Realistic Point Gains

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by 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.

Sounds like one of my favorites: Albert Wesker :)

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by 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).

I used some recovery rules for this, taking some examples as altered appearance (2 weeks), joint work (1 month), muscle graft (1 month), boosted heart (1 month), brain tissue graft (2 weeks), etc.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

If you gave yourself cancer via gene hacking it would be interesting to an oncologist, who might learn something about the causes of cancer, but it wouldn't be especially interesting in a typical roleplaying game.

If only she hasn´t invented the cancer cure already*

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Evadam

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.

"A billionaire did it" is the "a wizard did it" for sci-fi. Regardless of how much money and what year it is, if you actually want a realistic answer it is:
You are much more likely to give yourself cancer with somatic gene-hacking, then you are to give yourself some impossible-to-quantify advantage and you simply can't raise attributes or give yourself clear GURPS advantages (with some rare exceptions involving single allele changes to small population tissues most of which are probably Perks), because that is just how gene-expression works. No future technology, short of the ability to rebuild entire tissues and organs from stem cells, or some kind of nanotechnological reconstruction, will change this.

I want some really exceptional characters, and I am looking forward the limits of the GURPS learning system,

Which isn't intended to be used as a a lifepath 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.

Those rules are great for what they are intended for: campaigns that take place centered around an educational institution in which the characters are having adventures of some kind in the foreground while trying to keep up with studies in the background. They aren't intended to justify a ridiculous NPC, which you can just make. Notably your players aren't going to care if you went through all this work. The NPC will either be a minor character in their story and they will mostly just roll their eyes about the ridiculousness or it will be a scene-stealing GMPC, which will be no less fundamentally unfun if you can point to this rules abuse to justify it.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Evadam

I used some recovery rules for this, taking some examples as altered appearance (2 weeks), joint work (1 month), muscle graft (1 month), boosted heart (1 month), brain tissue graft (2 weeks), etc.

I don't see how that is at all relevant. Recovering from surgery isn't at all the same thing as being a single cell, differentiating into cell lines, developing into an infant, being born, being raised in a good environment, and then training for years to realize your potential. You simply can't just edit the genes in a few cells (using gene-editing) or a significant population of a tissue (with retroviral gene-therapy) and expect gross phenotypical changes in an adult organism (in days, or weeks, or even months). You also can't guarantee large-scale quantifiable phenotypical changes like "70% stronger" by just changing how a few proteins are expressed, even with germline engineering.

As a trivial example, the eight or so genes associated with height are present in the tallest people, on average, but there exist people who are very tall who lack all of them and people who are shorter than average who have most of them.

Originally Posted by Evadam

If only she hasn´t invented the cancer cure already*

That would also be of significant interest to oncologists. Although the medical profession tends to shut out people who experiment on themselves, so she isn't probably winning accolades. The late Henry Heimlich was the household name inventor of two significant life-saving technologies, and was a pariah in medical research because of his later work in deliberately infecting children with malaria. Realistically, your character might end up like him.

However the cure for this kind of cancer is almost certainly repairing the damage you did in the first place. So now she has Dependency for whatever protein she screwed up expression for, instead of Terminally Ill, and still no superhuman traits.

And if she turned nearly her entire liver, for example, cancerous at once, with retroviral treatments, she is just dead.

Realistically, though, there is no one "cure" for all cancer, and one person is unlikely to be the sole discoverer of any cancer treatment, since these are incremental technologies that improve as our understanding of the underlying molecular biology improves.

[whswhs]

Really, to me, the question for all of this is, what narrative purpose is the character in questions supposed to serve? Why do you want a character with those astonishing gifts and qualities? Will their presence make the campaign more fun for the players, and if so, how?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Really, to me, the question for all of this is, what narrative purpose is the character in questions supposed to serve? Why do you want a character with those astonishing gifts and qualities? Will their presence make the campaign more fun for the players, and if so, how?

And why is "realism" important?

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by Evadam

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.

It's not controversial at all to create exceptional NPCs for your campaign setting but it's also not realistic to use Back to School, if by 'realistic' you mean a 'reliable method to model real world study and training in extreme scenarios'.

If you want exceptional real world characters, go ahead and build them. If you want some basis for calculating how many points to use and you like Back to School, go ahead and use it. If you want a way to model realistic long-term training which reliably produces 1,000 point people, you may be out of luck.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

And why is "realism" important?

I just want to be able to point at some hystorical character and say: "See, she is just another (insert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Shakespeare, Mozzart)..." and I want them to be able to repeat her extraordinary feats if they want.

[Flyndaran]

Realism may mean "not silly or supernatural enough to break suspension of disbelief" more than how some of us may otherwise define the word.

But seeing as how incredibly subjective that is, I don't see how our opinions would or should matter or even help much.