Wanted: GURPS Power-Downs 1

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

I would want to see builds for some of our most common physical and mental illnesses.

While I would love to see a GURPS Flaws book, I'm always interested if I can figure out how to handle things with the existing rules, especially when they look like they're not covered.

Two things I try to keep in mind...first, to be playable, GURPS does have to abstract some things, and, two, illnesses, etc. need to be designed in terms of how they affect gameplay. Simply saying someone has an illness is not a disadvantage in terms of gameplay...you need to figure out how the illness affects stats, etc.

With this in mind, one could model game versions of most serious diseases with some combination of disadvantages like Chronic Pain, Dependency, Low Pain Threshold, Slow Healing, Susceptible, and Maintenance. This is how you handle the manifestations of the disease that might interfere with an adventurer trying to do something (which is why it is a disadvantage and worth points). If the disease is going to kill you eventually anyway (e.g., cancer) then you add Terminally Ill.

I think this is the key to modeling a lot of diseases and similar conditions...cancer isn't Terminally Ill OR Chronic Pain...it's Terminally Ill AND Chronic Pain. In short, a lot of diseases are worth a lot of points because they cause multiple problems.

In theory, you could build other conditions with Chronic Pain by extending the base price: -2.5 points per +10% enhancement cost of condition to an affliction. Mild/moderate pain is +20% and 5 points, etc. So unconsciousness (+200%) would have a base worth of -50 points. If someone was unconscious for two hours at a time each time they suffered from the condition and had to roll once a day vs. 12- (x2), the value would be -100 points! Such a character would probably be unplayable as one of the main characters, of course, but might make an interesting NPC.