Points without total

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

That's a special case that doesn't help me understand the basic idea.

As I understand it, the basic idea is "character points are used as normal during character creation, but completely ignored during subsequent play".

[VIVIT]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Something Kromm once said made this very clear. He was talking about $ costs of equipment, but it also applies to character points. The character sheet gives you spaces to record $ costs and character points, but these exist on the sheet mostly to aid you in creating the character. Once a character is made, you don't need to write down the $ cost of every sword you find and pick up in a dungeon. Likewise, you don't really get any particular benefit if you pick up a new advantage and write down its point cost in the blank.

The analogy between points and money goes deeper than that, I think—deeper even than GURPS as a system is willing to explore. The economics of different settings can vary, and with them, the relative valuations of just about any two things money can buy. The same is just as true of advantages and their relative utility within a particular a setting or campaign, or even a locale within a setting or an adventure within a campaign, but while GURPS expects $ prices of goods bought in play to vary naturalistically, it assumes that every trait has a single, canonical point value that is the same for all characters in all circumstances. There's Unusual Background and Accessibility limitations, but by being external to the trait, they only reinforce the idea that the Advantage has one "true" value that exists independently from context.

This is the another reason I want to step away from the idea of point totals: I want to be able to include things like template-specific "package deals" whose balance I have weighed ahead of time, or even "limited-time offers" where instead of counting study-hours, you can buy skills for points at a discount for access to high-quality instruction.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Basically, the character sheet is a worksheet, and the blanks for things that help you build the character are meant to be ignored once the character is in play. If you were to transfer your character to a new sheet of paper, you could completely ignore the blanks for character points and $ costs. It makes absolutely no difference whether you write "Combat Reflexes [15]" or just "Combat Reflexes."

I agree that this is a good way to think of character sheets, but RAW seems to treat them differently, at least judging by the word count it expends on instructions that have no purpose except to preserve a constant point total. Social Engineering even talks about characters gaining or losing traits like Low TL or High TL if the campaign shifts to a different setting with a different TL, even though your native TL stays the same!

Originally Posted by malloyd

It already is. Or rather point total has no game mechanical effect, so ignoring it has the same effect on play as ignoring the eye color of the character's grandparents.

Some of these point-total-preserving rules have quite major mechanical effects, such a the constant insistence that disadvantages must be replaced or bought off if they leave your character sheet in play. I know that the alternative opens up abuses like immediately buying cybernetic prostheses that fix your Lameness using the $ that you get from the Wealth that you bought with the points you got from the Lameness in the first place, but if anything, that just shows that Lameness is not appropriate disadvantage for a Wealthy character in a setting where cures for Lameness are available for $.

In the case of disadvantages like Enemy, the possibility of getting rid of them without the need to buy them off is actually an improvement. Relief from the disadvantage becomes a reward for defeating or escaping your enemy. If that's a trivial accomplishment, then the disadvantage shouldn't have been worth points to begin with.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

I agree that this is a good way to think of character sheets, but RAW seems to treat them differently, at least judging by the word count it expends on instructions that have no purpose except to preserve a constant point total.

I once said this exact thing on this forum, and Kromm's response was basically, Where did I say that? He didn't think maintaining point totals was all that important.

[VIVIT]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

That's a special case that doesn't help me understand the basic idea.

A character built on 100 points is not the same as a character built on 120 points who then lost an arm—but both are technically 100-point characters. And if 12 of those 120 points were spent on Two-Handed Sword, the latter character is actually much worse off than he appears.

This isn't just a special case. This is how point totals work in GURPS. If you gain disadvantages in play, your point total is reduced by the corresponding value, and this sometimes results in characters very different from the sort you end up with if you give a player 100 points and the discretion to spend them how they like.

To answer your question: discretion. The difference between a 100-point PC and PC built on 100 points is discretion, and it's a big one. Going the other way, you can also end up with advantages that aren't part of your planned build, and that you might not have chosen yourself because they wouldn't have synergized well enough with what you already had to be worth the points.

My contention is that unspent points have an implied value that goes away when they are spent, and that this value is the only one that really matters.

[VIVIT]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If someone joins the campaign later on, knowing how many points the established PCs have gotten up to can help me decide how many points their character should be built on.

You don't need to keep track of point totals of individual characters to do that. Just give them (starting point budget)+(average point reward per session)×(number of sessions).

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

One thing that would need to change would be the point costs of Allies, Contacts, Patrons, and Enemies

Originally Posted by whswhs

If someone joins the campaign later on, knowing how many points the established PCs have gotten up to can help me decide how many points their character should be built on.

If you aren't too concerned with exact precision, you could just maintain a sort of nominal point total (say, adding 5 to the starting total per minor milestone, 15 for major breakthroughs) and keep associate NPCs and new PCs in line with that, even if no PC is perfectly at that point total.

As to the other question of using in-game currency to fix a problem that netted you meta-game currency, I've always taken disadvantages as something that the PC will not or cannot easily fix. If you take Blindness and purchase cybernetic eyes during the first session, you've given the GM permission to impose 50 points worth of "this is why you didn't get them earlier" (like unreliable cybernetics that cause you to suffer chronic headaches and estrangement from your anti-cyber luddite family).

