A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)

[Madd Kossack 115]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The iconic characters aren't really example PCs for an Infinite Worlds game. They're demonstrations of how to build characters in a variety of ways, but their capabilities are very different. The one of them that's most like your character concept is Iotha, the elven archer, but she isn't close enough to just copy.

If the Basic Set is a bit much to get to grips with all at once, you might want to download GURPS Lite, which is free, easier to digest, and won't lead you astray, although it doesn't have all the options of the full Basic Set.

Before you start building a character, you need to talk to your GM, to get guidance on point budget, optional rules and so on. Your question on weight has an easy answer: pick a weight that seems plausible to you, since it doesn't actually affect very many things. The rules answer is: having picked a height, you also need to pick an ST score, and then look at the table on p. 18 of the Basic Set. That gives you height and weight ranges for modern humans by ST, and 5'10" allows you to be anywhere between ST 9 and ST 13. You'll probably be Average build, rather than Skinny or Overweight, and you can pick a weight out of the range for your ST.

A sniper needs as high a Guns (Rifle) skill as you can afford and the GM will let you have. That's a DX-based skill, and so is Stealth, also vital for snipers, so you will want to have an above-average DX. You also want to have above-average ST (for carrying equipment), IQ (because you'll also need IQ-based skills), and HT (for surviving in a hostile world). All that means you probably can't afford to have any of these stats far above average, but that depends on your point budget.

Sorry for not getting to you in my other reply post, but I maxed out my character limit there - I'll take this moment to confess that I don't have a GM just yet, and I'm not even designing Dallin for an actual game (although if I do get a chance to play a game, I'll gladly use it - and if anybody else wants to use my character for their own games, I'll gladly give them permission!).

The reason I'm going through this trouble is that I actually have an idea for a story -well, ok, a fanfiction, but my point still stands, and I think I remember a movie where the actors were given character sheets of an RPG as a method of getting them into character (I think it was one of the Dungeons and Dragons movies AFTER the godawful first one, possibly the second due to being far more faithful to the source material). I was planning to use something similar by getting the GURPS character sheets for an ISWAT team that I can use as aids during my writing process (less for the attitude and dialogue, but for how good they are with certain abilities - hell, I may even roleplay a few scenes in my story to see how well the characters fare in it).

I have far looser ideas for the other characters (I put up Dallin first since he was the one I had the most concrete ideas for, plus the background expansions on Lenin-2 for other players to use for their own potential campaigns), so I'll do a rapid summary of them here. Note that all names and callsigns are not final:

* Markus "Mark" Kowalski, callsign "Joker": POV Character for most of my story, the "most charismatic/social" (to justify the alliances he makes with local factions as the story/game progresses), and comms expert (to justify re-establishing contact with other PCs after their initial separation) - Homeline American.

* Dr. Isaak Steiner (Leader/Scientist), callsign "Brainiac": Official Squad Leader before the team is separated - Origin TBD, but leaning towards "Gernsback" or some other "Weird Science" Alternate, with country being Germany, or else somewhere in Central Europe or Scandinavia.

* Maya (Healer), callsign "Jaguar": Team Medic - Origin TBD, but leaning towards a Tribal Jungle or "Mayincatec" Alternate. May be from an "isolated tribe" that's still in an advanced TL society (possibly with her origin story being the advanced society trying to abduct her along with most of her tribe, like Apocalypto's opening scene), to explain the relative ease she integrates into ISWAT.

* Edward Balder (Pilot), callsign "Stormrider": Conveyor Pilot - Origins TBD, but is definitely British and scion of a RAF family. Leaning towards a near-future Alternate with notable British presence, may or may not be a full-on "Britannia" Parallel.

* [[REAL NAME CLASSIFIED]] (Spy), callsign "Phantom": Agent Provocateur - Origin Intentionally Unknown, but is heavily hinted to be from an Alternate where America more or less became a dictatorship - some speculate it's communist, others fascist - and that he was a top agent for whoever their version of the Secret Police was. In particular, he often apes scenes from Black Lagoon's Balalaika, such as this moment, where he casually orders a nightclub bombing whilst in a meeting with what's essentially an enemy spy league, and then casually explaining to the now-outraged enemy spies how empty their threats are in the face of his attack, before TERRIFYING them into submission with the promise that his allies will not stop until their entire organization is wiped out.

By the way, I'm not sharing all the details of the story/fanfic here, but the summary is that an ISWAT team gets stranded on a previously undiscovered parallel, are cut off from Homeline when they're dumped there, and have to deal with the ongoing conflicts between that parallel's factions to live long enough to escape it.