Resolved,There is no point to statting up anything that is not a PC

[Gizensha]

Originally Posted by Icelander

All the same, I think that more people are wired to think in narrative terms than in binary code. We are, more than anything else, a storytelling species. The thing that makes us human is our ability to turn events that may be only loosely connected into a coherent narrative.

I'd say 'pattern matching' species, myself - The tendency to turn events that aren't connected into a coherent narrative is simply a manifestation of the same property that causes us to see pictures in clouds.

I'd go on to presume that some people prefer to pattern match in different media, and intuiting a character from a trait list is just as much pattern matching as intuiting a narrative from random events, or a face from craters on the moon.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

I see now what the misunderstanding was and I believe I understand how our techniques in GMing differ. In short, my game balance issues are different from your game balance issues because we are fiddling different knobs for difficulty.

By setting the 'Standards' for background and scaling encounters on situation and multiplicity of enemies as opposed to individual enemy strength, you save ALOT of work and I see the efficiency of your approach. You all generally keep NPCs similar to troop's tier/level of specialization model with Skills peaking out around 14-16 for NPCs. TO balance that, you seem to keep more 'horizontal' concepts of character advancement (multiplicity of skills, allies, contacts etc).

The 'D&D type' comparison is a fair one (in the sense that as the players progress, they tend to grow 'vertically'), and that is the sort of game Im running and, although it gives me fits on balance, it allows my players to feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. Its worth noting that my players are, 13-18 years old, all come from a video game background (as all kids do these days) and all but one are males. Shooting a rope in half with a rifle from 300 yards away is fun for them. :)

We play it a bit more open ended on the character side. If my players wish to dump a sizable amount of points in <weapon of choice> skill and run it to the moon, I allow that, with the known and accepted condition that specialization means your chances to perform in those areas are much more limited than a 'rounded' build. They're cool with it, and so am I.

A couple more things about this.
Sometimes the PCs will have to go up against people who aren't average. Big powerful people. Those people are special and I stat them up beforehand. How do I do them? I don't do them with mathematical modelling. Usually I take the data I've come up with watching the players fight the average people and then use that to tweak my bigger foe. Because here is the thing: I have had players who were staggeringly effective in combat even with relatively weak PCs. I've also had players who were staggeringly ineffective in combat even with high powered PCs. I would probably put a stronger foe (or set of foes) up against those weaker PCs than the stronger PCs because the weaker PCs could handle it...whereas the stronger PCs might not be able to. But I also always have an in-character justification for this. If the weaker PCs are crazy effective, the bad guys are going to send stronger foes...they don't know what point total the PCs are.

But I also what to tell you something else. The last game I ran were a bunch of D&D sort of power-gamer guys. And I ran them through one of my sorts of games...a sort of a deep horizontal. No, no one shot a rope in half at 300 yds...but by we got to the end of the first season they were hooked like they'd never been hooked before. Why/How? Because I work really hard on making the world a living place and making the actions of the PCs matter on a larger level. So, my players who were used to things like. Kill the dragon! Get more stuff! Stop the gates to Hell from Opening...all of a sudden started seeing their actions having far reaching and long lasting effects and consequences. The actions of the PCs ended up causing Faction 1 to attempt a coup against Faction 2 on planet Y. The PCs ended up doing a major amount of political maneuvering and adventuring to try and clean up the coup they helped enable and through some brilliance on their part were able to resolve the political instability and come up with a new path that I never presented them with. They were able to get Faction 3 in power...a faction that is now very well disposed to the PCs (Both Faction 1 and Faction 2 were both hostile to the PCs). The players really enjoyed seeing the world actually react in a deep and ongoing way to their actions. And when they came back to planet Y they had a safe place in the galaxy...but then gained a few more enemies.