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

A character built on 100 points is not the same as a character built on 120 points who then lost an arm—but both are technically 100-point characters. And if 12 of those 120 points were spent on Two-Handed Sword, the latter character is actually much worse off than he appears.

This isn't just a special case. This is how point totals work in GURPS. If you gain disadvantages in play, your point total is reduced by the corresponding value, and this sometimes results in characters very different from the sort you end up with if you give a player 100 points and the discretion to spend them how they like.

To answer your question: discretion. The difference between a 100-point PC and PC built on 100 points is discretion, and it's a big one. Going the other way, you can also end up with advantages that aren't part of your planned build, and that you might not have chosen yourself because they wouldn't have synergized well enough with what you already had to be worth the points.

My contention is that unspent points have an implied value that goes away when they are spent, and that this value is the only one that really matters.

Not wanting to be obtuse here, but I have no idea what you mean by any of that.

I am trying to understand what you mean by not using character point totals. I don't know what it's used for that you would avoid by not using it.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I am trying to understand what you mean by not using character point totals. I don't know what it's used for that you would avoid by not using it.

I believe VIVIT is trying to make the following distinction: a character point total tallied at character creation is "worth" more than a character point total tallied after things have happened to the character that a player at character creation would consider non-optimized.

For example, a newly created 100-point character has 100 points of things the player wants, while a long-played 100-point character might have some of those points in useless or suboptimal traits because of things that have happened to them, traits that the player didn't choose. So, one asks, what do those 100 character points actually mean?

I don't think the question is a useful one. It doesn't really matter after character creation whether your character is really "worth" the character points it's built with. Your point total is, at most, an administrative index for the value of your Allies, etc. There is no other game-mechanical reason you want your point total to be anything in particular.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

You don't need to keep track of point totals of individual characters to do that. Just give them (starting point budget)+(average point reward per session)×(number of sessions).

I don't keep count of number of sessions.

[Varyon]

I've always considered the rule that you lose points from your total from Disadvantages gained in play to be a bad one. A [125] delver who recently lost an arm to a monster is still a [125] delver, and his shiny new One Arm Disadvantage is worth exactly [0]. This is because getting rid of a Disadvantage requires that you both a) do something that would logically get rid of it (have a healer regenerate your arm, kill off your enemy or convince him/her to leave you be, etc) and b) pay back the points it initially gave you. Writing One Arm [-20] implies you got points for it, but if you gained it in play you absolutely did not gain points for it, and charging you points to get rid of it isn't fair. This can also avoid issues where your Ally/Enemy needs to either be weakened or start showing up less frequently because you lost an arm. On the flip side, Advantages gained in play should similarly be worth [0] and have none of the plot protection purchased Advantages enjoy - the GM can't (or at least shouldn't) just kill off an Ally you purchased in order to heighten drama or similar, but an Ally you gained for "free" in play is fair game.

As for killing an Enemy being an acceptable means of getting rid of that Disadvantage, it's honestly quite easy to create an Enemy who both a) is a significant thorn in your side and b) would be easy to kill off. Disallowing that kind of Enemy removes a lot of Enemy concepts - Elijah Price ("Mr. Glass" from Unbreakable and Glass) certainly wouldn't work as an Enemy. But to make them feasible, killing them needs to have some significant ramifications. Maybe having murdered your foe becomes a Secret. Maybe law enforcement is actively seeking you out for said murder, replacing that Enemy with another. Maybe your foe had setup an illegal fund that, in the case of his/her death, would put a bounty on your head (similarly replacing one Enemy with another). Of course, even with a formidable Enemy, it's just a bit of high-risk gambling on the part of the player - set yourself up with a high-value Hunter Enemy (who specifically wants you dead) to get some extra points, set the frequency of appearance high enough said Enemy will likely show up within the first few sessions, and hope you can kill him/her. If you succeed, that's an extra pile of points you got. If you fail, you're dead, so you need to make up a new character... and with only a few sessions passing, you probably aren't very far behind the other characters in terms of capabilities, even if built on the same initial number of points.

Personally, I'd say keeping track of the point value of starting Disadvantages is worthwhile if such Disadvantages could potentially be removed during play, but not tracking anything else is probably fine (aside from perhaps noting what Advantages/Disadvantages were acquired for "free" during play, to know what does and doesn't have a degree of plot protection). For Allies/Enemies, I could see any of three general options (or permutations of them) in play - the Ally/Enemy doesn't improve, the Ally/Enemy improves proportionally to the PC (an Ally built on 25% of the character's points gains [1] for every [4] rewarded to the PC, an Enemy built on 150% gains [3] for every [2], etc), and the Ally/Enemy simply improves equally to the PC (which will narrow the gap between them as time goes on). This would just be for points awarded at the end of sessions; improvement through study and/or traits gained for "free" during play wouldn't have an impact (although it may be appropriate to give the Ally/Enemy some "free" traits as well).