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Old 05-25-2018, 04:40 AM   #1
johndallman
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Default [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Dependents

Dependents [-1 to -180] are NPCs for which the character has social and/or material responsibility. Their disadvantage value depends on their competence, as measured by point value relative to the character, their emotional importance to the character, and their frequency of appearance. You can claim points for two individual dependents, or one group of dependents. The same NPC can be both an Ally and a Dependent, possibly with different frequencies of appearance: if they appear as an Ally, they’re useful, if as a Dependent they cause problems, and if both, both. Of course the GM doesn’t have to roll for appearances, provided they have about the right frequency; they can be created to suit the story.

You have to take care of your dependents. If they are in trouble, you need to help them, and your enemies may make use of them to manipulate you. As the character’s point total increases, their Dependents can also improve. The player can suggest how they should change, but the GM has the final say. If a Dependent is killed, or otherwise eliminated from the campaign, you need to buy off the disadvantage, take a different disadvantage, or acquire a new Dependent.

Dependents have special rules for the Puppet advantage, the Uncontrollable limitation, and the Duty, Guilt Complex and Sense of Duty disadvantages. They also affect Fright Checks, and awards of bonus character points. Dependents have been part of GURPS since 1e, and the basic idea hasn’t changed, although the point accounting has.

Social Engineering adds detail to this disadvantage, and extends the relative point value table to handle very powerful characters. There are interesting examples in the Discworld Roleplaying Game, Adaptations, Banestorm, Boardroom and Curia, Horror, Infinite Worlds, Martial Arts, Power-Ups volumes 2, 5 and 6, Supers, Tales of the Solar Patrol, Ultra-Tech, and Zombies.

Dependents has significant benefits for the game. It ties characters into the setting, and gives them people to care about and who can help them cope with the strains of adventuring. Once you’ve got players to accept that these things are part of the game, it’s reasonable for Dependents to sometimes be useful in the game, if that arises naturally.

I’ve grown to like this disadvantage and use it quite a bit. That comes from a character in the long-running Weird War II campaign, whom I knew had a wife and children at the campaign start. It was only later that I had a creativity attack and did character sheets for all of them, well below 50% of the PC’s points, but with room to grow. The GM seems happy with them, and makes use of them occasionally, while I’ve learned about various bits of history relating to the things they’ve been doing. I’ve also written up a fair number of WWII historical figures – generals, politicians and the like – most of whom had a wife and children. Those Dependents don’t come up often, but they did matter to the originals, and affect how they behave in the game.

How have you used Dependents in your games?
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Old 05-25-2018, 05:54 AM   #2
Phantasm
 
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Default Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Dependents

I haven't played any characters with Dependants, per se, though one GM essentially turned a Contact (an underworld informant) into one without giving me the disad (I kept having to rescue the guy).

My one player in the Shadowguard game has taken a kid brother as a Dependent, with an FoA 6. In the char's backstory, the kid was used as leverage against her once, and the player has agreed to an arc involving another kidnapping of the kid, though I'm going to give it my own long term plot twists.
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