pointbuy vs levels, pros and cons

[OgreBattle]

What's the advantage of picking one format over the other? While working on my fantasy heartbreaker, and reading discussions on TGD, leveling systems are beginning to feel pointlessly restrictive compared to point buy.

[...You Lost Me]

You can write nonfunctional builds and hard glass cannons by spending too many points in one category. What if I buy up reflex and will and never pick up fortitude?

[Stinktopus]

Point buy systems seem to break down in two common ways.

1. "We're not designing this for the munchkins, so balance isn't needed." Essentially, the point buys don't create equivalent characters and you may as well just have the DM create the characters.

2. "You can spend five points on swording, or on having a horse." It feels really wonky when material wealth and the capabilities of the character are tied to the same pool of points. It produces some weird results, like how a Savage Worlds character who is Very Wealthy can't afford a car.

[Sashi]

A levels system is a form of point buy, the "points" are just levels, instead of build points.

The major advantage of levels is that it allows you to create "package deals" of abilities and base the "price" on their synergy, rather than price everything individually.

Some point buy systems do this in other ways. I remember one that balanced casters by making them spend one of their two backgrounds on "magically talented" or else they simply couldn't use magic at all.

[K]

Point-buy is for systems with little meaningful advancement. The power levels stay pretty much in a small range. For example, a beginning Shadowrun character will win fights against deeply experienced Shadowrun characters and they can adventure together.

With levels, these things are not true. A 1st level DnD character will die in one hit to a 10th level DnD character.

[Insomniac]

You can write nonfunctional builds and hard glass cannons by spending too many points in one category. What if I buy up reflex and will and never pick up fortitude?

You mean like a Bard who thinks race, feat, equipment and spell selection that boosts a Fortitude save is...

"Totally weak, bro! The game's all about offense!"

Or all the Martial characters played all over the world who have classes with awful mental defenses and they never think to make a race, feat or equipment choice to shore their mental defenses up.

"Who needs that, bro! All about attacking harder!"

At least with point-buy you have a little freedom and aren't deliberately building in poor defenses.

[tussock]

@Topic. The point of the restriction is to make people buy a bunch of stuff at the same time. So your hit points go up with your attack bonus and saves and whatever else. So no one's allowed to cast a 5d6 fireball until everyone can take one in the face.

Sure, the Fighters never got nice things, but at least the starting Wizard didn't dump all his points into Circle of Death with a side order of 1/round at no cost and flying-invisible in exchange for a stutter, a third testicle, and endless enemies who can only target the other PCs.

[hogarth]

What's the advantage of picking one format over the other?

As Sashi said, those aren't mutually exclusive; it's more like a spectrum of how many abilities you can select a la carte. Do you really mean "classless vs. class" instead?

[Josh_Kablack]

In a level based system:

1. Power of PCs usually scales dramatically during gameplay. (in 3e D&D a 3rd level party will have an easy time in a fight that is just double the number of the same opposition that gave them a really tough time at 1st level, and a 7th level party may be able to win such an encounter with a single spell)

2. PC advancement is along more predictable paths. Attack Values, Target Numbers, Health and Damage will all scale with level (although often in ways that become lopsided)

3. New players get introduced to game rules relevant to each level at a time, making breaking the learning curve into discrete chunks.

4. As a player's system mastery increases, they may come to regret past advancement choices made during prior levels.

In a point buy system:

1. Power of PCs usually scales much more slowly. (This is far from absolute, I've been in both Champions and Feng Shui (class based, but advancement is points) games where the PCs more than doubled in power)

2. PC advancement is much more open and players can be much more creative. Characters are never directly locked in to advancement paths (although certain abilities may be optimal or trap options) The flipside is that characters may gain massively in a single category of power (like damage dealt) without increasing other categories (like health/HP)

3. New players must either have a system veteran build their first PC, or learn the entire system at chargen.

[...You Lost Me]

[Crazy things]

You make no sense. A point-buy game is deliberately building in poor defenses because the built-in defense is no defense at all. Now those crazy fighters who want all attack powers and those crazy bards who never want to boost fortitude will do that even harder than before because point-buy gives them the option to do so.

Classes do the opposite, because they lock you in with minimum values. If anything you should be supporting level-based design.

[CCarter]

For newbies you can always have 'Archetypes' that are pre-built and make getting into the game easier.