I've found other ways to thrill my powergamers in a deep horizontal way. Yeah, you have a Vorpal Sword and you're badass and killed Azmodeus. You are very cool. Now howabout you figured out a way to resolve a much trickier challenge. An evil Baron is about to invade your home...and the greatest hero in the land...is also really evil. When my players find a way to resolve that conundrum they end up feeling a huge sense of accomplishment...because that is a multi-layered complicated problem that they have to take initiative and come up with their own path. It makes them feel even more powerful than the Vorpal Sword when they finally do come up with an answer to that problem. So I try to have their progress marked not in the fact that they have a 25 Mechanics skill or they bought Combat Reflexes, but that the world itself progresses and progresses because of them. Their power and progress is marked in the world itself, rather than just on their character sheets.

But there is nothing wrong with a cinematically vertical game either.

Originally Posted by Nymdok

Bringing it Back to the OP however, this doesn't excuse us from:

• assigning numbers to skills levels that people ask for and being clear on why those numbers are at that level.
• Making sure that the Ability builds are consistent with the rules (RAW or House) on both sides of the screen.
• The use of Full Pointed Character Sheets for Allies and Enemies as they are point driven Ads/Dissads.

Can we at least agree on this?

Nymdok

Oh, I can agree with those points. My main concern involves comments by jeff that accuse people who don't stat up everything beforehand as being dishonest and engaging in things that are game-breaking and not really GURPS. That is way extreme, and quite insulting. Jeff starts getting all "I'm real GURPS and you are not." Not cool. I don't think a person *must* stat up *everything* before a game starts. A person can, if that is what works for them. But there is a wide variety of techniques and approaches--many of them involve not statting up everything before game starts. And these techniques also work. I stat up some important NPCs fully. Other NPCs I stat up as they become important after their first or second scene. Other NPCs I never really write down because I don't need much more than Will-12, Merchant-14. If someone else wants to stat up that Merchant fully? Cool with me. I have no problem with what other people do in their games if that works for them.

What I have a problem with are a number of Jeff's follow up posts that ascribe a number of judgemental values to people who improvise. Things like:

I believe we can construct a sufficiently strong rebuttal to usefully reduce the frequency of chimes by showing most cases of statless winging to be optional at best and more generally a form of fudging or other deprecated game-breaking behaviors.

I suppose this includes playing games where the adversaries are all one-dimensional figures of EEEEEVIL who do things only because the plot requires it, but that's not a good reason to give that kind of char build advice out all the time.

The total point value alone may not, but on the way to calculating that value, you accumulate total points spent on skills for instance that does impact how a PC has spent his life and serves as a check on excessive or just plain unconsidered builds.

I wing, and I don't fudge. I don't have broken games. I don't have one-dimensional figures of EEEEVIL who do things only because the plot requires it. I don't have excessive or unconsidered builds. My problem with this thread is Jeff's judgmental and insulting comments about people who don't game like he does. I don't care how Jeff plays his own games. I just want him to stop throwing stones at people who play differently.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, to begin with, you write as if you thought I were advocating doing a complete character sheet for every single NPC the PCs might encounter. I've said repeatedly that I don't do that.

I did not mean to so imply and I apologise if I inadvertently did.

All I meant was that in my campaigns, at least, those NPCs which according to your criteria are deserving of character sheets are numerous enough to make statting them out a chore that I simply do not have the resources to even contemplate.

Originally Posted by whswhs

So when do I do a full character sheet? When I have reason to anticipate that the NPC will be interacting with the PCs repeatedly, and using multiple different capabilities to do so. When I want one or more of those capabilities to be distinctive and cool, and want to specify its capabilities and limits exactly. When I want to have a few picturesque details already thought out. In brief, when the NPC is not just a generic NPC, but an individual whose distinctive traits will matter . . . a guest star, not an extra . . . and when I want to think about those traits ahead of time.

The thing is that I try very hard to avoid any generic NPCs. When I said that my campaign featured 1000-1500 NPCs, that means just that. It is not counting unnamed merchants, vendors, servants or other people with which the PCs occasionally interact.

I have no way of knowing ahead of play which characters will be recurrent, distinctive, cool, picturesque and so forth. NPCs don't come divided into extras and guest stars.

