Goodie Points

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Revision as of 06:57, 2 October 2010

Goodie Points, abreviated GPs, are the central character creation "currency" of Sagatafl. When creating a character, one has an amount of Goodie Points to spend, and the more Goodie Points, the more powerful the character is, (more capable of enforcing his will on the surrounding world).

GPs are Non-Linear

No, actually, Goodie Points are units and units cannot be nonlinear, but functions can, and Goodie Points are converted to usable points (Advantage Points, Skill Points and Perk Points) according to nonlinear functions.

That sounds scary, but it's actually not too complicated.

The central decision of character creation - and the thing almost everyone won't ever get right the first time, which is why it is perfectly legal to go back and change one's mind here (and everywhere else, for that matter!) - is distributing one's Goodie Points between the three categories of

• Advantage Points (DPs)
• Skill Points (SPs)
• Perk Poins (PPs)

Goodie Points not spent during character creation are lost, so do spend them all.

Advantage Points are used to buy traits that the character is born with, traits that are largely genetic in nature or at least become fixed and non-improvable in very early childhood (when the character leaves his Formative Years - this happens at around the age of 4.5 Years). Basically you use these DPs (aDvantage Points) to buy Attributes and Advantages. You can also lower your Attributes and take DisAdvantages in exchange for extra (compensatory) DPs that you can spend freely.

(Advantage Points are abreviated DPs for historical reasons. Originally there were separate Attribut Points and aDvantage Points, APs and DPs, but this was deemed to be a game design mistake, and so they were combined into one type and one category. The question was whether to call them APs and DPs, and the final decision was DPs. So now you know.)

Skill Points are used to buy acquired abilities. Skills, basically. Regular skills (with a level), Lores (binary skills - you have then or you haven't), and Trainings (improved physical fitness, in the form of Strength and Endurance). This is stuff your character has learned, or trained for. There's nothing analogous to DisAdvantages when it comes to Skills.

Perk Points are used to buy social traits, including economic benefits, and state such as being in the state of carrying a magical sword at gamestart. Perks are what people think you are, and what you happen to have or control of external things (land, peoples, items). Note that Perks can be taken away from you by NPCs, e.g. your magical sword can be stolen, or an usurper can remove you from your expensively bought position of Galactic Emperor. NegPerks, sometimes spelled negPerks, are the equivalent of DisAdvantages, undesirable states that your character is in.

Now comes the scary "math" part but don't worry, you don't have to solve even the tiniest equation, let alone do any kind of calculus whatsoever.

Goodie Points are converted to DPs, SPs and PPs according to non-linear functions. You put an amount of GPs into one end of the function, and out the other end comes an amount of category points.

The function for Advantage Points, DPs, is AP = ((GP/5)*(GP/5))+(GP/2). Or in mathematical terms, if you prefer, f(x)=x^2+2x. Either way, round down to the nearest whole number.

Say you decide to spend 40 Goodie Points on Advantages. Divide the number 40 by 5. This gives 8. Multiply 8 by itself. This gives 64. Remember that number. Then return to the number 40, and divide it by 2. That gives 20. Then add 20 to the remembered number, 64, to arrive at the result of 84 DPs.

If you spend 40 GPs on Advantages, you get 84 DPs.

The trick about the non-linear functions used is that they don't work the way one intuitively expects them to. Try to guess approximately how many DPs one gets if one spends not 40 but 80 Goodie Points on Advantages.

80 divided by 5 is 16. 16 times 16 is 256. We'll remember that partial result. 80 divided by 2 is 40. 256+40=306 GPs.

Now, depending on your understanding of simple mathematics, you might be profoundly shocked or not.

Here's a rule-of-thumb. Ignoring the linear component, the +(GP/2) part, if you spend twice as many GPs on Advantage Poins, then you get four times as many Advantage Points. If you spend three times as many GPs, you get nine times as many DPs. And that's deliberate.

And it's even almost true ergardless of the linear component. 306 DPs divided by 84 DPs gives 3.64 as many Advantage Points for twice the Goodie Points.

That's because for sufficiently large GPs values, the linear component can be ignored. It has very little effect. What's left, what matters, is the exponent, which in the case of Advantage Points is ^2. The Goodie Points are raised to the second power. Raise 3 to the second power, you get 9.

Now come the catch. The functions for converting GPs to Skill Points and Perk Points are even more generous. They use an exponent not of 2 but of 2.5. Ignoring the linear component of the function, if you spend twice as many GPs on either Skills or on Perks, you get a little over six times as many Skill Points or Perk Points. If you spend three times as many GPs, you get over fifteen times as many Skill or Perk Points.

See the difference?

The functions for Skill Points and Perk Points are different from each other in some ways, but they both use the same exponent, 2.5, and that's what matters.

