10-27-2019, 10:18 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Jul 2018
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A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
So I'm relatively new to GURPS (although I have read up on Alternate Earths and Infinite Worlds thanks to their respective TV Tropes pages, as well as RvBOMally's GURPS Covers). I'm finding one of my biggest entry barriers is character design, since I can't find an equivalent to something like "Call of Cthulhu Occupations" to help me think of which specific skills and stats are needed for my characters. I have quite a few ideas, but even trying to use the sample Infinity Patrol characters from GURPS 4E's Basic Set, I'm spinning my wheels trying to sort out the stats.
However, besides help with how to work character creation, one of my character ideas also included some ideas of mine to expand Lenin-2 (a Hell Parallel listed under Xing La's character bio, and something I got some more details on from RvBOMally's "Lenin-2A", which speculated on the state of the world prior to everything melting down into environmental and nuclear catastrophe). To give everybody a "TL;DR" summary Lenin-2's POD had a communist revolution in the United States around the 1890s (think the French Commune, but during Industrial Revolution America), and from there it spread across the world, with the only holdouts being the British Empire (which lost "The Summer Wars" to the combined communist forces during the 1950s), and a democratic/capitalist China (which had its tech accelerate from expatriate Americans and other foreigners). The communists themselves were split between the Bolsheviks (which of course occupied Russia, but also had a presence in Western Europe, with RvBOMally giving them the faction name of the "Paris-Leningrad Pact"), the Mitteleuropan DKAP (which had an alliance between Germany, Italy, and the Scandinavian nations), and the Christian Communist Congressional Party (C... C... C... P...). Unfortunately, two problems arose in that the three communist blocs were A) about as dodgy on environmentalism as the USSR and PRC (especially prior to China starting to do an about-face on pollution in the 21st Century to bank on the oncoming Green Revolution), and B) were FAR from united in cause, wanting to crack each others skulls as much as they finally wanted to break the final capitalist holdout of China. Cue "The Autumn Wars" of Lenin-2's 2000s (where nukes were launched by the communist blocs on China as well as each other), and as far as Homeline can see, the world has been plunged into a T3 and under dark age, with only China struggling along with an overall T4 society trying to preserve what scraps of T7 tech they have (they HAVE launched a T10-level spaceship out into the stars, Alpha Centauri style, but where they are now is beyond the knowledge of the survivors). The character bio on Xing La (which is framed as a Homeline agent's report begging to recruit her to Infinity Patrol to prevent her from being killed on the utter Hell Parallel Lenin-2 had become - find it in the 4E Basic Set Characters book) expands on the sad state of Lenin-2 post-Autumn Wars, with the very earth and sea dying a slow, choking death between radiation and smog blankets, and most people outside of whatever meager settlements there are being mostly cannibalistic ferals trying to break your skull open or rip you to pieces, with Homeline desperately trying to scavenge Chinese records and find and use as many "magic bullet" environment cures they can. However, before going onto my own character, I was actually going to expand upon the other three communist factions (the Paris-Leningrad Pact, M-DKAP, and CCCP), and explain how they differed from each other prior to the Autumn Wars. Now, I have been introduced to how socialist ideologies aren't all copycats of Stalin and Mao through, among other things, Hearts of Iron IV mods like Kaiserreich (not to be confused with the various GURPS Kaiserreichs), and that there are more democratic variants of socialism such as syndicalism, anarcho-communism, etc. The fact that a revolution occurred in the 1890s USA, at a time when the only other model of a socialist society was the egalitarian if short-lived Paris Commune, I'd argue that America succeeded (at