Wherein I once again wax frustrated over buying earmarked Impulse Buy Points

 I'm sure by this point, if you're a regular reader, you're used to me complaining about this.  But let's go at it again, once more, for old time's sake.

I love Impulse Buys.  I think they were one of the great additions to GURPS for a variety of reasons, and not because they make the game "more narrative."  I play plenty of games where you have a resource and you bid on or buy successes. GURPS isn't one of those.  GURPS is a game about thinking through everything, coming up with a good battle plan and then seeing what happens. This randomness and uncertainty is important, and I'll discuss why I think so in a later post, but Impulse Buys act as a way of mitigating some of that randomness, exercising tight, focused little narrative tweaks to change the chaos of a storyline created via multiple players' input and the input of the random variable of the dice, and trying to push it back into a semblance of a satisfying narrative.  They allow you to add a bit more meaning than usual to the unbridled mayhem of a typical GURPS game.

Luck mechanics, like Impulse Buys, can also be tailored to give a character a theme.  For example, a swordmaster could be someone with very high sword skill.  I think everyone would buy that.  But if you also gave them the ability to turn one failed sword roll into a success, they begin to take on a mythic quality: not only are they highly skilled, but luck itself seems to guide their blade.  Monster Hunters has some of this with their Wildcard Impulse Buy points, which turn Sword! from something that is frankly overpriced into something that is awesome. We can think of other things like this: the character that can freely buy away one wound per session as a flesh wound, or a character who take turn his opponent's failures into critical failures once per session (some player, somewhere, is reading that and thinking "Wheeeee!"), etc.

But notice how often I say "Once per session."  I want to see these as earmarked (for a single, specific purpose) and used once per session (or maybe twice or maybe three times, but my experience with them is once you make something so limited in utility, it's very unlikely to come up multiple times per session, and they can become frustrating when they do: a character who can buy away five wounds per session begins to approach invulnerability for practical purposes; you can kill him, sure, but you need to start thinking of ways around that absurd luck the way one thinks his way past Superman's invulnerability).

So, we just use Aspected Impulse Buy Points, right?

How Impulse Buy Points Actually Work

To follow along, I recommend the Power-Ups on Impulse Buys, and Christopher Rice's work on "Impulse Control" in Pyramid #3/100.

So, how much does buying a recurring Impulse Buy point cost? Well, it costs 5 points. You buy a level of Destiny and you get one impulse buy point per session.  We can even aspect it.  Say, we Double Aspect it (only to buy successes with sword attacks) -40%, so we only need to buy 3 points.  Great!  We have everything we want. But what if we want to now buy a Flesh Wound point? I'd argue that's a double aspected point too (I mean, it's a single aspect of impulse buy points, but it's fairly niche), so that's another 3 points for a total of 6 points, right?

Well, hold on.  It turns out it doesn't work that way.

Destiny, at 5/level, is a container of Impulse Buy points.  The advantage to having Destiny 3 [15] is not that you get three Impulse Buys per session, but that you can spend up to three in a session. As someone pointed out to me, Destiny is like Energy Reserves for Impulse Buy Points:  you're buying the capacity for Impulse Buy points, not the Impulse Buy points.  You "naturally" regenerate 1 impulse buy point per session, the way you regenerate Energy Reserves at one point per 10 minutes of rest.  

So what happens if you want two per session?  Well, Impulse Buys pegs this at 10 points for a second Impulse Buy point per session and, of course, you need the capacity for it, so you're looking at Destiny 2 [10] and Increased Impulse Buy Regeneration (2 per session) [10] for 20 points. Chris looks at faster regeneration rates and pegs 4/session at 20 points, though I think his reasoning is wrong here (he argues that regenerating 1 per hour is the equivalent of spending 4 per session given that most sessions go for about 4 hours, while I think it would, you know, be equivalent to regenerating 4 per session), but you can make the case that it works like Regeneration does for fatigue: you spend some amount to increase your rate of regeneration.  Whatever your choice, if you want to reverse engineer it into "look, I want to regenerate a single extra point per session for this, and a single extra point per session for that" you run into some really crazy math.

I would, at this juncture, like to point out a fundamental difference between Energy Reserves and Destiny: if I buy multiple forms of Energy Reserves (say, one for Psi and one for Magic), these regenerate independently from your fatigue and one another.  Of course, they're also earmarked for specific uses.  Destiny doesn't seem to work this way.

So how much, after all of this, does a single impulse buy point cost per session? I'm still not really sure.  Originally I would have pegged it at 5 points, which fits the model we usually see in reverse: if Destiny costs 5, and a "single use" ability costs 1/5, then a Single Use Destiny is 1 point (which makes sense: you're just earmarking that point to be an impulse buy point).  So, isn't the reverse true?  Well, not necessarily. We often price advantages more than we'd price disadvantages, so making a single use ability multi-use might cost more than 5×. If you eyeball it, it seems to clock in closer to 10-15 points.

But what about...

So, computer programming lesson: if you find you're trying to rebuild something from the ground up to get it to do what you want, maybe it wasn't intended for what you want at all!  "Destiny" is ultimately a measure of how important your character is, their capacity for greatness.  That greatness is manifest in the maximum of Impulse Buy points you can spend in a single session, but if you're going to go berserk in a session and rewrite all of fate and destiny, it's going to take you awhile to recover.

So, let's step back.  What we want is a trait that you can buy that let's you make a narrative edit once per session.  What trait is that?

The first that leaps to mind is Serendipity.  Impulse Buy even suggests replacing Serendipity with two "Serendipity points" that can only be used for scene editing.  Now, I'd like to note that Serendipity, as written, doesn't actually allow the player to dictate events (that's what the Wishing enhancement is for), but when I tell that to most GURPS people, they look at me in shock, because nobody ever uses that rule.  But even so, we get an idea of what an impulse-buy-per-session would cost: int his case, it's about 7.5 per point (they regenerate every session but don't accumulate, perfect for my purposes) which, if we go back to my "about 10 points for an impulse buy" lines up nicely if we toss on an -20% limitation of "For scene editing only."

We have other examples, though.  Gizmo is effectively scene editing impulse buys for "but I actually have a gadget for that." And, in fact, Foresight, which is based on Gizmo, is very similar: it's also basically scene editing, but with the limitation that you need to justify it somehow.

These also address a complaint someone had about using Serendipity as the basis for these traits: the Serendipity version often ends up at unwieldy point totals and people question the value of "Aspect" on these anyway.  So this suggests using a 5/10/15 point scheme for these might be okay:

• 15 points gets you an extremely broad use of the equivalent of an Impulse Buy (or 2) once per session (or an extremely limited Impulse Buy per hour). It might let you turn a success into a critical success, or turn an enemy's failure into a critical failure, or allow generous scene editing.  It would require some justification and GM oversight, but it might be allowed.
• 10 points gets you a more minor, but largely unlimited Impulse Buy spend (about 1 point worth).  It might let you turn a failure into a success, or do a minor scene edit; Again, you need some justifications and oversight, but it could work.
• 5 points gets you a very limited impulse buy spend: you can turn a failure into a success for a single skill, or you can buy a flesh wound, or you can do a scene edit to claim you have a gizmo only.

This is what I get if I extrapolate Serendipity, Luck, Gizmo and Foresight into more generalized traits.  I'm curious what you think.  I'd really like to get a handle on how this mechanic is supposed to work. Let me know in the comments or the discord.