Is this ability legal?

[Refplace]

Not quite the same thing but from Template Toolkit 4: Spirits we have the following two ability writeups under the Psychopomp power.

Claim Soul: Affliction 1 (HT; Covenant of Rest, +10%; Cosmic,
Works on the dead, +50%; Devotion, -10%; Malediction 1,
+100%) [25]. 25 points.

Soul Reap: Affliction 1 (HT; Covenant of Rest, +10%; Devotion,
-10%; Heart Attack, +300%; Malediction 1, +100%) [50].
50 points.
Covenant of Rest is in there to represent the soul no longer being resurectable.

[RGTraynor]

Add me as a +1 to the "You're not compelled to make a NPC's power reducible to legal system mechanics" camp. I'd never want to play in a campaign so adversarial as requiring the GM to provide evidence of the same. Big Bad has nasty area affect Big Bad Attack. Fair enough!

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Add me as a +1 to the "You're not compelled to make a NPC's power reducible to legal system mechanics" camp. I'd never want to play in a campaign so adversarial as requiring the GM to provide evidence of the same. Big Bad has nasty area affect Big Bad Attack. Fair enough!

I agree, although I'll note there is still purpose to properly statting these things out, or at least figuring out a roughly fair price. A PC might later gain the ability (not necessarily in this campaign - maybe in a future high-powered campaign you have a player who wants to play as an Angel of Death with this power), or take the NPC who has it as an Ally or Enemy (in which case how many points the NPC is worth matters a good deal). And at a minimum, it's good practice.

Also, there are some GM's who prefer to operate under similar constraints as the players when designing characters. I believe Bill Stoddard opts for that path, for example. But if you're beating your head against the wall trying to get an ability to work the way you want it to, it's useful to take a step back and ask yourself "Do I really need to stat this out, or would it be fine for me to just fiat how it works?"

[Kallatari]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Neither Side Effect nor Symptoms is compatible with Heart Attack - the choices for the first are Stunning, Attribute Penalty, Disadvantage, and Incapacitation (Irritant should probably be an option, seeing as it's a lesser effect than Incapacitation, and so should Negated Advantage, as that's really just a special case of Disadvantage); the choices for the second are Advantage, Attribute Penalty, Disadvantage, Irritant, and Negated Advantage. Additionally, Side Effect is incompatible with Malediction, and the books suggest limiting Symptoms to 1d and lower attacks.

I disagree with this.

To be clear, you are indeed accurately quoting the rules for both Side Effect and Symptoms, and thus you are correct that the rules don't allow it. So in a sense, your answer is RAW (Rules as Written).

However, the rules themselves elsewhere contradict, or more accurately seem to contradict these restrictions.

Lethal Electrical Damage (GURPS Basic p.432) has make a HT roll at -1 per 2 points of injury or suffer seizure, and a failure of 5 or more is a heart attack. That is exactly how Side Effect, Secondary Heart Attack works. If I wanted to recreate exactly that type of attack as an ability, then the only way to do it using existing rules is with Side Effect.

Then in GURPS Psionic Powers, p.76, the Lethal Attack psi technique. That can be applied to any damaging psi ability (e.g., Innate Attacks), and if they reach 2/3 HP they suffer a heart attack. Again, this is Symptoms, Heart Attack. The default is skill -30, which means it's a +300% enhancement, and that would perfectly match the cost of Symptoms, Heart Attack.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Personally, I'd be fine with expanding Side Effect to cover more, including Heart Attack (although part of that is that I'd rather use Side Effect than Affliction, as I like the way the former works a lot better). Symptoms shouldn't be, however, considering passing the injury threshold causes the effect with no chance for a save.

Same here, but for me it's mainly because the rules already have those effects elsewhere as opposed to a preference. Although I do prefer them if the effects I want are exactly how Side Effects or Symptoms work.

I know that for Lethal Electrical Damage you could argue that's an environmental thing, not a player ability.. kind of like saying "it's for NPCs only", but I disagree with that. I'm of the belief that if there's an effect anywhere in the rules, you should be able to duplicate it with traits and someone can have that trait. Sure, some are easier to do than others, and some would require really convoluted builds, but in this particular case, Lethal Electrical Damage is clearly Side Effects, and I'm definitely good with allowing it.

The psi technique is definitely already useable for players as part of a psionic power build. So using Symptoms is technically already RAW even if not spelled out. So also valid. I'd therefore "allow" it in the sense that "the rules allow it" or "it's legal", but in most of my campaigns I'd not necessarily let my players take it because of the potential to break the game in terms of being too powerful... just like in most of my campaigns I "wouldn't allow" PC to take the "legal" Burning Attack 1 point (Area Effect 22, +1,100%; Cosmic, Irresistible Attack, +300%) [28] that can basically set entire continents - and everyone on them - on fire.

Anyway, I guess that's me just trying to justify why I personally allow Heart Attack with either Side Effect or Symptoms.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Varyon

or take the NPC who has it as an Ally or Enemy (in which case how many points the NPC is worth matters a good deal).

While true, it is rare that you need to know the exact point total of even an Ally or Enemy. An Ally to a 100-point PC, for instance, costs the same 2 points whether the Ally is built on 26 points or 50 points. As long as you know the NPC's point total is somewhere in the right range, you don't really need to know the exact total.

[Pursuivant]

Reasons to know the general point cost for a monster:

* PCs manage to acquire one as an Ally, Enemy or Patron.
* GM is trying to determine overall monster lethality for game balance.
* GM allows spells or powers which can summon, create or control said monster.

Reasons to know exact point cost for a monster:

* PCs can assume the monster's form using Shapeshifting.
* GM allows PCs to play a monster.
* PvP "build your own army" tactical combat scenarios.

While I totally understand when a game book or scenario just gives monster format stats for a creature, I admire it when someone goes to the trouble to give proper and complete stats and point costs for a creature. "Proper" stats include minutiae like what and how much it eats, how long it sleeps, what temperature extremes it can survive, how it interacts with others of its kind and how long it lives barring disease or violence.

That said, there are some types of NPC abilities which result in effectively infinite cost, like the recursive ability to permanently bestow powers.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Reasons to know the general point cost for a monster:

* PCs manage to acquire one as an Ally, Enemy or Patron.
* GM is trying to determine overall monster lethality for game balance.
* GM allows spells or powers which can summon, create or control said monster.

Reasons to know exact point cost for a monster:

* PCs can assume the monster's form using Shapeshifting.
* GM allows PCs to play a monster.
* PvP "build your own army" tactical combat scenarios.

'Game balance', if it has any meaning at all, definitely does not have anything to do with point values in GURPS. The point value of a naked athlete can be far higher than the point value of a soldier driving a tank or a pilot flying an attack helicopter, but the second two are many orders of magnitude more powerful.

GURPS character points are not intended to measure anything but how much a hypothetical player might want a trait, and given that GURPS is not a point-buy wargame, its points do not in any way reflect tactical, operational or strategic capabilities. They might sometimes roughly correlate with the ability to spotlight characters, assuming appropriate scenarios, but as GURPS points are priced for campaigns where artistic, comedic, investigative, puzzle, social or a wide variety of other scenarios are just as common and valid as combat, it's simply a red herring to use point values to gauge combat capability.

When you want to compare combat capabilities, just directly compare the relevant capabilities, ignore what they would cost as abilities, especially as 'using equipment provided by employer' is a zero point cost trait.

[Stormcrow]

I don't want this to turn into a derailing argument about the value of building NPCs as PCs; I just wanted to suggest to the OP that a GM can save themselves work by not worrying too much about NPCs being "legal."