least, initially) in keeping a more democratic government that instituted socialist policies. My model for the (initial) post-revolution USA would be based on AH.com's "Reds!", where, notably, a diplomat from Stalin's USSR is utterly baffled that the UASR didn't shoot Robert Taft for refusing to take his oath for office, and it caused a diplomatic rift between the UASR and Stalin's USSR. As for the other two factions, the timeline of how fast the European nations changed to communism is unclear (the statement of the Bolsheviks implies the Russian Revolution still happens at least within the early 20th century). So while I'm basically forced to resort to writing the gaps in myself, I feel that the USSR, instead of being taken over by Stalin, is instead led by Trotsky (as this Alternate History Hub video shows, the other most likely successor, Trotsky, actually invented most of Stalin's policies such as the Five-Year Plans, but also focused on aggressively aiding communist revolutions around the world, while Stalin was more concerned with keeping himself in power through paranoid purges and using the Warsaw Pact as a meat-shield), and that France (whether they went socialist earlier with a more successful Paris Commune, or underwent a later communist revolution, even potentially with Trotsky's help) would one way or another gravitate towards the non-Stalinist but still highly militarist USSR (a prime leader being Boris Souvarine, an OTL French Marxist who loved Lenin and Trotsky, but HATED Stalin). For the DKAP, I'm admittedly pulling at straws to show a concrete difference they have with the Americans and Bolsheviks, so the closest I'm getting is that Strasserism (a.k.a. "Nazism but with leftist economics") was what took charge in Germany, and that the Italian part of the alliance had Mussolini borrow a page from his Kaiserreich counterpart (with his path explained on the "Strengthen The Chairman" part of this Focus Tree). So to recap, we have a Trotskyist Russia/Western Europe, a Commie-Nazi Central Europe, and a (for now) Libertarian Socialist America leading up to the Summer Wars, where the European communists tackled Britain and most of its colonies in the Eastern Hemisphere, while the Socialist Americans likely had to deal with Canada and Britain's holdings in the Caribbean. The Lenin-2 timeline is, again, fuzzy, but I wanted to have the "government shift" of America happen sometime after the Summer Wars, when continued environment degradation began to foster a "desperate times require desperate measures" attitude from the Americans. This results in a rise of theocratic politicians (who were now espousing a more authoritarian version of socialist policies) around the 1980s (i.e. when televangelists and Ronald Reagan - who in this timeline, swings to the left instead of the right, but otherwise holds similar policies of increased military intervention, militarizing the "Drug War", etc. - begin to rise), until it builds up to a Handmaid's Tail scenario of a theocratic cult taking over in an armed coup d'etat, bolstered by even worse problems such as plummeting birth rates, sharp decreases in food and fresh water, out-of-control storms, etc. But why expand all of this backstory to nations that effectively no longer exist after the Autumn Wars? That's the thing Homeline doesn't yet know - they're still around. Yes, I'm basically taking the route of almost every nuclear post-apocalypse game ever, and saying that groups of survivors have survived the bombs and pollution through cowering in blast-proof bunkers, with each nation having their own version to the Enclave plotting to reclaim the wasteland from the "savages" that have popped up in the intervening time. I may be running afoul of the site's character limit at this point, so I'll break it off here, and get to explaining my character idea in the next post. Last edited by Andrew Hackard; 10-28-2019 at 11:40 AM. Reason: link to pirated material removed |
10-27-2019, 11:15 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jul 2018
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
Ok, I managed to get the first half of my post up without issues, so onto the second half of this whole exercise - my character concept. My tentative name for him is Dallin Graham, with the Patrol callsign of "Hangman".
