Margin Based (also called Margin-Based or Based on Margin)
It is not a stand-alone enhancement but rather, modifies the cost of a leveled Affliction (advantage) enhancement.
It relates to Resistance Rolls or Quick Contests
Psionic Powers[]
GURPS Psionic Powers uses this (noted as Margin Based without a hyphen in parenthesis) on pages 13 and 50, the hyphenation refers to the rule but not the notation
50's Drain (Attribute) allows Margin of Victory to determine the multiplier.
Temporary Enhancements[]
Pg 9 lists "special cases".
Area Effect is one: you don't need to specify how many levels of AE: you just take the penalty for 1 and then the margin determined how many extra you might get.
- "It is up to the GM whether other leveled enhancements should work in a similar fashion"
Although the benefit is that it's not "all or nothing" (fail a -10 penalty for +100% worth of Ae, get no AE at all!) the drawback here is that you can obviously only spend FP to offset penalties, so you can only offset the initial -5 with 5 FP, you can't spend 10 FP to offset the -10 for 2 levels!
This is not a Margin of Victory, since it is a 1-sided roll it's just a MoS
Supers[]
Rapid Fire for Warp also uses a 1-sided margin roll to see how many warps happen.
The "shots fired" isn't exactly a bonus to the IQ roll (though that isn't ruled out) but rather, by having "more teleports" (higher cost enhancement) you can lessen the distance penalty more by dividing it into shorter hops.
The problem with this, however, is that additional hops means a greater required margin.
The example of incurring merely a -3 penalty for the longest (500) yard jump probably is not the best one. The "six hops" prior were 20 to 100, so adding somewhere between 120 and 600 yards, for 720 to 1100 yards. Regardless this would be less than 10 miles which would only give a -4 penalty.
Where this might be advantageous is as a means of bypassing Range Limit, where you would already be limited as the distance you can jump, if this allowed more total per turn.
The best tactics when combining variable length is to make the longest jump first, that way you will make a decent distance. Ideally you actually make them roughly the same, and just under the length needed to fit a penalty.
A better tactic for example might be to divide into a series of 10 yard jumps (no penalty). That way it would be easy to get a high MOS.
Unclear if you can attack in between the teleports.
Creatures of the Night[]
can be found in http://www.warehouse23.com//media/SJG37-1560_preview.pdf preview of GURPS Creatures of the Night page 4:
- Margin-Based
- (Optional Rule)
- Instead of causing a set effect, an Affliction with the Attribute Penalty enhancement, or an enhancement that adds or removes a leveled trait, can make that enhancement Margin-Based.
- This triples the cost of the enhancement, but the effect is multiplied by the subject’s margin of failure (maximum x10). Thus, the greider pays +30% for its Attribute Penalty (-1 to IQ) enhancement, but a victim who fails his resistance roll by 4 is at -4 to his IQ instead of -1!
This expanded the concept outside of Affliction, to any enhancements with leveled traits.
This might be helpful with boxing problems and leveled DR.
Quotes[]
PK[]
discusses in http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=27233
- Note the interaction between "IQ-1, +10%" and "IQ-1, Secondary, +2%". The latter only comes into play with MoS 5+ and costs 1/5 as much.
- Playtesting has suggested that it wouldn't be unreasonable to allow gradients of Secondary that only apply with MoS X and cost 1/X as much -- though it has a potential for abuse at low levels (specifically, taking lots of levels at MoS 2+ for 1/2 cost) that suggests it shouldn't be allowed as an unrestricted rule.
- So Margin-Based IQ-1 could be thought of as taking the full cost of one level, plus 1/2 the cost of another, plus 1/3 the cost of another, plus 1/4 the cost of another, and so on, down to 1/10 the cost of the final level. This comes to 7381/2520 of the cost, or 2.93x the cost of the enhancement.
- Not trusting that, I did some comparisons with similar builds of equal cost, and was happy to find that my version seemed priced very accurately in comparison. Compare the following builds, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all of which are roughly comparable in pure utility:
- IQ-1, Margin-Based, +30%: MoS 1 = -1 to IQ. MoS 3 = -3 to IQ. MoS 5 = -5 to IQ. MoS 7 = -7 to IQ. MoS 10 = -10 to IQ.
- IQ-2, +20%; IQ -5, Secondary, -10%: MoS 1 = -2 to IQ. MoS 3 = -2 to IQ. MoS 5 = -7 to IQ. MoS 7 = -7 to IQ
- IQ-1, +10%; IQ-10, Secondary, -20%: MoS 1 = -1 to IQ. MoS 3 = -1 to IQ. MoS 5 = -11 to IQ. MoS 7 = -11 to IQ. MoS 10 = -11 to IQ.
- The Margin-Based version merely smooths out the lumps found in the canonical builds, which was necessary to simulate the Greider's ability properly. After doing the math both ways, I'm satisfied with its final value.
- (And for the record, I have no comment on Cyclic. Considering that the math above was based on an existing meta-modifier -- Secondary -- I feel confident that it holds. Cyclic has no such modifier and I'm not 100% sure if it would carry over the same. If you allow it in your group, I'd love to hear how that works out.)