Are Powers Overpriced?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

But what does Wealth do in that context? From what I recall of this being mentioned in the past, a bunch of things that are in no way documented in any GURPS rulebook...

There's a whole uFAQ post collecting examples of what it does.

Originally Posted by Anthony

In many campaigns it is not officially banned but no-one takes it, because positive wealth is a poor use of points and negative wealth gets you a no from the GM unless you have something like a Vow of Poverty.

And yet people do take it in Kromm's campaigns, and it wasn't meaningless despite your opinion about the trait.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

And yet people do take it in Kromm's campaigns, and it wasn't meaningless despite your opinion about the trait.

In my current fantasy campaign, three of the original five PCs started out Wealthy, and the other two respectively Comfortable and Average. They also each took 6 points of Signature Gear, giving them joint ownership of a merchant sailing ship. I let them invest their "fixed assets" wealth in trade goods, as they weren't going to be residing in a fixed location (other than shipboard); that gave them $7200 to invest.

Of course, this is a merchant explorer campaign, not a dungeon crawl campaign.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

There's a whole uFAQ post collecting examples of what it does.

There's a whole uFAQ of Kromm posts about the subject. Almost none of it actually lays out a course of action. Out of all of it the only things I can pick out are:

-Not a call to action but probably the most important: "To be fair, I wanted to call it "Economic Rank" or "Economic Status," but others felt that was too close to "Rank" and "Status," and probably easily confused given its relationship with the political kind of Status." Personally, I don't really buy the distinction, or at least the way he's weighting it. If I was going to import this concept I'd replace Wealth with Status, Status with Rank, and throw Wealth away.

-People can somehow perceive your Wealth directly and treat you as suspect if you don't stay in line with it. This is...exactly like Status, with heavily overlapping dominion. Which highlights why I don't think they can coexist. At least without a bunch of totally unwritten rules about how they interact.

-If you use the job rules, you'll magically get fired if you don't buy the requisite Wealth. I'm pretty sure that's very not in the RAW, but the job rules are a mess anyway.

And that's it. A couple punishments for not having Wealth. Nothing except the vaguest hints about it being actively used or providing positive effects. I revise my opinion from "in no way documented in any GURPS rulebook" to "in no way documented anywhere".

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

But what does Wealth do in that context? From what I recall of this being mentioned in the past, a bunch of things that are in no way documented in any GURPS rulebook...

It's documented well in DF and DFRPG.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

There's a whole uFAQ post collecting examples of what it does.

Isn't that where the Wealth rules in DF come from (Kromm's campaign that is)?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

It's documented well in DF and DFRPG.

Yeah, but that's quite specifically what it does in DF in place of what(ever) it does in non-DF GURPS.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Personally I don't like Wealth rules and would rather use something else.

That's just me.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

Personally I don't like Wealth rules and would rather use something else.

That's just me.

Yeah. I feel like what they represent would be better split into assets, income, and something like Call of Cthulhu's Credit Rating. But that's a bit of a tangent from Powers...

[ericthered]

Its interesting that the main point of comparison is gear. There are several things powers could be overpriced compared to:

• Attributes
• Basic Skills
• Cinematic Advantages and their associated skills
• Gear
• Magic systems

I think powers compare favorably to attributes and basic skills, and while individual cases of cinematic advantages and their skills are better, on the whole they are balanced. We've been talking about Gear for most of the thread.


Magic systems take as long to analyze. They tend to be more flexible and less spamable, and we usually say a magic system better than powers is broken rather than the other way around.



What did I miss?

[dataweaver]

Interesting you should mention that. One of the things that got me thinking about this was the Chi Sorcery Pyramid article (Pyramid 3/105), which converts the various Cinematic Martial Skills into the Powers framework. Only, it puts them specifically in the Sorcery framework, with a Modular Abilities based “core Ability” and all of the converted cinematic skills as Alternate Abilities. Would the Chi Abilities be too expensive otherwise?