Character Building: Ice Abilities

Hi-dey ho, Neigborino!

This is a pretty broad topic, but oh well. Ice and cold themed abilities. It's the monthly blogosphere wide topic, and I'll be looking at it from a magnum scope!

Character Building: Jezebel Schwarz, Futuristic Swashbuckler Cat Girl

So ultra-tech!

TL 12, the setting is "doom inspired" and the only thing to consider is fighting. I haven't even gone past TL 8 as a GM or a player. Today, let's try walking through recycling some templates from the TL3~4ish world of Dungeon Fantasy to some far flung brutal interstellar backdrop!

Character Building: Blending In (Blog or Treat)

You gotta draw freckles or it isn't a
pumpkin.

So, Halloween is a holiday where people wear costumes and makeup and masks to go to parties or get candy, or hide from ghosts and stuff. What mechanics make blending in easier or harder? Let's take a look.

Character Building: Henry Poe, Stuntman, Wannabe Actor, and Healing Magic User

Incidentally, a decent article for some
background info.

Today, I'll be doing another character build, because this time I read the instructions correctly, and got the ok for the one sentence description of the character: A stuntman with body themed magic who wants to break into dramatic acting. So let's take a look at the process of building this character and my thought process of plucking idea nuggets from the aether and congealing them into character sheet plaster works.

Character Building: An Alchemist (Guest Post!)

Mood setting art.

Today, I've made it in the blogger sphere. I have received a guest post submission. A forum poster Kalzazz submits this response to my stream of consciousness post a few days ago illustrating his own thought process while building a character, inviting me to commentate on it as well. Take a program (or character sheet) and h-h-here we go~

Character Build: Mariya Sokolova

Kinda an inspiration for the character.

I might be playing in a tech level 8 (modern day) campaign with magic, and so I've decided to create a shapeshifting character as the build budget is a (hefty) 250/-100. The guidance I was given for building a character was simply that magic exists, it's not especially common, but the default magic system is not being used, and mostly magic available to characters is available in the forms of Sorcery and advantages with the Magic modifier.
I had two ideas that I wanted to try for a while: magical alchemist, and magical shapeshifter, but as the GM has a few misgivings about the appropriateness of Ritual Path Magic for the campaign, for me this narrows it down to Shapeshifter. I don't know why, but I decided on the name Mariya Sokolova, for better or for worse. Today, I guide readers through my creative process and how I build a character.

Ritual Path Magic: Martial Artist...?

The cartoon wasn't terrible I think.
Not great, but not terrible.

First off, I like Ritual Path Magic. Second off, I do think it can work for a high paced game. Thirdly, it can work, but I'm slightly wary of recommending it for that purpose. However, I have a player that is considering it for a martial artist type of character, so here we are. Let's see what kind of abilities might behoove such a character.

Editorial: Help Me Help You Make A Character That's Fun To Play

That's a Character.

It's a weird, not really a system specific problem for GURPS or anything, but it seems a problem that I have difficulty solving. The problem that I need to solve is that I am having a lot of troubles spontaneously developing the power to read minds. I've talked about something in a similar vein before, but today, I'll try working on this in a subtly different way. Let's talk about how GURPS (but also, probably every RPG?) is not a one man show, and when everyone works together, it makes for a better game.

Math: What's Luck Got To Do With It?

It's physical, only logical

For some reason, figuring out an easy way to graph this has eluded me for a while, but then I decided to just write a little loop to go through the numbers. Originally, I was going to run through all 216 * 216 * 216 = 10,077,696 combinations together, but that was a little slow, so I used a fun little memoization technique to reduce it to 16 * 16 * 16 = 4,096 combinations, which is a lot more manageable, friends! Let's investigate these numbers further then.

Power-Ups: Samurai (Knight Variant)

A fun issue, mostly liked
the Havens & Hells part.

I've been putting together interesting abilities for my Divine Favor cleric player for a while, so I thought I'd take a change of pace and focus on my Samurai player. I based the character's template off of something of a mix of a Dungeon Fantasy 15 henchman template, and some of the lens ideas from Pyramid 3/89. This being said, take it or leave it, they might be nice for your run of the mill Dungeon Fantasy samurai? Some of these ideas, I am guessing are going to come dangerously close to something like a Mystic Knight, which I don't yet own the pyramid issue for, but I'm gonna go at it with my own spin on things. Without further ado, let's get cracking.

Fundamental: How to Not Die - Advantages and Skills

Unless they have Extra Life.

This is the last possible post in the series that I can think of, besides all the fundamental rudimentary applications of our attributes, and our first line of defense, active defenses, advantages can change the rules of the game to allow us to survive situations we normally couldn't, or simply augment our survival capabilities. Let's take a closer look at all the fundamental abilities that allow us to survive better in the Basic Set.

Fundamental: How to Not Die - Attributes and Secondary Characteristics

Lack of HT and FP loss from
dehydration and overexertion.

