Workshopping an apartment building
 

A vague idea I’ve got for my next RPG blog article;

Upscale (most who live here are well paid urban professionals, Comfortable Wealth and Status 1) apartment building in a nice neighborhood, 5 floors high (plus a basement and roof), one large apartment residence per floor. TL 8, probably America, the building was completed back in 1990.

Each apartment has its own cast of NPC inhabitants with their own backstories, secrets, plot hooks and personalities. Not to mention maps of each flat and contents/“treasures.” Physical stats for walls, doors, locks, security systems, etc.

My current ideas for NPC residents of the apartment building includes;
Hacker, gearhead mechanic/inventor, wealthy art collector, undercover spy, beat cops patrolling the neighbourhood (ok, not residents but still relevant NPCs), family of four, old man, eccentric writer, criminal in hiding.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Books and page numbers I should consult for this project?

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

ChatGPT will spin up casts of characters to order in just a few seconds.

Edited to add: But you can't rely on it for accurate GURPS stats.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

First of all, the right use of regular Internet search engines and just selecting the option, for those which have it, for an Image Search, will let you turn up a lot of blueprints and/or at least layout maps of modern buildings.

You should be able to find one you like to use as your map, without having to do any work, but if you are handy with technology and like to do extra work, I am sure you could import the image into some kind of program which would let you manipulate it exactly as much as you want, depending on your skills and desires, of course.

That being said, suggestions on inhabitants, security system, presence and exact job descriptions for any doormen or other security, not to mention how burglar alarms would work, as well as the parking situation and the hypothetical existence of an underground garage, all depend on exactly when and where the campaign is set.

You say that the department building was finished in the 1990s and the first inhabitants moved in then. Ok, that's one data point. But does that make it a brand-new apartment building or a thirty-year-old one going through some renovations right now?

Is the apartment building in one of the newly trendy tech workplaces that also features a growing population of remote-working professionals, like Atlanta, GA or Austin, TX? Is it maybe in a smaller city or even town, where the surroundings of this apartment building represents one of the few nice neighborhoods, like if it were located in a place like Beaumont, TX, Lafayette, LA, Biloxi, MS, Mobile, AL, or Panama City, FL?

Or is it maybe up North, where the need for air conditioning might not be as desperate, but insulation and heating takes on a wholly new level of importance, not to mention the vehicles people drive changing, or maybe even their whole attitude toward owning car or truck if you place it somewhere like New York City.

If it's in certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, maybe the mix of inhabitants changes again, with a lot of people coming from somewhere else, and some of them perhaps still hoping that someone will read their screenplay or notice them at the right parties, even if they've secured some kind of different employment that pays enough to finance their stay there while they hope for stardom.

And everything changes depending whether it's the 90s, the 00s, the 2010s or 2020s. So, more detail, please.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

In the real world, both of these measures are highly unlikely. The builder has to consider how to deliver the most building for the least practical cost.

Horizontal floor area is relatively cheap to build compared to the vertical transportation systems for utilities, goods, and people. A typical floor plan would include a minimum of four dwelling units unless they are extreme luxury types (i.e., penthouse-equivalent); eight or ten would be more common.

Similarly, five stories is an expensive place to stop. It's high enough (>4 floors) to legally require elevators, but won't max out the number of levels before special (and expensive) high-rise building codes take effect (to make up for being beyond the reach of hook-and-ladder firetrucks, etc.). A more cost-effective building would be seven floors.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

This is true and depends on economics and practical engineering concerns, so it should hold true no matter the local regulations.

However, this is cultural and regulatory. It depends on where the building is located. Apartment buildings higher than four or five floors are pretty rare here, probably because few people want to live in real high-rises.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

In some countries, high-rises are common not because people want to live in them, but because its almost as much of a hassle to get permits and zoning for a four-story building as a fourteen-story. Which brings us back to how the details vary with time and place.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

A detail that may be of use to you:

A former partner of one of my cousins worked as a building and maintenance contractor for a city in the South of England, and a major part of his work was maintaining and re-fitting public housing.
Apparently on one occasion he was require to rectify the damage caused by "unauthorised modifications" carried out by an extended family who, allocated a row of flats, had cut through the dividing walls - all of which were fire resistant and at least one of which was load-bearing - to form a single communal habitation.

This might be an interesting feature for somewhere in your block - either for habitation purposes as above, or for criminals who can use the rat-runs between flats to enter and leave unobserved.

Hell, if you're prepared to go full "Kowloon Walled City" the tunnels can go from building to building by improvised bridges, or even whole rooms suspended from the external walls.

Go old school Judge Dredd - have a beat cop (or perhaps a detective) actually live in the building...

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

I can't help you with NPCs, but if you want stats for the building itself, take a look at my "Random Things to Lift and Smash" thread here:

https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=176284

There are sections specifically designed to provide stats for modern commercial buildings, including TMI on elevators.

As for plans, a search for "apartment building blueprints" will yield suitably gratifying results.

It's also worth mentioning that a 5-storey building with just four apartments per floor isn't likely in most markets, but would just be plausible in a city where there are height limits on buildings (e.g., Paris or Washington, DC) and where the developers only had a small area to build on due to zoning requirements (e.g., parking lots or minimum separation from other buildings). It might have a T-shaped layout with elevator shafts, utility runs and emergency stairs at one end of the building at right angles to an access corridor to the apartments.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

I should clarify; the building was opened in 1990, and the current setting is (let’s call it) now. The year you’re reading this, basically, mid-2020s.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

Is it in a specific city, state, coast or other region?

