Thoughts and Experiences based on a low to high level 411 session campaign

[weby]

Basics
This is a set of a bit rambling posts in parts, not all posted at the same time. They are based on just finished campaign that ran for 411 sessions with average length of about 8 hours each starting in 2011. The characters started at 100 points and ended at above 5000 points.

If you are not interested in the background and such, you can skip to the next post, as the rest of this post is about the background for the campaign, the setting and similar.

Campaign/World Background

The campaign premise was that it was a set of fantasy books that were being read and the events in the campaign were the contents of the books. They detailed the raise of a group of adventurers from early days to gods.

There is a persistent legend that a entity known as “Seer of other-realm” or “Reader of other-realm” is in possession of 13 books of Fate, also know the as 13 books of shadow.

The legend claims that at some point in the future the seer will start reading them, as she reads them the events they foretell will start to happen and once she has read the 13th book to end, the world ends.

The basic setting is fantasy, but not "Ye olden times", instead being a TL 3+1(magic) world mostly with some parts 4+1(magic). Basically magic is an everyday thing, with about half of humans as example knowing some minor magic.

The world is my own with a long development and deep history, as I have been running games in it since 1989, including some very active times as setting for the Neverwinter nights server Cerea island. I have maybe run a total of 2000-3000 game sessions in the world.

One important concept of the world is Eras where civilization builds up and power is gained by many forces and eventually there is a huge fight that alters the world a lot and destroys all civilization and kills most of the population and many of the powers including many gods. Then the civilization starts again, but different than before and with many of the gods being different. This cycle has been repeated many times.

[weby]

Character progression and limits
This is also more kind of background info to make sens of some of the later things.

Characters started at 100 points. They had to buy fated(15 or 5 point version) and use most of their points in "levelups"

The basic progression was 1 point/hour of play, but many bonuses, most of those bonuses going to specific things. The total ending up at about 1.5 points/hour in the long run.

The ending points were from 5267 to 5455.

The levelups come in two types "Basic" and "Adventurer". The basic are basically mundane professions and the adventures ones are the adventurer types.

Almost all values are restricted, but there are many ways to increase over the limits, but they require special things or more points.

Limits were:
Attributes: 5 over the racial base(thus 15 humans)
Skills: level +5 ranks (ranks being 1,2,4,8,12,16... points and level being the number of levelup packages taken)
Attack advantages: 5 points/level.
Damage resistances: 1/level +1/level of more limited versions.
And so on.

But by the end the best attributes tended to be total of about 25 including magic items and such. Base skills for best skills were in the 40s..

Other design switches:
Wildcard skills were in use, though not available from start but eventually all characters had several.

There was a lucky break system in start allowing bonuses to rolls that really needed it and a fate point system allowing more godly powers at the end.

The campaign started with the standard Gurps magic with many tweaks to fix the holes and healing and nature magic moved away from wizards to divine and nature casters respectively.

Constant character points except when specifically burned. Basically if you got a disadvantage you did not lose the points, instead you got them freed. If you got an advantage in play, you had to pay for it.

Limited re-specing of characters is possible. That is, at times you could sell existing things and free up the points to buy new things.

[weby]

Start and early levels

The start of the campaign was a planned graduation mission for adventurer guild training that the characters had just gone through. Of course things went not as planned to make it a challenge...

Basically the 100 point characters at this point mostly had skills about 12 or so in main skills. So actual misses and failures in unmodified rolls were normal.

The feel of such characters is definitely one of beginners with many basic "routine" adventuring tasks seeming difficult. Starting a fire or climbing a slope are both real challenges.

Gurps magic system is kind of under powered at those levels with the high FP costs of spells and short effective ranges making things difficult.

Armored melee characters seemed most powerful as defenses were just not that good for the high defense ones.

The healing spells, even at low skill seemed to work well for after combat repairs but less so in middle of combat due to ranges and the FP costs.

There were many shots to the back of friends and such in this part.

There were many memes throughout the campaign from failures in this part.

Characters:
Kieron Demilier: Small sword and DR 9 plate. Duranaki(A sm -1 human race of high tech deep forest dwellers). The tank that wanted to be a swashbuckler but failed almost all acrobatics rolls. Gave rise to the expression "do a Kieron" when you try to get up acrobatically but just flop in place for several rounds.
Jaysek Demilier: Mage in DR 9 plate and using mostly a revolver for attacks. Also a duranaki. Mostly known for dropping the pistol on frequent fumbles.
Ra Dana: An Elf knight with a long sword, chain and a bow. Much more into sneaking and stabbing someone in the back than open fighting. Comes from a wood elf family living in a stone castle and thus seen as strange. Mainly a front line combatant.
Neeia Liamyn: A blaster elementalist elf mage that seemed to hit more friends than enemies. Extremely beautiful and charismatic, being the group "face".
Ertak Curtance: A priest, in chain and carrying a shield. Mostly known for spending a lot of the time putting away the shield and putting it on, in some fights spending half the fight doing one or the other of those actions. Likes weird foods and drink.
Agnarr Grettisson: A forester with an axe and leather armor. Does a lot of damage in combat, but tends to take more than others combined. Wants to become a druid but has not found anyone willing to train him.

[weby]

Starting the path
In the 200 to 500 point range several things were different.

Gurps magic came to work well in this range, being a nice support and force multiplier.

Skills are more in the 14-18 range and thus tend to succeed usually in most normal tasks and even some bit difficult.

Combat defenses actually start to matter with some characters reaching defenses that actually work quite often.

Adventurers start to feel like proper adventurers and towards the end of the range actually good at things. Most adventuring tasks do not need to be rolled anymore and can just be assumed to succeed unless in critical situations.

