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Old 03-04-2019, 01:31 PM   #31
Ottriman
 
Join Date: Apr 2015
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

Yeah, disadvantages are very exploitable and feel strangely mandatory sometimes. The best solution is honestly to restructure them to provide metacurrency when they come up and seriously hinder the character.

Said metacurrency can then be spent on boosts later.

Thus instead of a fixed CP cost, you just get some boosts stashed up based on how often the disad hurts you that you can cash in later to improve a roll.

I have ripped off fate points from FATE for this myself, but you could do something else with the metacurrency if you wanted.
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Old 03-04-2019, 02:14 PM   #32
Black Leviathan
 
Join Date: Sep 2018
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

We source some XP based on disadvantages/quirks so it's an added motivation to go all out and not buy-off disadvantages that are played in character.

I've actually been second-guessing the wisdom of taking full disadvantages. The difference between -40 points in disadvantages and -30 points in disadvantages is actually not that impressive and it's caught up to in about 3 game sessions usually. Rather than searching through disadvantages for that last 5 or 10 points that you're not going to enjoy playing, maybe start the game 1pt lower in HT or start with a Will hit or some softer skills.
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Old 03-04-2019, 03:13 PM   #33
mr beer
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

The latest game I'm running, I soft-capped Disadvantages to -25 / max of 3 total because I got very tired of grab-bags of -5 point Disadvantages that never came up in play.
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Old 03-04-2019, 03:48 PM   #34
Dalin
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
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.
I'm not sure I understand the concern about "balance" when it comes to disadvantages. Behind the curtain, as a GM, aren't minor variations in point budget sort of irrelevant? I find that I'm always balancing the game for the actual PCs (and players) at the table, including lots of elements that aren't accounted for in CP: optimization, synergies between characters, player skill, how sleep deprived someone is, how much beer they're drinking, etc. Moreover, some scenarios highlight some types of disadvantages more than others, just as some scenarios favor certain advantages and skills. Plenty of characters are suboptimal in combat or social situations or underground or at sea or what have you. If someone doesn't spend all their disad points, they're not going to feel notably less powerful than anyone else, not unless we're talking about a sizable percentage of the CP budget. Similarly, if a player or the GM forgets to apply a disad in a certain situation, meh, we'll notice it later and do better next time. That's more about losing an opportunity to enrich the story than about balance.

I also find that many players end up playing out their disads at different levels than the raw point values indicate. In my last campaign, for example, I had a character with Trickster [-15] and Xenophilia [-10]. As his character developed in play, it turns out that Xenophilia was his defining characteristic. it caused him tons of problems and he dove into it with gusto. If I were to revalue them, I'd say, he got -15 from Xenophilia and -5 or -10 from Trickster. So, yeah, maybe he needed to play up Trickster more, or maybe at some point, I would ask him to buy it down, but at the table, it all felt natural and the character seemed like a solid concept that took up the right amount of spotlight time. So why worry about it?
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Old 03-04-2019, 04:34 PM   #35
Rupert
 
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

My big problem with the solution of rewarding taking disads by giving out XP or metacurrency for their appearance in play is that over a long campaign taking disads that will turn up in play often becomes mandatory. Not having disads to generate rewards is strongly punished, especially as having them come up and complicate your PC's life is already granting your (the player) with spotlight time (arguably the most valuable currency of all).

On top of that, I find I'm not a fan of meta-currencies of the sort used for boosts - fate, luck points, whathaveyou. I know that to an extent hit points and the like are used as meta-currency, but at least they feel like they have some sort of link to something the characters can know. Gaining currency by having a disad triggered that can be used for something completely unrelated later just breaks what immersion I might have.

Having disads pay out up front has its problem too, though (as we're discussing right now). One I'm noticing is that their price becomes less and less important as a character's point value rises. With 50-point competent average characters those 25 or so points of disads are a big boost to competency in exchange for a few disads that will probably help clearly define that character. At 500 points to get the same impact you need hundreds of points of disads, which probably turn into a huge mess, or make the character unplayable much of the time. If you stick to only 25-50 points of disads, the character can be well defined and not dominated by the disads, but their point value has little impact.

To add to the problem, some disads scale well with point values (mostly ones that limit or control behaviour in some way and that use control rolls) while others don't (mostly the ones with small mechanical penalties, and/or which rely on attribute checks to trigger or resist them).
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Old 03-05-2019, 05:53 AM   #36
WingedKagouti
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

Quote:
Originally Posted by Maz View Post
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 wouldn't call that character hard to play, just very likely to die in the first five minutes of gameplay.

Impulsive and Overconfidence make for a suicidal combo, add in Greed and the character easily gets into big troubly quick. With Curious on top of that they're likely trying to break into the nearest place that looks like it could have valuables, regardless of the amount of security present.

If anyone presented me with such a character I'd immedately ask them what their next character looks like.
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Old 03-05-2019, 06:46 AM   #37
Maz
 
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Denmark
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

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Originally Posted by WingedKagouti View Post
I wouldn't call that character hard to play, just very likely to die in the first five minutes of gameplay.

Impulsive and Overconfidence make for a suicidal combo, add in Greed and the character easily gets into big troubly quick. With Curious on top of that they're likely trying to break into the nearest place that looks like it could have valuables, regardless of the amount of security present.

If anyone presented me with such a character I'd immedately ask them what their next character looks like.
That was also sort of my point with "hard to play". :)
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Old 03-05-2019, 07:26 AM   #38
AlexanderHowl
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

Disadvantages should hurt, though some of them are more fun that others. For example, I like playing characters with Berserk (12), Curious (12), Overconfidence (12), Insomniac (Severe), Sense of Duty (Close Friends), and Xenophilia (12). The combination is quite amusing in play.

Conversely, there are some combinations that are just too painful. For example, high reaction penalties are a horrible idea in my games. If you have a -8 reaction penalty, the average result is Very Bad, so police shoot you on sight at any legitimate excuse, lynch mobs form spontaneously to kill you, and average citizens run shrieking from you.
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Old 03-05-2019, 09:11 AM   #39
martinl
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Disadvantages should hurt
... the PC's effectiveness at doing PC things.

Disadvantages should make the player enjoy the game more because their character is challenging to play in a fun manner and possesses interesting depth.

In my experience many people misread this, and try to reduce the player's fun using the disads, which is counter productive.

More generally, the CP-based character generation game in GURPS should generally be subservient to the RPG it feeds into. This is easy to forget, since the CP game generally comes first, but GURPS is first and foremost an RPG, not a doll builder. (I won't call HWF if you use it primarily that way ... but I kind of want to. Sorry.)
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Old 03-05-2019, 09:26 AM   #40
Andreas
 
Join Date: Mar 2014
Default Re: Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

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Originally Posted by Ottriman View Post
Yeah, disadvantages are very exploitable and feel strangely mandatory sometimes. The best solution is honestly to restructure them to provide metacurrency when they come up and seriously hinder the character.
That leads to a different kind of problem though. Vampires who don't avoid sunlight because being exposed to that gives them meta currency etc. There are plenty of situations where it make sense for characters to try to avoid situations where their disadvantage apply, and this encurages the opposite behaviour.

It is probably better if the GM just don't give points for more disadvantages than what he or she is comfortable enforcing.

Last edited by Andreas; 03-05-2019 at 09:29 AM.
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