Realistic Point Gains

[Flyndaran]

Most people with it suffer some form of depression, but not all.
It's mostly a circadian rhythm issue.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Who mentioned depression?
My SAD has nothing to do with emotions. Seasons just change my sleep needs that I can readjust using caffeine. 7 hours or so in summer to 10 or so in winter.

I'm starting to wonder if you're only reading every other word of my posts.

No I am reading all the words.

Less Sleep 4 means sleeping four hours a night, in reality no stimulant can make four hours of sleep as restful as a full night's sleep. You sleeping eight hours (normal) instead of ten (slightly excessive) isn't something that would be represented by Less Sleep in GURPS.

[corwyn]

Originally Posted by Skarg

I like the guideline that starting characters can spend at most 2 x age in character points on skills.

I don't recall ever seeing this as a guideline. In 3e it was a strict requirement for starting characters in Basic. In 4e, i don't recall seeing it at all. Where is this from?

[AlexanderHowl]

I think that it is guideline that people kept from 3e. Skills can represent formal training, but they can also represent a specific innate talent. In 4e, you could potentially have a child born with Karate at DX+10 and Judo at DX+10 (Power Ups 3: Talents, discusses skills as innate propensity on page 17). If that child grows into an adult with DX 14, the adult would be one of the most talented martial artist on the planet, even without formal training.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by corwyn

I don't recall ever seeing this as a guideline. In 3e it was a strict requirement for starting characters in Basic. In 4e, i don't recall seeing it at all. Where is this from?

It's 3e and earlier. And frankly, it was ungodly unpopular in 3e, and routinely ignored, even in GURPS books.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I think that it is guideline that people kept from 3e. Skills can represent formal training, but they can also represent a specific innate talent. In 4e, you could potentially have a child born with Karate at DX+10 and Judo at DX+10 (Power Ups 3: Talents, discusses skills as innate propensity on page 17). If that child grows into an adult with DX 14, the adult would be one of the most talented martial artist on the planet, even without formal training.

This is more or less true in 3e too - it's even explicitly called out in the Artistic skills section even if you are adhering religiously to the RAW.

[sir_pudding]

Gene-hacking, if it doesn't give you cancer, is still very unlikely to give any really statistically significant changes to adult phenotypes, since that would require somatic changes to entire tissues and in many cases changes to things that were fixed during development. The exception are things like treating very specific mutations (usually single allele) with retroviral gene-therapy and sometimes that means it is hypothetically possible to add new (but minor) capabilities, like the possibility that you can induce tetrachromic vision.

You probably can't just add "(ST+2; DX+1; IQ+1; HT+1; Beautiful; Combat Reflexes; Double-Jointed; High Pain Threshold; Longevity; Resistant (Acceleration+3; Disease+8; Ingested Poison+3); Voice)" to an adult, and certainly not in any clear-cut, reliable, or instantaneous way. Although some of these things are achievable with exercise, training, or lifestyle changes (and in the real world there isn't any clear line between genetics and hard work; Kobe Bryant is almost certainly benefiting from his genes, but he also has trained very hard for most of his life).

[Ulzgoroth]

Yeah, any genetics significantly changing gross morphology and a lot of things that don't really are going to be limited once the body has developed. That's one reason THS and UT use pretty heavy-weight nano for major engineering on adult (or mostly post-zygote) animals.

[AlexanderHowl]

Now, you could have a character who was subjected to highly experimental, grossly unethical, and very expensive genetic engineering before implantation during the 1990s. A shadowy organization could have infiltrated fertility clinics throughout the world and replaced tens of thousands of embryos with their experimental embryos over the course of a decade. While 99% of the embryos would have suffered spontaneous destruction and 99% of the babies would have suffered disabilities, the character would be one of the very few lucky ones that benefitted from the technology to create a superhuman.

[Alonsua]

I see that the thread has been having some activity.

It´s 2032 and bioengineering, robotics, artificial intelligences, virtual reality, spaceships and cutting-edge medical treatments and drugs are blooming under the shadow of a multinational company the size of Apple. I made some of the info public and you can see it here (https://cristinahigh5.wixsite.com/transhumantech) but the facts remain the same. I want some really exceptional characters, and I am looking forward the limits of the GURPS learning system, considering that someone plays a realistic character, for which I followed the rules of Back to School, but as I see there is a lot of controversy about it.