[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Selfish and Selfless

[johndallman]

Selfish [-5*] is a mundane mental disadvantage with a self-control roll. You are highly motivated by social status, and spend effort trying to improve it and become socially dominant. This is not the usual English meaning of “Selfish.” The disadvantage appeared in the first edition of GURPS Uplift, as part of an alien species personality design system, which is why the terminology is a little odd. Selfish requires a self-control roll each time you suffer a social slight or snub. On a failure, you react as if you’d failed a self-control roll for Bad Temper. Selfish NPCs react to slights at quite substantial penalties, unless the GM wants to make self-control rolls for them.

Selfless [-5*] is likewise a mundane mental disadvantage with a self-control roll. You are altruistic and self-sacrificing. This disadvantage has the same origin as Selfish, but the GURPS term fits the usual English usage better. Selfless requires a self-control to put your own needs – even those of survival – before those of others. As a racial disadvantage, it implies a “hive mentality.”

The Uplift personality system survives in modified form in Space, where these disadvantages are on the Egotism scale, which measures how self-important members of a species are. Selfish and Selfless provide the extremes of that scale, and the book has material on the relationship between disadvantages, morphology and culture.

There’s a useful forum thread that discusses renaming Selfish and introducing another disadvantage with a more normal usage of the term here.

Both of these disadvantages are reasonably common options on published character templates, Selfish more so than Selfless, given human nature. Discworld, Fantasy and Horror both have quite high incidences of these disadvantages, fitting characters and creatures into their narrative roles; Madness Dossier can engineer Selfish, but not Selfless. The Bloods of Britannica-6 are often defined by RAW Selfish behaviour, and some of them would fit right into Locations: Hellgate, where Selfless is unknown. Mars Attacks’ Martians are all Selfish, far more thoroughly so than the quirk-level version of both disadvantages in Power-Ups 6.

I’ve played a few PCs with Selfless, but none with Selfish – I find that kind of behaviour really annoying in real life, and don’t want to role-play it. The same usually extends to my play of NPCs, although I got mileage out of the problems some Martians (not Mars Attacks ones, but more reasonable aliens) had with a late nineteenth century Spanish government, who’d turned up all their social airs as a delaying tactic.

Have these disadvantages been important in your games?

[Icelander]

My Jade Serenity character, Chase Taylor, is obviously Selfless, which causes him no end of trouble, especially as he has a deeply unhealthy relationship with a Callous, Selfish (and a laundry list of other nasty Disadvantages) NPC.

There is a heroic PC in my long-running Forgotten Realms fantasy campaign who is Selfless. He's actually quite hedonistic and indulgent of all sorts of pleasures in mundane life, which I haven't penalized, as the PC is perfectly willing to risk death and maiming for even the hint that someone needs his help (he's also Charitable). He's gotten a divine ability that includes the Healing trait, which means that he's usually at low FP because he spent them all healing NPCs.

Edit: I've interpreted Sir Michael's (aka Brash Mickey) combination of Charitable, Compulsive Carousing and Selfless so that he's devoted to bringing joy and happiness to others, very concerned that they are having fun and always prepared to drop everything to cheer people up. Oh, and bring copious amounts of booze and food to any gathering where that would be even remotely appropriate. Also, he tends to get into a lot of adventure-adjacent situations because if he notices that anyone is unhappy during a social gathering, he'll decide to do anything he can to help them, no matter how ill-advised his drunken ideas to do so are.

Classic shenanigans include being dragged into a serpent-people conspiracy because he undertook to collect a legally unenforcable debt on behalf of a grieving noblewoman, killing a powerful noble in a duel to protect the honour of a gentlewoman he'd never met (the noble was incidentally the party in the dispute who was actually telling the truth) and innumerable romantic comedic tropes of jealousy and misunderstanding caused by Brash Mickey selflessly devoting himself to comforting and cheering up lonely women at parties, without perhaps taking into account that his fiancée might view that kind of behaviour as an affront to her.

[RogerBW]

I think I'm typical of a lot of gamers in that I have no interest in playing social dominance games and dislike people who do it without need. I've played characters who have abilities that let them do that very well, but not characters who care deeply about how they're treated. (And let's face it, a lot of RPG campaigns involve being disrespected a lot of the time…)

I don't think I've played a Selfless character either; I may well play someone who often feels that way, but I don't necessarily want to hand that choice to a die roll.

