,056,800. Since starting wealth at TL3 is $1000, Arthur would need to have Multimillionaire 4 to be able to afford Excalibur. That would cost him 150 character points, and is perhaps a little hard to reconcile with the kind of society he rules or with the way he presents himself. It's the most extreme case, but several other meta-tech items seem quite expensive. Are player characters supposed to buy the high levels of wealth that enable them to afford something that costs that much? What if the character concept is "a poor person who has this one extraordinary possession"?

I suppose there are other ways to acquire such an item. I don't think Signature Gear will work: At TL3 each point of SG gives you $500 worth of gear unrelated to your wealth level, which would cost Arthur's player 586,114 character points. Maybe the Lady of the Lake could be equated to a 20-point Patron with assets at least 100,000x starting wealth: That would get her up to $100,000,000 dollars or more.

I'd like to just say "for a unique item like that, ignore the $ cost," but that doesn't seem to work well: It makes it impossible to take account of either the item's origin or its cost factors. I don't really want to use a system while throwing out its core assumptions.

I just figured he got the sword as a Quest reward.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k

I just figured he got the sword as a Quest reward.

That's fine if you're building "young Arthur" as a character. But what if you want to build "mature Arthur, who's been on the throne for years"? A universal system should be able to build either.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by nudj

You could just separate the wealth necessary for the item and the wealth for the character. Just interpolate the wealth table to get the exact cost. I think Kromm did this in thread long ago and also used it for a logarithmic price for signature gear as well.

Here it is

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...563#post750563

It can work if you make SG logarithmic, yes. But that's not RAW. And I might prefer to do a reinterpretation of Patron, which already IS logarithmic.

[dcarson]

Isn't there a ship as Patron for Traveller? Use that for the sword. One very expensive piece of equipment that helps drive the campaign.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Looking at the Appendix, I see that the cost of Excalibur (sword and scabbard together) is $293,056,800. Since starting wealth at TL3 is $1000, Arthur would need to have Multimillionaire 4 to be able to afford Excalibur. That would cost him 150 character points, and is perhaps a little hard to reconcile with the kind of society he rules or with the way he presents himself. It's the most extreme case, but several other meta-tech items seem quite expensive. Are player characters supposed to buy the high levels of wealth that enable them to afford something that costs that much? What if the character concept is "a poor person who has this one extraordinary possession"?

I believe Excalibur is the most extreme example in the book, granting Advantages worth [1184] (when combined with the Scabbard) and is Cosmic to boot. It should be obscenely expensive! Indeed, most of the examples have fairly high-point builds - of the three items that are below [100], the Tethering Arrow is only worth [5] (and is $52), the Power Ring is worth [91], and the Enchanted Radio-Thermal Generator is worth [95]. More modest builds will work to be cheaper.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I believe Excalibur is the most extreme example in the book, granting Advantages worth [1184] (when combined with the Scabbard) and is Cosmic to boot. It should be obscenely expensive!

But making it obscenely expensive does seem to make it impossible to have Arthur as a player character in most campaigns. At least, if you give all the other player characters commensurate points, they're going to be incredibly powerful, probably more so than the actual knights of the Round Table. Do you think that's not a problem?

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I believe Excalibur is the most extreme example in the book, granting Advantages worth [1184] (when combined with the Scabbard) and is Cosmic to boot. It should be obscenely expensive! Indeed, most of the examples have fairly high-point builds - of the three items that are below [100], the Tethering Arrow is only worth [5] (and is $52), the Power Ring is worth [91], and the Enchanted Radio-Thermal Generator is worth [95]. More modest builds will work to be cheaper.

Exactly this.

Complaints about the cost of something that gives 1,184 points worth of advantages and is already an extreme example is...disingenuous at best.

The system allows the building of it, consistently priced with other things it can build. If that price seems extreme for "PC starting wealth", then I would suggest that Arthur isn't a PC in the first instance, and secondly you need not stat out NPCs as PCs. So Arthur gets Excalibur because he does, and that's *entirely* consistent with normal GURPS. That you can price it to represent value compared to other things doesn't change that. It also doesn't mean there's an active market for it. Many rare items have insurance values or estimations to rebuild or replace, without anyone being prepared to actually spend that amount to purchase them.

If you really want a PC with something like that, then your campaign needs to reflect such enormously powerful items as being PC gear. You would also tweak the build, probably starting by removing the "impossible to replicate" which reduces the cost by 2 orders of magnitude immediately as you'd move down to Rare. You *might* leave it at Very Rare, but then why are PCs getting it (a concentration of such items within a party suggests "almost nobody has such a device" is probably not applicable), but even then you quarter the price.

[ravenfish]

I note that Excalibur has had its price multiplied by a factor of 100 for "impossible" uniqueness. In an Arthurian Legend campaign, this multiplier should probably instead be x1 for "uncommon" (magic swords aren't exactly available to buy at the market in the Matter of Britain, but any enterprising knight errant has a good chance of having obtained one by the end of his Tale) bringing the cost down to a bit under three million- pricey, but within the realm of plausible for the regalia of a major king.

EDIT: By way of comparison, in the old third edition Magic Items 1, a sword and scabbard crafted to mimic the powers of Excalibur had a theoretical price of around two million for the pair.