Expanding character creation possibilities/GURPS questions

[Surf Solar]

A few questions to the people more familiar with GURPS systems than me...
I recently wanted to elaborate on the standard Fallout character creation and looked at some GURPS systems for informations. I was especially interested in the "Advantage/Disadvantage" systems to give another additional layer to the exisiting background/traits/perks/stats/skills system. What also caught my attention were the "Quirks".

Now, I've looked at a lot webpages, but only found contradicting informations with varying stats, descriptions and so on.

Fucking Quirks/(Dis-)Advantages, how do they work?

If I understood correct, Quirks are things like "Fear of Height" "Fear of Dark", "Arachnophobia" and such?
If yes, how would you translate, let's say "Fear of Height" into the Fallout setting? Everytime the character fights on mountain range-maps, he suffers tohitchance penalty, or rather penalties to other stats/skills? Or even no penalties at all, but random chance to refuse to do assigned action?

Furthermore, those Quirks could affect dialogues and lock/unlock certain answers I guess.

(Dis-)Advantages are just Traits divided into Positive/Negative Effects? What are Vows?

When are those Quirks/(Dis-)Advantages applied in character creation? Before allocating Stats/Skills or after?

And last but not least, while I would find it fun and good to have more possibilities to give my character (or NPC) more... character, would players find it boring/too spreadsheet-y, or welcome it?

 

[Excidium]

Hey I don't know much about GURPS but you can get a free pdf that goes over the basics of the system here: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/

And last but not least, while I would find it fun and good to have more possibilities to give my character (or NPC) more... character, would players find it boring/too spreadsheet-y, or welcome it?

More character development options are always welcome for me.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Re: Expanding character creation possibilities/GURPS questio

A few questions to the people more familiar with GURPS systems than me...
I recently wanted to elaborate on the standard Fallout character creation and looked at some GURPS systems for informations. I was especially interested in the "Advantage/Disadvantage" systems to give another additional layer to the exisiting background/traits/perks/stats/skills system. What also caught my attention were the "Quirks".

Now, I've looked at a lot webpages, but only found contradicting informations with varying stats, descriptions and so on.

Fucking Quirks/(Dis-)Advantages, how do they work?

If I understood correct, Quirks are things like "Fear of Height" "Fear of Dark", "Arachnophobia" and such?
If yes, how would you translate, let's say "Fear of Height" into the Fallout setting? Everytime the character fights on mountain range-maps, he suffers tohitchance penalty, or rather penalties to other stats/skills? Or even no penalties at all, but random chance to refuse to do assigned action?

They are disadvantages. Quirks are stuff like dislike of heights, having to repeat certain words of phrases, etc.
They are often penalties to skills. Refusing to action and compulsions too - depending on willpower test result.

They are picked just like traits in Fallout.

 

[Surf Solar]

Re: Expanding character creation possibilities/GURPS questio

A few questions to the people more familiar with GURPS systems than me...
I recently wanted to elaborate on the standard Fallout character creation and looked at some GURPS systems for informations. I was especially interested in the "Advantage/Disadvantage" systems to give another additional layer to the exisiting background/traits/perks/stats/skills system. What also caught my attention were the "Quirks".

Now, I've looked at a lot webpages, but only found contradicting informations with varying stats, descriptions and so on.

Fucking Quirks/(Dis-)Advantages, how do they work?

If I understood correct, Quirks are things like "Fear of Height" "Fear of Dark", "Arachnophobia" and such?
If yes, how would you translate, let's say "Fear of Height" into the Fallout setting? Everytime the character fights on mountain range-maps, he suffers tohitchance penalty, or rather penalties to other stats/skills? Or even no penalties at all, but random chance to refuse to do assigned action?

They are disadvantages. Quirks are stuff like dislike of heights, having to repeat certain words of phrases, etc.
They are often penalties to skills. Refusing to action and compulsions too - depending on willpower test result.

They are picked just like traits in Fallout.

Ok, so at the moment, if one registres (creates) a new character by clicking "New game" in main menu, first the "origin" (by lack of better name currently) pops up - it is only very basic, determines where you start and changes minor stats/skills. Then the usual SPECIAL character registration you know from Fallout pops up, you choose 3 skills to tag and 2 (optional) traits. THEN, the Quirks menu pops up. Would this in terms of order be relatively true to the GURPS system, and would it make sense? I am open for suggestions to change the order, too.

 

[Alex]

Expanding on what Awor said, quirks are like mini-disadvantages. They are used only for very minor stuff, used to give flavor to the character. A good example of how this works can be seen by looking at the mental disadvantages.

Gurps has several mental disadvantages that a character can pick, such as phobias, megalomania or delusions. These phobias are worth more or less points depending on how much they affect your character and how often. For example, believing that your fedora hat is lucky and can save your life is a delusion, but it is not as debilitating as believing that you are the deliverer and must kill seven prominent people to save the world. Likewise, there is a system to determine if you can work against your disadvantage (it used to be a will roll on third edition, but on fourth edition it is a static roll. So, if you need to work against your disadvantage (such as a man obsessed with money needing to leave behind a chest full of gold), you would need to make the roll or be forced to roleplay the disadvantage.

Anyway, mental disadvantages make a good example because if you reduce their strength on both accounts (they are not life threatening like the deliverer example, nor make you roll to see if you can maintain your free will), they become a quirk. Not all quirks need to be mental disorders, though, they may be simple things such as whistling frequently, having a weird gait or even having a nickname you usually use instead of your name. In other words, they are simple, harmless things about your character put there to help you roleplay him in an interesting manner.

