Addendum to GURPS Meta-Tech Review
Earlier this morning, a wrote a review of GURPS Meta-Tech with my first impressions. Almost all my free time today was spent thinking about the book and reading some parts more thoroughly. And you know what? My opinion actually worsened.
When I was making different alchemical potions using pharmaceuticals rules, I found some weird stuff.
First, the "Drinkable" form takes 1d seconds to drink, but it doesn't really specify what that means. Does this include opening the container? Potions in DF require one Ready maneuver to open, and another one to drink. GURPS Magic potions do not say anything at all about the time it takes to drink them. This feels a bit inconsistent with existing rules and not very clear.
Second, the "Grenade" form doesn't say about what kind of agent it is. Blood agent? Respiratory agent? Contact agent? It seems that if you leave it as is, it just works regardless of bare skin contact or anything.
Third, the "Grenade" pharmaceutical form is different from the non-pharmaceutical grenade form. I made a sleep gas grenade using both approaches. The costs were similar, but not identical. However, applying a penalty to the resistance roll on the pharmaceutical grenade increases the cost by 5% per -1, while each -1 for a normal grenade adds 100% because it's based on Affliction.
Fourth, did you know that by default pharmaceuticals have no resistance roll? Even those that cause heart attack or anything like that? Sure, you can apply Resistible, but you don't have to. This can result in some crazy stuff.
Remember I ranted about the book suggesting adding Maximum Duration to Binding? The book itself says that this isn't legal on page 31!
I also mentioned that many of the examples in the appendix have incredibly high costs that reach tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars on TL3 are impractical. But now I have a question - why? If this is something a character is very unlikely to buy, why do you even need to know the price and make this very complicated write-up of the underlying abilities? Why not just GM fiat it? These items are like D&D god statblocks - they don't really matter.
But then my mind went back to the beginning of the book, to the Scaling Costs for Item Ubiquity thingie. If you want an item to be more common, you apply a multiplier to make it cheaper. If you want it to be rarer, you apply a multiplier to make it more expensive. But doesn't this thing completely invalidate the entire book? Why do you need to stat eveything up and calculate the cost if in the end you are told to just make shit up if you didn't like the result?
This caused me to have an epiphany - "Who the hell cares?" In my games, I used metatronic generators for single-use items, such as alchemical elixirs, scrolls, and poisons, because they are incredibly expensive for what they do when you make them as Sorcery items. For permanent enchanted items, I prefer to use Sorcerous enchanting because the pricing scheme works well both in terms on internal game balance and economical verisimilitude. I wasn't very content with some of the metatronic stuff even for potions/scroll. So, why don't I make shit up? When I was writing up all the elixirs, I felt "oh, this feels too cheap" or "oh, this feels too expensive," but that means that I actually know what feels right and don't need a formula to tell me that. Thus, I went a full circle - from being dissatisfied with arbitrary costs to making arbitrary costs. Now I have another project - rework the prices for my game's alchemy/scroll catalogue.
"Why don't I just make things up?"
ReplyDeleteI clearly see more value in Meta-Tech than you do, but that question is an important one. I've rapidly noticed a lot of things just don't matter, until they do. Examples I've personally noticed this with are GURPS Space and GURPS Vehicles. You can just stat up a vehicle from existing vehicles or even ignore the stats (most people don't care about the stats of the Mystery Mobile from Scooby Doo, right? It's just how they get from one mystery to the next). Likewise, while I tinker with GURPS Space design rules for planets in Psi-Wars, it's really not important. Most of them are just "Earth, but with a bit of a flavor."
So why use these at all? Mainly for consistency, for answering questions that are important but I don't care that much about, or for seeking inspiration. I don't need to run through the design process of a star system for Psi-Wars, but what if I do and something neat pops up and I can use that? Then there's some value.
So why use Meta-Tech at all? Well you're already using its core premise of points for dollars with your enchanted items, so you're already using Meta-Tech in principle, even if you don't directly use that book. If you're going to use a dollar-for-points system, how should that scale up and down? If you're going to include power systems, what sort of power systems should you include? What are some variations you might true, or some special exceptions or rules that might be interesting to integrate into your enchanted items? Meta-Tech can help you with all of these.
The one missed opportunity, though, is that it should have folded in the more interesting rules for repricing not based on size, but based on the gadget rules, which is what Enchanted Items do in Sorcery. Rather than worry exclusively about size, which is what Meta-Tech does, Sorcery also worries about durability and stealability, and adjusts the price accordingly. It makes sense that a ring of fireball is better (and thus more expensive) than a sword of fireball, but does it make sense that a twig of fireball costs the same as a ring of fireball? It's far less durable and much more easily destroyed. I wouldn't pay as much for it.
It's fine, even good, to not care, except when you notice that maybe you should care, or that you want to care. In that case, when you have a question, it can help with that specific question. It reminds me a lot of Template Toolkits 2 that way, of which like 80% of the book isn't particularly useful to me, but the 20% that is I keep coming back to over and over again.
I understand where you're coming from, and I even agree completely. For the most part, I care a lot about consistency, it's just that Meta-Tech doesn't work for the specific application I have in mind. For my permanent enchanted items, I use Sorcery regardless of the actual system used to enchant it (magic, psi, divine, etc.) because its point-to-money pricing scheme produces values that are consistent both in terms of game balance and in-universe economics, which is something I like a lot. The enchantment system itself was written in a way that accomodates it.
DeleteHowever, single-use items, such as potions, scrolls, and ammunition, are extremely expensive in Sorcery (I think I wrote a post about it several years ago), so I resorted to using Metatronic Generators for that and devised crafting times and costs for them. For the most part, this worked fine, but some items were way too expensive. This is not a fault of MGs, but the way Affliction works in GURPS.
Since I have Sorcery enchanting for everything else, I don't need Meta-Tech's pricing scheme for it. However, there's still value in the book. For example, the various cost modifiers can be backported to Sorcery. "Requires Sorcery (Full)" and "Limited/Loyal" from MT basically are the same thing, with the latter being more generic.
The main point of Meta-Tech is its pricing mechanism. One doesn't need to book to actually stat up an item - even the Basic Set is enough for that. Ironically, I see the value of Meta-Tech in everything *except* the main thing it is supposed to do. While some of my criticisms may sound harsh, I still think that it's an okay book. It does what it is supposed to do, and even if it is redundant for my goals, other people may get a lot of use out of it. It is (for the most part) functional, but for the thing I wanted to use it, it boils down to "Why don't I just make things up?"