Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

I haven't played GURPS in some time, but this is, to me, the essence of generating a character in any game system, or when writing a story. Once you start to feel that you know her, you can start working on numbers.

Well, sometimes. For some of my other players, they like to build from a template concept or from a particular mechanical bit that intrigues them. ("What kind of backstory would give me Post-Combat Shakes and Intolerance (Wizards)?" "I want a dude with Berserk and Two-Handed Axe/Mace-24. Everything else is just gravy." Etc.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

I wonder if it would help any to do something like cap number of Disadvantages instead of points. Probably not.

Thaty was one of the suggestions about Disads in the 3e Compendia so somebody has probably tried it.

[Dalin]

We're mostly playing DFRPG at this stage, so most people use the templates and end up with a full docket of disads. As a GM, I encourage people to swap or modify them in play if they're not fitting their vision. I require buying them off if they aren't showing up at all. We don't particularly care whose fault it is when a disad doesn't show up. Maybe as GM I'm too busy to figure it out. Maybe the player intended to roleplay it, but they keep forgetting. Doesn't matter.

Also, though, I don't worry over much about whether all the points fully balance. The purpose of disadvantages is to make the game more fun and to encourage interesting character concepts. They should provide hooks for the GM and dramatic obstacles for the PCs to grapple with. If that's happening, then I'm not worried about making sure every last point is impacting everybody on schedule.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I am entirely in agreement. I has seemed plain to me since I first encountered Champions that disad caps are a concession that the rewards games pay for taking disadvantages are greater than the burden of the disadvantages. I suppose that the reason for it in Champions is that the designers wanted to make the PCs come out like comic-book superheroes. James Bond 007, which doesn't need to use disads to balance in features of characters who are very different from a healthy man of mainstream culture and military age, is much less generous with them.

I always thought when playing and running Champions that the disads were mostly too generously priced, probably to encourage people to take lots of flaws (especially enemies and the psychological disads) so they'd be like the four-colour supers of the comics.

I find GURPS' to be more reasonably priced, in general. In my experience players tend to only fish for disads when point budgets are tight, and they are careful to avoid ones that will affect their intended style of play or character type, which says to me that they aren't giving out too many points (in general).

What does irk me is players trying to avoid having to suffer the penalties the disads apply, and not just by not playing them (and thus potentially incurring losses of XP), but by trying to avoid situations where they might apply, even when it makes sense to not avoid those situations. Getting the incentives in play when they come up (as FATE and some other game do) would seem to help avoid this, but it does require tracking such stuff and can result in things going to the extreme, with players trying to make their disad apply in any and all situations (ideally just enough to get the XP, not enough to be a real problem).

Mind you, the above is really just more of the players possibly trying to play the GM, and if they're the types to do that, they'll probably do it no matter what, so I suppose in the end all these systems utility depends on the group and the game contract.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Hard of Hearing [-10] Too much time around big guns in the Navy, and didn't like wearing hearing protection.

From the photos from that time and earlier, I'm not sure that navies routinely used hearing protection past 'fingers in ears' for smaller guns and 'don't be on deck' for large guns.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Maz

Where someone with Impulsive, Overconfidence, Greed, Compulsive Carausing, Curious and Sense of duty Friends = total -45.
Such a character is going to be really, really hard to play if you want to live up to all those disads.

I think it would be fairly easy in most traditional adventuring games. I don't think such a character would live long, though. Too much poking of sleeping dragons.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

A lot of that, but not all of it, is the control roll mechanic that's supposed to balance these traits. The control roll mechanic feels awful for me as a GM. The mental burden this mechanic creates is enormous. And then the players figure out that I'm not able to actually use the control rolls, and this encourages them to then load up on these mental disadvantages. The prices on those should all be much, much lower, because the way they work in play is that the player tries to roleplay them when they remember they have them, but that there isn't any actual enforcement of them.

A lot of people misinterpret control rolls. They aren't a target number to suffer the disadvantage (so no, it's not supposed to be an x% chance you suffer the problem), they're more like a target number to allow you to retain control over the character when the disadvantage should to come up. If you explain them as that's the roll not to turn into a GM puppet whenever the disadvantage could possibly remotely matter, or impose a perfectly reasonable penalty like every time you even try to make a control roll you get docked an xp for the session you might get better results.

But sure, getting players to role play their chosen disadvantages is the root of a lot of problems with them. If they can get away with not playing them and the GM isn't inflicting *major* xp penalties for that then yes, they are potentially unbalanced free points.

There's not a functional difference between -2 and -5 and -7. The GM just ends up roleplaying it all the same.

Though that's something of a GMing issue too. I rarely allow more than -3, since at that level you should expect nobody to react positively to you, even if I've predetermined they should for the adventure to work. It is after all the level where you are on par with someone they *know* to be a monster who eats babies. Even desperate people have some standards.

But yes, longstanding problem. There's a reason CHA isn't a high priority attribute either. Fundamentally a tabletop game is a social activity, and the social attributes and skills of the *players* tend to bleed through and modify the ones on the character sheets no matter how hard you try.

And that then creates a feedback loop where it encourages players to take those disadvantages, which leads to characters with more disadvantages for the GM to remember and enforce. And you end up at the table with upwards of thirty disadvantages to remember and enforce and make control rolls for, and it's impossible.

I agree there. Point based caps are a really poor limit. Number of disadvantages would be much better - although you need to allow some flex in that for stuff that is conceptually one "problem" that needs several disadvantages to model it.

It also helps to insist on picking the disadvantages *first*, ideally maybe before you even tell the players what the point limit is, but certainly before they start pricing anything out. There's a lot to be said for write up your character concept in prose sentences and they we'll try to model him with the rules for a game where you really want to emphasize the roleplaying over the war game aspect.

[JMason]

In my experience this is an enforcement problem. I use to have this issue and would have players take all sorts of disads that just never were any form of inconvenience to the player. Then I started to keep a list of player disads when I was writing up session plans or keeping a list while running the game and "checking off" when a disad had come into play in a significant way.

This kept me aware of what the player disads were and what impact they were having on the game. If a -20 point disad wasn't causing significant problems for the player, then I'd look for more ways that it should.

Another options is to just drop the points gained from a disad that you don't feel is a burden.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

You get the behavior you reward. In a game of 250-point characters with -100 points in disadvantages, most GMs balance the game as if they were 350-point characters. Not taking 100 points worth of disadvantages is sabotaging their own character's effectiveness.

IME, there are two solutions. The first is giving the player enough points to begin with, not giving additional points for taking disadvantages and encouraging players to take only those disadvantages they want to actively roleplay. The second is to build the character to concept without regard to point budgets, disadvantage caps, etc.

I, personally, prefer the second solution. ;)

[Kalzazz]

https://gamingballistic.com/2018/02/...st-by-kalzazz/

I'm fond of my disad bucket approach as above for spreading the load