Character Advancement

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by fridayparson

The problem lies in that most of the coolest stuff are things like Advantages, most of which one can't get after creation...

Says who? It's your game, run it the way you want. Let them buy Advantages, kewl Powers, etc.

Run the game you want to play in.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

GURPS advancement is slow.

Doesn't ahve to be. Hand out 25 exp per session if that's what it takes for you Players to feel the advancement.

Run the game you want to play in.

I'm making that my new slogan, "Run the game you want to play in."

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by mehrkat

an alternative rule that i've allowed in my game that creates an advancement is that players can reformat points to increase attributes.

So say a character has 10 4 point intelligence skills they can pull 2 points from each of them to make 20 points and add a point of IQ. The points pulled must not lower any skill but then IQ is now one point higher and all skills are recalculated. I do that in essentially all games that starts at a low point level.

I wrote up a similar procedure for GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School. At least one of the players in my current GURPS campaign, Fronteira, has used it.

[fritzbc]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

GURPS advancement is slow. It doesn't feature rapid rises to power like D&D. Instead it creates a more realistic growth for a person. When I say "Realistic" I don't mean to say that your desire for faster character growth is bad or wrong, just that exceeding that recommended CP per game will increasingly make character development make less sense. Regardless of how much CP you hand out, most advantages are a reflection of aptitude rather than advancement and really shouldn't be "learned".

If your players want big increases, a good solution might be to just hand them cool powers. Give them equipment that makes them powerful or let them get strange abilities through wishes or cosmic empowerment.

GURPS Advancement doesn't need to be slow, it can be as fast or as slow as you want it to be. As well as this, you don't need to give out CP for players to feel that they are advancing, fancy tools and equipment can provide that same feeling, although shouldn't be relied on. If players are feeling that they are advancing too slow, then maybe bump up their CP gain per session.

[mehrkat]

I have a standard rule that makes attribute raises allowable. When you get enough skill points that allows you to raise an attribute without losing levels I allow them to switch out the points.

So lets say you have 10 Dex level skills at the 4 point level you can drop them down to the 2 point level and add a level of Dex. Though I essentially never use different attributes for skills. I also give 2 to 3 points for each game and allow them to add advantages (with GM ok) that fit their circumstances. Also a lot of "magic" types use advantages for the powers if you make scalable powers they can easily grow.

I should warn that it takes about 30 to 50 games before we switch to a different game as the characters get kind of hard to challenge. I tend to run cinematic games in general but the feeling of no advancement is pretty easy to combat but you have to warn them that campaigns will be likely be shorter.

[Flowergarden]

About stats and advantage problem... Had that one. Now I give points that you can only use on advantages and stats. You can grow your psionic powers just because, but not learn physiology.

And for skills you need to get xp by learning. Time skips are very frequent thing in games I run or play. Everyone likes to craft, I suppose. Or make me build churches, for some reason.

And I give xp in things characters used in some interesting way, or to get to some milestone, or just +1 xp to HT or Hard to Kill for not dying. To skills I give points too. But this is what we came up to. Everybody in my group js using this 'advancement system' so I suppose everyone like that

I don't know if it would be helpful to someone, but here it is)

[the_matrix_walker]

I did a post on this years ago, referring to it as "Ongoing Optimization" and the general consensus was that that is what people tended to do in general.

It should be pointed out that this is not without a cost outside of the point accounting. It will have an impact on the effectiveness of the affected skills when floated to another attribute!

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by the_matrix_walker

I did a post on this years ago, referring to it as "Ongoing Optimization" and the general consensus was that that is what people tended to do in general.

It should be pointed out that this is not without a cost outside of the point accounting. It will have an impact on the effectiveness of the affected skills when floated to another attribute!

A potential solution I came up with for that is a trait I call Training, specialized to Training (Mental) and Training (Physical). Each cost [15] per level and give bonuses to "Trained Skills" - that is, those skills that you have invested at least [1] into. Training (Mental) applies to all skills that are typically based on IQ, Per, or Will, while Training (Physical) instead applies to those that are typically based on DX (you could optionally roll HT into that as well). This bonus is treated as being learned skill, and thus applies when it's floated to a different attribute (or floated to 10), for determining bonuses for Weapon Master or Trained ST, etc.

The point was more so that you can build a veteran with a wide array of related abilities without the system pushing you toward re-envisioning your character as a DX-monkey or high-IQ genius with only modest skill investment, as the latter is far less expensive (and the drawback of reduced skill when floating to another attribute tends to be more than made up for by having a higher DX+Speed or IQ+Per+Will, as those have their own benefits). But it would also work well for advancing an existing character - every [4] goes toward giving a +1 to a single skill, and once you've boosted three skills this way then once you've built up another [3] you can pull those points back out and combine them with that [3] to get a level of Training which gives a +1 to all the relevant skills.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Varyon

A potential solution I came up with for that is a trait I call Training, specialized to Training (Mental) and Training (Physical). Each cost [15] per level and give bonuses to "Trained Skills" - that is, those skills that you have invested at least [1] into. Training (Mental) applies to all skills that are typically based on IQ, Per, or Will, while Training (Physical) instead applies to those that are typically based on DX (you could optionally roll HT into that as well). This bonus is treated as being learned skill, and thus applies when it's floated to a different attribute (or floated to 10), for determining bonuses for Weapon Master or Trained ST, etc.

The point was more so that you can build a veteran with a wide array of related abilities without the system pushing you toward re-envisioning your character as a DX-monkey or high-IQ genius with only modest skill investment, as the latter is far less expensive (and the drawback of reduced skill when floating to another attribute tends to be more than made up for by having a higher DX+Speed or IQ+Per+Will, as those have their own benefits). But it would also work well for advancing an existing character - every [4] goes toward giving a +1 to a single skill, and once you've boosted three skills this way then once you've built up another [3] you can pull those points back out and combine them with that [3] to get a level of Training which gives a +1 to all the relevant skills.

That makes sense and is not all that far off from the rules Sean 'Kromm' Punch wrote for 'Job Training' on p. 25-26 in GURPS Power-Ups 3: Talents.