Much like Xing La, this Dallin is a survivor from Lenin-2, but from a different section of the world - the remains of post-apocalyptic America, which, among multiple other post-apocalyptic settings, I'm actually mostly modeling on the first Rage, both in tone (somewhere between the relentlessly grimdark STALKER/Metro series, and the openly wacky Borderlands), and in setting (there are survivors buried in cryonic shelters, and given high-tech equipment that gives them an out-of-the-gate edge over the mostly feral raider packs scattering America's wasteland; the only catch being an authoritarian and even higher-tech government wants these vault-based survivors for nefarious purposes, and otherwise is taking over the wasteland under a dictatorship). Since Lenin-2's America had gone for a leftist theocracy ("Stalin meets Jack Chick" according to RvBOMally's observation), I'd have the Enclave/"Authority" stand-in hold a very weird hierarchy that bases itself on Christianity's hierarchy of angels (Current name for them is the "Three Spheres", supposedly analogous to America's previous three branches of government, but I'll need some more time to think those details through). Anyways, back to my character; I'm basing Dallin on a LOT of things. Compared to Xing La (an ace mechanic who can fly or fix anything with an engine), this character is someone capable of combat, who's fought his way past danger rather than finding a means of driving away from it (I may or may not give him some driving skills regardless to use Rage's Vehicular Combat system, but that idea may end up being chopped by the end). The characters I'm drawing the most inspiration from: * Joshua Graham: While not sharing Graham's entire history (there's no period where Dallin went evil with a wasteland warlord, got burned alive for a strategic failure, and went crawling back to his old home for forgiveness, only to be tempted back to violence when invaders threaten his old home), Dallin is similar in that he is religious (possibly even Mormon, like Joshua Graham), but rejects the theocratic insanity of the Three Spheres (in particular, he compares the Spheres to Jonah where - in the non-whale parts of the story you may have never even heard about - God calls out Jonah for crying over a dead plant, but was angry when God spared thousands of peoples lives because Jonah considered them irredeemable sinners). I'd also borrow most of Dallin's weapons from the Honest Hearts DLC, such as having a M1911 Pistol and Thompson SMG. * Karl Fairburne: This is my model for Dallin's playstyle, in that he's primarily a long-distance sniper (haven't decided on a rifle yet, ironically enough - I'm torn between either a relatively high-tech rifle that he claimed from a plundered Three Spheres armory, or a classic bolt-action rifle to fit with the M1911 and Thompson SMG), with a pistol and SMG backup, along with melee takedowns (with a knife and/or hatchet, similar to Wolfenstein: The New Order/The New Colossus). * XCOM 2's "Reapers": This is another example of a "post-Apocalypse sniper" build (with an emphasis on both stealth and mass-damage via explosions both fitting the Karl Fairburne playstyle I mentioned earlier), with special attention to the appearance (along with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s) of a cloak and gasmask combination. Now onto my problems with designing Dallin due to not getting a grasp on GURPS character creation - so far I've managed to borrow his height and age from Karl Fairburne (5'10" and 35, specifically), his native language (English, along with possibly some Native American languages to show he's made allies with some scattered tribes during his journey in America's wasteland), along with his Size Modifier of 0 (going off of how all of the model characters besides the giant robot are all 0). But beyond that (including weight - every time I look up "US Army Sniper Weight" for comparison, I keep getting results on Bradley Cooper's workout routine for American Sniper claiming he needed to bulk up to 230 pounds of muscle, and none of the human-ish sample characters are close to that), I'm stumped. For starters, I'm having a hard time deciding on how many points Dallin should have in the first place (not helped by all the sample characters having WILDLY different point totals themselves) - I am looking for the higher end of the 200s (the "Heroic" to "Larger Than Life" range) to showcase Dallin having already cut his teeth in Lenin-2 for years, long before he was discovered and eventually recruited by Homeline (current explanation is that he stumbled upon a crude trans-dimensional experiment set up by a Three Spheres lab, and him blundering onto an Infinity Patrol operation after getting shifted out of his original dimension). The only advantages/disadvantages I have are Legal Enforcement Powers (15) and Duty (To ISWAT; 15 or less; Extremely Hazardous). I have a vague sense of quirks (his face under the gas mask is a bit scarred, and his harrowing experiences have left him in a dark place mentally, even with his faith), but I'd like help with the Basic Attributes, Skills, and Advantages/Disadvantages. If anybody has tips on how to build a "post-apocalypse sniper, with a secondary stealth/melee skillset" character, and can give me some tips on which skills and advantages are absolutely vital for such a character build, I'd really appreciate it! |
10-27-2019, 11:32 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
Sounds like part of what you need are some good templates to use for springboarding off of. As you're doing something of a post-apocalypse (albeit I assume very close to the apocalypse itself), the After the End series may be of use, particularly book 1, which has the character templates. GURPS Template Toolkit 1: Characters may also be of use, but as I don't own that one I can't say for certain (there's a very, very high probability it's useful for figuring out how to design characters, however - Kromm tends to make good stuff).
