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Post by inflatus on Mar 11, 2014 12:44:12 GMT -8
Can it be done or are you just optimizing? I know the topic of min-maxing and optimizing is about differing definitions. I am curious to hear about those that "feel" like they have min-maxed a PC in GURPS.
I've made PC's that were definitely one dimensional. Had one combat skill and first aid. That sort of thing. I always felt that even with that type of character the others were still equal. Can a point buy system really have a min-maxed characters?
I have been thinking about this topic for a blog post and trying to get some feedback.
Oh, and it is fun to have a 25 in Bow. That's a lot of called shots and hits.
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snoman314
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Post by snoman314 on Mar 11, 2014 17:26:07 GMT -8
Absolutely it's possible. I find it hard to elaborate more than that because it seems so self evident to me. There are always a bunch of disads you can take that aren't going to affect you much for a given campaign, or even help with what you intend to be doing (eg Callous for a tough-guy who plans to be doing the intimidating). The practice of looking at how many IQ or DX based skills you have and then deciding whether or not to adjust your attribute level and change the levels of your skills in the opposite direction to shave a few points off. Same thing with talents. There are plenty of ways to min-max a GURPS character.
25 in Bow is insanely high. I wouldn't expect to see that other than in a very high point level game. In the words of Sean Punch, skill levels of 24-26 are "Superhuman (outstanding mythic figures)". Is it possible that you've been min-maxing all along and not realising? I know that I used to be that way with GURPS.
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nanoboy
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Post by nanoboy on Mar 11, 2014 19:34:18 GMT -8
It's more than possible. Point-buy systems are often easily power-gamed. The trick is for the players to remember why they're playing and for the GM to rein in the worst offenses.
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Post by squeatus on Mar 12, 2014 5:31:45 GMT -8
Can it be done or are you just optimizing? I know the topic of min-maxing and optimizing is about differing definitions. I am curious to hear about those that "feel" like they have min-maxed a PC in GURPS. I wasn't even 20 pages into the core book a few weeks back when I started considering how players could create anthropomorphic horses with high magery, zero swim speed and flight to just completely wreck a game. You don't get that kind of flexibility without also opening it up to massive abuse (and also massive awesome): Munchkin's Universe-shaking Nondirectional Cosmic Hyperluminal Kinetoelectromagnetic Interference Neurodisrupter
I think I may have found that link here. Not sure.
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Post by malifer on Mar 12, 2014 6:59:57 GMT -8
Also instead of Disads that may not come up there is the option of choosing Disads that aren't really disads for your build.
What I mean are ones like being a loner, low empathy, bloodthirsty, etc.
Which would horrible disads for your Doctor, but if your playing a barbarian who cares?
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nanoboy
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Post by nanoboy on Mar 12, 2014 10:36:45 GMT -8
Regarding the Archery skill thing: make sure that it is appropriate to the setting and the group. If it's crazy mythic fantasy, and everyone has the chance to make over-the-top characters, then it is no problem. If it's gritty realism, then Archery-25 is right out. (I'd top it off at 18 myself.) Likewise, if your character is the only one with a really, really high combat skill, then it might not be good for the group as a whole.
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maxinstuff
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Post by maxinstuff on Mar 13, 2014 12:59:34 GMT -8
GURPS is actually one of the easiest games to min-max because point values are tied to 'real world difficulty' instead of in-game utility.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 4, 2015 12:06:05 GMT -8
25 in Bow is insanely high. I wouldn't expect to see that other than in a very high point level game. In the words of Sean Punch, skill levels of 24-26 are "Superhuman (outstanding mythic figures)". Is it possible that you've been min-maxing all along and not realising? I know that I used to be that way with GURPS. There's kind of a disconnect between the rules, what they mean, and what the designers may say that the rules mean. First, I would like to apologize for the necromancy, but it was either this or starting a new thread, and the existing comments here can already contribute to the discussion. I've been going through the archive of podcasts, and Stu has mentioned a couple of times that a skill of 15 is exceptional and a skill of 20 or higher would be superhuman. I think he might have gotten the editions mixed up, because this was a huge change between 3E and 4E. It's probably the single largest change between editions. In earlier editions, both stats and skills cost more for each higher level. I'm going from memory, but I want to say that increasing your DX cost 5/10/20/40/80 for +1/+2/+3/+4/+5 and skills were something like 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 for -2/-1/+0/+1/+2/+3/+4/+5 (depending on the difficulty of the skill). With that math, a skill of 20 really was something amazing, because you had to pay 80 points for DX 15 and another 128 points for skill rating at DX +5. If you could grab something like a racial bonus or an advantage that gave a boost to a stat or a group of skills, then that was super valuable because it added linearly rather than continuing the exponent. My old GM, whenever he got a chance to play GURPS Fantasy, always went with a goblin mage because their racial IQ bonus gave +1 to the stat for only 5 points, which meant it only cost 45 points to reach IQ 15 instead of the 80 points a human would need to spend. And of course, Magery was another "cheap" way to get +3 to all of