Quote from: David Johansen;779307I meant 3d6 + 1-10 Stat.  As I noted it's really no different than the GURPS all stats in the 10 - 15 range.  The functional range is actually the same.  It's just that the top end 16 -18 has been reserved for things that are better than humans.  You just lower the target number to reflect it.  Also, with skills starting at 0 instead of -5, it actually duplicates the GURPS skill roll range pretty well.

I'm not married to it, but it's in the class of things that can be 100% GURPS compatible while looking nothing like GURPS.

Okay, I can see where you're going there. So the average stat can be, say, 4, and the TN for basic checks becomes 15. Gives the same success rate as a skill of 10 vs. 3d6 roll under.

I'd go with 5 as average, so a TN of 16.  But then an average skill would be 5 or better as 0 = -5 default.  Though that'd be the total of the skill and the Specialty.  With specialties costing half what skills do and one level of a specialty being upgraded to get a level of a skill there's a reason to take specialties but it doesn't outweigh the value of skills. That way we can have less than twenty skills and more than a thousand in the same breath.

Quote from: David Johansen;778879Okay so I've been thinking about powers and magic.

The enabling ability for magic needs to scale directly to damage, area, range potential.  I'd suggest simply calling it Magic Level and making it link directly to spell level.  I don't know why but spell levels just make sense to me.  Like technology level I suppose.

Oh, and the name of the game shouldn't be a silly five letter acronym that puts people off from ever trying it.

Having spell levels is good if you're wanting to prevent starting characters getting access to fireballs or flying castles or etc. The higher level spells need to be better, but you probably also want some disincentive so characters don't entirely give up using a lower-level spell when they get a higher-level version.
Assuming you're mixing the idea with 'spell points', that suggests either tying spell level to spell point cost, or giving higher level spells some other issue (like a penalty to spellcasting rolls).

Quote from: David Johansen;779375I'd go with 5 as average, so a TN of 16.  But then an average skill would be 5 or better as 0 = -5 default.  Though that'd be the total of the skill and the Specialty.  With specialties costing half what skills do and one level of a specialty being upgraded to get a level of a skill there's a reason to take specialties but it doesn't outweigh the value of skills. That way we can have less than twenty skills and more than a thousand in the same breath.

That's great. So what we're talking about with skills is essentially a 3 tiered system.
Untrained, or attempting something completely foreign = Stat -5
Broad Skill training (Melee, Brawling, Science, Stealth, etc.) has a purchase rank that looks something like:
Skill            Cost
Stat-3           1
Stat -2          2
Stat -1          3
Stat              4
Stat +1          7
Stat +2          10

Or however the costs balance out. Specialties would have a cost structure of something like
Specialty        Cost
Skill +1             3
Skill +2             5
Skill +3             7

You'll notice that the costs for taking a specialty only make sense if you're buying up the Skill to Stat+0 at least. Otherwise you're specializing before you've mastered the basics.
I'm not wedded to the cost structure. I would like it to track with the general amount of time it takes to master a subject, but that will change dramatically when we're dealing with supercomputers, ultra-geniuses, and angelic beings.

A science office on a star ship might have skills and stats that look something like
Intelligence 7
-   Science 7
       -Biology 8
        -Astrophysics 9
- Navigation 5

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;779455Having spell levels is good if you're wanting to prevent starting characters getting access to fireballs or flying castles or etc. The higher level spells need to be better, but you probably also want some disincentive so characters don't entirely give up using a lower-level spell when they get a higher-level version.
Assuming you're mixing the idea with 'spell points', that suggests either tying spell level to spell point cost, or giving higher level spells some other issue (like a penalty to spellcasting rolls).

If you want Magic to be pointedly Not Technology, there has to be some intrinsic drawback to using it. For example, while having a tank is a big benefit, getting a tank is almost impossible for pretty much anyone.

So here's an option: there is a skill called Mana that is simply unavailable in some settings. Casting a spell is a two step process.

1. Channel the Energy from the Heavens, Ambient Energy, Chi, whatever the idiom needed. The more energy channeled, the higher the TN of the Mana roll. The Mana stat also determines the Mana reserve the character can maintain. Mana might drain at a random interval, making it hard to horde mana. Maybe you can channel over your Mana score, but you start taking damage if you hold all that juice in.

If the Channel check fails, you just don't get any Mana and have to sit it out. If you flub the roll, say roll 10 under the TN, and you've created a Mana geyser, soaking everything around you in mystic energies. Things without Mana skill just take damage.

2. You have to shape and release the spell. This is where the Thaumaturgy (or whatever) skill comes in. Once you've charged the battery, you have to build a circuit in your mind and release the spell. The more powerful the spell, the more Mana required, and the harder it is to cast.

