On nude teleportation

There's an occasional debate in GURPS-related circles (I can already see some of you pulling hats down and turning abruptly away; I promise this will have some broader relevance) about teleporting people out of their clothes.

This is not because GURPS players are particularly exhibitionist*. It's an artefact of how powers work and how they're made. See, teleportation is generally done using a power called Warp, which you can tweak in many ways to get different forms of teleportation, from Nightcrawler bamfing, to travelling through fairy rings, to performing a weeks-long ritual that petrifies you while a statue of you grows on Mars and becomes fleshier until you awaken there. And all of these are cheaper if you have to be naked.

* I have no data to support a conclusion in either direction.

Naked is a -30% limitation on Warp, and Warp is very expensive: 100 points, which is most of a typical starting character's points. Pricing is slightly more complex than I care to explain, but requiring nudity (either pre-teleportation or as a side-effect of teleportation) is going to save you about 30 points, or about a fifth of your total. So far, so good.

Things get trickier when you want to teleport somebody else. You do this using an Affliction, which (amongst so many other things) can slap an advantage onto another person. Or a chair. Or a planet, if you're hard enough. The price of the Affliction depends on what advantage you're giving them, and it's far more expensive than buying it for yourself.

This means the ability to teleport another person, unmodified, costs 1000 points. But if you have the ability to teleport another person naked, it costs only 700 points! Fantastic savings buy now while stocks last!!!

When you are applying this ability to move your friends and allies around - with, one hopes, their consent - that is reasonable. You can teleport them, but it requires their nudity (one way or the other). It means they may have awkward social situations, and more importantly, they can't carry any gear with them for fighting, heists, etc. So, it's significant cheaper. Fine.

Where arguments begin is when you use that power to teleport an opponent. Being able to teleport an enemy in combat, a guard blocking the way through a door, a political adversary who's trying to avoid the press, etc. is really useful. Being able to do that and strip them naked in the process is even more useful. But by the common assumption and the usual reading of RAW, it's cheaper.

Nuance, in my RPG? The very idea

Generally the arguments go one of two ways. Okay, there are some more, but those tend to be pretty unreasonable ("This is why I ban limitations in my games") or extremely dogmatic ("It is a legal limitation so you have to allow it in this exact way") in ways that the game overall does not support and that I don't think are interesting to discuss.

The permissive viewpoint goes something like: This is indeed troublesome. Still, the most useful feature of Affliction-Warp is to move allies around, and there Naked is a limitation, so the fact that it's beneficial when used on enemies isn't a big deal.

The restrictive viewpoint goes something like: This is troublesome, so you should buy Affliction-Warp with additional limitations like "Only on willing targets", or treat Naked as an enhancement on Affliction-Warp if it's intended for use on enemies.

Both have their points, but I'm going to suggest a more complex approach might be helpful. The fact is, GURPS has a fundamental principle that a limitation is only a limitation if it limits you. Controversial stuff, I know.

In the case of teleporting yourself or an ally, Naked is indeed a limitation, because it restricts your options or causes you inconvenience. There are situations where you can't use Warp because the nudity makes it impractical or causes unwanted consequences.

In the case of teleporting an enemy, Naked is not remotely a limitation, unless you are doing so specifically to move or obtain something they're holding, wearing, etc. That's not a very common case, and you can still do that with inanimate objects (a weapon, say) by targeting them directly, so it's only really an issue if you desperately want to yank them over and rifle through their pockets or something.

So to make the pricing reflect actual usefulness, I think there are a couple of other options.

Option one is to interpret the limitation in the least favourable form for the player. When you A-Warp (Naked) your pal, they end up stark naked in the street. When you A-Warp (Naked) an adversary, it only works if they are nude. Both forms of Naked are valid ways for the limitation to work, but only the "requires prior nudity" version functions to limit the power, so that's what you get.

The other option is to apply the pricing both ways. The ability to A-Warp your mates is limited by requiring or imposing nudity, so you get the -30% limitation. But the ability to strip adversaries of their stuff is not merely not limiting, it's beneficial; it's an enhancement, worth +30%. These cancel out, so your A-Warp (Naked) ends up with a +0% price modifier overall. If you don't like it, buy the "willing only" version to get the Naked discount and an extra discount for the limited target selection - it's a double win.

The broader point here is that, especially in a toolkit game, it's useful to think about all the ways an ability is going to get used, and that might mean getting creative in determining the appropriate pricing. Things that function as a drawback or an enhancement work differently depending on how they're being used.

It's well past my bedtime so I'll leave off here, any further intended musings on other games will have to wait. Feel free to add some!