0-point Features as Basis of Powers

[t@nya]

Using Affliction you can give another person a disadvantage or negate a disadvantage. What would you do if you had a power that gave a person a 0-point feature, such as making them sterile? Would you still use Affliction, considering that the "disadvantage" has no point cost? Or would you class it as a quirk (1 point) for the purposes of building a "sterility" power? Conversely, how would you build a power that rids a person of sterility or made them "super fertile"?

[PK]

It depends on the feature. Any feature which involves a morphological change is actually afflicting Alternate Form or another trait, for example. (So you couldn't call it a +0% enhancement to afflict someone with Feature (Breathes methane instead of air), even if the Rock Lords in your game have that as a feature.)

In the case of something that doesn't afflict any sort of morphological change, like Sterile, I'd have to call it a +10% enhancement to remove or to afflict. My reasoning is that the ability to be temporarily Sterile is fairly useful, and could thus be considered a Perk, while for the purpose of healing it, it's about as hard to heal as a Quirk. So while I can't point to any rule to justify it, as a GM who had a player asking me about it, I'd call it +10% either way.

[t@nya]

That sounds about right, thank you. I wonder how the IVF industry would react to someone who could permanently cure sterility with a mere touch...

Is it just me, or does GURPs offer too many options (not that I'm complaining!). There are so many possibilities I'm finding it hard to focus on one particular concept for my next super character.

[NorthSaber]

Originally Posted by t@nn

Is it just me, or does GURPs offer too many options (not that I'm complaining!). There are so many possibilities I'm finding it hard to focus on one particular concept for my next super character.

Same here, but the problem is that previous systems (and even previous versions of Gurps) have given us a "menu" of things we can pick and choose from to build characters, but now there is no menu - you can do anything you can imagine. So it's the imagination that's being put to the test now, not the ability to make smart and compatible choices from some list...

[t@nya]

Originally Posted by NorthSaber

Same here, but the problem is that previous systems (and even previous versions of Gurps) have given us a "menu" of things we can pick and choose from to build characters, but now there is no menu - you can do anything you can imagine. So it's the imagination that's being put to the test now, not the ability to make smart and compatible choices from some list...

The problem is too much imagination! I'm working on the idea of an "immortal" super, thousands of years old, born at a time when powerful supers were worshipped as gods. Should I use the "sky god", the "war god", the "fertility god", some combination of these, or something else entirely? I've read a great deal of mythology, mostly classical, but some non-classical, and I find all these ideas equally fascinating. I want to use all these ideas, but I know I can't.