Pointless GURPS

[Ulzgoroth]

Adding the regular point-based advancement to 'fairly pointless' (that is, allowing PCs to buy stuff with points or just gain it by in-play machinations) is one of the recommended approaches to, for instance, THS.

Utterly Pointless is perfectly reasonable if you've got players who will come up with character concepts that go together reasonably and then faithfully build them. Or the GM could build the characters to concepts provided.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Adding the regular point-based advancement to 'fairly pointless' (that is, allowing PCs to buy stuff with points or just gain it by in-play machinations) is one of the recommended approaches to, for instance, THS.

Dunno, I feel that THS is actually where mutable point totals look unnerving. E.g. the aforementioned Minion was a 150-point bioroid character. My character specifically set aside the money needed for Ghosting the minion, but the intent was to make a an emergency fund for use some time later in the campaign, as well as a meaningful-but-not-immediately-useful expenditure out of the 80% of Wealth.

But the way the campaign's events turned out, it seems like I'll be upgrading my minion to a Ghost in less than 2 months from the campaign's start. The minion wants it, my character wants it, the GM okayed it. But as a player, I feel uncomfortable about the situation. It's the sort of situation where there's a hanging question: 'So why was it not done before campaign start?!'

Also reminds me of the fact that Tzimisce are optimally created with Appearance 1, because Vicissitude can be used to permanently improve Appearance to 5 over the course of 4 days (costs some BP and 4 WP to do reliably, though).

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Dunno, I feel that THS is actually where mutable point totals look unnerving. E.g. the aforementioned Minion was a 150-point bioroid character. My character specifically set aside the money needed for Ghosting the minion, but the intent was to make a an emergency fund for use some time later in the campaign, as well as a meaningful-but-not-immediately-useful expenditure out of the 80% of Wealth.

But the way the campaign's events turned out, it seems like I'll be upgrading my minion to a Ghost in less than 2 months from the campaign's starts. The minion wants it, my character wants it, the GM okayed it. But as a player, I feel uncomfortable about the situation. It's the sort of situation where there's a hanging question: 'So what was it not done before campaign start?!'

Also reminds me of the fact that Tzimisce are optimally created with Appearance 1, because Vicissitude can be used to permanently improve Appearance to 5 over the course of 4 days (costs some BP and 4 WP to do reliably, though).

Yeah, it does have the problem of imposing a character-building currency for pre-gamestart that doesn't match up to post-game-start advancement rules.

[Rasputin]

The whole matter reminds me of Central Casting, if you can track down a used copy.

[Jachra]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The Nearly Pointless/Lifepath system is interesting, but I think it breaks down on some character concepts. I.e. I think reproducing some characters using a lifepath will be at best inconvenient. At worst, it might make some concepts statistically borderline impossible, even if they're acceptable for a given campaign.

E.g. throughout his 30 years of life, my current character had the following traits come up (ignoring skills):

• Started with Empathy Talent, Charisma, Dead Broke, Valuable Property, Duty.
• Gradually gained Status 1 and Rank 4.
• Lost Dead Broke and Valuable Property.
• Gained Diplomatic Immunity.
• Worked up Wealth to Wealthy, gradually.
• Bought a rather impressive Minion.
• Gained Tenure.
• Gained the Ghost template.
• Eventually ditched Rank, but left Duty in place.

Status, Rank, Wealth, Duty, and Tenure would all be things covered by Transformation growth.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by NocTempre

When every ruling comes down to a GM call, I don't understand you you still think the system is crunchy.

I think you're confusing character creation with playing the game. These are two different things. The OP is suggesting (for Utterly Pointless) that "GM Call" be used for character creation.

After that, you're playing the game, which is different :)

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Jachra

Status, Rank, Wealth, Duty, and Tenure would all be things covered by Transformation growth.

The question is how they would be handled when they come up.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The Nearly Pointless/Lifepath system is interesting, but I think it breaks down on some character concepts

Yes indeed! Character concept is quite a different thing from backstory. For example, look at character generation in the OOC thread of jmurrell's Rough Men Bump Back in the PBP forum. The concept for my character John Lawson was "a middle-aged former rural consulting detective, whose main contribution to investigations will be interviewing witnesses, and who will be one of the heavy hitters when it comes to combat; Columbo played by Jimmy Stewart". I also made up a backstory for him in some detail, but that was just to keep the dialogue straight. Character generation methods that are based on backstory sometimes, often I think, miss the point of high-concept characters.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I think you're confusing character creation with playing the game. These are two different things. The OP is suggesting (for Utterly Pointless) that "GM Call" be used for character creation.

Not exactly. Or at least not necessarily. When we were doing character creation for my PBP "Wear a Badge, Carry a Gun" I had to rewrite most of the character designs because I did not explain my alternative procedures clearly enough. Nevertheless it is possible to have a procedure that players can follow without many calls from the GM, but that does not use character points. You can see a worked example in posts 256–259 of the OOC thread for "Rough Men Bump Back", where I helped Ladyarcana generate her character.

After that, you're playing the game, which is different :)

Indeed. Once the scores are on the character sheet you can proceed as usual.

[Adina]

And to follow up on what Brett said, I laid out benchmarks and guidelines for Rough Men Bump Back* up front.

Originally Posted by Brett

Character concept is quite a different thing from backstory.

QFT. My experience has been that I get a much better fit of character to campaign (and more interesting characters) when backstory comes out of character concept than when backstory comes first. Now I always have the players discuss concepts and roles at the beginning of a campaign before they get to do backstories and charsheets. Which may be different from how other people run things.

I have noticed a couple of things about backstories. The first is that players who show up with elaborate backstories tend to be either spotlight hogs, loners who don't play well with others, or will try to break the game. Because, after all, they are the star of this great story. Or they use this backstory to justify forbidden or game breaking traits.

The second is that the player has a nice story but not a good sense of the character. So they have a hard time interacting in character with the other PC's and NPC's. An elaborate backstory is a picture portrait of the character at a single point in time. But a roleplaying game is a motion picture and these characters can't move.




*Which, in turn, owe a lot to Bretts Wear a Badge, Carry a Gun.