I'd start by imagining the Homeowner's Association, Condo Board or other bureaucratic entity through which nags, scolds and that guy who keeps complaining about a knocking sound in the heating system interact with other inhabitants, who just want to be left alone, not suffer through more passive-aggressive notes on their doorstep or, Gods forfend, another special meeting on the 'Canine Waste Crisis' in the garden.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

No, no specific location.

Re: Workshopping an apartment building
 

If it helps, PYRAMID 3/96 Tech and Toys IV has an article by Matt Riggsby titled Hi-Tech Buildings that may be of interest.

People of an Apartment Building
 

We're all the products of our culture, environment and history, so I find it pretty difficult to imagine characters without context.

I don't really know any of my neighbours now. I suspect that most of the apartments are either short-term leases or just full-on Airbnb. In any case, never seen the same person twice, but, on the other hand, I'm not looking very hard. I usually don't see anyone, as I walk to the elevator, take it down to the lobby, and walk out the door. I don't keep regular hours, so even if there were families who left and arrived at the same time every day, I probably wouldn't run into them that often.

Let's use my last apartment building as inspiration. My next door neighbours were a lesbian couple and their teenage son, who spent a week with them, and a week with his dad. They were loud when they'd had some wine, but had the audacity to complain to me and my friends when we were being very loud. For reasons which made sense at the time, when we opened the door, after midnight, wondering who was ringing the doorbell at such a late hour, most of us were wearing underwear and one guy was on his knees in front of another one, demonstrating techniques of fellatio through a thin plastic bag.

On that occasion, they backed away without complaining. The next time they came by to complain, we invited them in for a drink, which solved the problem of them coming round to complain about our noise, but did mean they occasionally came by to demand drinks and entertainment. On balance, I like to think it was a net positive.

Other family on that floor were Serbian-Icelandic. Three cute kids, slender, pretty mom, the father would want Jude Law to portray him in a biopic, but has to settle for Adam Driver, and then discovers it's because they made him into the villain. Every conversation between the parents I ever heard was loud, which might be cultural, but also angry, which I don't think is. Perhaps not so unrelated, they got divorced a couple of years in.

Next floor down, middle-aged (to be kind) couple who recently retired. He was my English teacher when I was young, which was a short time ago, even though, coincidentally, it can also be described as having taken place in the previous century. She seemed nice. I think they had a small white terrier. Never any problems, and they never complained, though I know for a fact that some of my less-cultured friends throw cigarette butts down into their garden, and the absolute-least cultured of them urinated in it. Bunch of ----ing savages, my friends.

Now, the apartment above me also held a middle-aged, retiree couple. Unlike the long-suffering, but ever dignified couple on the ground floor, Mrs. Whats-her-name from the top floor had a new complaint every time I saw her. I totally accept the ones I had coming, like, 'Last Saturday, your friends laughed like drunken hyenas all night, keeping us all up.' Yeah, it's a fair cop, guvnor, we were roleplaying and drinking. Or when a friend of mine broke the doorknob of the downstair door out of the apartment building, when he drunkenly tried to close it as we arrived home about five hours past Last Call at the last bar, on a weeknight. My friend said that as he left, the next day, the old man upstairs gave him a look that said, "I know it was you. And your ancestors are judging you from Valhalla."

Those we all had coming. But then there were the other complaints. Like, every time I used my propane gas grill, which in Iceland is a popular cooking option, out on most balconies in apartment buildings with balconies, or on verandas or the like in other dwellings. Except that the lady in the apartment above mine felt that the smell of cooking flesh offended her so much that she wanted advance notice to close all her windows. 72 hours of advance notice, for when I was planning to use the propane gas grill. I politely pointed out that as I was not Danish, I did not, in fact, plan get-togethers with friends that long in advance. I am also very proud of how I did not in any way intimate that she was cuckoo for cocoa puffs, at least not until the interaction was over, whereupon I obviously told everyone that.

Now, the layout of the house and the Homeowner's Association Meetings indicate that there were more people there. One of them was a retired CPA, who obviously got saddled with running the HOA. Some years, his official title was Treasurer, other times, President, but regardless of who wore the other hat, it was the responsible retiree CPA who got all the mail and had to deal with every unimportant, annoying issue people bring up to the HOA. God rest his soul. The poor man. There, but for the grace of God go I. Imagine if they'd found out I was a lawyer?

I jest, actually. They did find out. A prosecutor and her corporate legal husband, both of whom had been at the University of Iceland law school at the same time as me, moved into the apartment vacated by my old English teacher and his wife, when they decided to move somewhere smaller and not with a garden. Or, at least, not with a garden bloody savages who call themselves friends 'water' from the balcony and decorate with stubs.

In any case, though my old school mates outed me as an attorney, I was able to successfully argue that I was a criminal attorney, really the next step to a criminal, and they ought to nominate the guy who worked at the corporate legal department of a huge bank, instead, for whatever HOA appointment they were trying to fill. It worked, though I am not proud of leaving a man behind. But it was him or me and I really did prefer it being him who ended up with paperwork for nothing and nags for free.

I'd describe the typical HOA meeting, but it's more or less impossible to describe, and humans don't retain the memories, anyway. Just roll on the Confusion Table from GURPS Powers until the PCs are dazed and confused, use Fast-Talk or Public Speaking as the basis for a Parry score to avoid any HOA appointment, and never volunteer for anything.