High Attributes

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I don't think it's hard to play high IQ characters, you just have to understand that high IQ is just omni-competence at mental skills. What we tend to associate with "super-genius" is arguably a suite of powers more than high levels of IQ, and you note quite a few very good ones. You could probably add things like Oracle, language talent, etc.

I suppose that's kinda what I was getting at, it's damn hard to play a guy with IQ 20 and expect to seem like a genius, because you're doing all the work, you have to think of everything the genius would think of. Whereas with IQ 16 and a lot of supporting advantages you get GURPS rules and the GM to do the work for you.

Also, Talents are your friends, unless you truly want someone omni-capable who excels in every field covered by GURPS IQ, which includes social skills, you're going to want to use Talents to differentiate them.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

Arguably even he doesn't have crazy high social skills, .

In L.E.G.I.O.N. the fellow who was effectively Brainiac 1 successfully sold someone else's soul to the devil. That mays seem like an unusual use of social Skills but it does seem to call for a pretty high score.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

In L.E.G.I.O.N. the fellow who was effectively Brainiac 1 successfully sold someone else's soul to the devil. That mays seem like an unusual use of social Skills but it does seem to call for a pretty high score.

I stand corrected. In whatever I've seen him in he's usually got good-to-middling background Machiavelli-style manipulation abilities, but far worse face-to-face social skills.

[Vernon King Avaritt III]

I see that a mega intelligence may be too high. As for 10,000 point supers here is a little paper that I wrote for the cons

GURPS 500 Point Supers

I remember when we played GURPS Supers 3E: We all made up 500 point supers and had a good time. The rules favored a 500 point character and you could build a good one. Then GURPS 4E came out and Steve Jackson Games changed the rules. The rules didn't favour 500 point characters. Now the best hero you can make is a Good "Watchman" character with 500 points. In 3E having ST100 made you like Spiderman but in 4E having ST100 allows you to lift 1 ton. GURPS Supers characters are considerably weaker now. Supers lists several levels of super (on page 18) and they are: Wild Talents [100 point to 250 points]; Low Powered [250 points to 400 points]; Moderate Power [400 points to 1600 points]; and High Power [1600 points to 6400 points]. Nowhere does GURPS Supers mention 500 point heroes. You can have fun with 100 point supers and I know someone who runs 250 point super characters and they have a good time. In my opinion a 10000 point character is not out of line. High powered characters can cost 6400 points so I don't think I'm out of line. Now lets get to playing.

[weby]

Oh, you can play really at any point level if you restrict heavily what people can take.

My current fantasy campaign is up to above 2000 points now and while some of the systems kind of break (like movement exhaustion rules where the PCs are less fatigued by running than if they walked..), overall it works fairly well.

But that is because there are serious limits on things like attributes and talents. The highest modified attribute in the group is a will of 21, with most attributes being in the 13-16 range. The enemies and challenges are built so that they need skills of 30+ for many things, thus they must specialize by spending boatloads of points in few skills to cover their niche. Most characters have at last some skill that has 32 to 44 points in and several in the 20+ point category. The only system that we found that broke beyond repair was magic and are now using an alternate magic system.

So, have fun in your game come back at some point and tell us what broke in your game at those point totals.

[Skarg]

One difficulty that comes to mind with giving a huge number of points, is that much of the balance in GURPS was designed for more like the zero-to-200-point-character range, and that significant tradeoffs would be needed to put 50 points into something, let alone 100 or 200 points into something. If you give out 10,000 points, a character could have 100 abilities that are supposed to be amazing rare things, and that has multiple issues, not just for balance, but in terms of players relating to the characters as believable, roleplay-able, or even remember-able, and many of them may take whole slews of common advantages just because.

Something that might help, which I have used for a very long time, even in low-point games, is offering different numbers of points that can only be spent on certain things. For example, maybe you can spend up to 150 points on attributes, up to 100 points on realistic advantages, up to 120 points on realistic skills, and X number of points on fantastic abilities. (Or whatever variety of limits and breakdowns you want.) This would let you have characters who are very powerful due to super powers, while not also being uber-generically great in any number of mundane ways, just because you've given them a ton of points and it's so cost-effective to get IQ 20 and DX 20, that they'd almost be foolish not to from a gamey point of view).

You can offer a variety of templates like that, which they can choose between. One of my favorites (in lower-point games) is to offer more points total (or unique options to get rare advantages or skills) to characters who take interesting unpopular disads or backgrounds.

