High Power GURPS: Where lies the problem?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What's wrong with that? Most movies with cinematic combat and action don't show the protagonist changing all that much during the narrative.

Any mechanic based around spending a lasting resource for a transient benefit is going to have severe problems with long term game scaling -- either it's overly powerful in a short campaign, or it's overly crippling in a long campaign, or both. This doesn't apply as much if there's a return on investment type effect (i.e. spend money to make money), but that's not how character points work.

Originally Posted by Varyon

But you don't have to retard development to make use of those cinematic options that cost points - Impulse Buys includes a reworking of the Destiny Advantage such that it gives you a regenerating store of points for this purpose, rather than requiring you to spend character points.

Notably not in the basic rules. If a game system is meant to be a toolbox... the basic rules should give you the tools, and the supplements save you work using the rules (because actually building a game from the tools in the toolbox is likely a lot of work).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Any mechanic based around spending a lasting resource for a transient benefit is going to have severe problems with long term game scaling -- either it's overly powerful in a short campaign, or it's overly crippling in a long campaign, or both. This doesn't apply as much if there's a return on investment type effect (i.e. spend money to make money), but that's not how character points work.

The point is, why should the players be thinking about the potential for 'profit' or investing their character points in becoming more powerful, if they explicitly want to play in a cinematic campaign?

I don't think character points being used to steadily improve characters would be a faithful emulation of action cinema. If they were going to improve over the course of the cinematic campaign, they'd get a training montage and would presumably be awarded with whatever new traits they needed for the exciting finale.

So, players interested in cinematic campaigns are presumably satisfied with their character as they are, excepting perhaps the occasional training montage if it's that kind of cinema, and are prepared to treat character points simply as tokens that measure how much of the script they can dictate, by buying successes.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Icelander

The point is, why should the players be thinking about the potential for 'profit' or investing their character points in becoming more powerful, if they explicitly want to play in a cinematic campaign?

You can play a game that doesn't have experience points at all... but if experience points exist, they should be for lasting benefits.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Anthony

You can play a game that doesn't have experience points at all... but if experience points exist, they should be for lasting benefits.

There's no experience points in GURPS. They're character points, meta-awards that don't exist in the context of the characters' world. If the campaign is meant to reflect a coming of age story for the characters or young soldiers learning their trade in the hard school of combat, then character points being spent to represent them learning valuable lessons through hard experience makes sense, sure.

If the objective is to emulate action cinema, the Basic Set treats character points more like 'influence with the writer' points than 'experience' points. And that makes sense for cinematic campaigns.

For people who want it both ways, there's Impulse Buys, but the Basic Set rules aren't bad just because they assume that players who want to play an action-adventure campaign with cinematic rules actually want to emulate action-adventure cinema and have their character remain basically the same, give or take a night or two, before or after this particular adventure.

[Icelander]

I think players who want rules where their protagonist-hood overcomes all obstacles and the numbers on their character sheet go up a lot actually want a 'video game like' campaign, not a cinematic one.

So, it makes sense that such players would dislike the cinematic rules and want rules that make their numbers go up more.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Notably not in the basic rules. If a game system is meant to be a toolbox... the basic rules should give you the tools, and the supplements save you work using the rules (because actually building a game from the tools in the toolbox is likely a lot of work).

If that's the location of the goalpost here*, then yeah, the basic rules are lacking a good number of options. Personally, I don't think "brings in relevant rules from other supplements" fundamentally changes the nature of it, and should be fair game for "Powered by GURPS" products. Continuing the "toolbox" analogy, I'll note that most professionals tend to purchase additional tools as needed and add them to their basic toolboxes.

*I should note I'm not accusing you of the classic "moving the goalpost" conversational foul - rather, I'm noting that we appear to have been working off of different ideas of where it is.

Originally Posted by Icelander

I don't think character points being used to steadily improve characters would be a faithful emulation of action cinema. If they were going to improve over the course of the cinematic campaign, they'd get a training montage and would presumably be awarded with whatever new traits they needed for the exciting finale.

