GURPS Power-Ups 1 is out

[vitruvian]

If you want an armor piercing gadget which in enhanced by your own muscle ST, then you must buy the additional Melee Attack (ST-Based) +100% enhancement (Powers p.103-104), along with the Innate Attack bonus you want, as well as buying up the armor piercing enhancement for the full amount of damage you can generate with your ST when swinging that weapon. There's no freebies, ever.

The latter part is the part that's never been established in any book. The ST-Based enhancement simply says that you get to add thrust or swing dice to your Melee Innate Attack. If said IA also has Armor Divisor - Ignores DR, or Cyclic, or any other enhancement, it's not clear what happens with that additional damage. The idea of buying the same enhancement for your thrust/swing dice has some merit, except that the rules for *that* make very clear that it's only for unarmed damage - and your Innate Attack is frequently modified with Gadget limitations to make it a weapon, and even if not, would generally *not* be considered an unarmed attack anyway, making the rules technically inapplicable.

[Taumaturgo]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Imbue was built to be fully compatible with Supers, if you're seeing an issue, then you might want to start a new thread explaining the problem in detail, so that we can try to clarify the issue for you.

Well, I don't start a new thread because I think the point cost problem could have a simple solution what I had not seen.

As the solution is not as simple (if already have been remedied), I will do it now.

[dataweaver]

From the introduction to PU1:

Enhancements in GURPS assume that you have a specific attack to modify. They misbehave when you’re after the ability to modify something as general as “anything that may come to hand” . . . because, really, there’s no fair price for modifiers when you have no idea what they might modify at some future point.

(Emphasis mine.)

Imbuements are fundamentally "incompatible" with GURPS Powers, in the sense that they are based on an entirely different paradigm than GURPS Powers is. OTOH, it's a paradigm that handles with ease something that GURPS Powers handles with ill grace, if at all. So it might be better to think of them as complementary toolkits rather than incompatible ones.

Of course, I'm probably not the best judge of these things: I have long since abandoned point balance as a reasonable measure of anything worthwhile; so it doesn't bother me in the least if two different approaches end up resulting in wildly differing point totals. What draws me to PU1 isn't the effect that it has on character point costs; it's the different way of looking at things that it brings to the table. I like the fact that Imbuements can be incorporated into Martial Arts styles with relative ease - indeed, PU1 does for GURPS' approach to chi abilities what GURPS Voodoo's Ritual Magic system did for GURPS' approach to magic.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

From the introduction to PU1:

(Emphasis mine.)

Imbuements are fundamentally "incompatible" with GURPS Powers, in the sense that they are based on an entirely different paradigm than GURPS Powers is. OTOH, it's a paradigm that handles with ease something that GURPS Powers handles with ill grace, if at all.

I'm not sure that's really true; it wouldn't be hard at all for Powers to handle what Imbuements does smoothly if one took, as Imbuements does, as fundamental that the other attributes of the character and those of the weapon are not particularly important to the balance of an ability to enhance the behavior of a weapon, which is an assumption that is compatible with the general way that GURPS treats mundane gear distinct from gadget-based-powers, even where the two can have similar effects. If you wanted to do what Imbuements does, handling the concerns it handles and ignoring the ones it ignores, Powers could do so quite elegantly and with a greater degree of generality.

[blacksmith]

Originally Posted by Taumaturgo

I am creating sheets of super heroes, using Powers and Supers. I have problems to create characters like Silver Samurai, and the Imbue seems to be a solution, but it generates a imbalance in the point costs.

I think Imbue is structurally imcompatible with Supers.

Not all ways of doing something cost the same.

This is something that exists through out GURPS.

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

I'm not sure that's really true; it wouldn't be hard at all for Powers to handle what Imbuements does smoothly if one took, as Imbuements does, as fundamental that the other attributes of the character and those of the weapon are not particularly important to the balance of an ability to enhance the behavior of a weapon, which is an assumption that is compatible with the general way that GURPS treats mundane gear distinct from gadget-based-powers, even where the two can have similar effects. If you wanted to do what Imbuements does, handling the concerns it handles and ignoring the ones it ignores, Powers could do so quite elegantly and with a greater degree of generality.

Could you give an example of what you have in mind?

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

If you wanted to do what Imbuements does, handling the concerns it handles and ignoring the ones it ignores, Powers could do so quite elegantly and with a greater degree of generality.

Please explain it out. I'm all eyes. I'd love to read this.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Could you give an example of what you have in mind?

Sure, essentially its this: Imbuements do one of three things (note "weapon" includes the users own unarmed attacks):
1) Replaces a weapon's normal effects with the effects of a use of some other Advantage (note, given that different damage types are different base cost Innate Attack advantages, changing the damage type of a weapon is a special case of this),
2) Add an Enhancement to the effect of a weapon, or
3) Adds a Follow-up to a weapon.

It does so in a way which does not make the damage usually done by the weapon (whether the user's base damage or that added by the weapon) relevant to the costs of the ability.

