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

[Joseph R]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

My mentioning a possibility of empathizing with non-whites because as a white disabled person, I'm also a member of a frequently marginalized group is offensive? Damn!

I am still not certain that you understand 'why'. However, as you now know that you 'were', I can remove myself from the thread. We don't need to discuss this matter any further, really.

Hopefully the interesting on-topic discussions can continue - I have enjoyed the debate generally.

Originally Posted by LemmingLord

If you have a problem with a post, take it outside.

Sorry. I felt it important enough to speak up. But I'm done now.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by LemmingLord

So one "point" to statting up an important NPC is that some page in a GURPS book says you should. There's not a practical or ethical necessity is my point.

No, no, no. I did not quote that passage to argue "you ought to stat up NPCs." I quoted it to argue "the core rules set itself says you do not have to stat up all the NPCs, and leaves it to your judgment which ones to stat up." Context is vital in these matters.

I've discussed my personal reasons for statting up NPCs already, at much length. I don't need a passage in a rulebook to justify it. Nor is that passage among my reasons for adopting it.

Bill Stoddard

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

This post is appreciated in the very meta, satiricial way I hope it was intended. I am willing to take my turn in the barrel, and I resolve to to hold off from going back to Hurting Wrong Posting about Hurting Wrong Fun for at least thirty seconds. :)

Meta, yes. Satirical...ummm...no, light-hearted, perhaps, but I really don't believe you can "prove" this issue one way or the other. Too many factors involved that are only partly related or entirely external to the issue of GM preparation and its effect on gameplay during a particular session and the overall quality of a gaming group's experiences.

Thus, continued argument on the issue is, in my opinion, pointless.

Now, discussing the relative merits of different approaches is something that might be a little more useful. I'd be a lot more interested if the discussion was along the lines of "I did X one time and boy was THAT a mistake! I think this is what went wrong..." and "I did Y this one time and here's why and, you know something, my players loved it! But, of course, YMMV."

Yes, I'm threadjacking. It's for your own good, you know.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Mgellis

Meta, yes. Satirical...ummm...no, light-hearted, perhaps, but I really don't believe you can "prove" this issue one way or the other.

I'm so disappointed. I was really put off by the post's patronizing tone at first, but then it occurred to me that, "Hey, he's comiong in here and saying this is bull crap, you're doing it wrong, the only useful way to do things is this way, etc" just like people were accusing me of doing! Genius! Or not, as it turns out.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm just guessing here, but it could be that Mark is reading into your comment the attitude that the opinions of those not sharing those credentials are somehow less valid.

One could even impute from the tone of that comment that men must earn the right to have an opinion on GURPS and until someone does so, the opinion of someone with a proven track record as a lead playtester automatically trumps theirs.

Needless to say, anyone who read your comment in that way might easily have gotten offended.

Yes, Icelander is spot-on. With how self-righteous your posts have been in the past, that was exactly what I thought.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

If you can show where I said my way was the only way, I will apologize. Meanwhile, I require you to apologize to me for the personal attack of calling me self-absorbed.

Have you read your posts? In fact, requring me to apologize shows how self-absorbed you are. Every chance you get, you try to belittle the idea of winging and those of us who do. Trooper6 has pointed out several insults you have set upon us. You are coming out and telling us, that by winging it, we are liars and cheats, and we run games that, at best, are inconsistent, and at worst, incoherent.

As this is the the internet, I don't really give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys what your personal opinion about the process of winging is. What I do care about is all the neo-GMs who work themselves "to death" trying to create everything in their gameworld being told that is the only way to prevent their game from being a pile of bat guano.

You seemed to have missed, several hundred posts ago, when Archangel Beth decided to grace us with her presence, that we came to an agreement:

"Different strokes for different folks."

But, here are some examples of you preaching the one-true-way.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I believe we can construct a sufficiently strong rebuttal to usefully reduce the frequency of chimes by showing most cases of statless winging to be optional at best and more generally a form of fudging or other deprecated game-breaking behaviors.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Railroading usually means the overall course of story events is preserved despite actions by the player characters that should reasonably change that course. Far from being the opposite of winging, it's very often facilitated by revisional winging in an ironic desire to prevent the avoidance of carefully prepared encounters.

My personal favorite:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

• run simpler games
• use published GURPS books and PYRAMID articles with stats in place

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

They can endure a game run by a GM with insufficient prep time and material, or they can take longer between games to allow sufficient prep time, or they can choose another person with suficient time to be the GM, or otherwise use their problem-solving skills to address the problem.

"They can endure a game . . .."
I'll let that just stand on its own.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I'm so disappointed. I was really put off by the post's patronizing tone at first, but then it occurred to me that, "Hey, he's comiong in here and saying this is bull crap, you're doing it wrong, the only useful way to do things is this way, etc" just like people were accusing me of doing! Genius! Or not, as it turns out.

Oh, and just recently, there's this one.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Yes, and to go back to a point I made a while ago: If you are trying to hold a session every week, and you chronically find yourself too short of time to prepare good material for that session, you may be trying to run more games than you really have time for, and as a result producing merely adequate or even substandard sessions. It's not a question of filling out character sheets or drawing maps; it's a question of coming to the session with some ideas for what to do with it, versus coming in with no more than what you can think through in the last half hour before play starts . . . or, like one GM I know, in the hour and a half after play "starts," while the players wait.

