From: dseal@armltd.co.uk (David Seal)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: Burn, GURPS, BURN!
Date: 27 Jan 93 13:49:12 GMT
Distribution: rec
Organization: A.R.M. Ltd, Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambs, UK

In article <C1F92o.8A4@news.cso.uiuc.edu> dv52151@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
(RedSwordTarga) writes:

>As far as the stats cost, they are just plain bogus. If DEX determines
>whether you hit or miss, then DEX is hands down the most important
>stat no matter what time period you are playing in and should cost more
>than the others. HT is important to how much damage you can take and should
>cost more than STR or INT. If DEX cost more than STR, then someone wouldn't
>feel bad buying some extra STR to be in character. ...

Yes, DX fundamentally determines how well you hit in GURPS. You can make up
for its lack with extra training, but if you want more than 1 or 2 physical
skills, it's not going to be cost-effective. And high DX gives a number of
useful bonuses (e.g. to movement rate and default physical skills), which
further weights the equation in the direction of high DX.

But the idea that this makes DX "hands down the most important stat" is, in
your own words, plain bogus. The reason is simple: combat is not the be-all
and end-all of most campaigns.

Let me qualify that a bit: if your GM runs a game in which the only
important things that happen are combats, then yes, high DX is going to be
very important. Even then, it's actually more important in GURPS because of
its effect on whether you *defend* or not, not whether you *hit* or not.
Worse, if your GM runs a game in which the only important things that happen
are combats which are a collection of 1-on-1 fights, DX becomes very
important indeed: the effect of your DX on your Parry defence ceases to be
mitigated by the fact that you can only Parry once per turn. If the GM also
makes it impossible for you ever to avoid combat or gain a major combat
advantage by doing something *intelligent*, the effect becomes even worse.

Even then, you don't want DX to the exclusion of everything else in many
cases: for instance, depending on genre, a decent ST *may* be necessary to
do enough damage to get through your opponent's armour, or to carry enough
armour of your own to stop your opponent getting through. I've certainly
seen a badly designed GURPS character who was a real expert with a knife.
She could do all sorts of flashy manoeuvres with it: the only thing she
*couldn't* do was inflict any damage at all on someone wearing leather
armour or better, apart from a few critical results like "bypasses all
armour"...

But DX being more valuable than the other stats in the sort of campaigns
I've described above isn't fundamentally a problem with the values of the
stats. A GM can unbalance *any* set of points values within his or her
campaign by choosing a sufficiently unbalanced set of problems to throw at
the players. There are two solutions to this: IMHO the more enjoyable one is
simply for the GM to produce a more varied campaign, in which a wider range
of stats and skills can be useful. The other is for the GM to say to the
players "Look, I'm running a very combat-oriented campaign. Since this makes
DX more useful than normal, I'm making DX more expensive than the normal
rules say."

>... For example, if you use
>SpaceHero to do your game, the player buying his STR up to 20 vice 10 only
>loses 10 points. That is going to cost him 3 points of DEX, but it doesn't
>cripple him in gun combat. He's a little less likely to hit and more likely
>to get hit, but most people can live with that 1 OCV/DCV difference. Doing
>a similar thing in GURPS cripples that character.

I don't know enough about SpaceHero to know for certain, but I would guess
that this is based on a view that, *in the space genre* and *with Hero
rules* about STR and DEX, DEX is about 3 times as valuable as STR. This says
very little about whether DX is three times as valuable as ST to a character
in the space genre with GURPS rules, since GURPS DX and ST are *not*
precisely the same in game terms as Hero DEX and STR. In fact, I suspect
GURPS DX is somewhat more valuable than GURPS ST in that sort of campaign,
but I would be very surprised if it was anything like 3 times as much.

Valuing stats/advantages/etc in points terms is not an exact science: as a
GM, I'm willing to tolerate some inaccuracies in the process, while as a
player, I usually find I've "wasted" some points by sticking to a particular
aspect of my character concept. An inappropriate character concept for the
genre can waste far too many points - e.g. a high ST character who expects
to use his strength to win *ranged* combat in a high tech environment. But
this is a problem with the concept: you're trying to do something which just
doesn't make sense in the genre. And there *are* high ST characters that
will work in a high tech environment: they just have to be a bit more subtle
than "this character is a high ST gunman".

Ultimately, the decision is the GM's. If the GM really feels that DX is
especially valuable and ST especially poor in his or her campaign, then by
all means change the point values you charge. E.g. if you really feel that
DX is three times more valuable than ST, you might charge DX at 1.5 times
normal rate and ST at 0.5 times normal rate. On the other hand, make certain
you're reasonably correct about their relative values before you do this: my
guess is that in many high tech environments, creative players would
suddenly find all sorts of interesting uses for the cheap ST they are now
able to afford...

David Seal
dseal@armltd.co.uk

All opinions are mine only...
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy