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Old 02-08-2011, 09:55 PM   #6
tshiggins
 
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
Default Re: New to GURPS my head hurts

Fallout is a retro-futuristic post-holocaust setting.

While that sounds good, it doesn't make much sense without explanation.

The background of the setting is that United State culture didn't change much after the 1950s. The U.S. citizenry remained strongly anti-communist (McCarthyism was much more popular), militaristic and even reactionary. Imagine the United States as if the era of Eisenhower was never followed by Kennedy's focus on domestic policy, or Johnson's War on Poverty, or the anti-war or Civil Rights movements. Change occurred slowly, and the 1950s were romanticized as the Golden Age of the United States.

This continued until the the last quarter of the 21st Century, when tension over declining oil reserves triggered an all-out nuclear war between China and the United States. The post-apocalyptic setting takes place 90 years after the exchange of nuclear and biological weapons.

So, that makes the setting post-apocalyptic TL9, with heavily-armed mutant bikers, crazed isolationist societies whose members have big guns, wandering bands of cannibals, and a few scouts and others emerging from huge fallout shelters (vaults) to try to re-establish the United States and cleanse the world of remnants of the dirty diapers of Communism, for all time.

I'd say you could use any of the Mundane advantages and disadvantages you'd logically find in a TL9 survival-oriented society. Mental disads might include any socialization needed to survive in a given community (for instance, vault-dwellers might have obsessive neatness as a disad, or suffer from mild agoraphobia and serious fear of heights; while isolationist tribes might put the needs of the clan before personal desires).

As for advantages and disadvantages, I'd avoid anything with the "Supernatural" notation (that's a huge number of possibilities you can eliminate in one fell swoop), and restrict access to any with the "Exotic" notation to only those worth 50 points or less (there's another sizable batch gone).

Also, vault scouts will be the best and brightest, and the mutants and survivors will be the roughest and toughest. So, I'd start characters at about 200 points, and perhaps toss in some extra advantages (such as advanced vault equipment, patrons, pan-immunity treatments, or claims to hospitality) appropriate to the character background. That gets you an experienced and capable bunch, with some nice benefits, but nothing terribly difficult to handle, and no one character able to do everything.

Then, I'd set the books aside, and ask your players to jot down some notes about the types of characters they'd like to play. Don't even look at the books while they do that. Let them come up with character concepts based on fiction or imagination, which are appropriate to the setting.

Once they've got the character concepts down, then start to build 'em in the system. You'll find that GURPS makes it very easy to generate characters based on an initial concept. The presence of a character concept also reduces some of complexity, and that's good at the beginning.

What you don't want is for the players to ask, "What can I build"? The answer to that question, in GURPS, is "anything." Well, that's a pretty open-ended answer, and invites confusion at the complex range of options.

Instead, you want the players to ask, "How do I make this guy?" For instance, if they start with character concepts as simple as "medic on a vault scout team," or "salvager/mechanic for a kind-hearted mutant biker gang," or even "Mad Max," they have a direction. Have them focus on stuff appropriate to each character concept, and not even worry about the rest.
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Last edited by tshiggins; 02-08-2011 at 10:43 PM.
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