Quote:
Originally Posted by Steev
My general principle in games is to have character generation take no more than a few minutes and involve as little stress as possible for the player.
So I would, in this military style game, like the players to essentially pick a soldier, a specialty and a couple of customisations and be ready to play.
Hence my desire to employ templates etc.
Am I unusually in wanting this? If character generation takes ages and involves a lot of my time I essentially cannot kill PCs off in the game as everything would grind to a halt as I helped them generate a new character.
Do others not find this? Bear in mine my group do not know the gurps system so I would need to help them.
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I've run a lot of GURPS campaigns, often with players without much GURPS expertise, including some new to GURPS and some nearly new to RPGs as such. I do help them, by talking with them about their character concepts and suggesting ways to express those in GURPS. And yes, it does take time; we have a presession that lasts at least a couple of hours, and then a month of e-mailing back and forth while I check the legality of the character design and suggest refinements. I've used racial templates, but I don't think I've ever used occupational templates.
I don't often see character deaths; my players mostly are cautious about what risks their characters take. But if a character dies, the player gets to sit out that session (and enjoy the reactions of the other characters to the death). And then I'll work with the player to come up with a new character before the next session.
That's not to say you have to do that. But standard GURPS is designed to give details on a character's distinctive traits. It's not going to work right if you try to reduce all a character's skills to a single insanely high skill. If you want to do that kind of archetypal play, take a look at ! skills. GURPS Power-Ups 7 has a detailed presentation, with a long list of possible skills, and a preface that explains something very like the style of play you describe; I think it may be the tool you want. In particular, the wildcard skill Ten-Hut! is specifically designed for doing all sorts of soldierly stuff—though you're also going to want a weapon skill, possibly Shooter!