Frankly, I don't think that quirks, at least as they are, would really help a computer game much. To implement them well, you probably would probably need to change the text and graphics throughout the game to represent possible quirks well. I think what you are really after is the disadvantages themselves.

 

[Surf Solar]

First of all - thank you!

Frankly, I don't think that quirks, at least as they are, would really help a computer game much. To implement them well, you probably would probably need to change the text and graphics throughout the game to represent possible quirks well. I think what you are really after is the disadvantages themselves.

Why do you think Quirks would be limiting? Writing Quirk XY=only Dialogue lines is easy. So is designing such ones. IMO (maybe it is just me) giving characters random chances to be less/more effective by these "Schrullen" (to say in german) is cool, somehow. After all, you could just choose "none" in all these choices and take the normal, boring SPECIAL route without modifications. IMO, things like "doesn't like Critter XY", "freaks out in enviroment ABC" etc ADDS to the gameplay, the characters and such.

 

[Alex]

Well, it isn't that they are limiting, it certainly can add some flavor to your game, but if you are not careful, you may either end up with various situations where the player would expect his quirks would play up, but they don't or you would need to do a lot of extra work.

Also, you seem to want to make the quirks actually matter in the game, as in, they actually cahnge how the game is played, not only its appearance (which is what they do in Gurps). For example, a man with the quirk "fear of heights" uses it t make cool character comments like "No way in hell I am going up there." or "No way in HELL I am jumping down from here!". Whereas the actual disadvantage of agoraphobia might force him to be unable to go up there and have take penalties, or even fear checks, if he finds himself somewhere far from the ground.

Personally, I think the best course of action for you would be to mix both (that is, have something that affects both the appearance of the game, the exterior, and its workings, the interior), perhaps with the actual quirks as the softest form of disadvantages. For example, maybe you have three levels of fear of heights, with the second and third level being mild and severe agoraphobia. My other advice to you is to keep the list of actual quirks small, but make them matter a lot, hopefully keeping them with the theme of the game. I say this only out of my personal preferences, though, feel free to disregard this if you prefer the other way around.

Oh and

First of all - thank you!

You are most welcome. Not only I am thankful you are still working on this game, but Gurps was also one of the first RPGs I ever read, so I am always glad to talk about it.

 

[Surf Solar]

I know it doesn't really fit in here, but I didn't want to open a new thread for such a minor formula/mechanic.

Basically, do you remember that in Fo1/2 sometimes if you were too powerful, enemies run away from you? (the exact formula I need to know, that's why I created this topic here: http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=60496 ) What about expanding that a bit, making it a visible stat in the character sheet and give enemies the ability to "scare" the party too? This would ofcourse not cause the characters to run away (completely losing control is a no-go), but there could be some penalties, "Your character is shocked and standing still at the sight of monster blablabla and loses 3 action points for this round" if you fail the roll, for example. Would this only be annoyance, or a good addition? It's not very hard to add that, that's why I ask.

 

[Skittles]

I think it can add, as a mechanic with a little depth. It would be annoying to suffer it without having options to manage it. Avoiding the penalty or getting a sizeable bonus to saving throw for enemy types you've encountered before would be good. Removing fear effects for successful attacks on enemies would be nice. Using the liquor type items in the game to give bonuses to saves v. fear would be entertaining. On the flipside, new enemy types, aberrations, overwhelming numbers and surprise combat should provoke checks. Hearing or reading about enemy types before-hand with a decently intelligent character could mitigate the first two and careful scouting with a decent perception character could help with the surprise combat.

Just throwing ideas out. I do think it's something that might have potential, but it'd have to be more than a minor annoyance to really fail a check and it would have to be something the player can affect.

 

[Surf Solar]

Hah, the idea with the booze to remove fear is very good, I haven't thought about that! :D I agree with the rest - one always needs to adjust it instead of throwing it in thinking "oh well, it's another layer of tactics!11". That's why it was so bad in FO1/2, it was nowhere documented and only affected NPC, making it pretty much useless.

 

[tiagocc0]

One thing that is interesting is that in Gurps you can overcome a disvantage, but for example if you have fear of heights and you got 10 points for choosing it, if you always roll against your fear and you're successful most of the time, then the gm can say that you're not roleplaying well and since you had so much success suppressing your fear that you no longer have that disvantage.
The catch here is that if you have a 100 points character and you lose a disvantage now you have a 90 points character.

Thinking about the game, if you put disvantages there you will have plenty of room to make quests based on them that would make the character overcome the disvantage. Like you get the ugly as hell disvantage and then in the game you get plastic surgery.

 

[Vault Dweller]

A relevant discussion:
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,35.0.html

Overall, I feel that personality traits would work better than disadvantages. I'd suggest doing them not as perks but a second set of stats. The player would assign a limited number of points, creating strengths and weaknesses of his character's character.

 

[Surf Solar]

A relevant discussion:
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,35.0.html

Overall, I feel that personality traits would work better than disadvantages. I'd suggest doing them not as perks but a second set of stats. The player would assign a limited number of points, creating strengths and weaknesses of his character's character.

Thanks Vince, that's a nice read! Will look a bit closer into it and see where it makes sense in my game and what could be derived upon.