If you're not looking to spend any more money just yet, GURPS Skill Categories is a free download, and it groups skills in a much better way than the Basic Set's alphabetical list; I typically use it when designing characters from scratch. If you don't have a point budget, you may want to just start building and see where you end up. Seeing as you're basing your character off of Fairbairn, you may get some use out of GURPS Martial Arts: Fairbairn Close Combat Systems. Note the preview PDF has a character sheet for the man himself. Modern snipers tend to be a good deal larger than Fairbairn (indeed, most contemporary soldiers tended to be bulkier). Take a look at the Generation Kill miniseries; the actor portraying Rudy Reyes (the sniper) is actually Rudy Reyes himself.
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GURPS Overhaul |
10-28-2019, 10:58 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
If you want to build a sniper you want either Tactical Shooting or Gun Fu. both books have Templates for snipers with Tactial Shooting being heavily realistic and Gun Fu not realistic at all.
Note that Gun fu isn't deliberately not realistic. It's mission statement was to cover the most cinematic sources of gun-toting heroes and while none of the names you mentioned rang a bell with with me they sounded "cinematic" (a much-used term in Gurpsland). I looked at Gun Fu's Ispiration source material list and didn't see your guys either but surely you would recognize some of them. Sniper is the least common of the book's "Styles" (another important Gurpsism). Most post Apocalyptic stuff might be more likely to be Army of One or Ultimate Shootist.
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Fred Brackin |
10-28-2019, 11:21 AM | #5 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
One thing that really helps to get a hang of gurps is to look at other people's character sheets. Their is a lot of variety, and the Iconic ISWAT characters only brush the surface.
The Mook has a page of ready made gurps characters. These are fairly basic, have side explanations of how different mechanics work, and don't have point numbers attached, but they can give you a good idea of what someone else's character looks like. there are a lot of resources on the page. Do a search on the page for "sniper" to get in the right area. It might be helpful to the OP if people put example snipers they've built or seen used in games they've played here. EDIT: I found an old west sharpshooter I played for a bit in the PbP forums. He's only 100 points though, and he's more of a scout and survival expert than a warrior.. which isn't entirely inappropriate for an ATE sniper. The majority of his points are in talents, perception, and the riffle skill, so he has very flat primary stats. He's also way under the power level You're looking for, but the list of skills may be instructive. David Egan, age 32 Scout, Guide, Sharpshooter Code:
ST 10 HP 10 DX 10 will 11 IQ 10 per 13 HT 11 FP 11 Speed 5.25 Move 6 accented Spainish Broken Apache Broken Navaho Stalker Talent 3 Hard to kill 1 Signature Gear (gun) Signature Gear (Demon) Cannot Harm innocents Vow (wanderlust) Charitable (CR 15) Guilt complex Skinny Religious (quirk) Dislikes coyotes (quirk) Survival (Desert) per A 14 4 Survival (Mountian) per A 12 1 Survival (plains) per A 12 1 Wrestling DX A 10 2 Guns (Riffle) DX E 15 16 Riding (Horse) DX A 11 4 Navigation (Lands) IQ A 12 1 Stealth DX A 13 2 Tracking per A 15 1 Camoflage IQ E 13 1 Observation per A 12 1 Animal Handling (Horse) IQ A 10 2 Animal Handling (Cattle) IQ A 10 2 Veteranary (Hoofed beasts) IQ H 9 2 Knot Tying IQ A 9 1 Scrounging per E 13 1 Area Knowledge (Four Corners) IQ E 12 4 Hiking HT A 10 1 Carpentry IQ A 9 1 First Aid IQ E 12 4 Immediate Action Guns(riffle) A 13 2
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! Last edited by ericthered; 10-28-2019 at 11:30 AM. |
10-28-2019, 01:20 PM | #6 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
You probably want Weapon Bond for the sniper rifle which means that this weapon fits him just right so he gets a +1 using it.
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10-28-2019, 02:02 PM | #7 | ||
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
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10-28-2019, 02:26 PM | #8 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
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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.
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
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10-28-2019, 02:31 PM | #9 | ||||||||
Join Date: Jul 2018
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
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* Christine's CoS Silencer Rifle * Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle * La Longue Carabine * Paciencia * Ratslayer |
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10-28-2019, 03:00 PM | #10 | |
Join Date: Jul 2018
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Re: A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)
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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. |
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characters, gurps, infinite worlds, post-apocalyptic war, setting |
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