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

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by Bruno

(8 + 9 + 9 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 11 + 11 + 12)/11 = 10 as well. Average implies nothing about distribution.

(7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 +10 +10 +10 +10 +10 +11 +11 +12 +13 +14 +15 +16 +17 +18 +19 +20)/55 = 10

*grin*

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by ze'manel cunha

(7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 +10 +10 +10 +10 +10 +11 +11 +12 +13 +14 +15 +16 +17 +18 +19 +20)/55 = 10

*grin*

(8 + 9 + 11 + 12)/4 = 10. ;) The mean value of a set need not be a member of the set.

[Nymdok]

Originally Posted by Wicked Lurker

Wasn't 10 the average for healthy men ready for military service or something?

Well it depends on what you mean by 'ready for millitary service'.

Thats a vague principle.

In my head it means:

'The Military will accept these people for enlistment and they may washout during Bootcamp or training.'

NOT

'They conform to military Mental/Physical Fitness standards and are ready to be deployed.'

For the former, Id think that the military would take anyone as low as 9. For the Latter, Id think it would be 9 min for IQ and DX, 10 for ST and HT.

Nymdok

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Wicked Lurker

Otherwise: Women have less ST than men, children less ST than adults, elderly probably lower DX, ST. If you put these demographics together, a score of 10 being average would mean most men are stronger than ST10.

Which suits me just fine, since if you use the Basic Lift guidelines, most healthy Icelandic men are stronger than ST 10. Which in turn is not all that surprising, as most of them are taller than the average of 5'9" and heavier than the average of 150 lbs. too.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

There is no "game deprecating". I wrote, "deprecated game-breaking behaviors."

Very well, sorry to have misquoted you. However my statements still stand if you replace with the phrase "game-breaking".

That said: That sort of suspension of disbelief (people can't tell what is made up on the spot versus what was arranged ahead of time) is good and expected, but putting on as if you are running a game with objective conflict resolution when you are changing circumstances to favor a subjectively desired outcome is a moral hazard.

It don't see how it follows from improvise to fudging. These are completely unrelated. I improvise and do not ever fudge. The worst fudging is surely done by the GM who won't/can't improvise, anyway, in order to preserve the rails.

It might be important for simulationism, as the bog monster will get better over time if it survives and gets in practice struggling with the other soggy denizens. Or narratively, it might represent the bog monster's former life as local thug before being cursed or succombing to leprosy or prophyria, or in gamist mode, it could help establish how long the creep had been around as a clue toward finding out more about it in order to overcome it as a plot obstacle.

Except that in 4th Edition CPs don't actually tell you that, as they've been divorced from experience. The Bog Monster could have DX 11 and Wrestling -15 because it's been eating villagers for decades, or merely because the ability to grapple prey is instinctive to its kind.

Or it could be not for anything in particular other than to show you were paying attention when you made the character, like "this page intentionally left blank" in a manual.

GURPS already has a perfectly acceptable alternative to this in the form of the NPC Card and creature block style write-ups. If I do one of those for the bog-monster surely he's just as complete (at least for his purpose as a combat antagonist) on a 3X5 card as he would be as 350 point character with 3-4 pages of character sheets.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I don't recall saying anything like that, can you refresh my memory? I make sheets for any NPCs likely to appear, which has yet to include any members of the Godhead. I've had a few angels, some Tuatha Da Dana, and an Exalted Man, though.

I was thinking about the situations that I feel "don't bother with CPs, there" is the appropriate reply to a post and posted some hypothetical examples and asked you to provide a hypothetical reply. Including this one:

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

My campaign world was created by Omnius, god of everything. How do I build his ability to create the universe?

Your response was:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

think this could be possible using a combination of Warp, World Jumping, Shrinking, and the psychic battlefield rules from Supers, but I haven't had the extended time necessary to work out all of the details.

Which I interpreted as you saying that if a poster wants to stat a creator deity, you'd tell him how and therefore you think he should. I on the other hand, would try to find out why he wants it, and if it turns out to not actually be relevant to play, to advise him not to. Which would then be the sort of post that I gather bothers you so.

I wish I could find it now, but there was a thread in which a poster was trying to stat the ability (as a very complex Affliction) of a god in his setting to grant powers (and/or spells; I can't recall) to his followers. The god wasn't a PC, he was the vague heavenly patron of PCs with priestly powers. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. While there may be good reasons to have a full character sheet for a god, it isn't necessary if you have gods in your setting, even if they interact with PCs in some fashion.

