Goodie Points
From Sagataflwiki
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.
Crudely put, the more GPs a character is built on, the more capable he is of enforcing his will on the surrounding world, in both a passive sense, such as preventing world entities from maimimg, murdering or humiliating him, and in an active sense, such as causing small- or large-scale change upon the world.
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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.
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 DP = ((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
Attribute values affect skill learning speed, and thus the cost in Skill Points of skills.
Each skill has an Aptitude Block, consisting of seven attributes (only 3 for the Lores, the binary skills), some attrbutes appearing more than once in a block (for instance 5 instances of Intelligence and 2 of Will), thus defining the weight. For some skills, the learning speed is governed by 5 parts Intelligence and 2 parts Will. The higher Will or Intelligence is, the faster the character can learn that skill, so the fewer Skill Points it costs, and for that particular skill, Intelligence matters a lot more than Will.
Also don't be fooled by the relatively small differences in the cost of low skill levels. At some point, for each skill, your character will encounter something called the Plateau Effect, and the lower the character's Aptitude (weighted average of the relevant attributes) is, the sooner it'll occur. To truly compare Learning Speeds, look at fairly high skill levels, such as 6, 8 or 10 (depending on campaign "level", i.e. GP amount. Skill 6 is good in a 60 GP campaign, but completely unimpressive in a 160 GP campaign).
You must therefore choose how to distribute your Goodie Points.
Do you want a high-Attribute character with few Skill Points? Such a character has a lot of learning potential, and will increase his skills rapidly, especially if they start at low levels (low skill levels are cheaper than high skill levels), so that character concept has a certain three-dimensional shape, and can "respond passively" to frequently encountered challenges, since the skills pertinent to those challenges will automatically increase (and quickly, due to high values in relevant Attributes). On the other hand, it is no fun to play such a character in a very short campaign, so for one-shot campaigns, convention scenarios, brief playests and micro-campaigns, it's a bad idea, in a masochistic sort of way (and may also violate realism, if there is a close-knit and tactics-concerned PC party that allows your useless character to remain a member).
Note, however, that Advantage Points aren't used only to buy Attributes, which are potential, but also Advantages, that are often immediately useful, and which can make your character capabilitistically distinctive. Thus a DP-focused starting character doesn't have to be useless in the first few sessions. In addition to this, some attributes are directly useless, especially Charisma and Perception.
The other extreme is heavy on the Skill Points and low on Advantage Points, and thus has average Attributes, or ones only slightly above average. That's the veteran character (and you may want to put a few more GPs into Perks, to buy Reputations, Popularities, Rank and Equipment Budget, f that realistically fits the character concept), who has already done a lot of things. He's unlikely to improve much, since his relevant skills are already very high, and with average attributes he learns new skills only slowly, so he cannot "respond" well to challenge-frequencies. It may therefore be a good idea to make this charcter shape broadly skilled, or mostly broadly skilled but with a few skills that he truly masters, bought up as high as is reasonable given their price (keep in mind, with average values in the relevant Attributes, the Plateau Effect will occur early, at relatively low skill levels).
For players new to Sagatafl, the in-between character may be the best choice: Largely even weighting of Advantage Points and Skill Points, and a few Perk Points to buy desired social traits. Such a character can function well from the start, and has some ability to adapt to challenge frequency by learning new skills reasonably fast, and can also improve his primary concept skills by a level or two, without the XP cost being unreasonable.
Whichever spot on this spectrum you choose, please note that it is a spectrum, a linear distinction. It is a big mistake to put a lot of Goodie Points into Perk Points, unless you know exactly what you are doing, or at least have a fairly good idea and are receiving close advice from the GM.
All characters an benefit from a few Perk Points. 3% to 5% of GPs put into Perk Points is not unreasonable, maybe even 10%, but keep in mind that as with Skill Points, many Perks can be earned during play, either informally in the form of gained contacts (without the capital "C") and monetary wealth and found equipment, or formally in the form of Reputations and Popularities and Rank. Also, most Perks are the same cost for all characters, with Rank being a minor exception.
And if the campaign is about politics and strategy, then feel free to buy as many Perks as you want, just remember that if your character has little or no intrinsic competence, then other characters can take his Perks away quickly and easily. None of your character's Perks are in any way glued to him with metagame glue. Perks are gained and lost in an absolute realistic fashion. If a Perk should realistically be gained or improved, it is. If a Perk should realistically be reduced or lost, it is.
In particular, think twice before taking Perks that will bog your character down, such as Units (followers). If the campaign is likely to be about demonslaying in deep underground facilities with narrow passages, you'd be wasting a lot of Perk Points on buying a huge Unit (followers) of soldiers.