To be specific, this post isn't about effective combat strategies or little aphorisms like, "the best defense is a good offense," and stuff like that. Nope, I'm strictly talking about mechanisms that you can invest your character points towards so that you don't die. There are a lot of ways to not die, and it could go on for pages and pages, so to split this into manageable chunks, I'm only speaking to Attributes and Secondary Characteristics, which generally have the furthest reaching impacts. Also note, that although there can be many interesting ways to die, I'm mostly focusing on the violent, deliberate, and unsubtle means of shortening a character's life. So in any case, let's get cracking.

Mechanics: Leading Monsters

Maybe like this,
but not like this.
Really good Discworld
installment though.

So, there is a little bit of an interesting aside in Dungeon Fantasy 2 for Knights on p. 30 that talks about how one creative use of the Leadership skill might be to organize hordes of weak but friendly monsters. I really like this idea, and enjoy lateral solutions to problems that are difficult to solve if approached head on. Additionally, Leadership is a skill that kinda sounds real useful in name, but it's objective functionality is hard to quantify often times. This idea of leading monsters to help with other problems is, in my opinion a very compelling reason to try to come up with a way to apply some objective functionality to the Leadership skill.

Disadvantage: Compulsory Adventuring Disadvantages

A character forced into an adventure
because of a dependent disadvantage,
an Obsession (Travel to Paradise Falls),
and potentially a light version of
Weirdness Magnet.

I was thinking about how disadvantages feel like they can be put into a few different categories.
The most basic disadvantage is the type that makes you bad at doing something the "normal" type of characters can usually do. In this simple form, they usually can be reverse engineered as
-x reaction/attribute/secondary characteristic (Accessibility, A particular circumstance, -y%)[z]
But with a little bit of extra fluff and flavor to explain why you have the penalty in that given situation.
Then you have the type that makes it impossible to do a thing. Can't see, can't lie, can't fight unless in self defense, can't deal with spiders, etc.
A third basic type that I can think of are the type that force you to do a certain thing. For a GM these can be really good seeds for adventure plots and storylines, and if it leads a character to do the type of things you want to do anyways, it might be close to free points. I mean, a good GM should find a way to make it inconvenient, at least sometimes, but if you are the type of player who just likes doing the types of things you are obligated to do, is it really that painful of an obligation?
This post is a kind of index of the third category, focusing mostly on The Basic Set, but if anyone can think of similar plot grist disadvantages in other sources, I'd be happy to include them.

Character Build: Negotiation

I don't even know

Besides combat, social interaction seems like one of the most common role play situations. For new players there can be a few stumbling blocks that need to be overcome to being effective at negotiation. Like combat, work, survival, and anything else, GURPS needs a character to have some competency in social skills before they can use them. Let's take a look at that today.

Template: My Master, Right or Wrong

Not the most famous reference,
probably, but it is the one that
jumped out at me first.

My brother and I were discussing tropes when talking about backstory and the like, when the hypercompetent sidekick character for the incompetent bad guy came up. TVTropes calls it My Master, Right or Wrong, because the guy is usually loyal regardless of the consequences, and has to do with moress in a time where loyalty and obligation were considered among the utmost virtues. So this character is usually a shining knight or samurai or other honorable warrior type who is shown to be a master at his craft. Let's take a look at how to potentially put together a character package to describe someone in this situation.

Character Build: Backstory and Motivation

The only book you kinda need
today!

Good afternoon, friends, and welcome to another fascinating episode of the blind leading the blind, or Blind (Mitigator, Patron). Today, I'm going to be talking about something that has all the hardness of special sensitive gum formula Jello: backstories. I have opinions about backstories, and I think I've never exactly explained it just right to my players, so I often get things that are technically backstories, and they might even be written well, but it misses the mark entirely of what I really am asking for when I ask for a backstory. So today, I am going to wax extremely editorial on a topic I didn't see much advice for, and I encourage anyone else who has opinions, whether they are in a vehement opposition to mine, or they are in adamant agreement, to give me your thoughts.

Cross-Post: Using Disadvantages to Create Character Hooks

Interesting, this post from JustRoll3d6 is somewhat similar, but at the same time, different than the post I did somewhat recently on social advantages and disadvantages to make a character more popular. I guess you could say mine is a little bit like a deep/narrow look at the social aspect, and this is a wide/shallow look at disadvantages.

Character Build: Make a (socially) Interesting Character

Well, you don't have to go this far.

So, you might say there is kind of a spectrum of GMing styles ranging from "I want my players to experience an awesome story", or more pejoratively, "railroad," and at the other end, you have, "I want to give my player all the tools and freedom they need to enjoy themselves however they want" or more pejoratively, "sandbox."
I kinda start closer to the sandbox end to flush out what my players are looking for, and when they hone in on it, I start filling in the details around the point of interest they choose. This means I react to what the players want to do by accommodating the things they work towards. In a pseudo-meta way, if the world shapes itself to what it looks like my players want.
Therefore, the only way something just "happens" to a player is:

• It is the natural consequence of something the player has done
• The player has spent points on something that catalyzes an interaction, (advantages with an appearance roll, or an enemy disadvantage)

So, let's dissect the second bullet point further, and see how we can have NPCs find a player character interesting enough to just go out of their way and talk to them.