Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Greetings, all!

Inspired vaguely by the 4½ spec thread. What traits did you, or other players you know, buy just for the coolness, as opposed to practical consideration? Primarily GURPS examples, though it doesn't hurt to throw in the occasional case from another system. Here are some of mine:

• An aerospace fleet as a Patron just to be able to call in an airstrike exactly once (it made sense in context).
• Move! and Instant Improvised Morph in order to make a warrior-priest whose method of sacrificing enemies is by providing a flashy fight as a show to its deity. (Ended up mostly acting as support with Bindings and stuff, alas.)
• (Equipment.) A glove granting the Stretching (Force Extension, one arm) trait, in order to mimic the Sword-and-Armoured-Gauntlet style from the 7th Sea. This was a space operah game with force swords and stuff.
• If I even get to play in a low-Powers fantasy game: Strikers (Limbs, Arms) for a monk of some sort.
• Manul once bought the ability to summon Cue balls for his character, mostly as a projectile for Innate Attacks. He also fought with a cue 'staff'. The game was anything-goes 300ish points.
• My ex once considered letting her character learn a modified version of the Bodice Cutting Technique. Seems like it was worthy of a rules discussion.

So . . . what are your stories?
Thanks in advance!

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

I've bought a lot of Sig Gear over the years that wound up being pure eye-candy when the campaign played out.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Well, if we were to consider impractical traits I think the winner in my experience is Secret:4 Arms.

I once gave a pregen for a player who couldn't make the chargen session Delusion;I'm Not as Dumb as I Look.

I could list Perk:Always Has String but that turned out to be practical.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Referencing the source, I've found Dodge and it's chain to be extremely useful in D&D 3.x/Pathfinder. I'm not sure what ErhamDJ is even on about. I'm playing a Gunslinger in Pathfinder now with Leaping Shot Deed and it's ridiculous cool.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

I have a player that EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER have handsome and sex-appeal, just to be sure his character is good with the ladies. Even if it is a fighter, an assassin or a sniper that never talks to no one.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Uh, Dodge, in 3.5? +1 AC against one opponent at a time? As a prerequisite, it leads to some potentially interesting things, but on its own it's not much of a feat.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

In Pathfinder it's +1 all the time, and Dodge bonuses stack. Yeah, but ErhamDJ was complaining that nothing on the chain was useful, which IME isn't true. Mobility alone generally lets you ignore AoOs without messing around with Tumble/Acrobatics checks.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

"If there's any girls there, I want to DO them!" -The Dead Alewives

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Oh, many (but not all) of my characters have those traits (though I don't think I ever took more than Attractive in GURPS). But those traits usually just lay there, because romance turns out to not be considered an appreciated part of the campaign (there were some notable exceptions, but I still think romance is out of place in most campaigns I've personally took part of).

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

The biggest issues we had with it were:

1) It wasn't worth the opportunity cost. There was always something so much more powerful as to make it a laughable choice. Unfortunately, new players did not know this. A +1 situational bonus just was not that useful. If your declared dodge target attacked you, it would only matter if your armor class happened to fall into that small range where they didn't always either hit your or miss you. And the monsters in our games were ruthless. The casters' AC was too low for it to matter, and the cleric wasn't going to go with the 13 Dex needed to get the feat. And +1 AC to a wizard is negligible. What percentage of the time was it going to stop an attack aimed at you? Not very often. It was always more useful to take a feat that helped with your main shtick.

2) New players had trouble keeping up with the game since they were new, and often forget to declare who they were dodging.


It also didn't help that its main use was as a prerequisite. That meant you could go months before getting what you had really wanted. The other problem was that by the time anyone could get Spring Attack--which always looked so much more useful to new players than it really was--the casters were dominating and the only way to keep up with them was to take a full attack as often as possible.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

I often do that, but less out of practicality and more due to characterization. If a player describes the character as attractive - even if they have no use for that fact - I think it should be included.

I'll often give characters a well-rounded set of skill, even if a certain skill might never come up during play. The knight in armor might never use "Housekeeping" but you never know.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

For what it's worth, I think another reason might be pre-emptive:
The player expects that if romance comes up at some point in the campaign, the GM will look at those traits when in doubt. Some GMs might think that lacking those traits basically closes some of the possible narrative lines (hopefully not too many).

NPC example: a character who is Klutz from neural damage, and thus is unlikely to ever drive, but has Driving at a competent level to account for a short 'career' in racing in teen years. (It probably should actually be a lot higher, but combined with some sort of extra penalty; not like it matters at this point.)

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Oh definitely. But if it isn't going to be an advantage, it shouldn't cost points.


Hans

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

I like applying custom power modifiers to things. Sometimes to the point of said power modifier being unique to that one character. It gives me a hook to attach the visualizations and other descriptive bits to the character's abilities.

