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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 5699651" data-attributes="member: 40166">And a sufficiently good chess player could have defeated Deep Blue, and even a modern computer system built on the same budget. The fact that no human alive can do it, and it may exceed the limits of unassisted human cognition notwithstanding.One of the features of a good game system that a strong GM will find hard to cure is player independence. If I get choices, I prefer not to have to run them by the GM first, which also saves the GM time. This is a weakness of universal systems, yes, but also games like Rifts and D&D which don't have that excuse, where GMs ban stuff because it's simply overpowered. In other cases, it's simply a matter that a bad system makes more work for the GM. If a good GM can make a bad system work, shouldn't they be able to make a good system great?You said 1995 and 2nd edition. The 3rd edition came out in 1989. Cults aren't always big on reality.When you're blaming point systems for this, I don't think you're comparing apples to apples. HERO and GURPS are universal systems that support superheros. The more flexible a system is, the harder it is to be balanced. Let's compare HERO and GURPS to non-point buy universal systems of similar generality. Or let's compare D&D 3.5 to a point-buy system designed to cover similar fantasy worlds. I do buy that systems with a lot of options tend to reward system mastery; I don't think that point-buy systems are exceptional that way.And I'm not sure grabbing single examples is useful. HERO is not the end-all and be-all of point systems. I'd like to say that GURPS 4 is a good example, but I don't have the system mastery you imputed to me. It's certainly better than GURPS 3. Again, I'd like to be comparing apples to apples, though I'm having a hard time finding good examples of two systems to compare.One exception comes to mind; Pathfinder apparently has a point-buy race system in its Advanced Race Guide. It's still in playtest, and even when done will still be one concrete point system, done well or poorly, but I bet when done it will be less munchkinable then digging through 3.5 books for races, especially when including third party books.</blockquote>

Verification