This does a couple things. From the in-game perspective, it makes the rarity (or commonality) of spellcasters make sense. The simple act of Casting a spell is dangerous, and not for the risk averse. However, a caster that knows his limits and has studied his art down pat is reasonably safe.

I think the nature of a modular system is such that not everything has to fit into a prescribed box. Unlike say, Hero System, building a spell, like building a vehicle, robot suit, or superpower, should be based primarily around the in-world object.

It totally acceptable to have an alternate spell casting system in place, one similar to Ars Magica where effects are built off of nouns and verbs, or one like Epic Spell Wars of the Duel Wizards, where spells are built out of three components that can each be used individually.

Quote from: robiswrong;778122Doesn't FUDGE have a pretty direct lineage from GURPS?

As a long standing fan of FUDGE I am not sure I can see the lineage from GURPS to FUDGE at all, and SoS didn't stop playing GURPS when he wrote FUDGE, and anyway how do the publication dates stack up anyway?

He'd been writing for GURPS for at least a couple of years when he wrote FUDGE.

I definently want to see DERPS as a modular system but I'd like it to be a modular system with a strong intristic balance.  I want things from book X to work with things from book Y as much as possible.  Ideally the substructure, the rules that are used for building things, will be tight enough to avoid introducing broken things in supplements.

Actually I was thinking of going the D&D 4 and 5 route and making unskilled zero and boosting the target numbers for skilled actions.  The downside is that stat rolls need lower target numbers or for stats to be doubled.

Again, it depends on how tightly we want the character system to map to GURPS.

I suspect that the further we get the less successful the game will be with GURPS fans.  I'm not saying that's the only metric of success but the market is a crowded place.

I think you're right about diverging from GURPS will lose GURPS fans. On the other hand, there aren't that many of them. But there is a niche there that GURPS doesn't really fill: Realism without the cruft. It's better to build a good, fast system than worry overmuch about the market just yet.

I suppose I'm not sure what you mean by 'Balance'. It's a loaded word. If you mean that a laser pistol build on the same point value as a laser blast spell does the same damage at the same range with the same armor penetration and whatnot, that's good.

The issue arises if you want a character who has purchased a Zap-ulon 9000 from the local Spacemart for 200 credits to have expended the same character resources that the dedicated worshiper of Gorig the Unmaker has to get access to Burning Ray, who has expended the same resources as Captain Eyeborg the Superhero, then there's going to be some logical issues.

So I think I need to better understand what balance means for you.

Essentially I want 1 die of damage and 3 points of armor to have the same cost across the board.  It's one of those things GURPS doesn't do that makes supers work better.

That's why I want to set the cost of tech levels as an Omni power. Everyone in the setting has paid for it so it's often irrelevant but it gives a much better comparison between a cave man and a transhuman space warrior in battle armor.  In GURPS that's only 50 points.

Quote from: David Johansen;779748Essentially I want 1 die of damage and 3 points of armor to have the same cost across the board.  It's one of those things GURPS doesn't do that makes supers work better.

That's why I want to set the cost of tech levels as an Omni power. Everyone in the setting has paid for it so it's often irrelevant but it gives a much better comparison between a cave man and a transhuman space warrior in battle armor.  In GURPS that's only 50 points.

So here's what I propose. Imagine spells, superpowers, and technology as containers for powers and effects. How each of them are used is distinct, but within the bucket we can measure what the gross effects are.

For example, if we a rocket propelled grenade and a disintegration spell, the mechanics in the container might look pretty similar.

RPG-7
Damage: 5d6 Lethal, Armor Piercing 18
Range Increment 100', max range 1500'
-- An RPG-7 is a Soviet made anti-tank weapon. It fires a single warhead that arms after 30'. If the target is struck before 30', the warhead won't detonate and the damage is 2d6 Lethal. The RPG-7 has a backblast. Anyone standing within 5' of the RPG-7 backblast takes 2d6 lethal damage.
Point Value: 50

Disintegration (Rank 6 Necromancy Spell)
Damage: 5d6 Lethal, Armor Piercing 18
Range: 500'
Mana Cost: 25, Casting TN 21
-- The spell of disintegration strips the elemental bonds that hold a living creature together, cutting through the hardest armors and felling the mightiest beasts. It requires enormous amounts of Mana, however, making it outside the grasp of all but the most powerful mages. Should the mage fail her casting roll by more than ten, roll 1d. On a 6 the spell targets the caster.
Point Value: 50


The core mechanical information is held in the bucket and is consistent across settings. But how they act in the game world is very different. A spellcaster may never get the guts to try a disintegration spell, but if you're playing British soldiers in Afghanistan c. 1980's, then you can find piles of RPG-7s.

