[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Curious

[johndallman]

Curious [-5] is a mundane mental disadvantage with a self-control roll (SCR) and the usual variation in price by SCR target number. It appeared in GURPS Uplift, during the 3e era, but the mechanics were significantly overhauled at 4e.

You suffer from very strong curiosity. You just can’t leave strange or unknown things alone, unless you make an SCR roll, but you’re reluctant to try to control yourself. You aren’t blind to danger, but you tend to rationalise it away. New things are just so … fascinating. You want to press buttons, fiddle with levers, open secret compartments, and so on. You may well become highly familiar with the “Enigmatic Device Table,” on B.478. Nothing about this disadvantage prevents you from having or using appropriate skills or equipment to investigate. You’re just unwilling to leave well alone.

Curious is a common disadvantage on published templates. It provides a reason for getting involved in strange and dangerous things, without implying any particular role in adventures, other than “not the voice of caution.” Aliens: Sparrials always have quirk-level Curious, and many have the full disadvantage, as do several Banestorm races. Bio-Tech has uplifted animals that retain Curious, and a very crude way to remove it. It’s a good campaign-starting disadvantage in Fantasy: Portal Realms, and an excellent way to get into trouble in Horror. Madness Dossier has drugs that cause it, including ones that are just meant to make you more alert. Magic: Plant Spells has a meta-trait that uses Curious, and animated plants with this disadvantage (and others). Curious is surprisingly rare in Mysteries, but Power-Ups 6 has quirks that can help with that. Space makes curiosity part of the alien race psychology design system, and it’s common in Tales of the Solar Patrol.

This can easily become a character-defining disadvantage, if there’s an adequate supply of strange things, weird societies, or the like in the campaign. Taking an Aspected (-20%) limitation to only be curious about a particular class of things seems reasonable.

How much trouble has Curious got you into?

[Rupert]

My 'Traveller' campaign features several party members with it. The most notable result of this was the activation of an ancient device that dumped the party in a pocket universe that took them some time to extract themselves from.

More recently a similar act has dumped the party on a 'world' that's some sort of cross between an Alderson Disk and Pratchett's Disc World, physically speaking. This doesn't really count as being the result of Curious, though - the players collectively decided it would be fun to play with an experimental jump drive their characters found, rather than that being the result of some PC's Curiosity.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Taking an Aspected (-20%) limitation to only be curious about a particular class of things seems reasonable.

Usually, limitations like Accessibility or Aspected do not work with the same values for Disadvantages as Advantages. I'd rate Curious about only one thiing as a Quirk, unless it was something very broad, in which case it would still probably be worth only -2 to -3, rather than -4, compared to Curious about everything.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Usually, limitations like Accessibility or Aspected do not work with the same values for Disadvantages as Advantages. I'd rate Curious about only one thiing as a Quirk, unless it was something very broad, in which case it would still probably be worth only -2 to -3, rather than -4, compared to Curious about everything.

I don't recall Aspected used on disads, but using Accessibility on them at the same value is RAW.

[Kromm]

Curious is curious because it has a split personality for me:

One part of me feels it should be worth 0 points because adventurers are supposed to be like this. Yes, yes . . . strictly speaking, this is a more severe case that gets you into more trouble than your companions, who have merely the usual curiosity of adventurers. But there are times when it (and to some extent Impulsiveness and Overconfidence) feels like "free points," as relative to the general population, just about all PCs suffer from it. I have to remember that the GM has a mechanic for "forcing the issue" on this PC but not the others, which can lead to my second misgiving.

Another part of me feels it's woefully underpriced because given the sorts of things adventurers get involved in – things that too often involve temptations that bear booby traps, curses, poison, and similar dangers, or just secrets best left alone for social reasons – even slightly elevated curiosity is akin to Cursed or Terminally Ill. In actual play, well-played Curious is one of the leading causes of self-inflicted woe. So much so, in fact, that experienced gamers tend to play it less well, leading back to my first misgiving.

So it's probably fine where it is.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Usually, limitations like Accessibility or Aspected do not work with the same values for Disadvantages as Advantages. I'd rate Curious about only one thiing as a Quirk, unless it was something very broad, in which case it would still probably be worth only -2 to -3, rather than -4, compared to Curious about everything.

