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Old 06-22-2021, 05:20 AM   #21
Icelander
 
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Originally Posted by Emerikol View Post
So I've had the same thought. I'm thinking 125 points to start the game and mentally I'm thinking 25 points per "level" when determining threats etc... I realize there are no levels in GURPS but I'm just figuring out threat levels etc for the group.
That is not useful in any way, shape or form. Character points do not and are not meant to correlate with 'threat level'. They are a currency that determines how much players want a given trait.

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.

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Originally Posted by Emerikol View Post
My way of breaking that down was....
1. 100 points is your past life. Spend at least 80 on stats. The other 20 can be spent on anything. I allow 50 points in disadvantages so in theory up to 70 in advantages. At this point I imagine only a limited amount is spent on skills.
2. I will use the system we discussed for limits on stat advancement. +2 or double your initial buy whichever is greater. So buying good stats early is important for at least a lot of characters.
3. The extra 25 points are spent as if you had gotten them through advancement. So most of the points are in skills or mutable traits (advantages/disadvantages).

I'm still on the fence about starting at 125 or 150. If 150 the extra 25 go with the 25 in step 3. I like starting low and advancing up.
What about real people who are elite athletes, excellent students, popular and well-connected? This doesn't seem to allow creating characters that match some actual people, let alone a lot of fictional characters.

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.

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Just to keep my thinking straight and to port over some NPC concepts I've had from That Other Game, I think in terms of levels but I realize with GURPS the power curve is far flatter most of the time. But whatever my starting value each "level" after that is 25 more points. So 125 is kind of an elegant number. 20th level is 600 points. 100 + 20 * 25. 10th level is 350. You get the idea.
D&D is not good at modelling characters that feel like people that actually exist.
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Old 06-22-2021, 06:03 AM   #22
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That is not useful in any way, shape or form. Character points do not and are not meant to correlate with 'threat level'. They are a currency that determines how much players want a given trait.
Even with all my caveats I knew you'd misinterpret what I said. I was just waiting for it.

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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Old 06-22-2021, 07:10 AM   #23
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Originally Posted by Emerikol View Post
My way of breaking that down was....
1. 100 points is your past life. Spend at least 80 on stats. The other 20 can be spent on anything. I allow 50 points in disadvantages so in theory up to 70 in advantages. At this point I imagine only a limited amount is spent on skills.
2. I will use the system we discussed for limits on stat advancement. +2 or double your initial buy whichever is greater. So buying good stats early is important for at least a lot of characters.
3. The extra 25 points are spent as if you had gotten them through advancement. So most of the points are in skills or mutable traits (advantages/disadvantages).
Why assign limits to the number of points you can spend in any area when you can instead assign limits to the levels of things?

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.

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I'm still on the fence about starting at 125 or 150. If 150 the extra 25 go with the 25 in step 3. I like starting low and advancing up.
There are a lot of personalities on this forum who believe that character power equals fun, and more character power equals more fun. They will encourage you toward higher point totals. If that's not your thing, then don't listen to them.

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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Old 06-22-2021, 09:11 AM   #24
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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.
That's not just possible given the breadth of traits in GURPS, it's even a campaign premise:

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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Old 06-22-2021, 10:13 AM   #25
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Exactly. And if Mc Rich actually buys Military Rank, Reputation, or other advantages to cover being able to bring military equipment into restricted areas then he actually might have an easier time getting into places than the guy with a big built-in arm-cannon and no holdout skill, despite paying less for it.
If that kind of equipment exists in your campaign and is available to military people or rich people or whatever, then what is the premise for denying them to a PC who takes the necessary advantages to qualify for them according to the setting you have designed?
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Old 06-22-2021, 11:01 AM   #26
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Why assign limits to the number of points you can spend in any area when you can instead assign limits to the levels of things?
I guess I thought of 100 is your previous life and the extra 25 is what you were doing in your current career but before you joined this particular group.

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.

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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)?
I guess I don't want to limit any particular stat. I just want the PCs to be really above average but raw recruits to some degree.

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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.
Well I suppose the extra 20 points beyond 80 could be for some life path type skills but I wasn't thinking along those lines.

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There are a lot of personalities on this forum who believe that character power equals fun, and more character power equals more fun. They will encourage you toward higher point totals. If that's not your thing, then don't listen to them.
I definitely like the idea of going from relative nobody to big time hero over time. So that is one aspect of my prior roleplaying life I don't want to discard just because I'm going with GURPS. Perhaps this explains also why I thought about the strictures I place above. I don't want super skilled people right out of the gate. I'm okay with super talented people.

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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.
Well I want the campaign to become heroic over time but start out less so. I think I can build some fine characters for 125 points. Thanks for this vote of confidence on the idea as I was wondering. It seems incredibly over the top when Dungeon Fantasy started with 250. I'm considering buying the Delvers to Grow product and use some of the templates there perhaps with tweaking.

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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Old 06-22-2021, 12:20 PM   #27
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I guess I thought of 100 is your previous life and the extra 25 is what you were doing in your current career but before you joined this particular group.
.
The other way around would make sense to some people. Lots of 25 pt "normals" out there. The 100 pts would represent the things that made them different from those 25 pt normals.

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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Old 06-22-2021, 12:51 PM   #28
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If that kind of equipment exists in your campaign and is available to military people or rich people or whatever, then what is the premise for denying them to a PC who takes the necessary advantages to qualify for them according to the setting you have designed?
What? Did you read my previous posts? The entire issue is that a 250 point character can but thousands of points of advantages if unhindered. Meanwhile a 250 point cyborg would blow most of his budget on just having a built in weapon and some built-in armor. Please don't make me reiterate my entire point. :|
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Old 06-22-2021, 12:56 PM   #29
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What? Did you read my previous posts? The entire issue is that a 250 point character can but thousands of points of advantages if unhindered. Meanwhile a 250 point cyborg would blow most of his budget on just having a built in weapon and some built-in armor. Please don't make me reiterate my entire point. :|
I think I got your point. I am challenging it. You think it's unfair for a character to use social Advantages to buy or obtain technology that supplies similar capabilities as innate traits. I am saying that if those technologies exist it's unrealistic to prevent characters from accessing them if they buy the right social Advantages to fit the qualifications to get them.
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Old 06-22-2021, 01:01 PM   #30
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Originally Posted by Emerikol View Post
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.

I guess I don't want to limit any particular stat. I just want the PCs to be really above average but raw recruits to some degree.
So limit the character points they can put into skills, but leave everything else wide open.

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.

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
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.
It all depends on what you consider "super talented" to mean, doesn't it? Does it literally mean super-humanly talented? You could do this in a small way on 125 points by putting, say, 120 points into Health: HT 22 is, by definition, super-human. Does it mean above average in every area? That becomes harder. Does it mean way above average in every area? That you probably can't do. But I don't think that's what Emerikol is getting at.

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<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.
I don't think low- and high-powered fantasy is the right distinction. There's no clear line between them. "'High-powered' is a subjective term — these guidelines assume PCs with well over 200 points." (Campaigns, p. 487) That's why GURPS breaks them down into Feeble, Average, Competent, Exceptional, Heroic, Larger-than-Life, Legendary, Superhuman, and Godlike, and explains what each of these means. If Emerikol chooses 125 points, he's starting with characters who are "the realistic pinnacle of physical, mental, or social achievement," and he's aiming for "leading roles in kung fu movies, fantasy novels, etc." In the long term the characters might even reach the level of "protagonists of epic poems and folklore."
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