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Old 06-23-2021, 08:20 AM   #51
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Transient Advantages

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One Eye is an innate quality; Voice is an innate quality. Basic attributes are not purely innate qualities, nor are they purely learned qualities.
Social Engineering:Back to School even has Voice on a list of possibly learnable Advantages reresenting a rigouous course of oratorical training i.e. becoming a professional Shakespearian actor.

Any dichotomy that has Skills being what you learn and Attributes being what you were born with is a false one as far as Gurps is concerned.
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Old 06-23-2021, 08:27 AM   #52
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The issue with cybernetics is that they cost character points, of which in the example we only have 250 (AND money, if bought post-creation). Power Armor doesn't cost anything except from a tiny bit of the enormous wealth you can buy for much less if handled as equipment.

I'm in this camp: cybernetics that cost points often run into trouble when compared to wealth.

For a different version of the problem, look at guns and blaster supers.

I've often seen people suggest that iron-man type suits in supers games should be paid for with points, not cash and wealth, because that's the currency and paradigm the game is playing in. Conversely, in most cyberpunk games, I don't charge character points for most cybernetics, because they are just gear you happen to attach to your body, and we're working in a gear paradigm*.

I find that in most settings and campaigns, it makes sense to classify effects as paid for with points, or as paid for with cash. This is a setting choice, and every-time I play with cybernetics, its one of the first decisions I make.

*I do make exception for a data jack that provides capabilities that gear really can't come close to matching. I also will charge Legal Powers points for innate abilities that can be taken places gear cannot... but that's usually magic or a racial template, not cybernetics.
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Old 06-24-2021, 12:02 PM   #53
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Default Re: Transient Advantages

I've also pondered doing the exact same with cybernetics in my own campaign. We've got PSIs and stuff as well though, and not everyone may want to cyber-up themselves. Probably the Cybernetics will remain advantages, and I'll have to restrict really high-power stuff like advanced power armor to those who buy it with as an advantage with Gadget limitations. Not quite decided on how to approach it yet yet.
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Old 06-24-2021, 05:54 PM   #54
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Default Re: Transient Advantages

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Social Engineering:Back to School even has Voice on a list of possibly learnable Advantages reresenting a rigouous course of oratorical training i.e. becoming a professional Shakespearian actor.

Any dichotomy that has Skills being what you learn and Attributes being what you were born with is a false one as far as Gurps is concerned.
It may be hard to write on a piece of paper exactly what is wanted but it is very easy to give a quick answer whenever asked. So I may give an imperfect rule and then adjudicate on the fly during session 0 character creation.

Now lets go to IQ. I know people that no matter what you did with them they will never be smart. They will never be able to just spend a tiny amount of time and suddenly be really good at something. Tons of those people exist. Once your born with a certain level of intelligence you can advance it by working your mind some. And the smarter you are the easier it would be to improve. If you are dumb as a coal bucket then your going to struggle to improve it a lot.

I think it's pretty similar for DX though perhaps a bit more flexible than IQ.

Now I agree you can take any old nobody off the street and build up their ST. The only limit would be their body frame. So a limitation on ST is perhaps not so good.

HT is similar but again I think it has it's limits. A generally healthy person can really push up their HT but someone who is really sickly by nature is going to struggle there. Now if they aren't sickly by nature you can perhaps cure them and push it up. This one is the hardest for me to judge.

So I could see varying my system proposed on another thread.
You can improve IQ and DX as much as you improved it at the campaign start or +2 whichever is greater.

Maybe strength and health can be improved more. Maybe by triple the initial improvement or to 20 whichever is greater.
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Old 06-24-2021, 06:59 PM   #55
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Default Re: Transient Advantages

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Now lets go to IQ. I know people that no matter what you did with them they will never be smart. They will never be able to just spend a tiny amount of time and suddenly be really good at something. Tons of those people exist. Once your born with a certain level of intelligence you can advance it by working your mind some. And the smarter you are the easier it would be to improve. If you are dumb as a coal bucket then your going to struggle to improve it a lot.
This is where we get to the "GURPS is not a simulation" bit. IQ is not a measure of innate mental capacity. It isn't even a measure of innate mental capacity that's been boosted by training. IQ is your effective skill at using your intellect. It's just that number you roll against to see if your intellect is able to deal with mental feats.

