Character creation options

[philosophyguy]

Spinning off a discussion from the Ravens N Pennies blog thread (originally here):

GURPS has a lot of suggestions for how to adapt gameplay rules: what options to turn on or off for specific effects, what types of rules are appropriate for different genres or styles, and the like.

But, character creation is very rules-focused: here's what points get you, and here's what skill levels mean in terms of gameplay. There's not much of the meta-advice about what rules to use, what switches to turn off for different situations, and how to think about which rules serve your character creation needs.

I wanted to expand that discussion by brainstorming how people can approach character creation. The goal is to produce advice for GMs and players about how to adapt character creation in GURPS so that characters are less of a barrier to getting started.

With that said, here are some thoughts:

1) There's a need for character creation by people who don't know GURPS rules inside and out and want to create a couple of hooks to define their character rather than complex character concepts. This is the kind of character creation that occurs in games like FATE or even Fiasco.

2) There's a need for character creation by people who enjoy the numbers: min-maxing characters, using detailed rules like techniques, talents, and the like to create the most efficient, most powerful incarnation of their character concept. This is the GURPS-with-all-switches-on approach.

3) There's another niche for character creation in which the player has a specific concept from a genre but wants to make decisions among a couple of character paths. This is the D&D/Pathfinder approach - pick a race and class, make a couple of decisions within that framework.

What other philosophies of character creation are out there?

[Kalzazz]

Turning specific core notions into characters
For instance 'heavy layered expertly tailored armor is cool'
or 'using LOTS of guns while flying is cool'
or 'hmm, mind over matter is overdone, but mind with matter?'
or 'a kung fu practising dragon is cool'
or 'a modern tank would be cool'


Also, there is 'build to niche'
For instance, a recent character of mine I designed specifically to fit with preexisting party members, and to help shore up the two biggest weaknesses 'make knowledge checks' and 'drown things in raw dice of damage'

Primarily though my method is 'think of some cool core concept, then figure out how to make it work'

Admittedly probably 19 times out of 20 it leaves me angry, frustrated, and wondering why I'm such an idiot as to even try to play RPGs

[RyanW]

There is random, and random-plus-choices. Old school D&D fell in this mold, with its rolling of each stat in order, attribute prerequisites on class choices, and strict class progression.

There's backstory generation mini-game. Traveller, with its infamous "die during character creation" feature, is a good example.

[McAllister]

Kalzazz, for what it's worth, I've seen enough of your posting on the forum to be pretty confident you're not an idiot.

I disagree that there's a need for #1: after all, there are FATE and Fiasco. Fiasco does something so radically different from GURPS that if you're trying to decide which to play, I can't understand what that thought process would look like. But, if your players say "I want a character and I don't want to have too many choices," play a class-like template game like Dungeon Fantasy or Monster Hunters. Don't those do what you want, more or less?

Hmm, re-reading your post, I think that DF and MH are more like #3. You could create a variety of 30-point feature packages for hooks, let people grab three of them, and boom, they've got 90 point characters. You'll probably want to add a "normal functional resident of whatever world they're in" template so they aren't disappointed by the fact that they can't drive, cook, or relate to people with any appreciable skill. I don't know why you would do this, but "using lots of guns," "flying," "dragon" etc etc could be done or at least approximated in 30 points.

But, to answer the question you actually asked about philosophies, I think this is all one philosophy called "the choice spectrum." The minimum number of choices one could reasonably make is 3: each player chooses to play an ADJECTIVE NOUN who VERBS, if I can borrow from Numenera's paradigm. For example, I might ask Kalzazz's second example, "okay, so you're a FLYING person who USES LOTS OF GUNS, but tell me about what kind of person you are." The maximum number of choices approaches infinity, as a GURPS character with 600 points and 150-pt disad limit could make hundreds of meaningful and distinct choices. The middle ground is D&D, DF and MH: make a few choices, which generate subchoices, but all of which are picked off finite menus.

What would character creation that did away with the "spectrum of choices" philosophy look like?

[philosophyguy]

Originally Posted by McAllister

What would character creation that did away with the "spectrum of choices" philosophy look like?

As a simplified and not-entirely-worked-out example, you could do a pointsless approach. Every character gets three wildcard skills: one at attribute+1 for a primary skillset, one at attribute+0 for a secondary skillset, and a third at attribute-2 representing background skills. Each character also gets one disadvantage that represents a frequent source of challenges (think -10 point cost value), and one disadvantage that is more for flavor but still is a bit of a restriction (something ranging from quirk level to -5 if we were doing points).

The GM sets the power level of the campaign, and characters increase their attributes to the range appropriate for that campaign.

This approach would be great for players who aren't very experienced in RPGs and want to get playing quickly. It has the advantage of using GURPS mechanics, which are very easy to learn in the fundamentals and can be reused from game to game, instead of learning a new system for each genre.

There's still choices, but those choices are prescribed in a way that strips a lot of the rules density so newer players can make intelligent choices without being overwhelmed. It's different than a template approach, which still requires the GM to know the rules well and can require lots of explanation for what the options on the character sheet mean.