Yes, I might be able to guess that some people are unlikely to become important and others are almost certain to become so, but that still leaves hundreds, even thousands, of which I am not sure.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Sure, I could translate a prose description into game stats. But it might be a puzzle how to do so, for complex ones.

In my experience, the only puzzle is deciding on a point cost. Assigning game effects is intuitive and easy. By now, it happens without any conscious thought at all.

Originally Posted by whswhs

And even for simple ones, since I'm going to end up with game stats anyway when I want to use the character in play, why not use the game stats as the descriptive language instead of using narrative prose and then having to translate it on the fly?

Well, the primary reason is of course that by only translating what you need for a given interaction you ensure that no work is wasted. You don't spend hours working on traits that end up having no impact at all.

More broadly, I always start with a narrative concept. The character can do thing X or he is an expert at thing Y. Then I translate this into game stats. Coming up with mechanics first is so alien to me that I can only grasp it intellectually that there are some people who do so. I am utterly unable to empathise with it.

So if I were to stat out a character, the work would be

1) Come up with a narrative concept.
2) Write that concept up in game mechanical language.

For me, step 2 always follows step 1. It can't precede it any more than I could decide to digest food before I ate it.

So, for me (and before I heard Bruno said that some people weren't wired that way, I thought it went for everyone), it's not a choice between statting people up in game terms or describing them narratively. It's a choice between describing them narratively or doing both. This means that if I assume that my budget of time remains the same, statting up characters means that I spend less time on describing them, since statting is exclusively translation and no new creation.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Figuring the total character points strikes me as pretty trivial; it's just arithmetic, and I do arithmetic to relax.

Just adding together point costs is not that difficult, but it is, however, something for which I can see no possible use in cases where the character is neither a PC nor linked to a PCs point total by means of some Advantage or Disadvantage. It's a few seconds of work for zero return.

But that's not the part that's the most bothersome. Oh, no. The most bothersome is figuring out precisely what Enhancements and Limitations to apply to emulate a certain power, which you already know how works. You've written mechanic-heavy books. You know that it can be non-trivial to take a complex effect and write it down in precisely legal form.

But the point is that deciding whether a given usage limitation constitutes Preparation Required, Limited Use, Requires Recharge, Costs FP (Energy Reserve with Special Recharge) or something else is not going to tell you much if the end result is that it works a certain way and you already know how. Sure, it makes a difference for a PC whether the point cost is 125*.8*.95*.70*.95*.6 [38] or 80*.8*.8 [52], but it doesn't really matter to the NPC or the GM.

You know well that it's possible to get functionally the same effects for very different point budgets. And that it may require hours of fiddling to get precisely the effect you are trying to stat. But it requires only seconds to just write down the effects and ignoring the point cost.

And that's what 'don't bother statting it if it's for an NPC' really means.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think you took my comparison to writing a sonnet seriously.
[...]
Now, I don't claim that a sonnet and a character sheet are the same kind of thing. But I do feel that they are similar in this one dimension: working directly in the compressed form can be a way of organizing and focusing one's thoughts.

I did take it seriously. I just disagree that the language of character creation is expressive enough to be comparable to the sonnet.

I think that while it may be fair to compare the language of character creation to a poetic form, that form is more like the limerick than a sonnet. In other words, it's fine for its purpose, but trying to express anything of real depth while confined exclusively to that form is pretty much doomed.

Just because certain limitations on communications may help one organise one's thoughts it does not follow that the best poetry is written using only four letter words. And character creation using the mechanics as a starting point instead of narrative description is in my mind even more limiting than that.

Originally Posted by whswhs

And it's one that works for me. If it doesn't for you, that's fine, but your experience is a personal and not a universal truth.

I'll certainly acknowledge that humanity is varied enough so that any advice one can give is inappropriate to someone. Even when you tell people to treat others as they wish to be treated, you have to admit that the advice is somewhat problematic for sadists and masochists, for example.

But that doesn't change the fact that for anyone that I have ever seen gaming, statting only what you absolutely need is good advice.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Well, the primary reason is of course that by only translating what you need for a given interaction you ensure that no work is wasted. You don't spend hours working on traits that end up having no impact at all.