Two people with identical brainpower might have different IQ scores. One of them might just know more than the other.
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Old 06-24-2021, 09:00 PM   #56
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IQ is not a measure of innate mental capacity. It isn't even a measure of innate mental capacity that's been boosted by training.
IQ even includes general education and knowledge. That's why you get defaults based off of it.

You shouldn't even be trying to say things like "I want to play a character with an average intellignece who has gained a lot of IQ-based Skills." Once a character has put so many pts into IQ-based Skills that it would ahve been cheaper to build him with a higher IQ he probably should be re-built with that higher IQ. The condition of "I am very good with many IQ-based Skills." is basically indistinguishable in Gurps from having a high IQ.
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Old 06-25-2021, 06:11 AM   #57
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This is where we get to the "GURPS is not a simulation" bit. IQ is not a measure of innate mental capacity. It isn't even a measure of innate mental capacity that's been boosted by training. IQ is your effective skill at using your intellect. It's just that number you roll against to see if your intellect is able to deal with mental feats.

Two people with identical brainpower might have different IQ scores. One of them might just know more than the other.
Well, it is absolutely true that regardless of how much you train me I won't ever become a chess world champion. So a low intelligence would limit your skill level as well. I also realize that this is a game and most PCs are heroic.

I find it unsatisfactory though from a gaming perspective that you can spend the points to raise IQ which is the equivalent of raising 5 skills (at higher levels) and raise 20 instead. It seems in this situation that anyone playing an IQ based player would just push up IQ and forget entirely about skills.

This is probably why I am on the fence about whether the "cost" to advance a stat should keep getting more expensive each time you improve it. So it's easy at lower levels (it is easier) and harder at higher levels (realistically impossible for most people). So if you are going to focus on IQ based skills then you would push up your IQ to a reasonable limit but at some point it would still be better to advance your skills.

I would not say my players are munchkins but I would say that within their character concept they are optimizers. I don't really see anything wrong with that.
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Old 06-25-2021, 07:31 AM   #58
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Well, it is absolutely true that regardless of how much you train me I won't ever become a chess world champion. So a low intelligence would limit your skill level as well.
I don't know that to be true, because I don't think one's ability to play chess is strictly measured by one's raw intelligence. What I'm objecting to is that, for game purposes, you're coming at it from the wrong end. You're saying that given a certain level of intelligence, you must have a certain IQ score, and that means you must have certain skill levels. The way you're intended to look at it is: you've got a character who is capable of doing This, That, and The Other Thing, and this requires an IQ score of X. The character's stats are not a programmed simulation of a person; they are a collection of properties describing a person. The properties (a) may not correspond exactly to a real-world property, no matter what they're named, and (b) can be set arbitrarily to reflect the capabilities you want the character to have.

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I also realize that this is a game and most PCs are heroic.
I'm not coming at it from that angle at all. PCs can be whatever power level is appropriate for your game.

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I find it unsatisfactory though from a gaming perspective that you can spend the points to raise IQ which is the equivalent of raising 5 skills (at higher levels) and raise 20 instead. It seems in this situation that anyone playing an IQ based player would just push up IQ and forget entirely about skills.
And why not? It's a fair transaction. "I want to train ALL my IQ-based skills, so why can't I just raise my IQ?" You can, because IQ is not a fixed trait representing an inherent quality of a person. It is an abstraction of not only their inherent qualities but also their general knowledge and education, their perception, their willpower, their sense of self and orientation, and so on, and all these things can be trained. You're not literally training yourself to be smarter; you're gaining knowledge and awareness. So raising IQ to raise all your IQ-based skills is perfectly reasonable: one way or another, you spend character points to get better at doing things. GURPS doesn't care whether you do it at the attribute level or the skill level, because attributes do not represent untrainable, inherent qualities.

