Aberrant RPG - Couple of newbie Q's (not quantum)

[Alistaire]

Hi there,

Long time Trinity player finally giving Abbie a go. So far not bad, good role-playing material.

But I digress. A couple of things in the game don't make sense to me and I would appreciate some thoughts and/or clarification. I looked around on the forums but didn't see them elsewhere so forgive me if this has come up before.

1) Resources: They have the Resources background dots, and item cost dots, but no description that I can find on how to buy stuff with them. Does it, as I have been assuming, work like Trinity, where you roll your resources and one succ buys you a equal dot item, two = Resources +1, etc.? Or is it something different that I perhaps missed? If they did leave it out, what do you guys do? (I feel esp. sorry in this case for those who never played Trinity first!)

2) Certain merits, e.g. Speed Reading and Photographic Memory, give you the same abilities as Mega attribute enhancements. ::confused I mean what? Granted, Joe the farming yokel won't get as many dice to roll or whatever when he tries to read, but it would not be that much different than Brainitor the Mega-Int Master would get (4+succ, so at least 5); not enough, IMHO, to correspond to the difference in their respective intelligences. And especially not enough of a difference in their point costs: Merit = 2 bonus points, Enh = 3 NP = (based from cost of attribute dots) (15 x 3) 45 BP! (I won't go into XP, this is just for rough example.) It's just that I think that Brainitor would feel a little cheated if Joe could even keep up to a quarter his speed, never mind half or more if Brainitor rolled poorly (as can only happen to godlings in WW games ("oops! Look at all those six's!"). Does anyone else feel similar here? If so, what do you do about it? So far I've just banned those merits from my game.

Anyway, TIA!

[metaphysician]

Not a direct answer, but keep in mind that the bonus point to nova point conversion efficiency is *widely* variable. Quantum, for instance, is an extremely efficient to the point of broken purchase.

[BlueNinja]

1) Resources: They have the Resources background dots, and item cost dots, but no description that I can find on how to buy stuff with them. Does it, as I have been assuming, work like Trinity, where you roll your resources and one succ buys you a equal dot item, two = Resources +1, etc.? Or is it something different that I perhaps missed? If they did leave it out, what do you guys do? (I feel esp. sorry in this case for those who never played Trinity first!)

IIRC, the character can buy anything with a cost of less than his resources without needing to worry about the cost. (If you have Resources 3, going out and buying a Knife with a one-dot cost shouldn't make you worry.) At an equal level, I believe you are limited to one purchase per month, and at a higher cost you have to roll at a difficulty equal to however many dots you are short.

In general though, as has been pointed out on many threads (especially a four-page one in the Trans-D forum) it is so ridiculously easy for a nova to make money that I don't believe it was really worried about. There are a lot of powers that are very commercially viable, and that's not even counting Mega-Atts.

2) Certain merits, e.g. Speed Reading and Photographic Memory, give you the same abilities as Mega attribute enhancements. ::confused I mean what? Granted, Joe the farming yokel won't get as many dice to roll or whatever when he tries to read, but it would not be that much different than Brainitor the Mega-Int Master would get (4+succ, so at least 5); not enough, IMHO, to correspond to the difference in their respective intelligences. And especially not enough of a difference in their point costs: Merit = 2 bonus points, Enh = 3 NP = (based from cost of attribute dots) (15 x 3) 45 BP! (I won't go into XP, this is just for rough example.) It's just that I think that Brainitor would feel a little cheated if Joe could even keep up to a quarter his speed, never mind half or more if Brainitor rolled poorly (as can only happen to godlings in WW games ("oops! Look at all those six's!"). Does anyone else feel similar here? If so, what do you do about it? So far I've just banned those merits from my game.

As was mentioned, there's a number of situations where the number conversion over just doesn't match. However, I don't think it's all that bad. Speed Reading and Lightning Calculator are two of the more under-used merit/enhancements I've seen, and while Eiditic Memory is highly useful (and cheaper to buy that way), it's often easier for the player to take it as their "free" enhancement rather than worry about what not to buy with bonus points. After all, Eiditic costs you 20% of your bonus points, but only 10% of your nova points (or less, if you make it your free one). It's also really cheap to buy enhancements with XP, so much that I have not created one character with more than one enhancement per Mega-Att from NP.

Hope that helps. ::smile

[Alex Green]

RE: Resources

If memory serves, BN is right although I can't point to a page number.

RE: Merits

1) Those merits presumably don't work as well as the actual powers.

2) Even if they do it's pointless. There actually are people who can do these things, but having a good memory doesn't make you worth 10 mill a year like Mega-Int does.

3) There is no rolling for a direct contest in this sort of thing, the guy with the higher mega-stat automatically wins (see rules for contesting mega-stats).

4) In general those merits are expensive to buy with bonus points, and cheap with nova experience.

5) Those rules & merits were written for novas, feel free to ban their use for non-inspired.

6) Especially feel free to ban their inappropriate use. If you have a "best in the world" baseline scientist who is dealing with a crew of novas which doesn't have a mega-int brain, then maybe he should have that merit. If you have a baseline scientist who is dealing with a nova scientist, then the baseline probably shouldn't be built to show up the nova. The average non-best-in-the-world simply won't have them

7) Similarly you shouldn't allow the "sexy" merit to be taken by 60 year old male bums with an App of 1. You're ST, and you can and should be vetoing things that don't make sense regardless of how point efficent they are.

It's just that I think that Brainitor would feel a little cheated if Joe could even keep up to a quarter his speed...

Assume Joe can get a quarter of his speed. This means that what Joe can do in a month Brain can do in a week. Note that the reverse isn't true. There are things Brainitor can do which Joe simply can not.