Now that I think about it, in the cases where the characters continually improving is part of the point, the GURPS' "3-5 character points per session" falls woefully short of how rapidly such characters tend to improve when they do go through some improvement. GURPS doesn't formally handle these situations to my knowledge, outside of invoking Rule 0, but it wouldn't be too difficult to introduce something like an "Emergence" rule (to steal the term for this from The Zombie Knight Saga) - when a character is in a make-or-break, life-or-death situation (as determined by the GM), a successful roll of some flavor (Will is often appropriate, although given this would strongly encourage players to build high-Will characters, just a static target number based on the situation may be more appropriate) gives them a sudden boost of power, to be used to beef up an existing ability, gain a new one (often in the form of suddenly mastering an ability they've been trying to perfect), etc, to the tune of some large chunk of points - say [25] in many campaigns, boosted for particularly-high-power characters (a value equal to 10% of the current campaign average might not be inappropriate). In that case, the slow-and-steady gain of character points could be safely invested in impulse buys, since the bulk of character improvement would be in the form of Emergence. You could even make Emergence easier the lower the character's point total (at least relative to the current average - maybe +2 if you're the "weakest" character, +1 if below 0.9xAverage, +0 if within 10% of Average, -1 if above 1.1xAverage, and -2 if you're the "strongest" character).
... of course, the above probably counts as one of my harebrained "Alternate GURPS" ideas, but it wouldn't be too far out there, I don't think.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem is that the rules for cinematic play in Basic are… atrocious. In large part because they rely on spending character points for transient effects.

There are dozens of rules for cinematic play in the Basic Set, and, of them, AFAICT, only one cinematic combat option (Flesh Wounds) uses character points for transient effects.

The other option which does this (Player Guidance) is intended “for genres where the heroes usually ‘win’ but don’t develop much”, which overlaps with cinematic (four-color supers falls in both categories), but is distinct from it, and is pretty clearly intended as an alternative to using character points for advancement for genres where such advancement is itself out-of-genre.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Anthony

You can play a game that doesn’t have experience points at all… but if experience points exist, they should be for lasting benefits.

I would agree that there becomes a problem if [i]the same pool of resources[.i] is used for transient and lasting benefits (I think Flesh Wounds is not as problematic in this regard as other uses might be in a game where CP are otherwise used for lasting benefits because the incentive is to reserve invoking it for situations where it is avoiding a lasting harm – often death – so as long as the situations calling for its use aren’t either too frequent or distributed very lopsidedly among party members, it doesn’t make much distortion.)

But I don’t think there is anything wrong with a game where CP are periodically awarded and have their main use being transient things like Player Guidance with opportunities to use them for advancement being non-existent or limited and rare and minor in terms of total usage, any more than there is with a game where advancement is overwhelmingly the main use (but maybe Flesh Wounds is available.)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Varyon

If that's the location of the goalpost here*, then yeah, the basic rules are lacking a good number of options.

The question was in part about why GURPS has the reputation, and people really do judge based on first impressions.

[Genesis]

Originally Posted by thalcos

I kinda like how the Film Reroll podcast guys handle rolls and narration, especially with social situations. It's the reverse of the usual "give me your narration/speech, and then make your roll to see if it works."

So, if a player says, "Alright, I'm going to try to intimidate the street thug to hand me his weapon," the GM says, "make your Intimidation roll." And then, say if he fails by 3, the GM says "ha, give me that intimidating speech now" and the player roleplays a botched intimidation attempt, which is entertaining for all.

So the agency happens at the action level, vs. the narration level. It's a fun twist on the usual way GMs handle this, where the big speech goes first followed by the roll, and you sometimes get a disconnect between the player's narration and the result.

My favorite way to do it :)

If you've got players who can find the narrative delight in failure, who can separate "playing their characters" from "advocating on behalf of their characters," this lets a player decide on both the approach, and the details of the action - with the dice guiding that role play, rather than clashing against it. Not all tables are like this, though, and I don't think we'd do it this way if our players weren't conscious of telling a story/putting on a show/building the narrative in addition to picking character actions...