06-22-2021, 05:20 AM | #21 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Transient Advantages
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An NPC who is perfectly willing to kill and is camouflaged in a sniper's hide with a high-powered rifle might be negative in point value, for example because they are a wanted murderer with many social and emotional problems, but this will not help the 300 point National Merit Scholar and Olympian PC who doesn't like guns or violence. Not to mention that being outnumbered sucks, in GURPS and in reality, so several low-point value soldiers are a far greater threat in combat than one high point athlete. For that matter, 250+ point SOF operators might be completely stymied by media-savvy and photogenic enemies that accuse them of crimes calculated to elicit emotional responses and get support from political advocacy groups and online lynch mobs. Or they might be brought down by a 25 point employee of a credit company that ruins their credit score for years. Don't try to compare points in order to figure out how much of a threat a situation is. Rather, try to consider the situation in real-world terms and whether the PCs are the kind of people who are capable of dealing with it. Quote:
Realistically, having high DX will correlate with high ST for the character's weight and is highly likely to also correlate with high HT. There is also a slight positive correlation between athletic achievement and academic success, measured IQ (mostly irrelevant for GURPS IQ purposes, but still an indicator of capability in a very limited subfield of real intelligence) and social skills. Most people who end up with really high point values also start out with more points in Attributes than you're allowing. At least, if you're starting as adults, not children. Quote:
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! |
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06-22-2021, 06:03 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Eastern Kentucky
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Re: Transient Advantages
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I realize that you can build anything with points and that this doesn't equate to combat efficiency. This is actually why I use the approach I used. If I want to build a high powers archmage with world spanning powers I will use 500 or 600 hundred points. I won't put everything in accounting or geology. There is an assumption, reasonable I would think, that PCs will put some points (not all) in advancing their effectiveness at what they primarily do. In a fantasy campaign, they all do combat along with some other stuff. So telling them that when your point total is at 300 you better have defenses X and attack skill Y if you are in the thick of it is not a bad thing. The monsters you face will have values such that if you don't have the right abilities you will die. That doesn't mean some of them won't be a little worse or a little better. It's not a hard rule. It's a guideline. If you were playing a different sort of game that emphasized other aspects then you'd want different guidelines. Guidelines aren't bad though. They are there to help players know what to expect. |
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06-22-2021, 07:10 AM | #23 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Transient Advantages
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For instance, why say "spend at least 80 points on stats" when you can say "all basic attributes should be between 8 and 14, and no secondary characteristic more than ±30% off its base value" (or whatever)? If you're trying to create a "life path," I don't think your guidelines accomplish that. Character points are used to create a character as you want it to be, not as it was. They don't reflect any kind of accurate measure of a person's past development. Basic attributes, for instance, are not static values representing fundamentally unalterable aspects of a character. Intelligence doesn't measure just your inborn ability to reason; it represents knowledge, sanity, groundedness — things that can change over time. Quote:
Campaigns calls 100–200 points "heroic." 125 is at the low-ish end of that; 150 is already halfway to "larger than life." Try making a sample character at 125 points. If you can make a satisfactory one and if it didn't seem like there was only one way to do it, then 125 points is fine. |
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06-22-2021, 09:11 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Transient Advantages
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This crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The PCs. |
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06-22-2021, 10:13 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Snoopy's basement
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Re: Transient Advantages
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06-22-2021, 11:01 AM | #26 | |||||
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Eastern Kentucky
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Re: Transient Advantages
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There are probably many ways to skin a cat. What I'm really trying to avoid is a PC spending too many points on a skill initially when that would likely be a bad choice. I see these 100 points as defining your potential. I'm kind of going with the idea that the group is young. No one is over 25 years old likely. Quote:
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I kind of resent the attitude concerning other roleplaying games. I've played a few and I've never played the caricature that many GURPS people make those games out to be. Is that caricature ever valid? Maybe for a brief while in the 70's it was generally true but it's not generally true these days. Most campaigns I've seen always have a lot of depth outside the "dungeon" adventure. So if anything, I could see these attitudes ******* off newcomers and them rejecting GURPS before they give it a chance. Tell me why GURPS is a better way to play the games I already play and want to play. I chose GURPS because I wanted the improved system for customization. I got tired of playing in one single implied setting. I wanted to create worlds with entirely different assumptions. I wanted a flatter power curve because that extends the "sweet" spot of gaming further in both directions. Early on you aren't as bad and at higher levels you aren't as over the top. |
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06-22-2021, 12:20 PM | #27 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Transient Advantages
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By my reckoning it would be very hard to make "super talented" people on 125 pts. You'd spend 120 pts giving your guy a 12 in each primary Attribute and by the usual Gurps standards a 12 is high average but not exceptional. I suppose you could do a 20 ST with a 12 HT and Fit with everything else left alone and that would represent a lot of talent but absolutely no experience. <shrug> If you want to start at 125 pts that is of course your right but by other people's standards you may just be wanting to do low-powered fantasy. I'd doubt you'd ever get to really high-powered. It took my last Gurps group 2 years of very regular gaming to go from 250 to 400 (about 40-50 sessions).
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Fred Brackin |
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06-22-2021, 12:51 PM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sweden, Stockholm
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Re: Transient Advantages
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"Prohibit the taking of omens, and do away with superstitious doubts. Then, until death itself comes, no calamity need be feared" |
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06-22-2021, 12:56 PM | #29 | |
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Snoopy's basement
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Re: Transient Advantages
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06-22-2021, 01:01 PM | #30 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Transient Advantages
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The third edition of GURPS had a rule that you could have no more than twice your age in character points spent on starting skills. Since characters defaulted to 18 years old in that edition, the default limit was 36 character points. (You could choose any age you wanted to start; 18 was just a default.) You could do the same thing. No more than twice your age in character points in starting skills. That way you've got lots of points put into attributes and advantages, but relatively few in skills. And your limits don't have to apply after character creation. "No more than level 15 in a skill to start, but you can raise it later" is a perfectly fair rule to impose. Quote:
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