Giving large amounts of Character Points at once. (150, 200+)
 

Have you guys ever gave 100, 150 or more character points for each player at once? That will happen in my upcoming campaign 3 or 4 times, with different amounts. I’ve been thinking of 50 as the minimum and 250 as the max, but I would really appreciate your experiences with it.

This would happen after they take down specifically powerful “BBEGs”. The more powerful they are, the more points they give. Example: Lets say Big Bob is worth 1125 character points but the set is worth 1000. If the players kill Big Bob they’d have 1000 for themselves (divided among the players would give 200 each)

Ofc I would not count the NPCs point, but eyeball it.

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

I have not, though I have held off letting players spend points till an appropriate time. That measn that sometimes they save up a lot then spend a bunch at once. That is especially good in a Supers campaign where you have large jumps in growth.

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

I have never given that many CP at once. I usually give 2 points per session, with 'realism' constraints on how that is spent. At the end of an adventure arc I have may give from 10-25 points. Maybe sometimes with the addition of narratively appropriate Advantages (typically Social ones).

The most I've seen a GM give is 50 CP, and he was contemplating a significant shift in tone, practically moving the PCs to a new campaign (albeit in the same setting several in-game years later).

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

Not that many. At least not as a choose your own - I do sometimes hand out specific advantage, and sometimes those can be worth a lot of points.

I suspect the main problem with handing out big chunks of points the players can spend on anything is you are basically committing yourself to repeating the campaign startup session. Your players will spend a significant period of time deciding what to spend them on, and you are going to need time to consider whether all those choices are problematic in some way - obsolete one of the other characters, break something when combined with the traits they already have etc.

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

I've seen it done for origin stories (build your normal human; okay, now we have an origin story where you turn into a vampire or some such), or for specific advantages gained in play (guess you're all Very Wealthy now, gain 30 cp), but giving out a package of points without strong restrictions on how they get used will take in ordinate amount of time.

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

If you do this, expect a shift in the kind of game you're running. It would be like going from the Wonder Twins to Superman, permanently, in an instant.

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

For the sake of getting a feel for the scale, consider a few touchpoints.

- Comparisons with D&D levels occasionally come up, and while there's not really a good way to equate the two systems, the center of gravity of opinion is that one D&D level is in the neighborhood of 50 GURPS CP, spread among several abilities.
- 100 points in the Martial Arts lenses change characters from realistic, if good (Karate Kid, Rocky) to "Cinematic" (Jack Reacher, Taken)
- 250 points turns Joe Average into a movie-style action hero or SEAL.
- 250 points changes the 150 point capable hero into a low-level super (the lesser Watchmen, say)
- 20-point lenses in the Action line (250 base points) suffice to change the templates from "military" to "criminal" or "spy".
- 15-point lenses in the Monster Hunters line (400 base points) suffice to change the flavor of templates from "Accidental Hero" to "Chosen One" to "Criminal" to "Philanthropist". It doesn't take a lot of points to make characters feel different.

Stormcrow's observation is well taken. Point awards of those sizes will cause a notable shift in the feel and scale of the game -- not just to the players, but of the scale that the characters themselves would have to notice. That might be exactly what you want, of course -- a game where the characters go from the ordinary through cinematic to supers to godlings. If that's not what you're going for, then try building a few characters and throwing various amounts of points at them in 3-4 stages to see how they change.

Speaking just of personal experience, a few points per session still added up to new capabilities for the characters. Big chunks were sometimes part of the character creation process, similar to what Anthony mentions (build a 150-point viable hero, then add 100 or 250 or however many points). Campaign awards, as malloyd mentions, weren't something we'd normally bother accounting for, and they were most often something the entire party got (the king's your patron; you all lose Mundane and gain Wild Talent) rather than being something different for every character.

Re: Giving large amounts of cp at once.
 

I think it depends on how they might be spent.
getting a single high cost power might make sense (Jumper, ATR, high ST to super ST) but 100 to 150 cp can run a campaign off the rails if not very tightly controlled.
For 40 points you can buy a constant ally at 150% of your point level.
90 points will buy you a government* or divine patron that shows up almost all the time to help you out.
It is hard for me to anticipate how either of those, but especially the later, would disrupt the storyline

*Not someone FROM the government... A Government! I don't want to give my players powers like... 'Hey, get the president on the phone; I need him to authorize an extraordinary rendition on this guy who took my parking spot' or 'I beseech thee, oh lord of all creation, make thy will known by revealing to us the villain of this mystery'. If every problem is solved with a quick conversation there is very little adventure.

Re: Giving large amounts of Character Points at once. (150, 200+)
 

Not that extreme. I have granted 5 points or so at once on occasions where they finished off minibosses for the campaign, then could spend them in "cinematic training" in town.

I would only consider the OP's situation if the large lump represented some Signature Gear points for assets for each individual warrior (fighter craft? mounts? similar power gear{magical/superscience gear}?) or as other posters suggest, a paradign shift for the campaign (all become vampires? All get Super-radiation bath? all seem to die but meet 1000 years later in five different ways...) Or just adding a new team feature such as DR(Ablative, Force Field, Gadget)50 [50],


To that, remember strictly the Rules As Written for noncinematic learning of skills not used is 200 hours of training and THEN you can spend 1cp to learn/improve a skill not used during the adventure (p.B292). (800h for languages! p.B25)

OP has not described the campaign setting (it sounds supers?)As a GM I hope you have some "plan" for what those points would mean to each character, either adding a Lens or some specific place they will spend the points -- ... Thinking about RPGs, when defeating a new boss with a scary power the player often gains a variant of that power (or or on a run-up have to seek an ability to more easily defeat foes of the realm, mega-man style...(all our supers now have a new power technique to add "ice" to attacks now)

Sometimes new training that adds "affects insubstantial" on powers, and eventually adding levels of +Cosmic to them could be in such steps to counter foes once defeated.

Re: Giving large amounts of Character Points at once. (150, 200+)
 

Not quite. 200 hours of guided learning (100 hours of intense learning, 400 hours of self-learning, or 800 hours of on-the-job learning) outright gives you one character point worth of a Skill or Technique (or an Advantage, with the GM's permission), you don't also need to spend earned points. Character points earned adventuring cannot be spent improving skills/abilities that weren't meaningfully used during the adventure, this is correct (mostly - you are allowed to learn things you didn't use if you were around people who were using them), so you'd need to use the learning rules to improve those, but you don't spend any character points in the process. If you went monster hunting and earned 5 character points, then decided you wanted to improve your shoemaking skills, you couldn't spend those [5] on Professional Skill (Cobbler), and would need to put in the nominal 200 hours per point of learning... but once you put in the time, you get the skill at the purchased level without ever needing to touch those [5] you earned while out monster hunting.

The (currently indefinite-hiatus'd) webcomic Force Magellan, being about a superhero academy, gets into this. There's this humorous exchange that sheds some light on how characters learn Can Carry Objects for their powers.