However, Bill, that is an individual GM issue, and not a general brush you can paint everyone with.

In September, I was told with an hour to go, that our GM got called into work (he was on-call that weekend) and that I would need to run a space game from scratch. If my car wasn't in the shop, we'd be playing that game later today. So, on the drive over I was putting ideas together. As I'm the driver, I didn't have the ability to write anything down.

I know this is anethma to you, but I didn't even know what the characters were going to be until I got there. I took ten minutes total, talked to each player around the table to figure out what their characters were, and then we got started.

Could the game have gone smoother if I'd had more prep time? SURE! But, the game was still a smashing success. As I didn't have any firm preconceptions, I was easily able to tailor the game, as we got going, to the tone and flavor the players wanted.

At no point would I ever assume that everyone can do that. However, and please don't take this personally, Bill, it's not meant as a jab, I would expect that people understand that some of us can do that.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

That trust can be diminished by the appearance of inconsistency or fudging when you are improvising without a visible record of established abilities.

If that trust was so fragile that my players expected me to show my work, I'd consider the relationship beyond salvaging, frankly.

A marriage where 'trust' consists of one person monitoring the other to see that she is 'worthy' of that trust has already failed. A GM-player relationship which has deterioated to the point where the player has to see the stats for challenges is at a similar point, in my opinion.

[whswhs]

Okay, well, rather than go on debating who kicked who in the nads, I'm going to talk about the subject. Here's how I approach writing up NPCs:

Before anything else, I usually do full character sheets for one or several significant NPCs. This helps me get a sense for how many points will give characters with suitable abilities and traits. This is especially useful if I'm running an engine I haven't tried before. It also helps me think out what traits I want in the campaign and what traits I don't.

In the course of PC creation, players may pick Allies or other related characters. I do full character sheets for Allies, and for individual Patrons and Enemies, and sometimes for Dependents, if I'm going to be rolling against their traits; the point values let me check that they actually have the right point cost for what the player spent on them, and the exactly specified abilities are useful if they come into combat. For Contacts, I only define one skill, which is an "effective" skill and may not be the character's actual point value; for Patrons and Enemies, I may never figure a character sheet at all.

When I run a scenario, I typically stat up from one to three major NPCs fully. I don't necessarily care how many points they cost, but for personal aesthetic taste I tend to round the total points for the traits they really need up to a value that's a simple whole number ratio of the PC cost, and spend a few points on minor goodies.

I do generic character sheets for classes of characters that will turn up repeatedly: a generic tracker or warrior orc, a generic sailor or marine. Usually these are people who will come into combat; I want to know what they're capable of in exact statistics. I also probably want to check that leaders cost more than soldiers and soldiers cost more than trackers, or whatever. I probably will reuse these generic sheets repeatedly.

For a lot of other encounters during a session, I make up a name, a quick description, and maybe a stat or skill or two on the fly. These people can be the majority of those who appear in a given session. They don't have to be weak characters; they may be immensely powerful ones whom the PCs aren't going to challenge to a fight.

I've been doing this for years, and I find that it works for me: It enables me to run sessions that I feel satisfied with and that keep my players coming back. I wouldn't give up pre-statting to wing all stats; I wouldn't try to do full character sheets for everyone. I believe in "characters must not be statted in excess of necessity"—but my concept of what's necessary includes helping me imagine a scene more vividly. And character sheets do that for me.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

Could the game have gone smoother if I'd had more prep time? SURE! But, the game was still a smashing success.

I've done the very same thing occasionally. But I used the word "chronically" by design. For me, at least, the very fact that I habitually do lots of prep work for a session, including not only written work but walking around thinking, means that I have a reserve of thought to draw on when I have to improvise a session in a hurry.

There probably are GMs who can walk in and wing a session every time, and have it be superb every time. But I'm confident that there are a lot more GMs who can run first-rate sessions if they put in time thinking about the scenario before starting the session. And I would say that if you tried to walk in and wing it every time, and a lost of your attempts were failures, that would be a sign that you weren't one of the small number of GMs who can always improvise, and that you should either put in some prep time or let someone else take over.

Bill Stoddard

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I also probably want to check that leaders cost more than soldiers and soldiers cost more than trackers, or whatever.

This is something you've referred to before and continues to bother me.

Why should it be so? What's so implausible about a state of affairs in which leaders occasionally have abilities which are less desireable from the point of view of a typical player in a generic 'adventure'* than the abilities of soldiers lower down in the social order?

I'm willing to bet that a lot of realistic historical figures who had authority over over figures would come to a lower point total than their subordinates if they were statted out in GURPS terms. Points, as you undoubtedly know, are not experience levels and have no relationship with such levels. A higher point person is not necessarily more powerful, more experienced or better at his job than a lower point person.

One of the reasons for why I'm always apprehensive when I hear GMs' using the PC creation system for NPCs is that it often leads to those GMs misintepreting the nature of point values. You are too intelligent and experienced with GURPS for me to assume a priori that such is the case, but I'm afraid that I can see no rational reason why someone would want to ensure that leaders were worth more points than followers unless he subscribed to some such fallacy.

I hope that there is such a reason and I've simply failed to spot it.

*The guiding principle behind point cost, as far as I can tell and as far as I can interpret Kromm's word on the subject.