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This is probably why I am on the fence about whether the "cost" to advance a stat should keep getting more expensive each time you improve it. So it's easy at lower levels (it is easier) and harder at higher levels (realistically impossible for most people). So if you are going to focus on IQ based skills then you would push up your IQ to a reasonable limit but at some point it would still be better to advance your skills.
And you can set such limits. I suggested this before, and many people do it.

Ask yourself, "How generally capable are the PCs compared to NPCs?" Then look at the "How to Select Basic Attributes" table on page B14. If you've got Template Toolkit 1, look at the expanded table on page 9. These give you "power levels" for each attribute, and what kind of person they describe. If you read "strongly defines the most capable of adventurers" and think, "The PCs shouldn't be that good... yet," then the Amazing level of 15–16 is probably too high for now, and you should limit attributes to 14. Not because it's impossible for a human being to reach higher, but because that's not the sort of character you want in the game. Maybe you'll raise the limit higher later as you think characters are allowed to enter the Amazing level.

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I would not say my players are munchkins but I would say that within their character concept they are optimizers. I don't really see anything wrong with that.
Optimizing is fine. It isn't always necessary — a preferred character concept is more important that optimization — but it's not a problem if that's what you want to do. As long as they get the concept you have in mind and can voluntarily restrict themselves to it, you don't even have to set limits. Just ask them to abide by the concept. If they can't contain themselves, set limits.
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Old 06-25-2021, 08:14 AM   #59
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The condition of "I am very good with many IQ-based Skills." is basically indistinguishable in Gurps from having a high IQ.
Well, almost. If using Familiarities, how many you get for free is based on how many points you've spent on the skill - someone with IQ 10 and Armory (Body Armor) at 15 has invested [20] in the skill and is thus familiar with up to 40 armor designs (assuming that's the way you handle Familiarity for Armory, I don't think there's any guidance there) from the beginning, while someone with IQ 16 and Armory (Melee Weapons) at 15 has only invested [1] in the skill and is thus familiar with up to 2 armor designs. It can also be important if floating to another attribute, although I think it's more common to float to IQ from something else than it is to float from IQ - for our Armory example, you might float to Per for searching for a particular tool in a workshop (or noticing something important about the anvil), but Per is based on IQ anyway. Floating to DX or HT for certain jobs might be appropriate, such as with some artistic embellishments or to work on a long project, but I'd expect such to be rare. This is more noticeable for DX-based skills, of course, as Familiarity is a bit better defined for those and it's more common to need to float to other attributes.
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Old 06-25-2021, 08:44 AM   #60
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And you can set such limits. I suggested this before, and many people do it.

Ask yourself, "How generally capable are the PCs compared to NPCs?" Then look at the "How to Select Basic Attributes" table on page B14. If you've got Template Toolkit 1, look at the expanded table on page 9. These give you "power levels" for each attribute, and what kind of person they describe. If you read "strongly defines the most capable of adventurers" and think, "The PCs shouldn't be that good... yet," then the Amazing level of 15–16 is probably too high for now, and you should limit attributes to 14. Not because it's impossible for a human being to reach higher, but because that's not the sort of character you want in the game. Maybe you'll raise the limit higher later as you think characters are allowed to enter the Amazing level.
I definitely don't want my PCs to be even above average at campaign start. They are trained but still green. That is how I see it. Now over the course of an entire campaign they grow into world beaters. They may have a lot of potential though.

So you are arguing with my stated reasons but not my approach. My approach was no more than double your initial buy in any stat or +2 whichever is greater. That means if you start out as a 15 you can go to 20. If you start out as a 14 you can go to 18. 10 and 11 can still go up by 2.

Again with HT and ST I might have a different system. I will have to think that through.
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