[Kalzazz]

To continue the example, I guess 'steal from source materials'

A lot of people, myself included, come up with desires like 'I want a character like Bloom from WinX Club, Daryl from the Walking Dead, Selene from Underworld, Conan, Indiana Jones, Cassandra from Soul Caliber Ii' etc

On the 'Flying and shooting lots of guns', on the forum just been a discussion of adapting dual weapon attack to n-weapon attack, and that sounded awesome. Due to mispent youth I love video games like Ikuruga and 1942 and Gradius etc where you fly and rain death, so 'flies and rains death' is a much loved character premise of mine, so I wanted to have a character fly and shoot lots of guns

'Fly and shoot lots of guns' is cool but incomplete. You need some reason for it, and more character stuff, and its a pretty one sided approach to helping the party

I remembered a funny picture I saw of Princess Luna from My Little Pony (shame on me I know) where she had a couple blasters floating in the air next to her . . . so, okay, will inspire character off of Luna

I liked RPM, and Alicorns use magic, so she became a gun platform / RPMist multi class (I used Gunmage on her character sheet since sounded cool), figured Luna would really like 24hr WalMarts, video games and Facebook and other things which encouraged being happy and active at night, and would be upset with evil nocturnal things which caused people to want to cower indoors, and the DM thought she should have Obsession - bring back the drive in movie theater, as a magical critter she got dependency mana and vulnerability anti magic and whatnot, and a bunch of magic weapon mounts, high IQ and imagery, and ST and Lifting ST to wield guns, 8 BARs, and nWA

Of course by trying to make someone both a halfway competent living gun battery of 1 and a halfway competent spellcaster I was majorly out of points, and I realized she had no defenses beyond small size and HP. So I thought , armor! But where does one get mini pony armor? But then realized they make police dog armor, and the notion of poor Princess Luna wearing black tacticool armor emblazoned with 'Police K9' in big white letters was to amusing to resist

But the end result was a character that fit into the campaign world, had logical reasons for adventuring that the DM could hang hooks off of, could contribute to the party, and had a backstory of sorts (Luna was imprisoned in the moon for oodles of years for cloaking the world in night, but when she got out she saw that now everyone loved the night with 24hr WalMarts and stuff, so was good)

. . . . and you can see why I have problems when this counts as a chargen success story

[Litvyak]

My philosophy is probably best summed up as: "Build whatever the heck you want to play, as long as it fits the campaign and is consistent with the other PCs... points be damned!"

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by philosophyguy

What other philosophies of character creation are out there?

What's currently often called a "lifepath" system.

The idea is to have some sort of structure that guides you through formative events in your character's life before they started adventuring, adding abilities and details at each stage. This usually involves both story elements and mechanics. FATE touches on it a bit in the games that have the "who did you cross paths with" kind of categories for choosing Aspects. And you could even classify Classic Traveller under this heading, as it has a whole mini-game to play before you get started, with "advanced" generation systems giving you a pretty detailed chronology of your earlier career prepping you for your adventuring life.

[mook]

I like the "Seven-Minute GURPS Character" for impromptu and/or games with non-gamers to get characters up and running quickly.

Players who join a long-term campaign usually prefer "the full GURPS experience" as it were, so we set aside a 'game zero' night before the actual game, all sit around for a couple hours hammering everything out and putting the newly minted PCs through a quick scene or two to get out the kinks.

Questionnaires are handy too, I usually use those for one-shots like "October's Halloween game" or whatever.

I love how many different ways you can twist the GURPS character creation and still get playable PCs out the other end.

[Johnny Angel]

For one of the players, I removed some of the math from his character sheet and wrote things down in terms of what they do. For this particular player, the numbers were distracting him, and he had a hard time making choices.

At the time, he was playing a robot in a Supers game. Some of his powers had an Energy Reserve cost. Instead of writing down the whole slew of math behind how the powers were built, I would write things such as "Electro-shock Punch: uses 1 energy point; does punch damage and causes the target to make a HT-3 roll or be stunned."

On my end of things, I still wrote down how I actually built the power. That way, when it came time to power up his character, I could ask him questions about how he wanted to improve and then help him adjust his character accordingly. When it came time to do this, I would ask questions in terms of what his character could do in-game; not what the game math was as a player.

For example, in one instance, I asked if he'd like the punch to be stronger or if he'd like a better battery. He responded by saying that he'd like a way to hit more people with his stun attack. This lead to building an alternate version of the attack which was a cone of electrical energy. On his end of things, I think we wrote something like "Electro-Blast: uses 2 energy points; everyone in a 1x3 area in front of you needs to make a HT-3 roll to avoid being stunned."

It created a little more work for me as the DM in some cases, but, in the long run, I think it made the game run more smoothly. As it pertains to this conversation, I think writing things down in a more user-friendly way which helps detail what the options do from a character viewpoint rather than a game-math viewpoint makes it easier to make choices. If I can steal what I think is a programming term, having a GUI interface can be less intimidating sometimes. Sometimes, I think it's possible to become so familiar with how a game concept works that we forget that we had to learn it.

In the case of the player above, he was pretty new to tabletop games in general, but I knew he had some familiarity with a few video games that I play, and he had some vague idea of how spell slots worked in D&D. So, as silly as it may sound, I actually drew -in pen- a series of boxes to represent battery charges for his robot character. When he used a power, he checked off how many charges/slots were used. Later, when he recharges his batteries, he could erase the check marks, and the boxes would still be there to be used again.

When players become more comfortable with the system and building their own stuff, I encourage them to do so. Even then, being able to compare the behind-the-scenes math to the simplified version helps put things into perspective and give them a better idea of what things actually do. There are times when -especially if you're new to the system- there's a ton of information which sounds cool, but you're not sure what it actually does or why picking one option might be more desirable for your concept than a different option.

Currently, I'm in the process of relearning some of the rules myself. Ideally, as I continue to work on the setting I'm running in a face-to-face game, I'd like to sit down and write out character options in the way I've described. I'll still keep the more math-visible work available for those who want to modify things, but I believe it will be helpful for someone to be able to look at an option and say "ok, I pay 20 points; I get this ability, and this is what it does" without reading through numbers and percentages.