But my goal is not to avoid wasted effort. I'm perfectly willing to engage in some effort that will never have a payoff in play . . . because I can't know which effort will pay off and which won't. And when that effort does pay off, it pays off big.

It's kind of like insurance. You pay, say, $250 a month for medical insurance to cover major illnesses. And in most years, you don't have a major illness, and you don't get that $250 back. You might go your whole life and never collect on your medical insurance. But if you do get a major illness, you'll feel that the insurance was worth it. In a crowd of 10,000 people, having everyone pay into a fund that goes out to the minority who are sick is a good deal for everyone . . . if they don't know if they're going to be among the sick minority.

I don't know which traits are going to be important, or which characters are going to see lots of playtime (though I can often guess). But I get substantial enough benefits from the ones who turn out important to justify the relatively trivial expense of time on making up some who turn out not to be important.

Bill Stoddard

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But my goal is not to avoid wasted effort. I'm perfectly willing to engage in some effort that will never have a payoff in play . . . because I can't know which effort will pay off and which won't. And when that effort does pay off, it pays off big.

It is a goal for many GMs, wouldn't you agree?

Given that I know many forms of effort that do reliably pay off in game, I'm disinclined to spend effort on something that is unlikely to do so.

Originally Posted by whswhs

It's kind of like insurance. You pay, say, $250 a month for medical insurance to cover major illnesses. And in most years, you don't have a major illness, and you don't get that $250 back. You might go your whole life and never collect on your medical insurance. But if you do get a major illness, you'll feel that the insurance was worth it. In a crowd of 10,000 people, having everyone pay into a fund that goes out to the minority who are sick is a good deal for everyone . . . if they don't know if they're going to be among the sick minority.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that you choose to go without health insurance because you believe that it is more efficient for you to do so. If you get sick, you will spend only what money you need in order to become healthy again and thus ensure that there is no wasted money.

This sounds like when it comes to your health, you adopt my strategy.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't know which traits are going to be important, or which characters are going to see lots of playtime (though I can often guess). But I get substantial enough benefits from the ones who turn out important to justify the relatively trivial expense of time on making up some who turn out not to be important.

I started out doing so, when I was younger.

I spent too much time on doing so and the NPCs that resulted were neither more interesting, more plausible nor more lifelike than NPCs made using my current, more narrative method.

I've tried both methods. One works about an order of magnitude better for me and also works better for my players when they try to GM.

Have you tried starting with a narrative concept and statting only when it becomes necessary?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I admit that the possibility of anyone's brain being wired in such an alien manner escaped my notice. If this is truly how you think, I can certainly understand why you'd prefer to write down NPCs using another descriptive language than English*.

All the same, I think that more people are wired to think in narrative terms than in binary code. We are, more than anything else, a storytelling species. The thing that makes us human is our ability to turn events that may be only loosely connected into a coherent narrative.

I don't actually think it's that unusual. Writers regularly stumble into writer's block. We don't know "where to start." RPGs, on the other hand (and computer programs and so on) provide ritual and a system. They say "Start here," and so you do so, and naturally progress, and then eventually, you have a finished product (Many players do just that, in fact, just seeing what they come up with, and describing him after the fact), and this is fairly easy to describe with more conventional language. The average writer does this with brainstorming and outlines, but it's quite possible to do this as above.

Consider the wench. Assume for a moment that we want her to be a major character in the game (for a minor character who shows up once, this isn't actually important), so we actually stat her up. All she needs is appearance, right? Well, er, no. She also needs her professional skill, whatever that may be. And let's say we want to make her on exactly 25 points, something the average person in this thread would probably say is craaazy, but let's do it anyway, because it will force us to think, and we'll also give her at least one character defining disadvantage, and five quirks.

