Disadvantages and Cooperativeness

[martinl]

One thing that IME causes a lot of friction in GURPS is disads (and more rarely ads) that cause problems working with the other PCs. That is to say, it is fairly easy to spend -50 pts on GURPS disads and make a PC who, if played correctly, will not be able to co-operate with others. At all.

There is nothing wrong with this, and folks who's parties spend a more time interacting with each other than the scenario are not having Hurting Wrong Fun, but I've seen plenty of games where the fun was reduced because the impulsive greedy paranoid lecher alcoholic loner caused endless problems with the other PCs.

This is probably not news to anyone on this board.

However, it occurs to me it might be handy if there was a "cooperativeness" score on disads (and even possibly ads) that provided rough guidelines on how much pain each disad usually adds or subtracts from inter-PC interaction. The the GM could state, for example, "Don't bother bringing any PC with less than 0 cooperativeness" for PVE games, or "You probably want -10 or more cooperativeness for this PvP game."

One might rate disads and ads on a cooperativeness scale similar to the points scale, using roughly the fraction of the disad points that are there due to the problems the disad causes with party cooperation. Call them Cooperativeness points, or CoPs.

Examples
Impulsive: -10 CPs, about half due to self-injury and half due to inability to stop and make a plan. -5 CoPs
SoD Adventuring Companions: a -5 CPs, but all the points are there because they restrict your options to no cooperate. +5 CoPs.
Overconfident: -10 CPs, and might occasionally lead to a bad plan, but the effect on your party is not the focus and easy to compensate for. Maybe -1 or -2 CoPs, but probably not worth the effort of tracking it.
Innate Melee Attack, 5 MT nuke: Costs lots of positive points, but both hard to co-ordinate with and ripe for interesting abuse, -20 CoPs

Thoughts?

[RyanW]

One potential problem I see is that some disadvantages can be played multiple ways. Overconfidence, for example, may be "I don't need your help" or "I've got your back, damn the consequences."

Perhaps more importantly, it depends on the characters and campaign. In a Band of Brothers style military campaign, Code of Honor (Soldier) is a huge boost to cooperation. In a game of crooks and war profiteers, not so much.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

I think this is something which goes into my "interesting, but more work than it's worth" pile. For example, it misses what I think is the real problem: destructive synergies between characters. Imagine a kleptomaniac in the same group with someone with Honesty or some other flavor of law-abiding compulsion, or two characters with the same flavor of Fanaticism vs. opposing ones. One character with, say, Overconfident or Impulsive can be regulated or channeled by more sensible ones, but the problem gets geometrically worse with multiple characters. As nice as it would be to automate stuff like that, I think the game really needs an active GM overseeing character generation.

[Kromm]

I explicitly append "toward everyone but PCs" to all mental disadvantages other than Sense of Duty (Companions) and similar traits that enhance group cohesion; e.g., Chummy. I am well aware that this is (1) "meta" and (2) a free limitation that ought to make the disadvantage worth fewer points. I don't care. My justification is that "the whole world" is still six or more orders of magnitude larger than the PC party in nearly all settings, and that people who work together in close proximity learn to put their foibles on hold around allies and/or ignore their allies' problems, and that's good enough for me. All of which means that the social contract at my gaming table includes "Thou shalt not be annoying to other players and then point to disadvantages to justify it."

When I first took up GURPS in 1986, I didn't do things this way. The result was hours of valuable gaming time lost to players being argumentative over who was using Kleptomania to justify stealing what from friends, whose Honesty was keeping the party thief from filling his niche, religious Fanaticism resulting in PCs being strapped to altars of blood gods, etc. That was fun at first, then distracting, and finally annoying, because the story was perpetually sidetracked. Since changing to my current way of thinking in around 1990, I've seen disadvantages limit the PCs well enough to justify their cost without leading to frustrating PvP conflict. I like it better.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The result was hours of valuable gaming time lost to players being argumentative over who was using Kleptomania to justify stealing what from friends, whose Honesty was keeping the party thief from filling his niche, religious Fanaticism resulting in PCs being strapped to altars of blood gods, etc. That was fun at first, then distracting, and finally annoying, because the story was perpetually sidetracked.

YES. This exactly.

I sort of like your solution, but it does require aggressive containment of charactersitics that bring down ruin from the outside.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by martinl

I sort of like your solution, but it does require aggressive containment of charactersitics than bring down ruin from the outside.

