Stop Spending Earned Character Points

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Alden Loveshade

I once saw a video where some of the original Dungeons & Dragons people said that, when they had a PC get very powerful, they stopped playing it and started playing a new one. They didn't want their PCs to keep getting more powerful. They didn't see a point to that.

It's different for very high-level characters in early versions of D&D. A great deal of their power is in weird and unique magical items, enormous spell lists, one-off abilities and the like. Eventually they become very hard work to play. GURPS allows for more character growth without starting to bend the system.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It's different for very high-level characters in early versions of D&D. A great deal of their power is in weird and unique magical items, enormous spell lists, one-off abilities and the like. Eventually they become very hard work to play. GURPS allows for more character growth without starting to bend the system.

Other early-D&D factors that could be relevant:
-There was some notion that a high-level PC would become a landholding power or similar. I dunno whether tables actually mandated that, but presumably somebody did.
-The official and AFAIK widely practiced custom was that replacement characters had to start from scratch. If your character had outlived their original compatriots they might be too high level to sensibly adventure with any other PCs in your gaming group...

[Ultraviolet]

I play in a long running Cliffhangers campaign with switching GMs. We started out as a spin off of a long running 3rd ed Cliffhangers campaiugn, which started in 1994. I can't recall when we rebooted but it was when 4th ed was new.
In the original campaign we started out with 100 pts, which was the fashion at the time. When we rebooted, my character - the one who had seen the most play, since people came and went and several of them switched characters - was around 400 pts. Mind you, we played bi-weekly and recieved 1-3 points per session.

The new campaign started out as 100 points as well, but it quickly seemd them 150 was the new 100. My new character is around 430 pts.

I've never had problems spending my points, but some of my co-players often sit around with 20-30 unspent points. Primarily because they forget to update, or just don't bother. Or because some of the less rules-savvy need design help for exotic stuff like Targeted Attack. And then once in a while they'll catch up.
In a campaign as long as ours, new needs arise. For one, we've taken to using Technical Grappling and some players invest points in becoming good grapplers. Traditionally we were based in London, but half a year ago we for some reason decided to move to Munich. That quickly went sour, and now we're in Shanghai. That means new Area Knowledges, Current Affairs, Language annd other skills to train. One character, who already had dabbled in some asian martial arts, decided to go full out kung fu. So that means learning Savoir Faire, Philisophy, Breath Control etc.

And of course, you can always blow points on social advantages! Several of the characters right now have some Wealth and Status, but Reputation is also important.
In the old campaign my character was an archaeologist from Australia (think Indy meeds Crocodile Dundee). His ambition was to become professor at a prestigious university, which cost a low of social Advantages and a lot of game time doing favours. Later on he turned out to be the potential heir of a Scottish castle and title, which took some back-in-time-as-ancestors adventure to resolve.

[Dencat]

Based on my observations on OtJT in real life, many people seem to train skills not actually that crucial for the job. Such as Current Events(Office Gossip) or (Company Gossip), different Area Knowledges and of course the very useful Advantage Danger Sensen with limitation Only when Boss is watching..

[dataweaver]

All true. But it's also true that they don't keep getting better and better indefinitely; they reach a point where these skills are adequate to their needs, and then they stop improving.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Alden Loveshade

Anybody else run into this? How do you deal with it?

Great topic. My first big GURPS campaign (a 3e outgrowth of my D&D campaign, a mix of Fantasy and Arabian Nights) lasted for more than ten years. Most of the players eventually stopped spending most of their earned CPs. One of them had nearly a hundred points in the bank. It was a LotR-style fantasy epic where the point wasn't to defeat the BBEG in combat as much as to convince the rest of the world that they faced an existential threat, to help resolve political conflicts to foster alliances, and to outsmart the ever-growing opposition. The PCs started at 100 points and began to stop spending points as they reached 400 points. The players became more interested in the ongoing story than buying new bennies for their characters. They would occasionally spend a few on something convenient, but for the most part, they just engaged with the world, the large cast of NPCs, and the sprawling plot without spending their points.

Honestly, this felt like a big win to me. Ultimately, engaging with the fiction is what it's all about. At the time, there wasn't anything like Impulse Buys out there, so I didn't have that option. Now I would move in that direction to provide the players with new ways to co-author the story.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

All true. But it's also true that they don't keep getting better and better indefinitely; they reach a point where these skills are adequate to their needs, and then they stop improving.

Time-Server in Social Engineering: Back to School is a pretty common quirk I see in real life that shows this well.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

Time-Server in Social Engineering: Back to School is a pretty common quirk I see in real life that shows this well.

*checks pg 15*

If you lack this quirk, you may add it in return for your first point in a previously unknown Easy or Average job skill

*checks B182: Archery is an average skill*
*checks F114: Archery is a job skill*

Apparently you only need skill 12 despite the template having 14... so if someone who normally does this at default (DX-5) wants to become an archer, they get an instant upgrade so long as it would bring them up to 12? One point brings average skills up to DX-1 so you'd only need DX13 for that?

I'm thinking you'd actually have to fulfill the minimum requirement (skill 12) before counting as joining the job and getting the instant skill point, which would mean a minimum DX of 17?

[dataweaver]

I generally don't use Time-Server in my games; it carries the implication that the reason why someone plateaus in his job is because of some sort of “burn-out” mentality — which, while it does happen, isn't the reason why most people plateau: for most people, it's simply a matter that they aren't insatiable learners: they want to know what they need to to do their jobs, and are satisfied once they can do that.

If anything, a mindset that keeps you perpetually looking for something new to learn about your job, and thus always benefiting from on-the-job training, is the exception to the rule and ought to be represented by a perk. And I'd be leery about that too, because another part of the tendency to plateau is that the more you know, the harder it is to learn something new: people stop trying to learn new things about the job because of diminishing returns from their efforts: after a while, it stops being with the effort. It's not a mental block; it's more a matter of setting priorities.

All of this is neatly captured by the aforementioned optional rule requiring you to spend character points as well as time in order to improve a skill.

[AlexanderHowl]

Honestly, I do not really believe that people plateau in skills, they just reach a point of diminishing returns, so they turn their attention to developing new skills. For example, people receive a +4 on routine skill rolls, so a person with skill 12 is just as good as a person with skill 24 when it comes to everyday tasks. Now, when it comes to situations where they are suffering a -8 to their roll due to crunch time, inferior equipement, sickness, etc., the person with skill 12 will likely horribly fail while the person with skill 24 will just breeze through, but such circumstances are so uncommon that it is often more rewarding to develop new skills rather than continuing to develop one skill.