Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9783897" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Just a side comment on one branch of this discussion, since I've seen it come up in other discussion:Disadvantages that work by yielding metacurrency instead of up-front points have some virtues: they're more or less good at automatically regulating frequency since they come up as often as, well, they come up.I've rarely seen a take on them that's good at regulating intensity, however, because in most systems they're a binary yield/not yield choice.  There's nothing that says that can't be done (if your metacurrency isn't super-chunky, you can have the trigger yield different amounts), but for the most part it simply isn't done, and I think for some purposes that's a problem.  My suspicion is that's because most games that do this sort of thing think in fairly broad strokes, so doing that would seem perversely finicky, but not everyone wants broad strokes.In other respects, sometimes I think the real virtue of point build systems is sometimes missed in these discussions (and there's reasons for that): they aren't always as representative of value as they can be (because as note, value can be so campaign dependent) and sometimes a game is putting a thumb on the scale for reasons that don't seem important to some end users (not everyone is all that pumped about whether a given trait is rare in the genre involved or not), but the one thing they do do is set a finite list on character resources and set it for everyone, so if if players A and B want similar characters, either one of them can get there because there's not character gen mechanics that will allow one but not the other to do it.  That doesn't mean a build system as fine gradient as GURPS or Hero is necessarily what you want, but it means even if the value comparisons to cost within the system fail, its still serving a purpose.</blockquote>

Verification