To reiterate, the circumstances under which I maintain that full character sheets for NPCs are not necessary, and are reoccurring types of similar posts on this forum are:

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

• The poster wants to use them as a CR system.
• The poster wants to stat something that isn't really a "character" in any meaningful way, and the complexity is clearly causing problems. E.g. Gods, Planets, Refrigerators.
• The poster is having trouble understanding how to create NPCs or creatures for GURPS without using the full character generation sytems. In other words they don't know how to create the simple stat blocks.

[Archangel Beth]

Originally Posted by Wicked Lurker

Please explain why you need game mechanics to create worlds, scenarios and NPCs because, quite honestly, I don't see it.

Need, as in "can't function without, ever ever ever"?

I doubt anyone here has that issue.

Need, as in, "find extremely useful in jump-starting my inspiration"? At least two of us exist!

And as to why... Because it gives me a structure. I might flail around, foundering on all the... BIGNESS of a universe that I want to use. There's so much to do, I'm like the mule who'll starve to death because she can't decide which of the million-zillion different bales of hay she wants to taste first.

Rules, presented in a clear, orderly way, give me a framework. A structure. A way of deciding which bale of hay to bite first, and which to sample second. Which can be combined. "Oh, hey, that sentence implies this implies that implies a cascade of implication that colors in whole swaths of my world now!" Or whole swaths of character. Or whole swaths of plot. "Oh, oh, oh, this will be SO COOL if I do this, because it will interact with that and then this is likely to happen and OOOO, I can't wait!"

Neither Bill nor I, I believe, are crippled if we don't have stats. If we need to come up with some random NPC that the PCs have taken an urge to find, we can. (I sure can, anyway.) But the stats, the rules, focus our thinking; we get more ideas for the minute, about the character, the world, the plot.

Plus, there's something satisfying about making points balance. I write drabbles, which must be exactly 100 words... Sometimes I fudge a little (hyphenation counts as one word when Word's word-count counts it! or a DI Drabble (111 words) works for a given story...), but it's got an elegance to it. A discipline. An art form.

Doesn't mean I can't write a multi-thousand word book. Done that, too.

[Archangel Beth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Still, I find that point costs are a handy rough gauge of how much a character's presence warps the narrative of a campaign.

*beth trims some other stuff that adds nuance, so as not to overquote*

That is a very elegant way of saying that. Yes, the lower the point value, the more the character is focused -- or ineffectual in general -- and thus the less they affect the fictional world. The higher the point value, without deliberately crippling disads tacked on, the more the character has the potential to affect the world.

It's like... gravity! O:D (Character points as gravity. Okay, I amuse easily...)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

It's like... gravity! O:D (Character points as gravity. Okay, I amuse easily...)

That was exactly the metaphor I had in mind: character points as mass in a narrative equivalent of geometrodynamics.

Bill Stoddard

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

Need, as in "can't function without, ever ever ever"?

I doubt anyone here has that issue.

Need, as in, "find extremely useful in jump-starting my inspiration"? At least two of us exist!

Also, it's fun!

You can describe characters in words, you can show what they look like with pictures... or you can illustrate them mechanically. For a one-shot "Fantasy super-heroes," I designed a golem named the Clockwork Titan. He began the game with 40 points of energy reserve that could not be regained except via special methods (a magical winding mechanism that had been lost), and the Draining disadvantage which took 1 point of fatigue from him per day, and the Ultrapower advantage, and Super Strength. Thus, this character had the ability to vastly exert himself and destroy his enemies, but it brought him closer and closer to "winding down completely." There's a poetry there that you can't express with mere words.

Sometimes when I'm designing NPCs, I'm not just thinking about how they'll look or what their history is, but also how they'll help the players, or how the players might manage to defeat them. To me, the real beauty of an RPG is the union between mechanics and narrative. I don't really see "fluff vs crunch," because if that's the conflict, we might as well discuss board games vs fan fiction. Instead, I think you get the most out your games when you actually apply mechanical stats to your important characters where possible, not because it's necessary, but because it's awesome.

And if we're not playing to have fun, then why are we playing?

(And before you answer with "But statting stuff up isn't fun for me!" Well then, at the risk of stating the obvious, don't do it. I'm just explaining one of the reasons I do)

[Wicked Lurker]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

Rules, presented in a clear, orderly way, give me a framework. A structure. A way of deciding which bale of hay to bite first, and which to sample second. [..]

Plus, there's something satisfying about making points balance.

It seems we are almost completely different in approaching this.

To me it's all about the story - I am happy to throw any trait that I thought a npc should have overboard if I realize during play that it will not work for how the story has moved or that another trait would create a better scene or show the NPC in a more interesting light.
I do not care a bit about point values and if a rule gets in the way of the story I don't use it.

To me conforming to a rules framework during NPC/world/scene creation would make me feel like I was just programming a computer RPG instead of delving into a world of imagination and creative freedom.