your spells. That's not the case in 4E, though. As they pointed out during the interview, everything is down to a flat cost now. You can't game the system by playing a goblin mage instead of an orc mage, because it's the same price whether you're an orc with IQ 15 or a goblin with IQ 15, regardless of how far above the racial average that is (I want to say that average for an orc is 9, and average for a goblin is 11). If you want IQ 15, then you're paying 100 points for it, and there's no way around that. With flat skill costs, though, everything caps out at only 4 points per level. Instead of costing 128 points for a skill rating at (stat+5), it only costs 24 points or so. (Again, going from memory, but it was something like 1/2/4/8/12/16/20/24 for -2/-1/+0/+1/+2/+3/+4/+5.) It's just ludicrously cheap to get a single skill to 20. Even with average DX, you could get a Sword skill of 20 with a mere 44 point investment, or a skill of 25 for 64 points. A dedicated fighter-type can easily get +10 to a skill, for the same price that it would cost the same character to improve a skill by +1 in an older edition. And of course, Swords at 25 means your Parry is 15, and Archery at 25 means you can take a called shot to the eye and still have an effective skill at 16. The benefits are just ridiculous, compared to the cost. I mean, would you rather have +1 DX and +1 IQ, or +10 on all attacks and +5 to Parry? What's more, GURPS has always had rules for training yourself during down time. I can't recall the specifics, but it was definitely at least 4 points per year spent training. If you had a character like Inigo Montoya, then - which should be a perfectly valid archetype to play - then he practices swordfighting for 20 years and comes out with a Sword skill of 30. Which should be ridiculous, except it's just the logical extension of a character doing what makes sense for the character. If a player wanted to build that character, then it would take some pretty serious meta-gaming to justify not having that skill of 30. Which I guess is part of the reason why I don't play GURPS anymore. It's just too much work to keep trying to justify characters who have "realistic" skill levels, which is the realm where the rules (with the nice bell curve) were really designed to work. Any character who even tries to be competent at anything should be able to reach that goal trivially. The closest I've come to being able to balance it was just imposing a hard cap of 20, between stats and skills and advantages, but even that just ends up with each character having 20 in multiple skills.
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Post by HourEleven on Sept 5, 2015 8:37:53 GMT -8
I think I've mentioned it before, but at one point I got so sick of the min/max characters I was seeing in GURPS that I changed how I let my players make characters. My players were way too into "shopping" through the books to find combinations of ads and disads that were insane and made no sense, then trying to hang some garbage story bits on the mechanics to make it a character. The options presented are so you can mechanically represent any character you think up, not Frankenstein some number pile and give it a name.
I require my players to write up a fleshed up character, with back story and answers to a series of questions. I take those write ups and stat them up accordingly. Then I meet with the player and have them look over the sheet and tell me what's missing or doesn't feel right based on the info they gave me. We tweak accordingly.
Make the human, then stat it out. Not make the stats then try and make it a person.
I think if you work from the numbers backwards to the person, instead of the opposite, it's a min/max-ers paradise.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2015 11:13:29 GMT -8
Make the human, then stat it out. Not make the stats then try and make it a person. You do still end up with the Inigo Montoya situation, though. The rules in the book clearly state that the most-accurate method of representing someone who had practiced swordfighting for twenty years is to give them the Sword skill at DX+20. If my character concept is "someone who had trained with a sword for twenty years, to become the best in the land and avenge his father's death", then that character concept leads to the game breaking itself. Personally, I think that sucks. I don't think that players should even be given the option of choosing what is, essentially, the level of their character as part of their backstory. (The equivalent to combat skill, in D&D, is the level of the character - if you made Inigo Montoya in D&D, he would necessarily be a high-level fighter or possibly rogue.)
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Post by mook on Sept 9, 2015 7:57:39 GMT -8
To each his own, natch, but I don't feel like the Inigo Montoya problem is a problem so long as the rest of the group are also playing characters of the same power level. As you note, trying to make Montoya from the movies on a 150-point budget will turn out about as well as making Conan the Barbarian as a 1st-level Fighter. But if the whole party are 300-point characters? No prob.
On the other hand, skill levels that high (and attributes) start nudging the tone of the game as well. To my mind, a skill level of, say, 20 is about the absolute pinnacle of realistic human achievement, like Ronda Rousey's Judo or something. But if it's a cinematic game, if your group is emulating "The Princess Bride" or "Die Hard" or whatever, I can see the skill cap going to 25 or even 30.
On the gripping hand, it's the age-old issue of mechanics vs. story, i.e., "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should." The GM is the point man/woman/being for what is or isn't allowed in that particular game (as a representative of the group's consensus for the kind of game they want to play, of course).
Mechanically, yes, the rules (which are objectively neutral and without discernment) say you can build a one-eyed, one-legged, hemophiliac dwarf with brachiation and a two-handed axe skill of 30. Those are just numbers on a page. But what does a character like that even look like? How did he survive long enough to even be an adventurer? Does he fit with the rest of the group?
