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

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Trooper6? Care to comment?

Bill Stoddard

Certainly! Bill's campaigns are really brilliant. Some of the best I've been in. Creative, surprising, intricate, open-ended, evolving, collaborative...really I can't use more superlatives to describe his campaigns.

I drove 2.5 hours, one-way, just to get to his game.

What worked so well for me, was a real emphasis on character development. And Bill is very perceptive. He has a great ability to see ingenious ways to torture our PCs. I really liked the way our environment and our PCs were in a continual dance with each other.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

For my part, I'm arguing with Jeff, not you. Jeff seems to be taking the position that "An approach that does not use full character sheets cannot work (or perhaps should not be done)". He also seems to claim that improvisation is a form of cheating. [*]I can't imagine how anyone (including Jeff) can run games without improvising unless they railroad. I think improvising is part of the fun of GM-ing and a vital tool when doing so. [/LIST]

I'll say it again, I don't have a problem with improvising IF you really know what you are improvising from and IF you don't mislead people about it.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

[*]I don't think character points have any real meaning outside of "potential usefulness to a PC".

Do you mean character point totals or character point costs? The costs in general don't differentiate between NPCs and PCs, aside from certain important exceptions like making gold or body swapping. They also control important matters like skill traininig that are largely symmetrical for PCs/NPCs

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Regarding the all-able bodied world: If ST, DX, IQ, and HT are independent random variables each with standard distributions and medians of 10, and with the majority of the population having values falling in the intervals [8,12] respectively (p.B14) , the standard deviation would be about +/- 3

Just throwing some numbers out there...if there are ten people in a population of 6 billion with a stat of 20, 1 sigma is 1.7, more or less.

If you accept that (you need not), just over 50% of the population will have any individual stat between 8 and 12. 25% would be below that, and the other 25% above.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I'll say it again,

I must have missed it the first time.

I don't have a problem with improvising IF you really know what you are improvising from

So improvising is only "game deprecating" when it is bad improvising? Isn't that a self evident statement? Can't running planned events be just as "game deprecating" if the planning is bad?

IF you don't mislead people about it.

What do you mean by mislead? How do you go about misleading or not? If I'm doing it right, how should they know? I like my games to be seamless, I certainly don't want the players knowing if they are interacting with planned or improvised elements, if I can help it.

Do you mean character point totals or character point costs?

What's the distinction here? Are the totals not merely the sum of the costs?

The costs in general don't differentiate between NPCs and PCs, aside from certain important exceptions like making gold or body swapping. They also control important matters like skill traininig that are largely symmetrical for PCs/NPCs

These things are only needed when relevant. I don't really need to know how many hours the bog monster studied Brawling do I?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Certainly! Bill's campaigns are really brilliant. Some of the best I've been in. Creative, surprising, intricate, open-ended, evolving, collaborative...really I can't use more superlatives to describe his campaigns.

I drove 2.5 hours, one-way, just to get to his game.

What worked so well for me, was a real emphasis on character development. And Bill is very perceptive. He has a great ability to see ingenious ways to torture our PCs. I really liked the way our environment and our PCs were in a continual dance with each other.

Thank you!

And the phrase "real emphasis on character development" captures one of the roots of my approach to this. So I'm going to write about that.

When I'm a player, creating a PC, I don't go for any of that stuff about "write down your character's life story and we'll come up with stats that fit it," or "fill out this grid of your character's friends, enemies, and business associates," or the like. If I'm asked to do that, my imagination freezes up. There are too many possibilities. What works for me is to pin down some of my character's capabilities, which can be represented in game mechanical terms, and which give rise to what my character will actually do in the evolving story of the campaign. And then I start asking "what side effects do these capabilities have" (such as my speedster having a high food intake, being skinny, and having a quirk-level addiction to chocolate and chocolate energy bars in her utility belt) and "how did my character come to have these capabilities" (as in the story of Fornication Jones, who had formerly served in the artillery, where his name was shortened from Fly-Fornication Jones) and "what other capabilities would my character have picked up in his earlier life" (as in my character Nick Landry's being a skilled basketball player). The character's personality and life story come out of the core capabilities in an emergent process, like raindrop condensation around a seed crystal.

When I'm creating an NPC who is supposed to be a full-dimensional character, and not just a bit player, I use the same process, because that's a process I know how to use. Unlike Icelander, I'm able to go into a session having identified NPCs who have a high probability of complex interaction with the PCs, and having thought out who they are and what they want. So I come in with a bunch of fairly well realized starting points for improv . . . including traits whose applicability I didn't foresee ahead of time, but will spot in play (as when I realized that the Russian telepath whose physical body was destroyed while she was in a psychic duel with Eben's telepath Morpheus could have used her Extra Life to jump into the other compartment of his Compartmentalized Mind). The more I have statted up, the better my chance of those "Easter egg" moments. It does sometimes happen that a character I didn't work out in advance turns into "real people" in that way—it happened with Constanza—but as Pascal says, "chance favors the prepared mind."

I love those moments that I've called "condensation" (did you know that the German word for writing poetry, "dichten," etymologically is thicken or condense?), when working with a character design sets off a cascade of "if this, then that" jumps that turns into a fully formed character. And I love those "Easter egg" moments when some character traits suddenly comes to life in an unexpected way. I feel that those are the times when my GMing is at its best; and everything else in my methods is designed to maximize their probability and frequency.