I always buy some kind of artistic or creative skill for every character I make. For GM_NPCs, I tend to make that Artist (Calligraphy) if I can squeeze it into the concept. My personal handwriting is very, very, tiny and evidently very hard for others to read. And, so, I like making characters that have very good handwriting.

I tend to buy various appearance perks, especially Classic Appearance, because everyone is someone's thing. As I'm the GM, I make sure it comes up, but I understand that others don't.

I've a few others, but I'm less consistent about those.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

Just recently I found I had to buy 'Current Affairs (High Culture)' because one of my Quirks was 'Loves Opera'.

In Pathfinder buying a magic item that gave Knowledge (Nobility) because my Fighter had just recently been elevated to head of House. Turned out to never that I can remember come into play on account of we were all off adventuring.

Any number of shiny toys that meant nothing at all except that the character had to have it to complete their 'look'.

Edit: I had a World of Darkness VR mage with a Background that gave him a laptop with more processor power than a mainframe. He rigged it to a set of VR goggles that looked like thick sunglasses and VR gloves that looked like designer fashion. The laptop sat in the small of his back under his Matrix-esque longcoat and it drove people nuts trying to figure out how he was spellcasting without using a computer... and it also looked way cool.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

I want it noted that "Coolness factor" isn't necessarily a waste of points, depending on your RPG philosophy. For many, they're the whole point behind points.

From a certain perspective, everything done in an RPG is about maintaining narrative control. The point of winning or losing a battle is about controlling what happens next. If you want the story to go in the direction of your hero marrying the pretty princess, then you need to ensure that the princess is rescued from the dragon and that she falls in love with you (or, in the very least, that you can convince her father to let you marry her). The actual battle against, the dragon, the details of it, aren't nearly as pertinent as the outcome itself.

Many of the things mentioned in this thread pertain to that. Take, for example, the fellow who always takes Handsome and Sex Appeal to ensure success with the <Isaiah Mustafa>ladies</Isaiah Mustafa>. He's trying to ensure that his character always has good fortune in romance, because that's important to him as a player. This isn't a "waste of points" it's exactly what he wants out of those points. A similar thing is true of signature gear or ensuring that you have a cool sidekick. It's a direct control over the narrative. It gives you the sort of story you want.

There's another school of thought that argues that RPGs are really about overcoming the challenges places before you. What happens before and after the battle with the dragon is not as relevant as overcoming the dragon itself. The dragon is a conundrum placed before the players, and they need to solve it with a certain budget of points, abilities and tactical choices. Thus, for such a player, "Handsome" is a waste of points because it's unlikely that he'll need a higher reaction modifier with women, or at all, and he'll stick with tried-and-true combat methods like Combat Reflexes and he'll finagle the best gear for the cheapest money, and discard said gear as soon as something better comes along because that's how you win the game.

According to some theories, as soon as you toss both people into a game together, you run into a problem, but I'm not convinced of that. Narrative guy is interested in what happens before and after the battle, and gamer guy is interested in the battle itself. You do run into an issue where one is bored by what the other finds exciting, but if people are patient, I think you can find a middle ground and, in my experience, even the most extreme tend to see at least some merit in what the other camp is enjoying.

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

I love Weirdness Magnet, It often fits with the kid of character I like to play. The charm of it is the fact that anything can happen so no session will the same as the one before. It also gives the GM some flexibility with his adventures, he/she always has a plot hook to ensnare my Nosy gate/mind mage with .

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

For a cinematic warrior who can get Flying Leap, I like Super Jump as a Potential advantage - increases leaping distance by only 50% instead of double, for half the base cost, and to this I can add the enhancement Maneuverable. In conjunction with Power Mod (Chi), net cost 7 points, net flying leap distance 4.5 times normal jump but you can swerve in the air.

I also like Levitation as a perk, that thing where you sit in lotus position about 3' off the ground. It's functionally equivalent to Accessory: Chair.

Along the same lines, I like Chi Projection as a perk; I guess it'd be a shtick. Whenever you use Great Lunge, as a cosmetic effect, you don't really stretch, you just project the force of your chi from your fists across the intervening distance to your target. (For this to balance, spines and auras "disrupt the chi flow" so you can't avoid the consequences of melee attacks.)

For a different kind of chi projection, I like a 1pt followup attack with Incendiary and Surge; it's not the best way to improve damage and it's not enough spark to matter often, but there's that chance of pyrotechnic punctuation.

One Eye gives you that grizzled veteran pirate look but shafts you for more than it's worth if you need to buy back ranged weapon skills. So, take it as a quirk. You have the cool eyepatch, and a hit to your good eye takes you straight to Blind, but otherwise you suffer none of the drawbacks.

For Psionics, psychometabolism is the the just-for-cool ability. It's not exactly useless, but TK is generally better for everything that Psychometabolism is good for. However, TK doesn't always make you look like an action movie star.

GEF

Re: Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness
 

All yours are kind of neat but that one is my fav.