"Limiters"

One day, we were making a character for Silver Age Sentinels - a point-buy superhero RPG. We made a gadgeteer - someone who could craft stuff at incredible speeds.  They also had the means to create the component parts out of thin air, and even create whole items (like, say, an engine) the same way.  On top of this, they could communicate with any machine, and control said machines with a thought (a machine including things like wheels, levers, handles, etc). The character had more than a few flaws, but that's not the point.

 

The point is the game had a limiter built in.  "You need to have a certain amount of points set aside to create gadgets". This is, we guess, to represent the limited materials you might have, or the limited funds, or whatever.  What that didn't take into account was the character could make the parts out of thin air - and the 'I make stuff' power didn't come with a quantity limit.

Now, maybe, we could have possibly accepted that if the created items had 'powers' or something, but the game put that limit on anything even remotely useful.  Wanted to gadgeteer a perfectly normal car? You need to have the spare points to spare.

Frustrating.

We've seen this wall in other games too.

"It costs X character points to get this thing you could go out and buy.  Don't care if you actually have the funds / contacts / whatever, if you don't have the points, you can't get the thing."

This seems to be the problem with most point-buy systems. They don't want you progressing beyond a certain power level without paying for it, but your character's running around in the 'real world' where there is a thing called "money".  Sure, you've got the Cyberdoc and the Cyberengineer, and the facility that they have access to and the parts, and the money to pay for it all.  What, don't have 10 character points? Sorry, no-can-do.

Yes, we've heard the 'game balance' mantra before.
It's bullcrap.

See, here's the thing.  Assigning point values to temporal power - something characters can gather over time - is absolute garbage.  Sure, the game master can come up with hundreds of reasons why the stuff 'isn't available at this time', "They're on vacation, the parts aren't in stock, you don't have the time to get the stuff you want", whatever.

The argument is 'the character needs to be on-par with everyone else'.

Then why have wealth?

Why have contacts?

Why have the ability to do stuff if it's tied to something that doesn't exist in-setting?

Now, Shadowrun had it better (even with a point buy character creation system).  You want something, you make the appropriate tests for it.  You've got the money?  Great.  Make the check to see if the stuff you want is available.  Make the check to see if your contact is available.  Passed?  Done, go get your implants, you're out of play for a little bit while you heal.  Or you go to a black market dealer and you get that nice car you're after.  Whatever.

One of the neat scenes in Iron Man 3 is when he pulls out all the armour and goes to town.  Imagine if the GM said 'sorry, you don't have enough points to have all your armour available to you'.  Yeah, the suits he uses personally are 'paid for', and in theory when he swaps armour they're all within a certain cost range - but what if he wanted to make suits for the entire team?  He's got the tech, the money, the resources, the time. Ignoring things like 'yeah, it doesn't suit the characters' - if they said 'sure thing' - he'd be able to do it.

There's no "well, sorry, you don't have the points", or "well, someone's got to pay the character points for it".  He does it.  It's done.

I'm sure Hawkeye and Black Widow wouldn't mind a bit more protection.  I mean, Spider-Man got the Iron Spider outfit (which we still think is cool).

 

We just don't think there should be 'meta' reasons for limits.  If it's something you could do IC, then it's something you can do.

Getting out of the 'point buy' thing, Pathfinder 2 does something similar with minion-masters, in that for each minion you have, it costs you one action out of your three to give the minion a command. Every single turn. Some guy with three trained hounds has to spend all three actions to tell the group 'sick 'em' on a single opponent.  Every turn.  Apparently, this applies to thinking, reasoning minions too.  "Hey, shoot that guy over there."  Isn't talking a 'free action'? But apparently, you need to remind your minion what they were doing every six seconds.

'But balance!' or 'But we don't want them to take up most of the game' or ... whatever.
Don't want it, you don't allow it at the table, you know?
But in stories you can see someone call a horde of woodland creatures to fight the enemy, or raise up a small army of the dead, or command a unit of soldiers to take down the foe.

It really shouldn't take all your actions to get the job done.  And most certainly not every six seconds.

If it's something that makes sense within the context of the setting, it should be possible.