In addition to what other people have said, considering points systems I'd say:

Pro - Point systems do seem to be better at the equivalent of '+1 to a stat or that feat' type choices. Maybe since escalating costs eventually stat pumping a bad idea. Most level systems have escalating costs built into getting levels themselves, then linear costing within the class that rewards maxing out a particular stat or strategy.

Con: Because point systems don't inherently have niche protection, balancing options may be harder, and failure to do so will may result in everyone having similar-looking characters.

[PhoneLobster]

It's been said already but I'll say it again.

The basic benefit of point buy is increased customization, the basic cost of that is increased risk of the specialist vs generalist problems that many RPGs suffer from.

Your point buy systems perhaps could have some attempt at protections built in either with segregated pools of points and purchasable options, or with somewhat more subtle limits to potential stacking. But generally that's not done.

As someone who's been building and running his own point buy based systems for an extended period now I'll sticking with the specialist/generalist thing as the big bogey man. I would like to think that some of the relatively soft segregation and stacking limitations I have tried have significantly helped out.

Enough that I'm frankly a little bit amazed that more point buy systems don't seem to even ATTEMPT such moderate limits, let alone the potentially much harder limits that could be used.

But even within what I would regard as a pretty successful take on dealing with the specialist/generalist point buy bogey man, it's still the bogey man you choose to deal with in preference to dealing with the customization limitations of a Class based system.

[Koumei]

Point-buy makes it really easy for everyone to step on each others' toes, but let's be honest here: that happens really often with classes as well, just by people taking similar classes (or taking other options like feats that let them do the same thing), or through the game itself basically focusing around one thing and everyone does that.

So if you can do a thing where you say "Jim likes to be the sneaky stealthy one and doesn't want a whole party of ninjas, and so he's going Rogue and promises to do all minesweeping, could other people please not then play Invisibilitymancers, Ninjas, Rogues and Shadow Stalkers?", then let's face it, you can also say "Okay so Bob put fifteen points into Driving and would like to be The Pilot, it would be nice if others didn't try to be The Pilot as well".

[hogarth]

Enough that I'm frankly a little bit amazed that more point buy systems don't seem to even ATTEMPT such moderate limits, let alone the potentially much harder limits that could be used.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a game with a point buy system that doesn't have either built-in or suggested limits.

Champions has a suggested limit on the number of points you can put in one power based on the power level of the campaign.

M&M has even more specific limits on where you can put your points based on the power level of the campaign..

DC Heroes had practical limits on how big powers could get, due to its exponential power costs.

3E D&D has limits on how many points you can put into skills and which feats a character can take based on the power level of the campaign.

What counterexamples are there?

[Whipstitch]

So if you can do a thing where you say "Jim likes to be the sneaky stealthy one and doesn't want a whole party of ninjas, and so he's going Rogue and promises to do all minesweeping, could other people please not then play Invisibilitymancers, Ninjas, Rogues and Shadow Stalkers?", then let's face it, you can also say "Okay so Bob put fifteen points into Driving and would like to be The Pilot, it would be nice if others didn't try to be The Pilot as well".

Yeah, I suppose it's technically a drawback, but I did enjoy throwing a cheeto at my cousin when he got all butthurt over not being allowed to bogart the Stealth and Perception skills. I mean, c'mon, it's Shadowrun! Shadows and running in them is in the title! It's a game with ED-209 and something called the chunky salsa rule. If your GM tries to run things RAW then being bad at camouflage is like being the dude with 6 Constitution in the Tomb of Horrors.

[Josh_Kablack]

Champions does not have built-in hard limits, but the suggestion to set limits of some sort on CVs, damage and defenses is so strong that you will just about never see a campaign without some sort of gentleman's agreement on it. However what those limits are and what precisely counts against those limits will vary drastically from table to table.

[...You Lost Me]

Dragonquest has no suggested limits. It just hands you an XP pool and a bunch of ability trees. It's also a dead game, but examples are examples.

[PhoneLobster]

What counterexamples are there?

The limits in your examples seem somewhat poor.

The most likely to be practical is M&M which I'm unfamiliar with.

As for the others.

3E skills aren't really a point buy character advancement/build system at all. And outside of Ranks characters can modify skill totals out the window pretty freely (and have ludicrous variance and specialty within ranks, to the point of just flat out having vastly more ranks in general).

And for the other two, you need more than just a flat out limit on depth in a single skill. People are complaining about glass cannons unless the system contains a clear motivation to spend something on defenses at best a "no more than X in fire cannon!" is highly likely to just produce characters with X in Fire Cannon AND X in Ice Cannon. Not to mention never producing characters that diversify in less directly explosion related random second rate options that these systems seem to be designed with the assumption of being oddly compelling or demanded by a gentleman's agreement.

