Disads: the Second Best CP Deal in GURPS

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

A lot of that, but not all of it, is the control roll mechanic that's supposed to balance these traits. The control roll mechanic feels awful for me as a GM. The mental burden this mechanic creates is enormous. And then the players figure out that I'm not able to actually use the control rolls, and this encourages them to then load up on these mental disadvantages. The prices on those should all be much, much lower, because the way they work in play is that the player tries to roleplay them when they remember they have them, but that there isn't any actual enforcement of them.

A lot of people misinterpret control rolls. They aren't a target number to suffer the disadvantage (so no, it's not supposed to be an x% chance you suffer the problem), they're more like a target number to allow you to retain control over the character when the disadvantage should to come up. If you explain them as that's the roll not to turn into a GM puppet whenever the disadvantage could possibly remotely matter, or impose a perfectly reasonable penalty like every time you even try to make a control roll you get docked an xp for the session you might get better results.

But sure, getting players to role play their chosen disadvantages is the root of a lot of problems with them. If they can get away with not playing them and the GM isn't inflicting *major* xp penalties for that then yes, they are potentially unbalanced free points.

There's not a functional difference between -2 and -5 and -7. The GM just ends up roleplaying it all the same.

Though that's something of a GMing issue too. I rarely allow more than -3, since at that level you should expect nobody to react positively to you, even if I've predetermined they should for the adventure to work. It is after all the level where you are on par with someone they *know* to be a monster who eats babies. Even desperate people have some standards.

But yes, longstanding problem. There's a reason CHA isn't a high priority attribute either. Fundamentally a tabletop game is a social activity, and the social attributes and skills of the *players* tend to bleed through and modify the ones on the character sheets no matter how hard you try.

And that then creates a feedback loop where it encourages players to take those disadvantages, which leads to characters with more disadvantages for the GM to remember and enforce. And you end up at the table with upwards of thirty disadvantages to remember and enforce and make control rolls for, and it's impossible.

I agree there. Point based caps are a really poor limit. Number of disadvantages would be much better - although you need to allow some flex in that for stuff that is conceptually one "problem" that needs several disadvantages to model it.

It also helps to insist on picking the disadvantages *first*, ideally maybe before you even tell the players what the point limit is, but certainly before they start pricing anything out. There's a lot to be said for write up your character concept in prose sentences and they we'll try to model him with the rules for a game where you really want to emphasize the roleplaying over the war game aspect.