Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems

Inspired by Facebook's "Like" button (and the often requested "Dislike" button), I thought I'd take an entry now and then to talk about things I like and dislike in RPGs. I'll tag all of these posts with "Button" so that you can see them all in one place and get an idea of whether or not my tastes are like yours, which should be useful to you if I ever review RPG products here.

Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems

Now I'm not talking about little things like buying your attributes in D&D 4e. That has a very minor impact on the direction of character creation in that game, which mostly involves picking abilities from ever-growing lists. Offenders for this crime include systems like GURPS and HERO. Games where a player can't just sit down and say, "I want my dude to throw fireballs!" and then look up the fireball power and reference it on his sheet. If you want your "dude" to "throw fireballs" in these systems, get ready to crunch some serious numbers.

"Okay. Do you see your fireball being a thing that just hits one guy or hits a bunch of guys? Area powers cost extra you know. Hits a bunch of guys? Okay, does it explode or just kind of land on them? If it explodes, maybe you could buy the knockback feature with the power. You'll need three or four levels of it to lift anyone off the ground though. How far away can you fire it from? Do guys keep burning after it hits? Alright, buy these adders too then... This is getting too expensive for your character. You'll have to buy it with endurance drain to offset the price. Ooh, or you could take an allergy to cactus jelly and a dependent NPC with chronic anemia! That should give you just enough points to buy this without having the drawback of needing a material focus to use it."

Do you see where I'm coming from? These systems often gloat of their capability to handle any genre, but you're practically making a game yourself by the time you build all of the components. And even after that, we still don't know what a fireball really is! Another player in the same game could want a fireball-throwing power and build it completely differently unless you decide that the first player's decisions are canon in your game world.

The only way I could see myself enduring one of these systems would be if the GM had, in advance, custom built all of the options in his world from the point system. This would provide a consistency and logic across powers that would make sense in the world. But even at that point I'd end up building my character by poring over a text document, and at that point, I'd just as soon use a system built for whatever genre I'm trying to play.