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Making Yourself As A Character

Often when a person comes to a new game system, they'll try to make themselves as a character in it. Apart from the little thrill you get of imagining your real self having adventures, this acts as an ease-of-use and reality check for a game system. If a system says it's "intuitive", then it should be pretty easy to make yourself as a character - you can easily relate the reality to the game, and vice versa. If a system represents reality, then what you produce as a character should look about right.

There are two ways to make yourself as a character in GURPS. The Judgment Method, and the Ranking Method.

Judgment Method

This is the method that tests the ego of many a geek. Don't worry about point totals or anything like that. Have a look at RealityChecks in general. Basically, though, consider the following guidelines for Attributes and Skills:

• 8 and below are very incapable. It's immediately obvious to people that you're incompetent in this area.
• 9 is a bit incapable. Your friends will have noticed you're lacking here, but strangers and casual acquaintances won't know about it.
• 10 is what the average Joe has in any Attribute. If they have that, they make no particular impression.
• 11 is a bit able. As for 9, friends will notice, others won't. With effort you could do a passable job using this Skill or Attribute.
• 12 is quite able, a professional living. You'll be known among your friends for this level of ability, and acquaintances will learn about it very quickly.
• 13 and above are really stand-out. If anyone doubts you've this level of ability, you probably don't, because it's a level that leaves no doubt.

Using the Judgment Method, you develop your character. Now, go through and review it. In general, what you find is the following:

• Guys whose main job involves using their brains, or who are students or unemployed surfing the net a lot, will tend to put their IQ a couple of levels higher than it actually is.
• Guys with contact sports or military experience will tend to put their ST as higher than it really is. Fortunately, Basic Lift (p.B15) gives us a test for this.
• People will give themselves lots of skills in things they tried once. Remember that GURPS allows default use of skills; when you add the "there's no pressure" bonus, this means that people can go on the firing range or into the lab or whatever for the first time and do a decent job. Remember that even a single character point is 200 hours of training under a teacher, 400 hours training alone, or 800 hours "on the job."

Ranking Method

To save the egos of players, half of whom will overestimate themselves, and the other half, underestimate (and the underestimating, low self-esteem half will feel even more miserable when they see the other half's character sheets), you can do it this way:

• Get ST, DX, HT and IQ, and rank them from best to worst. Then assign 12, 11, 10 and 9 to them.
• Choose four skills each from your Background (growing up), rank from "most effort put in" to "least effort put into it", and give 4, 2, 1 and 1 points to them.
• Schooling (high school, night school, technical college, university): 4, 2, 1, 1.
• Professional (what you do or have done for a living): 8, 4, 2, 1
• Hobbies (things you do or have done for recreation, that you can take or leave, unlike Professional skills): 2, 1, 1, 1.

Point totals from this method will range from 46 to 86. The character will not be the person themselves, but a representation of them. Like a cartoonists' caricature, it's not a portrait, not you, but it's recognisably you, and perhaps not so flattering.

Testing Method

It's possible to test the various attributes, and rate them. Much remains to be done here, but the DXRealityCheck is a start.

Dis/Advantages

These can be tricky. No-one wants to tell their gaming buddy that he's Unattractive, and lots of people would like to say they have Combat Reflexes or Charisma. If you're just making the character on your own, then the thing to remember with a GURPS Dis/Advantage is that 1 pt is a Quirk/Perk, not a big deal; 5pts is significant and noticeable to friends; 10pts and above really start affecting your life in a major way, becoming something that in your biography, there'd be a whole chapter about it. So be conservative when choosing them. Almost everyone will have Pacifist: Reluctant Killer, and even a battle-hardened soldier would like have Pacifist: Cannot Harm Innocents.

Point Totals

If it's just being done as an exercise to check out the system, point totals don't matter. If a GM is considering running an "us" campaign, then there are a number of things I recommend:

• Look at the highest point-total character, and add points to it to bring it up to a multiple of 50, like 50, 100, 150, etc. Then give everyone else an amount of points to bring them up to the same total. Let them spend it on whatever's appropriate for the planned campaign.
• Give everyone X points for "Wish List" skills, or Advantages, again aiming to bring them to roughly the same total.
• Make use of the "Potential Advantages" rules (p.B33) so that the unfortunate 10-pt guy has some latent abilities, perhaps psionic or magical, that will come out in play.

Summary

Most people will tend to over- or under-estimate themselves, that's why I say to be careful with this. As well as testing the system, you can have a decent campaign with such characters, especially in some Infinite Worlds setting. This was the basis for the old BTRC game, Timelords, and it was fun. As a character, you'll have something you as a person don't have: reckless courage. You know how in horror movies, we say to the screen, "no, you fools, don't go back in the dark old house!" In an adventure, you always go back in the dark old house. That's the player-character advantage!