If your character is wealthy, but has no intrinsic capability to defend himself against robbers and thieves, then soon after robbers and thieves hear about the wealth, they will rob or steal it. If your character is the leader of an elite band of warriors, such as the Jomsvikings in the Ärth setting, but is unable to impress them in any way, someone else will challenge your charater's leadership, one way or another, and your character will lose.
You will also get it wrong. For the first several characters you make, your initial GP distribution will not be as it should be. You'll find yourself short of either DPs or SPs, and go back and shift a few GPs from Advantages to Skills, or from Skills to Advantages. Don't worry about that. It's perfectly normal. Your GM does that too. Even The Designer does it.
Or if you find yourself short of both DPs and SPs, then you need to tone down your character concept, because your imagination is operating at a level that is inconsistent with the amount of Goodie Points that you have to spend. As you gradually increase your familiarity with Sagatafl, you will get a better feel for the various "levels" of play that Sagatafl can be used at. 60 GP elite normals. 100 GP minor heroes. 140 GP great heroes. 180 GP mythic heroes.
The same goes if you can't find ways to spend all your DPs, or SPs, or both. Then you must identify key attriutes and key skills of your character concept, and increase them. Your character's key skills will most likely already be high, so even increasing one high skill by 1 level can burn a lot of Skill Points. Or if your character has an expensive Advantage that comes in multiple levels or grades, buy it at a higher level. Instead of Empathy 2 and Danger Sense 3, buy Empathy 4 and Danger Sense 4. That burns a lot of Advantage Points, and thus moves your character concept closer to the appropriate competence level.
Or go for Perks. If you already have the Attributes, Advantages and Skills you think your concept warrants, then give the character some nifty, powerful Perk, such as ownership of a permanent magic item, or high Rank in an Organization (Guild Master, or General). Or buy some stark Reputations or Popularities. Or if appropriate for the setting, and for the campaign expectations, throw a lot of Perk Points at a big Unit, and then ask if the other players are willing to have their characters be captains and lieutenants in your army (or whatever your Unit is).
Perks can be a wonderful GP sink, if you really do not know what else to spend your GPs on, although Perks can also be a recipe for player frustration. So consider yourself warned.
Please note
You never have to sit and fiddle with a calculator to find out how many Advantage, Skill or Perk Points you get for any amount of Goodie Points. A variety of tools and aids will be produced, including lookup tables in HTML (wiki) and PDF format, and eventaully a character creation spreadsheet with many features.
Also, you can get far with the rule of thumb: If you double the GPs put into Advantage Points, you get four times as many DPs (although actually it's slightly less, because of the linear component of the function), and if you double the GPs put into Skill Points or Perk Points, you get a bit over six times as many SPs or PPs (ignoring the linear component of the function you get 6.25 times as many, but the linear component does eat some of the pumping-up effect, so six is a good rule-of-thumb).
And note that this stacks multiplicatively. If you put eight times as many Goodie Points into Perks, you get something like 216 times as many Perk Points.
Permanent magical item refers to an item that remains magical forever (or at least for longer than a typical Human lifespan), as opposed to one that runs out of charges eventually and then is useless. It does not mean that the ownership of the item is in any way permanent or guaranteed.
Design history
Originally, Sagatafl had four categories. Seperate from aDvantage Points were Attribute Points, DPs and APs, and APs were used only to buy Attributes, while DPs are used to buy sub-Attributes and Advantages. This was scrapped, in favour of combining APs and DPs. The question then was, whether to call them APs or DPs, and it ended up with DPs, because characters built on many Advantage Points are genetically advantaged.
Also, originally Goodie Point amounts were five times lower, thus an average person was built in 8 GPs, and a capable but not-very-remarkable adventurer on 20 GPs. This proved too coarsegrained, though, when distributing GPs amoung the (then) four categories, and instead of allowing half-GPs it was decided to multiply GP amounts by 5 (this being 2.5 times as flexible, and integer values being prettier to look at), and at the same time include a divisor of /5 in the GP-to-category-point functions.
This explains some apparent wierdness in the GP system.
Mini-FAQ
General questions on GPs, Perks and GP functions
Q: Why is NPC creation more flexible than PC creation, in terms of the spending limit on Perk Points? I thought Sagatafl was supposed to always treat PCs and NPCs the same way.
A: The different treatment, with PC creators (typically players) being subject to a maximum of 65% of the Goodie Points spent on Perks, and NPC creators (almost always GMs) being allowed to spend up to 75% of GPs on Perks, is there to facilitate the creation of Perk-heavy incompetents. If the limit on NPCs was also 65%, then a GM who wanted to create an NPC with lots of Perks would have to use more GPs than the concept warrants, and end up sitting there with DPs and SPs in excess of what the character concept warrants, and he'd then spend those so that the end result is an NPC that is more inrinsically comptent than he ought to be. The 65% limit on PPs is extremely generous already, and even in a politics-heavy campaign, one starkly different from traditional adventuring, the PCs are very unlikely to go near that limit.