[WingedKagouti]

In my experience both disadvantages provide simple handles for the GM to nudge players towards a specific task/plot point/whatever and frequently in ways that don't feel forced, arbitrary or rules reliant. Other players can also use these traits to entice a character into following their plans.

[vicky_molokh]

My main reason for disliking Selfish is that it sets up a character for an interesting and strong character motivation . . . but then mandates going about this motivation in the most idiot-ball, unconstructive way: by throwing tantrums. This is similar to my issue with the Loner Disadvantage, which also warrants throwing tantrums as the canonical form it works for some reason.

[swampthing]

Come to think of it, it's not clear the system really needs Selfish as a distinct thing from Obsession (gain social status).

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

My main reason for disliking Selfish is that it sets up a character for an interesting and strong character motivation . . . but then mandates going about this motivation in the most idiot-ball, unconstructive way: by throwing tantrums. This is similar to my issue with the Loner Disadvantage, which also warrants throwing tantrums as the canonical form it works for some reason.

I'm not sure that it actually says you have to loose your temper. It says you lash out "as if you had bad temper". I.e. "Insult, attack, or otherwise act out against the cause of stress". The timing can be problematic though. It doesn't allow for smoldering grudges, which are useful, flavorful, and appropriate consequence.

A while back I decided that Selfish would be better named "Arrogant", and I use it all the time. Stuck up characters can be lots of fun to portray, satisfying to triumph over, and cathartic to mock.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by swampthing

Come to think of it, it's not clear the system really needs Selfish as a distinct thing from Obsession (gain social status).

Quite a lot of the GURPS list of psychological problems could be consolidated and trimmed down, really. I did it a bit in Discworld for the sake of space. The tendency to have a separate entry for every variation goes back to the early days, when the list was quite a bit shorter; it jarred with me quite a lot when I first saw GURPS, as I was coming from Champions, which took a more elegantly abstracted approach.

I haven't used either of these disads very much, though I might have added Selfish to more demo game pregen character sheets if it wasn't for the tiresome misnaming. (Having to explain to players that the system I'm demonstrating misuses the language jars rather.) But I could argue that Selfish should appear more often in games that are heavy on social interaction and set in formal societies. Whereas in classic dungeon-plundering games, the mark of success is picking up buckets of gold and jewels, and the disad which every PC has, whether or not their character sheet says so, is Greed, in a game where social ascent is the mark of success, Selfish -- in the peculiar GURPS sense of the word -- is actually the default motivation for the typical adventurer.

This suggests to me that Selfish characters don't have to behave like asses towards the other PCs, provided that the other PCs share or at least recognise and respect that motivation. A party of social climbers could collaborate usefully to hatchet their way up the greasy pole, in exactly the same way that a party of dungeon plunderers collaborate to kill monsters and take their stuff. They don't have to throw tantrums at each other, any more than a dungeoneering team has to backstab each other.

Selfless is of course a perfectly nice disadvantage, but I tend to avoid it for PCs because it feels to me like it clobbers character agency rather badly. A PC who's forever trying to help others -- and the world is always full of people who could use help -- isn't going to have much time to pursue interesting objectives of their own; in fact, I can't imagine someone so saintly even formulating objectives of their own. I guess that you could take self-control 15, but then you'd be arbitrarily torn and at the mercy of the dice, and I'd feel that the character should feel guilty about all the times they made the roll... Admirable person, no-fun PC.

(And disentangling this from Charitable seems like one of those tricky GURPS things. Having both is surely another artefact of 3rd edition disorganisation.)

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'm not sure that it actually says you have to loose your temper.

At first I thought I misremembered something . . .

Originally Posted by ericthered

It says you lash out "as if you had bad temper". I.e. "Insult, attack, or otherwise act out against the cause of stress". The timing can be problematic though. It doesn't allow for smoldering grudges, which are useful, flavorful, and appropriate consequence.

. . . but then you proceed to describe exactly the bad-tempered, unthinking, shortsighted kind of reaction that I was implicitly contrasting against scheming ambition and treacherous vengefulness.

[cptbutton]

While it is 3E, I checked GURPS In Nomine and was surprised that Selfless is common but not required for angels, and is a Discord for demons.

Selfish is suggested for some demons, but not required. And noted as bad for angels.

Page 36:

Celestial Discord
Mental disadvantages that reflect selfishness (in angels) or selflessness (in demons) are classified as Celestial Discords. Examples include Greed, Lecherousness, Miserliness, Pacifism (Cannot Kill), and Sense of Duty.