*nods* I was about to say. A hypothetical -20% version of Curious would have to be quite broad, IMO, and might be hard to justify.

[JohnLynch]

In a non GURPS game we had someone bite hard down in their mouth and start foaming and die. The wizard moved in to examine the mouth, touched the foam and suffered a milder dose of the poison before washing it off. Player was being stupid, but that would be a pretty good example of Curious and how it justifies a -5 cost.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Curious is curious because it has a split personality for me:

One part of me feels it should be worth 0 points because adventurers are supposed to be like this. Yes, yes . . . strictly speaking, this is a more severe case that gets you into more trouble than your companions, who have merely the usual curiosity of adventurers. But there are times when it (and to some extent Impulsiveness and Overconfidence) feels like "free points," as relative to the general population, just about all PCs suffer from it. I have to remember that the GM has a mechanic for "forcing the issue" on this PC but not the others, which can lead to my second misgiving.

Another part of me feels it's woefully underpriced because given the sorts of things adventurers get involved in – things that too often involve temptations that bear booby traps, curses, poison, and similar dangers, or just secrets best left alone for social reasons – even slightly elevated curiosity is akin to Cursed or Terminally Ill. In actual play, well-played Curious is one of the leading causes of self-inflicted woe. So much so, in fact, that experienced gamers tend to play it less well, leading back to my first misgiving.

So it's probably fine where it is.

I think to some extent Curious underscores the common issues that seem linked to oldschool design of behavioural (RP-oriented) disadvantages. The issues are:

• All of the carrot is given in advance (points gained upfront), and all that remains after that is a stick. This breeds the "how much can I avoid the trait before being forced to buy it off" mentality, as opposed to "when would more focus on roleplaying this trait make the campaign more fun for everyone". Yes, good roleplayers are less likely to be affected by such a push, but the push is still there.
• The fact that resisting the trait is tied strictly to dice means that even when the player knows the letter of the disad doesn't match the spirit of the character concept, it has to be played, because the price is already paid. To some extent, the Ham Clause softens this issue. OTOH, the default assumption of not even rolling to resist disads somewhat exacerbates the issue.
• For many disads, the downside isn't a constant. Instead, in many cases, taking a disads turns out to be a "lottery of disaster". That is, a disad such as Bad Temper (15) may seem like a near-harmless little quirklike thing . . . until that thing rolls a 16 at the Blood Elven Court and results in being sentenced to death for insulting the regent. Admittedly this is likely to be even more prominent with non-behavioural traits like high-multiplier Vulnerabilities to rare stuff.
• Due to the combination of the way SC rolls work, the way different GMs and players may interpret the trait differently, and the way it's hard to predict what triggers will and will not be encountered [and how often] throughout the campaign, they're even more of a lottery. This of course can be mitigated by micromanaging frequency of encountering triggers through GM fiat, but that has downsides of its own.
• The above is worsened by the fact that just how bad the far-reaching consequences of a failed SC roll are gonna be is effectively impossible to estimate when deciding whether to take the trait.
• Sometimes playing such traits due to a failed SC roll can lead to things that nobody finds fun, neither GM nor players. This of course can be avoided by saying "don't even bother rolling, you auto-resist" in such cases, but it still seems like there could be a better solution.

Due to all this, I'm seriously thinking that behavioural and perhaps other disadvantages may be better redesigned using a scheme similar to reverse Impulse Buys, where a GM can 'bribe' players into activating their behavioural (or other similarly qualitative and 'on/off') disads when it'd be good for the campaign, and the size of the bribe can be scaled to the amount of trouble this gets the PC into (retroactively adding more points if the trouble turned out to be bigger than the GM expected). IOW, I'm wondering how the disadvantageous usage of Aspects can be ported over to GURPS.

[smurf]

There's this disk shape, about as wide as the span of your hand, about two knuckles deep and weighs between 1 and 2lbs. It has a large button on the top of it!

Aliens looking at odd earth artefacts in one of the older campaigns.

[khorboth]

In my experience, many PCs take this on a first draft. The player reads the full text, understands the disadvantage, and deletes it. This happens a lot with players unfamiliar with the system. I've seen a few PCs where it survived to play, but usually people think it's the adventurer-standard curiosity when first reading and then change their mind later.