Q: Why all the warnings about going heavy on Perks?
A: This is thought necessary, because players may come to Sagatafl with assumptions from other RPG rules systems that are inapplicable here, such as that all advantages are somehow sticky, glued to the chaacter with metagame adhesive, so that if a player pays for the privilege of being Wealthy during character creation, the character is guaranteed to be Wealthy most of the time, and even if he is robbed or his property burned down or otherwise destroyed, it'll recover easily and almost automatically. Not so in Sagatafl. Perks represent only starting positions, states that the character is in at a specific point in time, namely that point in time in which the campaign begins. After that they fluctuate completely naturally. Perks are extreinsic traits, not intrinsic traits; external to the character, not internal. If a character has a lot of Perks, but lacks the intrinsic competence to protect and hold on to them, then malignant or greedy NPCs will destroy or steal or rob those Perks, sooner or later.
This goes even for intangibles like Reputations. It is perfectly legal to buy a Reputation as a total badass warrior, for a character that cannot fight at all. There'll even be rules for making this cheaper if the character has the skills that makes it more plausible and easier for him to fake such a Reputation. But once the game begins, NPCs might very well challenge that Reputation, in some way, and ask for or demand proof of martial prowess. Such a Reputation is unlikely to last long, before being eroded, eventually removed entirely and subsequently replaced with an undesirable Reputation for being a preposterous fraud and braggart.
If you are sure what you're doing, and you fully understand that Perks change in a completely natural fashion, and that all Sagatafl campaigns are very likely to take place in realistic worlds, then go ahead. Go near the spending limit of 65%. Even touch it if you feel like it.
Q: Why are the funcitons for converting GPs to SPs and PPs tentative? Why isn't the function for converting GPs to DPs tentative? How much is the DP function likely to change?
A: The reason that the SP and PP formulae are still tentative is one of scaling. There'll be a final multiplier applied to the total result of the SP function, and probably also the PP function, and it is not yet certain what that multiplier will be. The reason for this is that it is very desirable to avoid having to deal with fractional SP and PP costs. The scaling, the "shape" of the SP and PP functions, the rules-of-thumb, won't change, and the DP function is very unlikely to change at all, except perhaps that the linear component will be modified, although even that is not too likely.
Q: Can you please provide some more examples of levels of play, or competence levels?
A: As an attempt, 40 GPs builds an average person. This might be a white-collar worker, with some college or a full BA or BS, or a relatively well-off blue collar worker (a normal blue-collar worker is a very few GPs less, maybe 38 GPs, although often better physically fit). A welfare recipient maybe 35 GPs, or often even less if there is a severe physical or mental disability. Note that only a very abstract 40 GP character has been attempted, but he could afford everything he needed, including Skills, a Home, and a Job-shaped Income, and possessions.
60 GPs might be an elite soldier, or a non-elite special operations forces soldier such as the US Army Rangers or US Army Special Forces (a sergeant, member of an 12-man A-team). 50 GPs might built a SWAT police office or an experienced police detective, but easily 70-80 GPs for the kind of very skilled police or private detectives featured in novels, movies and TV shows. 45 to 50 GPs can probably build the average intellectual nerd, with above-average Intelligene and a wide variety of skills, either intellectual, or a blend of intellectual and hobbyist martial arts/guns skills. The Designer can probably be built on something between 50 and 60 GPs, but it's a long while since this was attempted.
80 GPs might built an elite special operations forces soldier, such as a US Navy SEAL, US Army Delta Force group member, or UK SAS trooper, although such a person will not have much in the way of skills not related to his or her military career. Someone with the ability to also have hobbies could easily be 90 or even 100 GPs, although a retired elite special operations soldier is more likely to be 80 to 85 GPs, all military skills having deterioated in some way due to disuse, and been replaced with civilian skills.
100 GPs builds a typical adventurer, as seen in many RPG campaigns, and in more modest action movies. He's broadly and deeply competent, and a party of such people, as opposed to a lone individual, can function very well in a wide variety of situations (the same way a team of 80 GP Delta Force dudes can function very well in almost any military or paramilitary situation).
The members of the IMF team from the Mission Impossible TV show were probably around 100 GPs.
At 120 and 140 GPs, competence goes up starkly, and lone adventuring begins to become more viable, with survivability even in a realistic campaign with no GM intervention to save the PC's bacon. 140 GPs can probably also be called heroic. And keep in mind, GP values are not linear. A 140 GP character is much more than 3.5 times as good as a 40 GP character.