This way you can eyeball the gear and powers a character has, but it's not a straight jacket. If you're playing that British soldier and you commandeer a tank, your character's Point Value doesn't go up except for the GM being able to estimate the effectiveness of the character-- and even then it's always going to be dependent on more variables than we really need to deal with.

We could get into the real nitty-gritty of item creation, and start number crunching the point value of the back blast, or mana burn, or weight, or how much ammunition you can carry, but HERO already does that, and I don't think we need to follow their lead.

No, HERO does what it does better than anyone but it's still not that hard to break.   I don't think we need that kind of balance.  I'm thinking more about ensuring that getting an effect from one source or another should cost the same points.

For example, those soldiers in Afgahnistan all paid 50 points for their tech level while the wizard has to pay 50 points to learn the spell.  So, in the end they actually have balanced point costs.  The balancing limitations of the technology level Omni power would be expendability, accessibility, legality, and price but the cost to get the same damage effect remains the same.

Quote from: David Johansen;779876No, HERO does what it does better than anyone but it's still not that hard to break.   I don't think we need that kind of balance.  I'm thinking more about ensuring that getting an effect from one source or another should cost the same points.

For example, those soldiers in Afgahnistan all paid 50 points for their tech level while the wizard has to pay 50 points to learn the spell.  So, in the end they actually have balanced point costs.  The balancing limitations of the technology level Omni power would be expendability, accessibility, legality, and price but the cost to get the same damage effect remains the same.

I think hard coding equipment to a character can lead to problems. If a character requisitions a tank, do their point values suddenly increase? If they go broke and live as a hobo, do you re-adjust their point value?   I can tell you that will be the very first bit of bookkeeping people ignore.

The things that should be locked into the character are their Stats, Skills, and Powers. Backgrounds and Equipment (at least at character creation) only define what the character has acquired up to the point immediately before play begins. That means that Tony Stark can lose his company, Baron von Klevitch can be excommunicated, and Trainyard Willie can strike it rich all without having to readjust their core point value.

That's why I want Tech Level priced as an omni-power.  It's not the gear you have you pay for it's the gear you can have.  If we want money as money then it should also factor in there.  It's about access.

Quote from: David Johansen;779905That's why I want Tech Level priced as an omni-power.  It's not the gear you have you pay for it's the gear you can have.  If we want money as money then it should also factor in there.  It's about access.

My concern there is that things like access and availability are so dependent on a thousand in-fiction variables that they are impossible to balance. Case in point:

A 1920's occult investigator is built as a bumbling old professor. He's tenured, has a beat up old jalopy and a collection of books on ancient history.

He sells his books for $30.00, and buys a Thompson SMG from a mail-order catalog. There is no way to make the Thompson machine gun have the same point value as an ill-tended collection of books, but a mail order machine gun is a fact of life in 1920's America.

So how do you balance that? Does the Professor's point value increase when he gets the gun, and decrease when he sells it again? What about the other player who paid the 40-odd points in character creation to get access to the machine gun? Do you decide that the Professor has to give up the gun somehow, or compensate the other player an equal amount of points?

So what if we try to balance with wealth? It seems like it would work-- a tank costs several hundred million dollars, after all-- but there are enough corner cases that that measure loses value as a balancing method.

Take for example a sword. A fighting blade can cost in excess of $1000.00. Spend any less and it's probably going to be clumsy, break easily, and likely get you killed. But you could walk into a pawn shop with half that amount and get a decent pistol that is superior in game terms in every single way.

If you want to try and balance things out, you have to make a system as detailed as HERO is, but then you lose any semblance of simplicity and only make the game more, not less exploitable.  The more moving parts included in a game, especially one dependent on human interaction like an RPG, the more exploits will arise, unless you limit the design space to a narrow field like DnD 4e did.

I don't think achieving parity between character's equipment, spells and powers is a design goal that can be reached.

To look at it as a GURPS issue, a guy goes to the store and buys a DR 30 flak jacket and pays $500.  The guy next to him buys DR 30 with 90 points.  He's now at a 90 point disadvantage relative to the other guy.  Sure he can go and buy a flak jacket too but it doesn't work for his superhero in tights character concept.

So what I'm saying is, the base line cost for stuff you can do with the general technology level of the setting should cost less some how or the technology level should carry a significant cost of its own.

The problem is that technology as handled in GURPS has a disproportionate and undue advantage over alternatives unless you stack it.

What if the cost of wealth scales with the tech level?

Or at least if it doesn't scale, could the cost of things scale linearly so higher tech stuff always costs more?