Making Occupational Templates

[Anders]

My problems with making occupational templates is bloat - I end up with 30 advantages, a like amount of disadvantages, four primary skills, 300 secondary skills and a short note on Background skills saying "put one point in each of four secondary skills".

Does anyone else have this problem? How do you solve it?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Is that bloat? I notice that a bunch of DF templates tend to have something like 20-30 potential advantages and disads. Or are you making all those traits required?

[Anders]

Nah. Not many are required.

Maybe I should put it into context - it's a low-fantasy TL3 world with active deities. 150 points.

[Phantasm]

I tend to have the opposite problem when it comes to my advantages: not enough. The bulk of my templates tend to be skills and attributes, not advantages.

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

I tend to have the opposite problem when it comes to my advantages: not enough. The bulk of my templates tend to be skills and attributes, not advantages.

Yeah, me too. If it's on the realistic side of the scale, then most of the points are skills, attributes, and 1-5 point advantages.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Anders

Does anyone else have this problem? How do you solve it?

I used to have a similar problem when I was centering my templates heavily on traits found in GURPS Lite. I found the solution was already suggested in Basic: Don't list everything that might fit, just the most important things.

Yes, a warrior might have Versatile or Eidetic Memory but that's not really related to him being a warrior. Yes, a wizard might have High Pain Threshold, Polearm, or Artist(Drawing) but those aren't really part of the archetype.

The only reason to put three quarters of the skills in the book on an occupational template is if you want to enforce templates the way DF suggests and still want to give the PCs lots of freedom for background skills.