Likewise the "Three Dryads", Daalny the Herb-Wise, Veldicka of London and Narvla the Raven-Haired, rampaging through Chritian Europe on a variety of automonous missions, are probalby buildable on 120 GPs, maybe 130. Likewise the "lesser" members of Eurielle of the Icy Land's team, Halfdan of the Great City, Ulf the Scraggly, and Folkvid the Troll-Axe, are probably buildable on around 140 GPs, although Eurielle herself and Johan the Trickster are more like 180 GP characters.
Above 140 GPs, at values of 160 or 180 GPs, we reach legend, maybe even myth. Phrases such as larger-than-life become apt. The character will be talked about a lot, not just during his lifetime, but also for many decades (several centuries for 180 GPs) after his death. Many Hollywood-movies will be made.
180 GPs can make for one comprehensively skilled badass. The non-powered superhero Batman, from the DC Comics universe, springs to mind as an example. Also the most elite NPCs of the Ärth setting are built on 180, 190 or 200 GPs.
Johan the Trickster at one point, during the period in which he applies for membership of Eurielle's team, thinks that he's very glad that Eurielle is on his side. This indicates that he realizes, fully, that she's an extremely dangerous person, one that he would hope never to have as his enemy. That's one way of recognizing a 180 GPs-or-so character: The visceral, emotional reaction of "I'm so glad that he/she is on my side". They're often as much like faces of nature as they are like human beings. (That certainly fits Sláine of Ulster, Asbrand, Eurielle and Johan the Trickster, and to a lesser extent Solomon ben Melchior and Olav Tryggvesson, and of course also Batman.)
200 or 220 GPs are certainly possible. Sagatafl won't break down, but at that point, the characters are almost divorced from the lives of ordinary people. One can easily build a demigod on much less than 200 GPs, but these guys, built on 200-220 GPs, will seem like demigods, to the average person.
More than 220 GPs, and we're probably entering superhero territory. Sagatafl can still work there, but it'll be a different experience, and there should probably be vast supernatural options to spend Advantage Points on (or Perk Points for a truly high-level poltics campaign), such as stark Psionics or vast magical powers. Otherwise it'll just bog down in everyone having maxed every single Attribute and having double-digit levels in almost all skills, with no real character differentiation.
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The world
The Goodie Point system does a good job of enabling the breadth of competences that need to exist in any realistic setting, from the few howling incompetents to the few profoundly capable. That the system is coarse-grained towards the low end of the competence scale, around normals and subnormals, does not matter, because it is not realistic for such people to be involved in interesting events in any capacity except as victims, and therefore it is not a legitimate power level for PCs in RPG campaigns.
World impact
GPs do not really impact the world, except insofar as they encourage the creation of NPCs of a wide variety of competence levels, from normals and slightly-better-than-normals with important social roles, and to the thoroughly able who can and will affect changes upon the world according to their agendae or whims.
Campaigns can feature PCs at any power level, from about 60 GPs and up to as much as the world can bear, with this limit being dependent solely upon whether or not expensive abilities, such as space opera-scale psionics, exist within the world or not. If there are no such expensive abilities, the practical limit is probably 220 GPs or so, and maybe 300 or 340 GPs if there are, or even more than that for actual superhero scale characters.
PCs built on less than 60 GPs are a truly bad idea, because their autonomous ability to overcome realistially encountered world threats and world challenges is minimal, and so they rely upon direct GM intervention to get anything done, which is of course severely undesirable.
The Ärth setting
The Ärth setting is a good example of the breadth of the GP value scale, with interesting characters some of which are worth as little as 80 GPs, and others that are worth more than twice as much.
Quick mini-glossary
Explain terms of great relevance to the subject matter of the article here, but not terms that are of generally great importance (e.g. RD).
Goodie Point. The "currency" of Sagatafl character creation. Each player gets an amount of these GPs, to distribute among the three categories of Advantages, Skills and Perks.
Advantage Point. Abreviated DPs, these are used to buy Attributes, sub-Attributes and Advantages, all traits that the character is effectively born with (they are largely determiend by the character's genes, and cannot be improved at all once the character leaves early childhood, except through magic or futuristic technology).
Skill Point. Abreviated SPs, these are used to buy Skills (and Lores, binary skills), and Trainings (such as improved Strength and physical endurance), acquired intrinsic abilities.
Perk Point. Abreviated PPs, these are used to buy external or extrinsic advantages, desirable states of being, starting positions, such as having ownership of a magical item.
Level of play. The scope of the campaign, as determined by how powerful the player characters are. 80 GP PCs will be fighting robber barons, or raiding coastal villages, or crawling around in dungeons, while 160 GP PCs will go on legendary quests and may realistically save the entire world multiple times. Level of play changes very little, if at all, during the campaign, and therefore is determined by the starting GP amount. It has nothing to do, in any way, shape or form, with character levels.
