NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9544735" data-attributes="member: 4937">You hit on two things there but mostly just illustrated how counter intuitive probabilities are and why linear math is so much better at the table.  First, it's not diminishing returns - it's actually huge returns.  To understand why, let's look at some simple linear math from 1e AD&D.  Let's say you are fighting orcs in something like B2 Keep on the Borderlands.  How much better is a -2 AC than a -1 AC?  The answer is not 5% better, but twice as good.  With -1 AC you get hit 1 time in 10, but with -2 AC you get hit only 1 time in 20.  Your expected damage versus each attack is halved.  You have effectively twice as many hit points as the guy with -1, and three times as many hit points as the guy with 0 AC, and four times as many hit points as the guy with but 1 AC. Failing only one time in 50 is five times better than failing only one time in 10.  The number of situations where the failure matters is proportionately decreased.  This is the reason system mastery players horde those modifiers, because they now that if they are already close to good every little increase is huge.  The increase from someone needing a 12 to hit you to someone needing a 13 is small.  But the increase from needing an 18 to a 19 is huge.  And for GURPS this meant that any positive modifier wasn't an incremental improvement but an exponential one, but one which would be variable and unpredictable depending on how many ranks the character already had.  Which is why GURPS could never be generous with bonuses.  It's also why pumping points into your defenses broke the game.  Worse, damage resistances were static, so they either did very little or did so much that you became invulnerable except to critical hits.  But critical hits themselves were absolute rather than quantified, so everything was ultimately just luck, and because you couldn't really horde positive bonuses you couldn't even be particularly tactical about it.  Traveller 2D6, BRP, WEG D6 - they all handle this better than GURPS does just across the board.The point buy was broken all to heck in GURPs.  You could take situational penalties to an attribute to get enough points to increase the attribute, effectively being better than you would have been without the handicap.  Take weak willed, then spend the points to up attributes so that you are now effectively not weak willed.  And on and on.  All the numbers were just pulled out of the air with no real balancing.</blockquote>

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