[Vernon King Avaritt III]

thank you. I have a number of Avatars or what you call templates and I am still making characters for the game. I hope that one day I will make comic books out of these characters. I think that 400-500 point characters are a little weak and I don't use the Strength chart near the end of GURPS supers for several reasons of my own. I know someone who runs GURP Supers with 250 point characters. He is a great GM. I want supers like Thor, Supes and Hulk.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Vernon King Avaritt III

. In 3E having ST100 made you like Spiderman but in 4E having ST100 allows you to lift 1 ton. .

I'm afraid you missed something. It's only Basic Lift that's 2000lbs at ST100. That's how much you can lift in one hand I one second. Maximum 2-handed Lift is 8 times that. So ST1000 can lift 8 tons and not 2.

That's without Extra Effort. The 3e formula included a sort of extra effort which is how you could get to a 10 ton lift at ST94. Unfortunately, in 4e how much you can reliably increase your lift with Extra Effort varies from basically nothing to a lot depending on how the character is designed.

The real difference between 4e and 5e Spiderman is that you need 110 pts of ST in 4 but this costs you 1000pts. There are various ways around this disproportionate cost for Super levels of ST in 4e and the 4e version of Supers covers them about as well as can be done.

I don't personally _like_ any of those rules dodges and think there are basic structural problems with doing four color Supers in 4e that won't be resolved without an edition change but the problems might not be what your paragraph made them out to be.

[Vernon King Avaritt III]

Marvel IQs
Some of you people said you would never give a superhero an IQ greater than 16. While that is your right I think you're opening a can of worms. Supers travel through time, build force fields, super headquarters, spaceships, discover Pym particles, discover the negative zone, build robots, super battlesuits, anti grav vehicles.
Lets look at the real super geniuses have created in Earth's history: Leonardo DaVinci painted and created designs but he actually built nothing; Darwin created the theory of evolution; Issac Newton discovered the Laws of Gravity; Aristotle and Socrates were fine at reasoning but could they discover Pym particles that alter your size? I don't think so. Did Einstein build an antimatter generator or create a wormhole? Benjamin Franklin created a lot of gadgets and he discovered electricity but did he create the Fantasticar or defeat Galactus? I don't think so. No. When you look at Comic Book super geniuses and compare them to real geniuses the real geniuses lag way behind. Way behind. What did GURPS Who's Who give these people for an IQ score? Leonardo DaVinci-18, Newton-16?, Darwin-15, Mozart-12, Benjamin FRanklin-15, Aristotle-17, Einstein-15. The greatest Marvel heroes got a 15. Clearly there must be an adjustment somewhere X3.
Lets look at the wisest Marvel characters. Gadgetter is always slow.
Name-----------------IQ----Gadgeteer Skill-----Other Skills
Reed Richards-------15----Yes--------------------Science! 25
Doctor Doom--------15----Yes--------------------Science! 25, Inventor! 25, Scholar! 25
Iron Man--------------14----Yes-------------------Inventor! 20
Henry Pym-----------14----Yes-------------------Inventor! 16, Science! 16
Bruce Banner---------14---No-------------------Science! 17
Beast-------------------14---No------------------Science! 12
Magneto---------------13---No------------------Inventor! 12
Machinesmith--------13---No------------------Engineer (nanotech) and others
Beetle------------------13---No------------------Engineer
Vulture-----------------13---No-----------------Engineer (Low G Wings)
Shocker-----------------12---No-----------------Engineer (Microtech)

I don't want to go over most of these but I Want to go over two of them.
Magneto has an IQ of 13 and he has buile many supertech fortresses; He created several super powered people, and he created a machine that drained mutant powers continent wide. Not bad with an IQ of 13 and Inventor! 12. I would say that anyone with IQ 13 and Inventor! 12 could build most anything.
Now for the jackpot! Shocker has an IQ 12 and an ingeneering skill. He made shock bands that shoot out electricity. Clearly Shocker is a Super Genius at IQ 12. By these standards someone with an IQ 11 or even 10 would be considered a genius. So it would be permissible for someone with IQ 10 and Science! 10 would be able to build a cosmic cube and turn the other PC's into multicoloured goo. Just sayin. X3
Not ****** of yet? Well we have got to readjust the Historical geniuses. Since Reed Richards and Doom are the worlds smartest people we cannot give them a 15 or higher. DaVinci and Aristotle get an IQ14, Mozart gets an IQ of 11 and Einstein and the others get an IQ of 13. They are still all geniuses. XD

[mr beer]

GURPS Whos Who is 3e.

In 4e, world class intellectual giants would have IQ:12+ and associated Talents, as opposed to IQ:16+.

The omni-competence bestowed by GURPS IQ:18 has never been possessed by any human being and belongs firmly in the comic books.