So, to cover the range of effects that Imbuements covers within the Powers framework, what you need to do is define how to make each of those into an Advantage, again, without regard to the damage normally done by the weapon. In reverse order:

#3 is easy, its just a bog-standard Attack (etc.) with the Follow-Up modifier; the trick is costing Follow-up in a generic way -- Off the top of my head, I'd say its +50% for something you can apply to any weapon within the degree of specialization used in Imbuements (but not to anything bought with points, to which you would just add the appropriate Follow-Up directly), but the exact modifiers may need some tinkering.

#2 is harder, because it is a really new Advantage. How much for an Attack Enhancement that can be applied to any weapon of a given type that you use? I'd say 10 points as a base, with the actual value of the Enhancement applied as an Enhancement.

#1 is the trickiest: but you can use #2 as a guide, and presuming crushing damage (5/die) as a base, and consider the enhancement it would take to get from crushing to the cost of the desired type as the enhancement to use (or +0% if the damage type isn't more expensive than crushing). For other advantages, you can use a flat 10 point base cost and (inspired by what Imbuements does for Bindings) use the rolled damage times 2 as the number of character points of effect, and figure the level of the effect from that (rounding down). If you get less than the cost of 1 level (or the Advantage itself, if its non-levelled) you get no effect at all.

If you want to be able to combine these kinds of advantages, buy the relevant advantages with a +10% Link enhancement if the set of effects is exclusively linked, +20% if it's mix and match.

[dataweaver]

I'm not impressed.

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Sure, essentially its this: Imbuements do one of three things (note "weapon" includes the users own unarmed attacks):
1) Replaces a weapon's normal effects with the effects of a use of some other Advantage (note, given that different damage types are different base cost Innate Attack advantages, changing the damage type of a weapon is a special case of this),
2) Add an Enhancement to the effect of a weapon, or
3) Adds a Follow-up to a weapon.

3 is a special case of 2 (Follow-Up is an Enhancement), just as changing damage type is a special case of switching out one attack Advantage for another.

Originally Posted by cmdicely

It does so in a way which does not make the damage usually done by the weapon (whether the user's base damage or that added by the weapon) relevant to the costs of the ability.

So, to cover the range of effects that Imbuements covers within the Powers framework, what you need to do is define how to make each of those into an Advantage, again, without regard to the damage normally done by the weapon. In reverse order:

#3 is easy, its just a bog-standard Attack (etc.) with the Follow-Up modifier; the trick is costing Follow-up in a generic way -- Off the top of my head, I'd say its +50% for something you can apply to any weapon within the degree of specialization used in Imbuements (but not to anything bought with points, to which you would just add the appropriate Follow-Up directly), but the exact modifiers may need some tinkering.

+50% of what? The bog-standard Attack (etc.) is going to have a point cost based on how much damage it does; right?

Originally Posted by cmdicely

#2 is harder, because it is a really new Advantage. How much for an Attack Enhancement that can be applied to any weapon of a given type that you use? I'd say 10 points as a base, with the actual value of the Enhancement applied as an Enhancement.

How is this even as good as what PU1 provides, let alone better? And how is it in keeping with GURPS Powers?

Originally Posted by cmdicely

#1 is the trickiest: but you can use #2 as a guide, and presuming crushing damage (5/die) as a base, and consider the enhancement it would take to get from crushing to the cost of the desired type as the enhancement to use (or +0% if the damage type isn't more expensive than crushing). For other advantages, you can use a flat 10 point base cost and (inspired by what Imbuements does for Bindings) use the rolled damage times 2 as the number of character points of effect, and figure the level of the effect from that (rounding down). If you get less than the cost of 1 level (or the Advantage itself, if its non-levelled) you get no effect at all.

FWIW, GURPS Powers - indeed, Basic Set - already has a mechanism for being able to switch out one attack advantage for another; it's called an Alternate Attack. If you're wanting to work within the GURPS Powers framework as you say, shouldn't you be using something along those lines as the analog of the Transforming Imbuement skills?

[vitruvian]

#3 is easy, its just a bog-standard Attack (etc.) with the Follow-Up modifier; the trick is costing Follow-up in a generic way -- Off the top of my head, I'd say its +50% for something you can apply to any weapon within the degree of specialization used in Imbuements (but not to anything bought with points, to which you would just add the appropriate Follow-Up directly), but the exact modifiers may need some tinkering.

This is actually in Power-Ups 1. +50% Cosmic on Follow-Up Attacks to apply to any mundane weapon. Perhaps you missed it.

3 is a special case of 2 (Follow-Up is an Enhancement), just as changing damage type is a special case of switching out one attack Advantage for another.

??? Follow-Up is not an enhancement on the base attack; it's a modifier on the Follow-Up attack, which may be an enhancement or a +0% feature, depending on the nature of the attack it follows up on. That is, a Follow-Up is a separate attack.