We'll start with HT +1 (10 points), Beautiful (12), and Bartender at IQ+2 [8], which puts us at 30 points. We have disadvantages to choose from, and we could easily pick Lecherous or Bad Temper or possibly Addiction or what have you, but what about Dependent (child)? Assuming he/she is worth 50% of her cost (10-15 points), this is a -10 point disadvantage, leaving us with 5 points to spend. Plus we need need 5 quirks, which gives us another 5 points. How are we going to fill out those last 10 points? Well, we could grab an advantage (Common Sense would be great), but we should probably save some of those points for a few skills, so nothing worth more than about 5 points. Fashion Sense might work, but I think Sensitive would be more fun. And for skills, we grab Sex Appeal (How she got the kid and earns her tips), Carousing (good for the job) both at 1 point, and a few others that catch my eye: What about Accounting at 2 points (Because it's interesting), and Current Affairs (Regional) (Because she would hear alot of gossip and this makes her fairly useful to the players).

From there, a picture starts to emerge, and we stretch ourselves with quirks: She worries about money, She has a thing for Elves/Fighters/Mages/Rogues (Pick one that'll make her interested in the party), Ashamed of her bastard child but loves him/her fiercely, and then we need two more... flipping through the quirks, Cautious and Code of Honor (Professional) at quirk level both make sense, the first for the fact that she's no adventurer, and the second means she takes her job very seriously.

And there we have it. I envision scenes with a beautiful woman with some broken dreams, a boss whose ineptitude is running the tavern into the ground. She has two major hooks to involve her in the game (her child and her fascination with one of the players), and her child can be an interesting secret we can reveal later on. In retrospect, I really like the idea of Common Sense, so we'll ditch Sensitive and take Common Sense instead (That way she's a voice of reason in the party, an NPC who can say "Woah, maybe setting fire to the building we're in isn't a good idea!"). That violates our point value, but it already served its purpose: it gave us a decent order of magnitude on the character, and it inspired some ideas that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't done it this way.

It's easier in other systems with more hard mechanics in place, like Vampire (Covenant and Clan? And what disciplines? Virtue and Vice?), and some have systems that aren't really conducive to this sort of thing (Giving her a D&D class is actually counterproductive), and GURPS sort of stands in a middle ground, as it's system is rather "descriptive" than "prescriptive," but it's still handy to try. It's not necessary, but it can help. And it's fun. It makes you think, and thus it's a useful mental tool.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that you choose to go without health insurance because you believe that it is more efficient for you to do so. If you get sick, you will spend only what money you need in order to become healthy again and thus ensure that there is no wasted money.

This sounds like when it comes to your health, you adopt my strategy.

Only because catastrophic health insurance in California costs more than I can afford, at least if I want to indulge in luxuries like having a roof over my head. I paid for insurance as long as I could possibly force it into my budget.

Have you tried starting with a narrative concept and statting only when it becomes necessary?

Well, yes, obviously. I do it all the time. But I find I get extra payoffs from doing it the other way.

Bill Stoddard

[Nymdok]

Originally Posted by trooper6

A couple more things about this....

Its true that it can be a rewarding experience when done this way! Sadly, as we game in 2 or 3 12 hour blocks with 3 month interludes, its difficult to keep that sort of game straight. I have to keep adventures relatively simple and episodic. When your 13-18, 3 months is an eternity and as so much happens in life during those years, details and subtlety fade from memory quickly.

With that in mind, we tend to break out the 'epic' brush and paint in broader strokes because the details are easier to remember that way and it makes gaming feel more like a 'special event' than the weekly/bi-monthly hobby that most gamers enjoy.

Originally Posted by trooper6

Oh, I can agree with those points. My main concern involves comments by jeff that accuse people who don't stat up everything beforehand as being dishonest and engaging in things that are game-breaking and not really GURPS. That is way extreme, and quite insulting.

Although he may have worded those statements better, I still hold those same concerns. Alot of it, as we covered above was due to nomencalture. What does 'hand waving' mean for example? What does 'fudging' mean?

As it turned out when the term 'hand waving' was used, it was meant as 'I have preset standards which I go by for Attributes and Skills of various degrees from layman to expert that I always have on tap so individual sheets aren't needed.' It did NOT mean 'I produce a random number from my hinder parts.'

