Labels

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Success Point GAT Abilties

What Is Happening Now: Innate Powers is proof-read and I am integrating the changes and making some play-test modifications that cropped up. Next up will be Cybernetics (then Fast Company, then Psionics, then Domain Control, then the back of the book and then DONE).

Success Point Generic Archetype Traits
As we started our new game (more on that in another post) we went through the GATs and discovered that there were NO Traits that just gave out Success Points. There were several COMBAT abilities that gave SP pools--but there were no abilities that just gave SPs "per session" or anything.

There had been some like this in the original version JArch 1.7 ... what happened?

What happened was that our thinking had evolved between 1.7 and 2.0: when I was re-doing the powers for 2.0 I could test what happened with SPs in combat with combat pools but there was no good way to test generic SPs because the pure combat environment didn't work for that (i.e. if you are running around with 16 SPs--a lot--you will pretty much dominate any roll you can make that you *have* to dominate--when that happens it can make a HUGE difference in a real campaign but only a statistical difference in the combat simulator).

Also, for what it is worth, the simulator doesn't have logic that can say "Okay, I hit really well--NOW is the time to make him Armor Save and THEN pay all my SPs into increasing Damage Mod ..." This makes it dumber than a person would be.

As a result, I wasn't sure what to do with them--so I didn't put them in. Then I went looking for them for the character I was making.

Our Thinking Now
For 4 Archetype Points you get:

  1. 4 SPs that can be spent on anything related to you each game session. They cannot be saved up.
  2. +8 Damage Points
  3. 4 SPs that CAN be saved under SOME condition.
So we have:
Theme Song: You get your 4 SPs once per game session becoming active when you play, sing, or even hum your theme song (this can be more if they are limited, say, only to combat or even more if to a single category of non-combat skills like playing Axel-F for Street Skills and Stealth).

Loser: You get your 4 SPs each session but you get 4 to keep any time you suffer humiliation or a humiliating defeat.

Come Back: You get your 4 SPs to keep when captured, when facing very bad odds, or when defeated (humiliating or not).

... What am I missing? What conditions should you be able to buy "power ups" for that are not complete gimmes (such as "When I defeat a Foe")?

No comments:

Post a Comment