Etric said:
That is their loss because it is an awesome supplement.
It's a shame that there wasn't any more work done on it.
It is a pretty darn groovy supplement, that's for sure. As for it being a shame more work wasn't done on it... I dunno. As it stands, it's pretty complete. Sure, there might be certain things (WotC psionics, d20 Modern) that wasn't really an explicit design goal, but it's possible to bash it together.
The thing I like it for is not so much the "D&D is now a kind of point-buy system", although it could certainly be used for that. No, I like it for the whole class building thing. Nothing stopping you from turning around and making your classes in a consistent fashion, and not only that, but you'll have a pretty good idea how it stacks up to other classes too.
Sure, it's not 100%, but it's a darn sight closer than just guessing.
Buy the Numbers does kinda cheat on a couple of things. The first of course being class abilities. The system presented for handling special abilities/powers isn't _too_ complicated, but a bit more guidance might have been nice. However, since the breakdown for class abilities is given, the guidance isn't really necessary, it's just that kind of safety net thing.
The one thing that BtN "cheated" on I think, is feats. In fairness, D&D says "all feats are worth the same amount" although players and the designers know that some feats are really not worth the same as others. Part of this is reward for rules mastery by players, and part of it is making a person pay for a cool thing later by taking something crappy now.
Of course, if you're into to trying to cost the feats to reflect their "real" value, something that might work:
Use the BtN system for figuring out the cost of a feat. That way you're staying within a consistent framework, at least to start.
Now, head on over to Sean Reynolds' site and read this interesting idea "Feat Points"
http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html
I would try simply converting the feat points into a decimal multiplier. So instead of feats being worth 5 to 10 points, they're worth .5 to 1.0. Apply the decimal multiplier to the BtN cost, and now you've got a feat that's (in theory) being bought for what it's actually worth.
I'd like to stress though, that I'm not sure the payoff doing this kind of thing is really worth it. Buy the Numbers can be fiddly enough as it is, and introducing a sliding cost like that for feats could quickly spiral out of control. It's also flawed, because I wouldn't be surprised if there are later feats that are better than the benchmark feats chosen. So that means either you need to decided on new benchmark feats and shift everything accordingly, or figure out just _how much_ better the newer feats are, and increase their cost beyond 10 points.
Shifting tracks...
My toying with 4 color to Fantasy is because I'm kinda curious to see which would be a "better" way of dealing with the issue of class special abilities. Either figure out what they look like being done up as a super power, or simply using the BtN system.
From the looks of things, 2 Hero Points are worth 1 feat. So in theory, one could simply use the BtN method of costing feats, and apply that to class abilities. You'd run them on a different "track" than feats though, so that way you're not really messing the character up too badly. D&D separates feats and class abilities, and so does BtN. I don't know how viable the idea really is, it's just a vague idea at this point.
