Giantip M&M Balance/Ability Cost Guide

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Superfanboy
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Jul 08, 2022 9:37 pm

Giantip M&M Balance/Ability Cost Guide

Post by Superfanboy »

I've been reading this interesting breakdown of pricing and effect, basically how to build character concepts cheap by not choosing the obvious things to build it. Very interesting breakdown of effects and the math of them, I've seen similar guides for GURPS.

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread. ... cter-Guide
One thing that's funny to me is many of the unbalanced build the author cautions against (continuous penetrating vision, Perception based Extended Remote Sense attacks, Variable Immunity) are powers Liefeld's Supreme has.

Many of the issues he brings up could be handled by judicious GMing but I think he has a good point that a lot of powers are, practically, just inferior, overpriced versions of other powers when you do the math. Speed+Environmental Adaptation is better than Swimming and relatively cheaper, why does Swimming exist or why isn't it priced exactly as a discounted Speed? More importantly, though, a Swimmer character is likely to buy this power when he has cheaper options to do the same thing better. It's not so much the point cost but waste through taking the obvious option. I've encountered many similar issues with GURPS, but GURPS is far more granular so it's easier to price things at halfway points for rebalancing than M&M. Though it's a hell of a lot more work in general. M&M is basically GURPS D20 😂
FuzzyBoots
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Re: Giantip M&M Balance/Ability Cost Guide

Post by FuzzyBoots »

I've read that list. I get some of what he's saying, but other bits seem to come down to "Why spend points to be able to use more than one weapon when you know that losing that one weapon will render your character useless and the GM won't play chicken and make you actually lose?" or "Why spend points on this thing when you can minmax this way?"
theVoidWatches
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Re: Giantip M&M Balance/Ability Cost Guide

Post by theVoidWatches »

I'm with Fuzzy here. A hell of a lot of it is really minmax-heavy, like linking Deflect to your attacks and only buying Stamina.
Hi, you can call me Void. I prefer she/her or they/them pronouns, please. Yes, "they" is a singular pronoun. I write a superhero webserial called Paternum - check it out!
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