I have no wish to prescribe to other people how they should GM. I'm just describing the method that works for me. My disagreement is only with anyone who thinks that my approach is impossible or unworkable.

Bill Stoddard

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Why is it so wrong to suggest that people create NPCs the way that many of us (including Kromm) does and that the Basic Set even suggests?

I give them credit for having already tried the way the book says before asking other people about it; if the book way worked for them they presumably wouldn't need to ask.

As for the way Kromm does it, his deprecation of different rules for PCs and NPCs (with some obvious exceptions) is one of the reasons I advocate for treating NPC builds like PC builds. This is especially true for allegedly NPC-only powers and abilities - if you check his LJ blog updates for his previous "Age of Magic" campaign, you can see that he lets PCs have the most godawful powerful abiltities - stuff that would leave your average Black Op reaching for his brown battlepants and leave stat normalizers on life support.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I just compare like stats. If I'm making up a creature that needs to be able to wrestle the strongest character in the party (but still allow that character a chance) I'll give it a ST 1 to 5 points higher (also accounting for mass and size). If an NPC needs to threaten a PC with DR 15, I'll make sure he either has an attack that does at least 4d+1 damage or has some way to overcome the armor. If I need an NPC to sneak past the PCs he'll have Stealth at least equal to the highest Observation in the party, or the benefit of modifiers that allow him to do so. And so on.

If your players like that as a steady diet, more power to you, but I don't think GURPS is especially suited to such a strongly narrativist mode as that last case; why bother to roll the dice if you're already rigging the modifiers to let the guy sneak past?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I give them credit for having already tried the way the book says before asking other people about it; if the book way worked for them they presumably wouldn't need to ask.

I think you are giving them way too much credit. GURPS doesn't hold your hand at all when GMing as other game systems do. The text is a single sentence on page 493. The NPC record cards are mere quarter of a page in the back of the book. The character generation system gets so much more text, is capable of nearly anything, and contains any number of evocative traits. Furthermore they are often coming from systems in which everything is either made with same rules as PCs or a "Monster" from a pregenerated "black box" stat block. Is it any wonder that they often seem to be operating under the assumption that they must use the full character generation system for all NPCs and monsters?

At the risk of sounding extremely arrogant: many of the posts in question are written in such a fashion that I doubt the posters actually read the Basic Set cover to cover even once. I think it's a serious mistake to assume that they have.

As for the way Kromm does it, his deprecation of different rules for PCs and NPCs (with some obvious exceptions) is one of the reasons I advocate for treating NPC builds like PC builds. This is especially true for allegedly NPC-only powers and abilities - if you check his LJ blog updates for his previous "Age of Magic" campaign, you can see that he lets PCs have the most godawful powerful abiltities - stuff that would leave your average Black Op reaching for his brown battlepants and leave stat normalizers on life support.

I was referring specifically to the use of the simplified NPC stat blocks without character point costs or totals. I don't see how "powerful abilities" has anything to do with it.

If your players like that as a steady diet, more power to you, but I don't think GURPS is especially suited to such a strongly narrativist mode as that last case; why bother to roll the dice if you're already rigging the modifiers to let the guy sneak past?

Are you deliberately misunderstanding me? I'm saying that if an NPC thief or commando needs to be able to (capable of) sneaking past the PCs he'll need a modified stealth skill of a certain value. I never said anything at all about automatic success. Note that I almost never do it this way anyway, but you asked how you can compare the short stat blocks with PC abilities. If the PCs all have Observation-18 than Sneaky McNinja with Stealth-11 isn't going to stand much of a chance. You compare opposing traits between the stat block and the PCs, that's all.

In practice, I usually stat what makes sense, and only tweak for balance for edge cases. In that situation, I'd figure out how experienced Mr. McNinja is and give him an appropriate skill level. Now Mr. McNinja is going to try to work things in his favor, he's going to use darkness, distance and so on for positive modifiers. Otherwise, let the dice fall where they may.

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I'm not imposing anything on Trooper6's setting, he claims that he is using the GURPS standard for average scores; the GURPS standard includes the statement on p.B14 that most people have scores from 8-12 in any given stat, so that establishes quartiles no father apart than 8 and 12, and standard dev no more than 3. This could still allow for a smaller std dev of 2 like you prefer. Proceeding thusly:

No, not quite, most of the people have scores from 8-12 means the highest percentage or 50%+, most people does not mean 99%+ or all.

A noticeably physically or mentally gimpy person will have stats of 7- and such, a noticeable fitter and brighter person will have stats of 13+.

Stats of 6 and below are crippling, stats at 20 are considered human maxes, there's lots of variation beyond that 50%+ in the 8-12 range, damn all stat normalizers to hell. *grin*

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

No, not quite, most of the people have scores from 8-12 means the highest percentage or 50%+, most people does not mean 99%+ or all.

I think that's what Jeff said, actually. I took "quartiles" to mean that the second quartile was 8-10 and the third was 10-12; that would have half the population in the indicated range, which is the greatest lower bound of "most."

Bill Stoddard

(Not that I particularly worry about percentage distributions; there is no indication that GURPS stats are normally distributed.)

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I'll say it again, I don't have a problem with improvising IF you really know what you are improvising from and IF you don't mislead people about it.

Much like sir_pudding, I must have missed that. Would you please point me to that post?