Those are the same questions I'd be asking about the hypothetical Montoya. A Sword-25 warrior works fine in a party with a Fireball-25 wizard and a Stealth-25 thief; not so much if he's the only special snowflake in a party of realistic humans.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2015 17:14:25 GMT -8
To each his own, natch, but I don't feel like the Inigo Montoya problem is a problem so long as the rest of the group are also playing characters of the same power level. As you note, trying to make Montoya from the movies on a 150-point budget will turn out about as well as making Conan the Barbarian as a 1st-level Fighter. But if the whole party are 300-point characters? No prob. That's kind of the opposite of my point. In any older edition, someone with a Sword skill of 30 would be hundreds and hundreds of points (between buying DX up three points, buying the Sword skill up to DX +7, buying a talent in all Melee weapons up three or four, etc). The point cost showed us that this dedicated specialist is actually really powerful - virtually untouchable in melee combat - and the point cost reflected that. With 4E, you can build Montoya as the greatest swordsman to have ever lived... for standard point costs. You can give him Strength +2, Sword +20, Combat Reflexes, and +2 or +3 in half a dozen different skills, before you even think about Flaws (alcoholic, obviously, but what else?). You can say to be realistic, but perceptions of reality are going to vary wildly between individuals. You can try to mitigate the worst of it by imposing a hard cap of 20 or 25 on any given skill - and I strongly suggest doing so - but I still have to count it as a mark against the system that power levels can vary so wildly between characters with the same point budget. The system is so flexible, and optimizing is so straightforward, that keeping everyone remotely balanced requires a lot of work. It really is like playing D&D, and you get to assign your level as one of your stats. Everyone can come to an agreement and assign a low number there, so it's more fun for everyone, but just having a choice to set that however you feel like shouldn't even be a default option. Something like that should be hidden in the back of the GM book, because implementing it causes far more complications than it solves.
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Post by mook on Sept 12, 2015 1:37:03 GMT -8
I still have to count it as a mark against the system that power levels can vary so wildly between characters with the same point budget. The system is so flexible, and optimizing is so straightforward, that keeping everyone remotely balanced requires a lot of work. Ahh, now I understand why I'm not having your issue! I don't care about power balance, though I know most people do, which is, ya know, cool too I care about "spotlight balance," trying to let each PC have more-or-less equal time in the story, but what they do with their Character Points is up to them -- I throw everyone the same size bucket of metaphorical "Legos" to build whatever PC they want, so the potential is always there for something like Justice League (Batman and Superman on the same team?), or Buffy (one total badass, the rest mostly talented normies), that sort of thing. The classic GURPS example is something like a 200-point forensic investigator with high IQ, high levels in lots of very hard skills, etc. If he gets jumped in an alley by a 50-point crackhead who's "learned" to fight just enough to get by on the streets, the egghead's going home in a body bag. Am I understanding correctly? That by "power level" you mean "ass-kickin'-ness," and your frustration is confined to the discrepancies in characters' combat potential? If so, I think templates could help. That way, the GM can prepare a dozen or so pre-made templates as a base for the party to start with. Much easier to maintain combat power balance if you're starting with 150-point already balanced templates with 50 points of customization for the players to tweak 'em out than with just giving everyone the 200 points to buy whatever. I'm not sure there's an elegant way around that in a point-buy system. As long as GURPS has skills like First Aid, Computer Hacking, Dancing, there will be players who want to dump points into them, resulting in characters not 'up to par' with the more combat-oriented gun bunnies. Maybe setting point budgets at character creation? Like, "These are going to be 200-point characters, with at least 60 points used for attributes, at least 100 points used for combat/support skills, and the last 40 used for whatever you want." I'm not trying to convert you over or anything, I understand now why you're feeling like the rules can be a roadblock. To have balanced PCs from a point buy system, the players need a reason to spend those points a certain way.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2015 10:48:58 GMT -8
Am I understanding correctly? That by "power level" you mean "ass-kickin'-ness," and your frustration is confined to the discrepancies in characters' combat potential? Indeed! Even though it's probably not the best tool for the job, a lot of people end up using GURPS for traditional D&D-style antics, where my motto for such games has long been that, "Exploration is where everyone shines individually; combat is where everyone shines together."
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nanoboy
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Post by nanoboy on Sept 12, 2015 11:10:49 GMT -8
Indeed! Even though it's probably not the best tool for the job, a lot of people end up using GURPS for traditional D&D-style antics, where my motto for such games has long been that, "Exploration is where everyone shines individually; combat is where everyone shines together." You can always get Dungeon Fantasy. In it, characters are forced to take templates to represent class-based dungeon games. Dungeon fantasy leans toward high-powered cinematic characters, which is why I'm not especially enamored with it. While GURPS can do that quite well, I like grittier fantasy games in GURPS, because it does that very well.
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