'Handwaving' was also used to describe building powers and abilities. In the context of most of the speakers that meant 'I know what it is and how it works AND it is either consistent with the Rules (Either Raw or House) or the players don't complain about it.' It did NOT mean 'It does whatever the heck I say it does whenever the mood so strikes me and the players can whine like cats in heat for all I care.'

'Dice Fudging' is still something I find reprehensible and it still feels like cheating, but can you truly cheat participants who accept it as part of the game? If the players and the GM are ok with fudging then who are any of us to judge?

I will say this:

When you abandon dice resolution of conflicts your either playing a different game, or your storytelling.

I use the word conflict here to generally denote Contests, Sucess, and Reaction.

I'm not the arbiter of what the ONE TRUE GURPS is, but I do know that using dice for conflict resolution is a key part of the system and when you stray from that you stray from the system. Im not advocating rolling for eveything all the time, narrating past things is the story telling element Im talking about. But even the Almighty Dice are only a part of the system, not the system in its entirety. You could I suppose, use the point buy system, skills, and Abilities from GURPS and then simply take turns narrating.

Originally Posted by trooper6

What I have a problem with are a number of Jeff's follow up posts that ascribe a number of judgemental values to people who improvise. Things like:

We know now that 'winging' and 'improv' don't mean 'statless'. See above. His point about people asking for numerical answers and not getting them is still valid. Telling someone 'just wing it' and then not telling them what you mean by that is neither helpful or kind.

Originally Posted by trooper6

Character building is a partially meditative exercise that allows you to build complex and subtle characters, this includes NPCs. Taking the time to Fully write out an NPC is a rich exercise in and of itself and helps keep the GM 'in touch' with the character building rules. THat said, the vast majority of the NPC's really are just cogs in the plot machine, they dont require full writeups, and there is NOTHING wrong with that.

Originally Posted by trooper6

This is may be a useful, but non manditory use of point values where NPCs are concerned. If a lifetime of constant daily sword pursuit gets you an 18 skill or Relative level +4 in your world, then thats what it gets you. For those running 'absolute scale' games this might be handy.

Originally Posted by trooper6

I wing, and I don't fudge. I don't have broken games. I don't have one-dimensional figures of EEEEVIL who do things only because the plot requires it. I don't have excessive or unconsidered builds.

Your not on trial here troop. That you have an ongoing game that you run is indicator enough of your success.

Originally Posted by trooper6

My problem with this thread is Jeff's judgmental and insulting comments about people who don't game like he does. I don't care how Jeff plays his own games. I just want him to stop throwing stones at people who play differently.

You cant make people 'behave' on the internet. If his comments had been that incendiary, Sjard would have stepped in and locked this thing tight. Because of what has been gained from this discussion, Im glad he didn't.

Nymdok

[copeab]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But my goal is not to avoid wasted effort. I'm perfectly willing to engage in some effort that will never have a payoff in play . . . because I can't know which effort will pay off and which won't. And when that effort does pay off, it pays off big.

For me, that effort is spent reading. Novels and short stories for ideas, books on history and mythology for background, etc. For example, last book I picked up a short book on Catholic saints because it might be useful for and NPC occultist I'm considering using; while I have read parts of the book, I have not written a single word on the occultist, not even a name. Even if I don't use him, the information from the book may be useful at some later time.

This also gets back to something mentioned a few hundred posts back about time management -- I'd rather spend six hours reading things that might give me ideas for the campaign than spend six hours statting NPCs.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

Its true that it can be a rewarding experience when done this way! Sadly, as we game in 2 or 3 12 hour blocks with 3 month interludes, its difficult to keep that sort of game straight. I have to keep adventures relatively simple and episodic. When your 13-18, 3 months is an eternity and as so much happens in life during those years, details and subtlety fade from memory quickly.

Ah, then statting makes more sense for you given the long gaps. Your adventures are like movies, mine are like a serial TV series.

(I GM once every two weeks, but could GM once a week)