Shapeshifting cost too high by RAW trying to think it out

[Anthony]

As a note, the '1/5 cost for transferring abilities' I mentioned above can be accomplished with structures where you have an alternate ability that is a metatrait containing a package of advantages and Negated Disadvantage, or that is a package with Temporary Disadvantage applied to it, but the result is an inordinately complex writeup.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Plane

I think the -10% has more to do with how you lose the advantages if KO'd, since it's 100% if you have P75/P109 "Once On, Stays On" enhancement.

Adding "Alternate Form (Super strong form, Once On Stays On)" to a human character should cost the same as buying Super Strong Form template and adding Alternate Form (Human), because that is pretty much what it will be in play.

[mehrkat]

thanks for everyone's thoughts.

I'm going to bend more simple than complex. I know from a realism standpoint "its just replacing the racial template" but the whole concept of GURPS doesn't base the cost on reality but on a combination of difficulty and usefulness.

While the aspect by aspect sounds cool its way more complex than I would every use in game without my own AI to do the math because I'm not that math oriented :)

For folks who say its a perfectly reasonable cost. I guess I can see it in some cases and not others but in the games i've run it always seems to fall on the not worth it for what you get when you consider just buying other abilities.

Very much thanks for everyone's thoughts. I'll ponder some more.

[RyanW]

I recall an old method of buying Alternate Form which amounted to buying all the advantages of the target template with all the disadvantages taken as temporary disadvantage limitations. It was awkward, and you could easily wind up with things like negated advantages as temporary disadvantages on negated disadvantages.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by mehrkat

thanks for everyone's thoughts.

I'm going to bend more simple than complex. I know from a realism standpoint "its just replacing the racial template" but the whole concept of GURPS doesn't base the cost on reality but on a combination of difficulty and usefulness.

Realism has absolutely nothing to do with it. (Neither Alternate Form nor point values in general relate to realism.)

The point about it being based off the racial template is that you pay for what you get. Consider two 300 point characters. One is a human, the other is a Basic Set 260 point dragon.

Both gain an alternate form as a Basic Set Felinoid. When the human takes their alternate form, they're 35 points more capable. When the dragon takes their alternate form, they are 225 points less capable. By RAW, the human pays a lot more for this form (47 points vs 15, I think) than the dragon does. By your approach they would pay the same.

[Kallatari]

To those who were stating the method I previously mentioned was too complicated, I wholeheartedly agree. That was the main reason I dropped that method without even doing a full analysis of the cost implications. I was just throwing it out there for others to consider in their brainstorming (in case it led to different ideas than it did for me), and not recommending it.

Of note, the reason I started looking into repricing Alternate Form way back when in my games was because, as the exact opposite to the original post, I personally thought Alternate Form was not expensive enough for what it potentially gave and had lots of potential for abuse.

I had started with what someone else also suggested in that you must buy your most expensive form at full price (regardless of the "special effect" as to which form was your native form), and then all less expensive forms were 15 points per form. That actually fits within the RAW and merely mandates which one is at full price.

However, for 15 points, I could in theory move around hundreds of points from one trait to another so long as there was no net increase in total cost (of the racial template). The same 15 points into a Modular Abilities that was limited to certain traits might let you move maybe up to 10 points around at most (depending on exact limitations). So no fairness in price comparison there, and why I thought it needed to increase in cost.

It also became obvious that, if your most expensive racial template was, say 500 points, then every 15 CP gave you potentially up to another 500 points in different advantages. That's just over a a 1:30 ratio. And even if a player wasn't trying to abuse that (there are these nasty things called GM to prevent that), it didn't seem fair that he would pay 15 points for a 0-point template, and 15 points for a 100-point template, and 15 points for a 500-point template. Why were two different abilities of extremely different power potential worth exactly the same?

The issue that led me to how I ultimately decided to price Alternate Form was actually a problem from a different advantage. I had a lot of trouble pricing Alternate Form so that it could be put into an Affliction for my powers-based magic system. My "turn the target into a rabbit" power (i.e., Affliction (Alternate Form, Rabbit)) was based on a 15-point Alternate Form with the assumption that the rabbit was 0-points or less... but it wouldn't work on any creature whose normal racial template was worth less than the rabbit's template because you weren't paying for the "increase" in point value. Throw in the fact that most monsters don't have full-fledged racial templates, you end up not knowing if it should apply or not other than by a guesstimate.

As another example: Affliction (Alternate Form: Orc) and pricing the Alternate Form at its base 15 points for the Affliction. If Orc is a 20-point racial template, it would work on the 300-point dragon to turn it into an orc, but wouldn't work on the 0-point human.

So anyone using a powers-based framework had a difficult time correctly pricing an Alternate Form Affliction by the rules as written, and I didn't like that when designing my powers-based magic system.

The conclusion I ultimately came to for my games was that Alternate Form was worth 15 points plus 90% of the racial template (minimum 0). It didn't matter what the cost of your original template was, or whether it was higher or lower cost. A rabbit was less than 0, so Alternate Form rabbit is 15 points, and works on everyone. If an orc is 20 points, then Alternate Form orc is worth (15 + (20 x 0.9) =) 33 points, and it works on everyone.

I've had no issues running my games with that pricing for Alternate Forms and it definitely simplified building abilities for powers. Although I did increase the costs somewhat (my original goal), it still wasn't a fair price comparison to Modular Abilities, but that doesn't bother me anymore. It likewise still has potential for abuse to access a bunch of different traits... you can still get some pretty crazy 0-point racial templates, so GM oversight is still required.

But at least I could Afflict them on anyone.

[dataweaver]

A relatively simple fix:

Go through the various Limitations, and build up a list of “activation modifiers”: that is, modifiers that make it harder to activate an Ability, and modifiers that allow you to force an Ability to deactivate. Limitations that can force you to activate an Ability or force you to keep it active don't count: it's far too easy to exploit them and/or work around them.

Once you've built that list, allow those limitations to be applied to the racial templates that define each form. The harder it is to assume an Alternate Form, and the easier it is to be forced out of it, the cheaper that form should be. As with the formal Alternate Form rules, you only need to pay for the single most expensive form; but that cost is determined after the activation discount is applied to it.

And it should always be a discount: it should never cost you more points to purchase a template as a form than it would cost to purchase the template on its own. That's why I talked about “activation limitations” and not “activation modifiers”: enhancements never apply to the form costs, only to the “base cost” of 15 points per Alternate Form.

I'd have that discount replace the “pay 90% of the form cost” that the existing write-up includes. It serves the same function of making the form cheaper because you won't always be in that form; but it can go all the way up to -80% if the activation limitations are severe enough, representing a form that you're almost never in.

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So in summary: put together a list of Limitations that you think would be okay to apply to the form costs; then charge 15 points per form plus the cost of the single most expensive form after those Limitations have been applied.