[Judging__Eagle]

Where would something with pre-arranged pools of points for different aspects of ones character; such as After Sundown, be classified?

It's something of Point Buy, but also has parts of the "levels" since each "chunk" of the character has minimums and maximums.

[PhoneLobster]

It's something of Point Buy, but also has parts of the "levels" since each "chunk" of the character has minimums and maximums.

It would just be a point buy+Level system instead of a Class+Level or a Point buy+Individual Point advancement system.

[Koumei]

The way M&M worked was as follows:

You have a Power Level, which determines the maximum (total, after all modifiers are added together) rating in anything ever, and which also determines how many points you have to spend on stuff.

It then gives a suggestion as to how you break it down, but you are allowed to just max out your basic BAB, Defence, Saves or just be SUPER SKILLED or whatever, or be an enfeebled dolt who put basically all points into powers.

This might sound perfectly reasonable, except they then provide two (stackable) ways to ignore the actual hard limits: the first is by buying the (dirt-cheap) feats of Power Attack (lower attack bonus, raise damage rating, even above maximum), Accurate Attack (see above, but inverted), Expertise (lower attack bonus, raise defence, even above maximum), Reckless Attack (as above, but inverted). The second is you can actually say, at character creation, "I am going to permanently reduce my maximum Defence Rating/Damage Rating/Saving Throws/BAB by X and increase (one of the above) by X."

So until you get to the above paragraph, it was workable. It was point-buy with levels, and with some suggestions you're free to ignore. And then they said "oh also you can ignore everything here."

[darkmaster]

It should be noted that power attack and the like are capped at +/-5 and trade offs are TECHNICALLY +/-10 but anyone who knows what they're doing only allows up to a maximum of +/-5. I personally never go more than +/-3 because you get diminishing returns after that.

Or are we talking about 3e where it's exactly the same except that you can go up to +/-2 without power attack and the like?

Or 1e which I haven't had the chance to read?

[RobbyPants]

What's the advantage of picking one format over the other? While working on my fantasy heartbreaker, and reading discussions on TGD, leveling systems are beginning to feel pointlessly restrictive compared to point buy.

Level system
Pros:
[*]Easier to calculate power level
[*]Keeps stats on a standardized advancement rate
[*](Possibly) makes advancing your PC faster
Cons:
[*]You are more locked in with regard to the choices you make during advancement
[*]Adding more options likely takes much more page space. For example: if your system doesn't have a good way of combining Fighter and Mage, you will have to create a new Fighter-Mage class


Point buy system
Pros:
[*]More freedom to build your PC how you want
[*]Able to create a very wide array of PC options out of a relatively small amount of actual available options printed in the book
Cons:
[*]Hard to predict power level. Some threats may behave as expected, others might have disproportionately weak or powerful offenses offset by a disproportionately powerful or weak defense. Fights may likely ping pong between boring and insanely lethal
[*]It may be very hard to playtest all the available combinations


Of course, it's possible to think of these as being on different ends of a spectrum. You can add limits to what you can and cannot buy with your points to help keep things sane. You can add customization to your level-based system to mix things up a bit. A point buy system with sufficient limitations will begin to resemble a level based system with sufficient customization.

[ishy]

I'd say a class system allows more freedom to build a PC how you want, while a PBS prevents that.

You can add some nice flavourful, situational mechanics in a class based system, since you only care about the balance as a whole.
While in a PBS you're locked in to needing the good stuff.

For example (not saying you'd necessarily want to include this in your game) : you want to do something like monks get the AC of a plate armour while not wearing any armour.

In a class system you just give them that for free.
While in a PBS system, either everyone has it, or you need to put some kind of cost on it (even though it isn't really worth anything)

[mlangsdorf]

Depending on the system and the implementation of the power, having defenses equivalent to wearing full plate while not wearing full plate could give you some of the following benefits:
* additional defense from actually wearing full plate
* increased movement speed compared to the guy wearing full plate
* extra load capacity from not having to cart a suit of full plate around
* you get your defenses anywhere, including situations in which wearing full plate is inappropriate.

Now, I'll grant that for a variety of reasons, those aren't very good benefits in D&D. But if you're playing "Burn Notice: The Role-Playing Game" and 90% of the game is spent on the streets of Miami, having invisible weightless rifle-proof armor is worth a fair bit.