For all three point categories, the obverse is of course also true. If you spend half as many GPs on Advantages, you get only one quarter the DPs, and if you spend one third as many GPs on Skills or Perks, you get only about one fifteenth as many SPs or PPs.

GP spending limits

There are some limits on how many GPs may be spent on any one category, expressed as a percentage of total Goodie Points. These limits are 55% for Advantage Points, 60% for Skill Points, and 65% for Perk Points, except for Npcs where the limit is 75% for Perk Points (so that the GM can create howlingly incompetent leaders, e.g. kings and colonels and multi-millionaires with average attributes and minimal skills).

In addition to this there is also the Intensive Ninja Training Rule, which puts a hard limit on how many Skill Points a starting character can have based on his age (in Years). This rule has not yet been created, but will be based on the most extreme possibility of a character having received near-constant intensive skill training starting at a few months after birth. And therefore it is not at all likely to be the least bit limiting to your character concept, regardless of what said concept is (nor is your character at all likely to ever "overtake" the limit during play, even if he spends all his waking hours in vey high quality training). (If it wasn't for potential copyright issues, this rule would have been called the Paul Atreides Rule.)

The challenge of Sagatafl character creation

The trick to this core decision, how to spend the GPs, is to decide what shape character you want, and find the right balance.

Skill Points come much more cheaply than Advantage Points. For only a few more Goodie Points spent during character creation, you can massively pump up your Skill Points. So it's attractive to spend a lot of GPs on Skill Points.

On the other hand, your Skill Points are used much more efficiently if your character has high values in those Attributes that are relevant for your character's most important skills. Attributes determine skill learning speed, and thus how many Skill Points each skill costs at each level. Therefore, leaving your character with all 3s in all Attributes is not a choice you should make lightly.

One possible character concept is that of great genetic potential that has yet to be realized: Go for high Attributes, but few Skill Points, because you'll earn lotsof Skill Points during the campaign, in the form of eXperience Points (XPs translate directly to SPs on a 1:1 basis).

Another is the almost-average-dude who has been around for a long time, and done a lot of differnt things (some of them quite intensely). He has bought all the t-shirts, and has very high skills, but with average'ish Attribute values, he's unlikely to improve his skills much, if at all, during the campaign (he can learn new skills, though, but not very quickly).

Both conceptual shapes are potentially fun, depending on player style, as is the middle ground.

Perk Points, on the third manipulatory appendace, are largely ignored by players, and for good reasons. Most RPG campaigns are about adventurers who adventure, and Perk Points are mostly for settled types of folks. And don't worry about fame and fortune. Fortune comes naturally to charactes during play without being artificially held back by point accounting, and fame in the form of Reputations and Popularities also come and improve naturally (characters can earn Perk Points during play, but these are always ear-marked for improving specific Reputations or Popularities, i.e. if you solve a major problem for the Town of Dublin, then in addition to your XPs you'll earn some PPs that go directly towards improving your Popularity in the Town of Dublin).

Goodie Point amounts

It is possible to create an average present-day person on 40 Goodie Points. This has been tested. An actual average person, average in all Attributes, perhaps one sub-Attribute raised one level and another sub-Attibute lowered one level. He gets enough Skill Points to buy the Skills necessary to get by in daily life, including speaking his Natural Language at a reasonable level, and Reading, using a Computer and Driving a car, and to buy further skills at sufficient levels to hold a paying job, and the Perk Points required to buy said Job, and a Home, basic belongings and various Insurances (such as Medical Insurance).

An average "adventurer", Sagatafl posits, is to be built on 100 Goodie Points, but because of the non-linear fuctions used to convert Goodie Points to category Points (DPs, SPs, PPs), such an average adventurer is not merely 2.5 times as good as an average person, but instead many more times as good. Try ten times as good, or so.

This average adventurer can be a skilled knight or other warrior, or an expert thief or spy (or both), a ranger who is a skilled archer with good Wilderness skills, a spellcaster with high ability in a Spell Realm or decent ability in an entire Spell Category, a highly trained Warring-States era ninja or modern era US Army Special Forces sergeant.

A 100 GP character is much more comparable to a starting character in GURPS (built in 100 or 150 Character Points, depending on edition) than to a first level character from any edition of D&D or AD&D, or any other RPG system that uses character levels

The next step up, an above-average-adventurer, is 120 Goodie Points. This is much better than 100 Goodie Points. Not twice as good, but almost. The next steps are all 20 GPs higher. 140 gPs, 160 GPs, 180 GPs, 200 GPs, 220 GPs. Eventually one reaches absolute and comprehensive badass territory.

The lower steps are also 20 GPs less. 80 GPs, 60 GPs, and then normal, average, screamingly boring dudes, although note that at the low end of the scale, finer graduations are necessary, e.g. a slightly below average person is 35 GPs, or maybe 30 GPs for a really pitiful individual (incompetent and poor), or 45 GPs for a slightly better-off person. Old attempts to re-create The Designer ended up at around 60 Goodie Points, but new attempts could perhaps yield a slightly different value; anything from 50 to 65 GPs would be unsprirising.

