MP - What's up with the 2.5 CP thing?

The Mighty Protectors game is loaded with "2.5 CP" costs. You have to be comfortable with numbers or it makes you crazy.

Here's my take, from having read the 1997 "Advanced V&V" extension, Living Legends and Mighty Protectors.

I think the basic unit of build cost is 5 CP, and then granularity occurs, resulting in the need for "half values" (or 2.5 CP).  Unless I missed something, MP has only two places where 1 CP has any meaning - Basic Characteristics and Languages.

If I recall correctly, AV&V had more granularity, so this has already been collapsed and simplified.

I think MP 2e might collapse it more and go with a model like I'm about to present. You can even use this model now, depending on how you feel about half points.

On a brief tangent, the official rule is to round up those half-CPs. I recommend ignoring that rule, and just treating "2.5 CP" as a standard unit, instead of pretending "1 CP" is the baseline.

Here's a new unit called "Build Point." One Build Point is the equivalent of 2.5 CP.

In this model, everywhere it says "2.5 CP," you read it as "1 BP," and "5 CP" is read as " 2 BP."

1 BP buys 2 points of Basic Characteristics (the same that 2.5 CP would buy you), and 2 BP buys 5 points of BCs (same as 5 CP would buy).

This makes reading the game a lot easier.  The "Standard" character is now 60 BP, instead of 150 CP.  So, six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the-other.

Basically, just don't worry about the ".5" - once you get used to it, calculating a character's total CP cost is merely a matter of counting by 5s.

(Model Tessa Hays)