Low CP Characters: Start small, Grow often

[VariousRen]

Hey,

I'm the DM for and frequent player of low point games, usually low fantasy games. In all of these games the PC's have started off at very low points compared to the average that I've seen on the forums, usually 40 points with a further 40 in disadvantages rather than 150, 200, or 250 that many games start with.

I personally love the idea of starting with a very low point character and playing them as they grow. My wizard/fighter Terry (mythweaver link below) is just about to reach 100 points, and feel miles away from what I would have designed a 100 point wizard/fighter to be. All along the way I have made now-vs-later decisions, spotted and patched obvious skills and traits that I was missing, and discovered who Terry is (rather than who I designed him to be).

Now when another PC dies and is replaced, their 70 point character feels about on par with my power, because they can be min-maxed without worrying about survival at low points. This works very well in game, new PC's are specialists, but my old character has points spread across everything and feels like a survivor.

So I was wondering, does anyone else here share my love of low point characters as a starting point for a campaign? Has anyone experimented with running shorter 2 hour sessions twice or three times a week to speed through the low point section while saving the now-vs-later decisions? Post your favourite low point character, share your best stories, cleverest plans, and hilarious failures!

Terry, fighter/wizard: http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=193608

[weby]

I like to start campaigns as low power(though higher than you have) and grow to really high power.

The current fantasy campaign was started at 100+45 points with mandated templates and the characters are now at 2000+ points.

The characters had to chose a 35+15 point adventurer profession, a 15+15 point mundane profession and mandated 10 point debt along with a 10 point race, basically leaving them with 40+5 points for other stuff (mostly attribute raises in reality as the profession packages did not include any such)

We run a weekly, but long game typically 9-10 hours and I award 1 point/hour of play as normal reward, thus the growth is fairly fast.

[ericthered]

I enjoy the similar effect I get by throwing mundane Modern characters into supernatural, dangerous, and foreign situations. The game is called lost in dreams, and the longer term players have odd collections of skills and abilities. (like the hobo who has electricity based techno-magic and speaks ancient Egyptian)

[tshiggins]

I started the "Facets" characters with 125 points, base, and limited them to no more than 50 points of disads (plus five points of quirks).

The characters had one or two areas of competence (skills of 13 or 14), a broad range of stuff they were decent at (10s and 11s), decent stats and a few nice advantages.

They were supposed to be members of a skilled search & rescue team, and I wanted them to resemble characters at the START of a action-adventure fantasy TV show. As examples, I cited Sam and Dean at the beginning of Supernatural, or Giles at the start of BtVS, or everybody except Angel, at the start of that series.

It worked out pretty well, and the characters have begun to grow, "organically." Once they start working on spells, I expect them to diverge from one another, quite a bit.

It's how I like to see characters develop, in a campaign.

I hand out about three CP per 5-6 hour session, and grant bonuses to those who post in-character journal entries on the Denver GURPS group forum, or do other things that add to the campaign.

For instance, the player of Beatrice sat down and created her character's wand out of stuff she had around the house. It included the right components, and everything. :)

Points earned during the session, plus extras, means the PCs average an increase of about four points per session that the players attend.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by weby

The current fantasy campaign was started at 100+45 points with mandated templates and the characters are now at 2000+ points.

At roughly 10 points per week, that's 190 weeks. You've been playing that campaign longer than I've been roleplaying (2 years). That's... that's pretty impressive. I must have played/run 10 or so campaigns since I started.

I like the idea of taking a character from a low point level to a high one, but I've never really done it. In practice my group tends to like a lot of variety (me in particular).

[whswhs]

I wouldn't even try to run multiple sessions in a week. My players are too busy for more than one session a month—and one of my two current campaigns seems to miss nearly as many months as we actually get together for.

[Anthony]

I've considered running games with distinct "level-up" events, particularly near the start of the campaign. Usually I find that it's best to slow down advancement at a certain point, though I think my last D&D campaign was set to "gain one level every 2 sessions", which was pretty drastic.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I've considered running games with distinct "level-up" events, particularly near the start of the campaign. Usually I find that it's best to slow down advancement at a certain point, though I think my last D&D campaign was set to "gain one level every 2 sessions", which was pretty drastic.

Every D&D campaign I was ever in was a set "one level every session" and we still never made it higher than level 8.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

At roughly 10 points per week, that's 190 weeks. You've been playing that campaign longer than I've been roleplaying (2 years). That's... that's pretty impressive. I must have played/run 10 or so campaigns since I started.

I like the idea of taking a character from a low point level to a high one, but I've never really done it. In practice my group tends to like a lot of variety (me in particular).

We started the current campaign early in 2011 and now have played 193 sessions and the highest point total is 2216 points and have gone though about 40% of the expected campaign arc. Not all campaigns are that long though.. the previous campaign was only about 3 years.

[Christopher R. Rice]

I've run all sorts of games at all sorts of point totals. My lowest level one was a 25-point two-session event where the PCs were told in advance that most - if not all - would die. That was the entire point. All but two of the PCs were killed by the demonically infested house and the real campaign began. Everyone made new characters except the survivors who were given 10% more points than everyone else and allowed to free-form advance their characters (everyone starting from tabula rasa had set limits on things). That game lasted quite a while and ended up morphing into a five year game.

I had another low-level game (75 points) that was pure political thriller in the vein of the West Wing or House of Cards. We had to stop playing that one because it was actually causing some of my players to stress out from the things happening in game. That was fun.

Overall, I prefer to start out ignoring point totals (exception: games like DF or MH I follow them closely) and use my massive character background generation tool. You might call it a "life path" system or the like. Optionally, I just have players create their backgrounds and then we mutually decide how they can fit their characters in the campaign.

I think sometimes that folks confuse "points = power." Take for instance my current sprawling epic fantasy campaign, "Sicatra." The players have taken on the role of deities and are around 4,000 points or higher (though they don't know that because I created a customized pointless character creation system) and they fear for their lives - as they should. The game may be higher powered but it's gritty as hell because I've cranked up all the realism (bleeding, sleeping in armor, hurting yourself, etc.) rules to the max. Their characters are not used to eating and sleeping, much less bleeding or other "mortal" things.

GURPS is one of those awesome systems where you can play 300-point characters and make them feel much less than that just by turning the dial on how the world functions all the way up to 11 on the realism scale.