Levels of play

Sagatafl works very well for very high-powered campaigns, including ones featuring adventures such as the major characters from the Ärth setting get involved in: Sláine of Ulster, Eurielle of the Icy Land, Kariton, Solomon ben Melchior, Asbrand the Stuttering, or Olav Tryggvesson. Individuals with both breadth and depth of competence, who can only be built true-to-themselves on very generous Goodie Point budgets indeed.

An early and only partial attempt to re-create Asbrand the Stuttering suggested that 180 or 200 GPs would be a good starting point, but that's for the young Asbrand, age 16. In the decade ahead of him, in planned written fiction, he'll grow a lot, acquire a lot of Skills, and boost his various Reputations massively (at age 25 or so, re-creating him would probably cost something like 10 more GPs). A point value estimate for Sláine of Ulster has not been made, but his 980-or-so version, at age 30 when he finds out who murdered Asbrand's teacher (the Wizard Fionn Mac Dougal) is not Sláine at the peak of his form. He has a significant amount of character growth ahead of him (but more like 5 GPs than 10 GPs).

There is only one problem with a high-powered campaign, and that is world engagement. High-powered campaigns only work if all the players truly, madly, deeply care about the world in which the campaign is to take place, if they engage strongly with the setting, already during the character creation phase. The players - all the players - have to creae characters that can in some way be seen as respones to the setting.

If one player just "wants to play a Paladin", and doesn't give a shit about the setting, giving him much more than about 120 GPs is a recipe for total disaster, for untold horrors. All the players have to care, and deeply, otherwise high-powered gaming won't work in any campaign that takes place in a world (and if your campaign does not take place in a world, why would you want to have anything to do with Sagatafl?)

Most players do not understand worlds, and have no idea how to engage with them, so if the GM can stomach the boredom of GMing for low-competence PCs, starting at a training wheels level of 80 GPs, or maybe 100 GPs, is a really good idea.

Please note that this is about levels of play. Characters don't really advance much, as measured by GPs (e.g. if you were to re-create a character mid-campaign, his GP value would have gone up by only 1 or 2 GPs, maybe 3 for a really long campaign). It's not the initial power level, but rather the power level for the entire campaign. If you think that you're starting at a slightly high power level of 120 GPs, then you're mistaken. You're not deciding on a starting level, but on a level for the entire campaign.

Don't expect D&D-style cometary characte development. Normal charactes do not become great. Great characters realize genetic potential, or have already realized (most of their) genetic potenial prior to gamestart.

The power level chosen will, due to the way Sagatafl works, be the power level for the entire campaign. For this reason, if new PCs are introduced part-way through the campaign, they should simply be built on 1 GP more than the starting PCs. That'll be good enough, unless the campaign has been going on for a very long time, or featured an unusually large amount of Teaching and Training.

Three (or four) character types

Characters created with Sagatafl can be seen as falling at any given point in a triangular 2-dimensional space.

The lowest point in the triangle is few GPs to begin with, and spend more or less evenly on Perks and Skills, with average Attributes. This is Mr. Normal, alias Mister Bore-me-to-death.

The two upper points of the triangle then represent two basic versions of high-GP characters.

At the leftmost high point are characters with most of their GPs spend on Perk Points. These can be called Politicians, Nobles and Merchants; heavy on social advantages such as Wealth, Reputations and Popularities, Contacts, Rank, Social Status, Legal Rights and political power.

At the rightmost point, or close to it, is where most PCs in traditional campaigns are likely to be. At that point in the triangle, most of the GPs are spent on Advantage Points and Skill Points. This makes for intrinsically competent characters, including typical RPG-style adventurers, elite soldiers, pirates and Viking raiders, ninja and spellcasters, professional thieves and spies, and engineers, physicians, scholars and scientists.

One can also expand this two-dimensional triangular diagram into a three-dimensional tetrahedral diagram (the same shape as a four-sided die, a d4). To do this, we simply take the rightmost point, heavy on Skill Points and Advantage Points, and turn it from a point into an axis, where as one end of the axis the character is heavy on Skill Points and at the other end he's heavy on Advantage Points.

Of course the three upper points in this tetrahedron are the extremes, where 100% of the GPs are spent on each category, and that's flat out illegal. No character, PC or NPC, can ever be at any of the corners, but they can be close to either one, or far away, with the corner that one can get closest to being the Perk Point corner, since for PCs up to 65% of the GPs may be spent on Perk Points, for for NPCs up to 75%.

Advice

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Please note

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Mini-FAQ

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sub-section

Q: A: Q: A:

The world

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World impact

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The Ärth setting

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See also

Advantage Point
Skill Point
Perk Point
and
Bonus Points