The amount of friendly fire and other similar situations drops a lot.

Overall at start of this range the characters feel fairly competent and towards the end like super competent normal people.

Characters:
Kieron Demilier: Small sword and DR 9 plate in the start. Ditches the plate towards very end of this range when she gets DR 5(not cumulative with armor). Actually succeeds in most acrobatics rolls and starts to feel more like a swashbuckler.
Jaysek Demilier: Starts to be useful as support and progresses to a hood blaster and crowd control. Comes very close to dying many times in this time, most due to failed maneuver rolls in difficult places.
Ra Dana: An Elf knight with a long sword, chain and a bow. Has quite many difficulties in this range as tries to be a scout by failing due to low perception. Many times sneaking through groups of ambushing enemies without being seen, but not seeing them either.
Neeia Liamyn: come to power in this period with withering damage from spells and good parry defense(fencing parry with fairly high skill, enhanced parry and retreat)
Ertak Curtance: Provides good healing support even in middle of fights. After gaining earth form starts to want to get hit in the head, up to the point of deciding to go head first on successful acrobatics rolls on falls due to the +2 skull DR. Gives raise to the meme "head first, as there is nothing important to damage there anyway". Becomes a tank with fairly high defense, healing and no incoming damage multipliers.
Agnarr Grettisson: Finally gets druid training, continues the dangerous path of high damage, low defense character, requiring even more healing.

[weby]

The path continued
From 400-500 to about 1000 points.

At this level the first things started to seriously break in the rules.

The most serious was the magic system where effects became too good at too early in the campaign ark. So had to go through many cycles of nerfing individual spells and such to try to keep the breakage low.

In the end almost half of all spells had some notes on them.

Also towards the end the standard difficulty levels of things started to be lacking when a -9 action is an almost certain success. So had to work a lot on making the high skill levels meaningful.

Due to players leaving Ertak and Agnar that were the Fated 5 points characters were dropped from the party. And Jaysek and Ra were shifted to new players who started shaping them in a different direction.

Kieron Demilier: Is really good at stealth attacks at this point. Also starts to be very knowledgeable about monsters so spends a lot of time in early parts of fights/before fights studying them.
Jaysek Demilier: Being a mage can do anything and well.
Ra Dana: Continues failing in scouting, but becomes more and more like a tank.
Neeia Liamyn: Specializes more and more in crowd control and is the most frequent target of the magic nerfs. It even became kind of a joke where any rules changes would start with a statement that it was a nerf to Neiia, even if the change in effect did not have any effect on her.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by weby

The path continued
From 400-500 to about 1000 points.

At this level the first things started to seriously break in the rules.

The most serious was the magic system where effects became too good at too early in the campaign ark. So had to go through many cycles of nerfing individual spells and such to try to keep the breakage low.

In the end almost half of all spells had some notes on them.

Also towards the end the standard difficulty levels of things started to be lacking when a -9 action is an almost certain success. So had to work a lot on making the high skill levels meaningful.

Due to players leaving Ertak and Agnar that were the Fated 5 points characters were dropped from the party. And Jaysek and Ra were shifted to new players who started shaping them in a different direction.

Kieron Demilier: Is really good at stealth attacks at this point. Also starts to be very knowledgeable about monsters so spends a lot of time in early parts of fights/before fights studying them.
Jaysek Demilier: Being a mage can do anything and well.
Ra Dana: Continues failing in scouting, but becomes more and more like a tank.
Neeia Liamyn: Specializes more and more in crowd control and is the most frequent target of the magic nerfs. It even became kind of a joke where any rules changes would start with a statement that it was a nerf to Neiia, even if the change in effect did not have any effect on her.

I'm kinda wondering about nerfing casters as you approach 1,000 points. Because early or low-power Superman is about 1,000 points, as is a D&D 3rd edition-equivalent "20th-level wizard". At 1,000 points, everyone can have some level of Unkillable and still have at least 850 points left over.

So rather than nerfing the casters, perhaps buffing the non-casters was in order.

Of course, I only have this brief overview, so it is entirely possible I don't know what I'm talking about. :)

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Say, it isn't that bad!

I'm kinda wondering about nerfing casters as you approach 1,000 points. Because early or low-power Superman is about 1,000 points, as is a D&D 3rd edition-equivalent "20th-level wizard". At 1,000 points, everyone can have some level of Unkillable and still have at least 850 points left over.

If, and only if, they are allowed such purchases.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by Rupert

If, and only if, they are allowed such purchases.

True; but I don't think 1,000-point characters should be mundane - counting Batguy's tens of billions of monetary net worth as an effective superpower.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Say, it isn't that bad!

True; but I don't think 1,000-point characters should be mundane - counting Batguy's tens of billions of monetary net worth as an effective superpower.

My current campaign has 750-1700 point cinematic but mundane characters. A few have some points in psionics or sorcery, but most are mundane.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by Rupert

My current campaign has 750-1700 point cinematic but mundane characters. A few have some points in psionics or sorcery, but most are mundane.

At that point-total, even if you buy nothing but levels of mundane skills, you're still either hitting skill levels high enough that you could win the Olympics in multiple events, or you've put points in basket-weaving to ensure none of your skills rise "too high".

This guy got a thread for writing him up in GURPS; I think on the Reddit? and the conclusion was that he came to around 450 points:

https://www.nasa.gov/astronauts/biog...-kim/biography

And let me note here, he's a NASA astronaut, Navy SEAL with over 100 missions, and a doctor of mathematics and a doctor of medicine.

Unless you mean the GURPS-technical definition of "mundane", no, a 1,000-point character is not, and should not, be mundane, unless "normal humans" are superhuman.