Agreed. One thing I found very useful was to channel what control-freakishness I had (not much, but we all have some) away from the railroading that tempted me as a young GM in 1979 and toward being the CO of the gaming unit. That is, I took the energy that some GMs dedicate to setting up linear stories and forcing PCs onto those paths, and redirected it into establishing gaming-table expectations and enforcing the campaign social contract. YMMV, but I firmly believe that it isn't possible to have a completely laissez-faire attitude as GM – though I prefer primus inter pares to dictator, and see the GM's first responsibility as being to the social unit (the gaming group) rather than the plot.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Agreed. One thing I found very useful was to channel what control-freakishness I had (not much, but we all have some) away from the railroading that tempted me as a young GM in 1979 and toward being the CO of the gaming unit. That is, I took the energy that some GMs dedicate to setting up linear stories and forcing PCs onto those paths, and redirected it into establishing gaming-table expectations and enforcing the campaign social contract. YMMV, but I firmly believe that it isn't possible to have a completely laissez-faire attitude as GM – though I prefer primus inter pares to dictator, and see the GM's first responsibility as being to the social unit (the gaming group) rather than the plot.

What are your thoughts on the disadvantage sections in the Templates in Dungeon Fantasy and Action?

The impression I get is that the first section is mainly for mental disads, and the 2nd section for physical and social ones, but IIRC with a provision that the player may take all mental disads if desired.



In Sagatafl I've split disads out into three different categories.

"Real" disadvantages are physical and metaphysical ones, and neuro-structural ones. There's something objectively wrong with you, with your body, your brain, or your soul, and that has real and fairly constant and predictable consequences, and a high degree of suckiness in that it limits your freedom.

Social disads are handled via a special cheap kind of points called Perk Points, because like social advantages, they're temporary, they're not glued to the character with metagame glue, and they're almost always location-bound, so if you move to a different village, or to a different galaxy, you'll be moving away from them.

Initially, Sagatafl didn't have mental disads, because I didn't like the huge subjectivity of it, the player being "expected to roleplay it", and knowing that it doesn't make sense to allow some kind of Will roll to ignore a mental disad, because that just makes it super easy to play a high Will character.

I did add them eventually, very strongly modelled on GURPS Self-Control Roll model, just implemented more widely and thoroughly (and eagerly!). People are by definition less than perfectly rational, and player characters (and major NPCs) should average slightly more crazy than normal people. You're supposed to take an allotment of 20 Flaw Points worth of crazy. If you take less, that's an advantage (because you're less crazy - more rational, more in control of yourself), relative to how much less you take, and if you take more than 20, it's a disadvantage, but a very minor one (in terms of points, it goes by aDvantage Points, not Perk Points, so we're talking "real" points here, albeit small sums).

20 FP worth of crazy isn't much more than 20 CP worth of crazy in GURPS, though. I think it may be slightly less. But more importantly, you don't get rewarded much for piling on the crazy, because I use diminishing returns. You can build and play an Adrian Monk type, if you want, but the character creation system doesn't reward you for it. Likewise, you can opt to play a character with only 1 or 2 FP worth of crazy, but you'll have to pay heavily for it, and even more so for playing a zero FP character, whereas as long as you land somewhere within the 15-25 FP range, or more generally 12-30 FP, the effect on your point total is quite modest.

Most PCs will probably have one or two 3d strength Flaws, which are the equivalent of 5 CP'ers in GURPS, and a few 2d ones, which are more serious than Quirks but not much, with the occasional obsessed guy (or girl) with a 4d, and the very, very rare 5d.

More generally, I'm hoping to have engineered Sagatafl so that the "I must hunt for disadvantages"-aspect is much weaker and much less prevalent, much less pressing in the players' minds, relative to comparable systems like GURPS and Hero System. But that's something I can't know before character creation is actually ready for testing.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Perhaps more importantly, it depends on the characters and campaign. In a Band of Brothers style military campaign, Code of Honor (Soldier) is a huge boost to cooperation. In a game of crooks and war profiteers, not so much.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

it misses what I think is the real problem: destructive synergies between characters.

Both of these arguments apply to CPs as well as CoPs, and CPs are "Good Enough" for most folks.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

I think this is something which goes into my "interesting, but more work than it's worth" pile. ... As nice as it would be to automate stuff like that, I think the game really needs an active GM overseeing character generation.

It may indeed be more work than it is worth. Notice I didn't volunteer to do it.

But to clarify, I'm envisioning this as a flag more than anything else. Yes, an active, experienced, interventionist GM can nip this in the bud without even working up a sweat. However, not every group has one of those, and having some good warning flags might help.