[gurps] GURPS: Nightbane?

[Jon Lang]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 5:55 PM, rekres <rekres at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Travis Watkins <terwin3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If that template is so much more expensive than any of the other
>> templates, then either A) that template is more powerful than the
>> others and everyone who does not want to be left behind must play
>> it(seems unlikely), B) you are not including all of the balancing
>> disadvantages that will bring down the cost, or C) GURPS is unable to
>> reflect the disadvantages that normally balance the character
>> template(seems very unlikely)
>>
>
> D) The Palladium system is wildly unbalanced to begin with and you
> either play the insanely overpowered munchkin or you SUCK!
>
> When converted to a fair and balanced system like GURPS, it just shows
> up how goofball some of the Palladium material can be...

More diplomatically: Palladium material doesn't subscribe to the
notion of system-enforced game balance.  Some character types are
simply more "powerful" than others.

Food for thought: in In Nomine, all characters start out with the same
number of Forces, the same number of Resource points, the same number
of Attunements, etc.  But when converted into GURPS terms, you get
wildly varying point totals, sometimes in the hundreds of points.  A
similar phenomenon sometimes crops up when translating characters from
GURPS 3e to GURPS 4e, though not nearly as drastic.  Write up a
character that's balanced in GURPS 4e; then write up the same
character in Mutants and Masterminds or Big Eyes Small Mouth; or do it
the other way around.  I can virtually guarantee that the point
balances won't come out the same - often, they'll be wildly different.
 And yet all three of those systems claim to provide character balance
through point balance.

Point balance does not mean game balance.  It is, at best, a first
approximation.  At worst, it's a straitjacket that kills
otherwise-playable character concepts, either directly ("yeah, your
cop character would fit into my campaign perfectly; I could challenge
him without squashing everyone else, and vice versa.  But this is a
250-point game, and he costs 300 points.  Sorry...") or indirectly (by
encouraging people to think in terms of point efficiency first and
concept second, passing up opportunities to flesh out their characters
with probably-useless traits that would otherwise make sense and add
flavor in the name of not wasting points, or altering their concept in
order to justify shaving off points from the total).

-- 
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang