Least sensible character concepts...

[Guest]

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The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
characters and games, not intentional silliness.)

By least sensible, I mean choices of advantage or disadvantage or
skills that make no sense in light of what the character is supposed to
be doing or the situation, or that are counterproductive. True, some
intense roleplayers might deliberately like the challenge of a
mismatched character, but it's usually clear what was intentional hard
roleplaying and what just made no sense.

That could include suggested characters that the GM vetoed, too.

For ex: a vampire hunter character who chooses hemophilia and Weak
Will as disads, or a character who is supposed to be an experienced
infantry soldier with Combat Paralysis and a Phobia of loud noises and
blood and mud, and no weapons skills.

Or perhaps a character who will be playing a TL7 naval officer, who
puts all his pts into Desert Survival and Forestry. Things like that.

Shermanlee

 

[Dave]

Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (More info?)

Well, not so much least sensable, but I have been in two games now where I
brought in a character, only to have it rendered useless by circumstances
ingame.

The first one was years ago when we were told to build characters for a
modern game. So I built mine with all sorts of useful modern skills - I
think she was a photojournalist or something - and a complete equipment
list.

Then, not even ten minutes into session one, we find our characters
transported into a futuristic setting with only the clothes on our backs and
what we were carrying, where we're caught in the middle of a galaxtic war!
Trust me, I was NOT impressed!

The next time was when I had to switch characters in an L5R game. I had
been playing a Scorpian clan samurai character, and decided to switch over
and play a Crain clan artisan. Unfortunatly, when I brought the character
in, we were still in Winter Court, so I brought someone with lots of
diplomatic and court intrigue skills into the game; next thing I know, our
characters are off to a war skirmish setting, and I'm left there twiddling
my thumbs most of the night because my character is berift of combat skills.

(Yes, I had talked things over with the GM before bringing in the new
character.)

Dave

 

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On 2005-06-14, Johnny1a <shermanlee1@hotmail.com> wrote:
> The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
> sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
> or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
> characters and games, not intentional silliness.)

Well, there's the time I started a game, and the GM had a rep for
Illuminated games. It was my first time playing GURPS, so I picked a
character I thought would be interesting, a cop. I'd have to work my day
job while investigating the cultists or the cabal or whatever. I was
looking forward to that kind of personal conflict. Especailly since he
was trying to make ther SWAT team in his day job, so we'd have access to
neat weaponry if I really needed it. In the first game session, magic
comes back to the world, and I'm transformed into a midget with
cannibalistic tendencies. Modern weapons and technology don't work any
more. Society collapses, along with most civilization. I'm so glad I
agonized over investigation skills, buying up police rank, weapon
skills, and contacts in the department.

When I went insane and decided to run a Traveller game right after the
debut of GURPS 4th Ed., my wife decded to get back into gaming. I had
everyone else a really good idea of how they fit into the crew. But my
wife, who had Firefly on the brain, decided to play a rich woman who
decided to leave the family business, and become a cargo handler. When
other characters were trying to find some saboteurs who were messing
with a patron's warehouses, she decided to go out partying, and took the
muscle along with her in case of trouble.

 

[Guest]

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Johnny1a wrote:
> The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
> sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
> or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
> characters and games, not intentional silliness.)
>
> By least sensible, I mean choices of advantage or disadvantage or
> skills that make no sense in light of what the character is supposed to
> be doing or the situation, or that are counterproductive. True, some
> intense roleplayers might deliberately like the challenge of a
> mismatched character, but it's usually clear what was intentional hard
> roleplaying and what just made no sense.
>
> That could include suggested characters that the GM vetoed, too.
>
> For ex: a vampire hunter character who chooses hemophilia and Weak
> Will as disads, or a character who is supposed to be an experienced
> infantry soldier with Combat Paralysis and a Phobia of loud noises and
> blood and mud, and no weapons skills.
>
> Or perhaps a character who will be playing a TL7 naval officer, who
> puts all his pts into Desert Survival and Forestry. Things like that.
>
> Shermanlee
>
Well the one time we are told to make characters for Shadowrun 3rd (yeah
not GURPS but...) so I decide to avoid as much as possible the standard
combat monsters and archtypicalness of the whole thing, I make a
Detective crossed with a Physical Adapt (but a physical adept with no
awesome hand to hand abilities, most of it was enhanced sense with a bit
of firearm boost (pistols), for those playing attention yes this is
roughly the Sentinal from TV). Well turns out it is not a street game
but a corporate game (yeah I'm almost totally useless). Then we get to
fight some monster that is immune to non-magical attacks (now I'm
completely useless). Whats worse is that all the other players are
encouraging me to engage it in hand to hand combat because "Your the
Physical Adept and you can hurt it with your fists." *sigh* (note it is
not that I was bad at combat, just that all of my combat skills revolved
around guns, mostly pistols; "I aim, I shot him, 15 dice looking for 2's").
Ken

 

[Guest]

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"Johnny1a" <shermanlee1@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1118723897.615117.88180@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
> sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
> or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
> characters and games, not intentional silliness.)
>
> By least sensible, I mean choices of advantage or disadvantage or
> skills that make no sense in light of what the character is supposed to
> be doing or the situation, or that are counterproductive. True, some
> intense roleplayers might deliberately like the challenge of a
> mismatched character, but it's usually clear what was intentional hard
> roleplaying and what just made no sense.
>
> That could include suggested characters that the GM vetoed, too.
>
> For ex: a vampire hunter character who chooses hemophilia and Weak
> Will as disads, or a character who is supposed to be an experienced
> infantry soldier with Combat Paralysis and a Phobia of loud noises and
> blood and mud, and no weapons skills.
>
> Or perhaps a character who will be playing a TL7 naval officer, who
> puts all his pts into Desert Survival and Forestry. Things like that.
>
> Shermanlee
>
An imaginary Bigfoot that most people can't see, and those that saw it,
didn't believe. It just lurked. That's it.

 

[Guest]

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Johnny1a wrote:
> The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
> sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
> or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
> characters and games, not intentional silliness.)
>
> By least sensible, I mean choices of advantage or disadvantage or
> skills that make no sense in light of what the character is supposed to
> be doing or the situation, or that are counterproductive. True, some
> intense roleplayers might deliberately like the challenge of a
> mismatched character, but it's usually clear what was intentional hard
> roleplaying and what just made no sense.

Old GURPS Fantasy campaign. 100 point starting character. Player insists that
his character is an archer. Gets upset when another (more experienced)
character is a better shot that his character, because, after all, his character
was "designed to be an archer".

Did I mention that his character bought the Weretiger advantage? For (then) 40
points (out of 100)? And never used his were form, because the character felt
that it was a source of shame? But couldn't understand why his (effectively) 60
point character was less effective than another (probably at that point) 110 or
120 point character?

He later got slightly put out when the fact that he was a were was revealed, and
none of the other characters hated him for it. (They all thought it was cool)

I all fairness, he was a very well designed 60 point archer. It's just ...

--
Andy Luddy
Remove appendix to reply
aluddy.appendix@adelphia.net

 

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On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:13:20 -0400, Ken Vale <k3nv4l3@r0g3r5.com>
wrote:

>Johnny1a wrote:
>> The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
>> sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
>> or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
>> characters and games, not intentional silliness.)
>>
>> By least sensible, I mean choices of advantage or disadvantage or
>> skills that make no sense in light of what the character is supposed to
>> be doing or the situation, or that are counterproductive. True, some
>> intense roleplayers might deliberately like the challenge of a
>> mismatched character, but it's usually clear what was intentional hard
>> roleplaying and what just made no sense.
>>
>> That could include suggested characters that the GM vetoed, too.
>>
>> For ex: a vampire hunter character who chooses hemophilia and Weak
>> Will as disads, or a character who is supposed to be an experienced
>> infantry soldier with Combat Paralysis and a Phobia of loud noises and
>> blood and mud, and no weapons skills.
>>
>> Or perhaps a character who will be playing a TL7 naval officer, who
>> puts all his pts into Desert Survival and Forestry. Things like that.
>>
>> Shermanlee
>>
>Well the one time we are told to make characters for Shadowrun 3rd (yeah
>not GURPS but...) so I decide to avoid as much as possible the standard
>combat monsters and archtypicalness of the whole thing, I make a
>Detective crossed with a Physical Adapt (but a physical adept with no
>awesome hand to hand abilities, most of it was enhanced sense with a bit
>of firearm boost (pistols), for those playing attention yes this is
>roughly the Sentinal from TV). Well turns out it is not a street game
>but a corporate game (yeah I'm almost totally useless). Then we get to
>fight some monster that is immune to non-magical attacks (now I'm
>completely useless). Whats worse is that all the other players are
>encouraging me to engage it in hand to hand combat because "Your the
>Physical Adept and you can hurt it with your fists." *sigh* (note it is
>not that I was bad at combat, just that all of my combat skills revolved
>around guns, mostly pistols; "I aim, I shot him, 15 dice looking for 2's").
>Ken


continuing with the shadowrun i played with a chap who had bogart on
the brain. he played a private eye right out of the maltese falcon
genre with his one concession to shadowrun was that he chose for some
reason to be a negamage. negamage is essentially a person who is
impervious to magic and as far as magical forces go simply does not
exist. now of course to get this he had to forgo any manner of cyber
goodies. he also didn't wear any body armour for some reason.
basically if there was a fight he was dead last to go every single
time and exploded like a meat balloon if he got hit. spent about half
the campaign getting very expensive medical care (to preserve his
negamage status). he was immune to a number of spells including all
healing hehe but the heavy damage causing spells create a physical
effect to which he was not immune to (should have heard the bitching
first time he got fireballed). the only time it paid off for him was
when a villain tried to sic an elemental on him which led to a sort of
demented who's on first routine as the ele tried to figure out what in
heck the boss wanted him to kill.

never could really figure out why the other char kept that guy around
because he was virtually useless.
--
"Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp,
panicky half-measures lead to more violence. However, complete,
fully-thought-through, professional, well-executed violence
never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the
other guys are all dead."

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (More info?)

Johnny1a <shermanlee1@hotmail.com> wrote:
: The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
: sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
: or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
: characters and games, not intentional silliness.)

Well one of mine that was a 100 point gurps fantasy character. I
though we were going to play a city kind of game and created this
guy with 25 pts Very Handsome, 10 pts Voice, 15 pts Danger Sense,
15 pts Luck kind of guy whose primary interest was in wooing
ladies. He had Danger Sense and Luck to get him out of house
_before_ the husband gets in

Of course in the first campaign we go into woods and do not see a
single living and intelligent creature in the course of the game
(apart from those few that try to kill us). And the GM keeps
forgetting that my char has Danger Sense...


--
Mikko Särelä
"I find that good security people are D&D players"
- Bruce Schneier

 

[Guest]

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On 13 Jun 2005 21:38:17 -0700, "Johnny1a" <shermanlee1@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Well I had a friend who had a penchant for making weird-ass
characters. In a Space/Magic GURPS game, he was a dwarf with dwarfism
(so he only stood about 1-foot-nothing and made for a nice chew toy
for security dogs). Then we had a fantasy game where he decided to be
a hobbit with gigantism, so the hobbit was 6-foot tall...

* Robinson

 

[Guest]

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forkliftramp.com <Brian_knowspam.McDonald@shaw.ca> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:13:20 -0400, Ken Vale <k3nv4l3@r0g3r5.com>
> wrote:
>>>
>>Well the one time we are told to make characters for Shadowrun 3rd (yeah
>>not GURPS but...) so I decide to avoid as much as possible the standard
>>combat monsters and archtypicalness of the whole thing, I make a
>>Detective crossed with a Physical Adapt (but a physical adept with no
>>awesome hand to hand abilities, most of it was enhanced sense with a bit
>>of firearm boost (pistols), for those playing attention yes this is
>>roughly the Sentinal from TV). Well turns out it is not a street game
>>but a corporate game (yeah I'm almost totally useless).
>
> continuing with the shadowrun i played with a chap who had bogart on
> the brain. he played a private eye right out of the maltese falcon
> genre with his one concession to shadowrun was that he chose for some
> reason to be a negamage. negamage is essentially a person who is
> impervious to magic and as far as magical forces go simply does not
> exist. now of course to get this he had to forgo any manner of cyber
> goodies. he also didn't wear any body armour for some reason.

For my first Shadowrun character (1st edition, I think) I decided not
to make one of those boring streetsamurai or mages or shamans. It was
a dwarf with a gun, a workshop, a helicopter, and generally some pretty
cool stuff had this been a GURPS campaign. In Shadowrun combat, however,
he was completely useless. Everybody else was just so much better,
because they were streetsamurai, mages and shamans.

Another, more sensible useless Shadowrun character was a fixer. She
was still useless in combat, but at least she had lots and lots of
contacts and could find almost anything.

As revenge for my first useless character, I also once made the ultimate
Shadowrun killer character: a shaman with dozens of spell locks, a power
focus, one bit of cyberware that magic couldn't duplicate (the +2 bonus
on guns). In combat, she could fly invisibly and fire on full auto with
her AK-98 with stupidly high initiative, and she could still cast spells
whenever that was needed. She couldn't summon spirits, though.

Fortunately, spell locks were nerfed at the next edition.


mcv.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (More info?)

I had a player in my first campaign build his combat abilities around
using puppets. When he later quit the group I made his character an
insane NPC villian, and it was way creepy.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (More info?)

Kent Allard wrote:
> It seems to be that more than half of the "Least sensible character concepts"
> were generated by players who didn't know what game they were playing thanks to
> D*mb *ss GMs.

And then there are the *unfocused* GMs. I still like my Werewolf
character, at least in part because I based him on myself, in the false
expectation--as it turned out--of having to LARP with him. So he was
fifty-something, just barely came into his were powers, explaining why
he was my age but skillwise a cub. Ragabash [the trickster aspect],
because that's my actual birth moon--looked it up in an ephemeris.
Glasswalker--the urban tribe--CFO [Chief Financial Officer] of the big
telephone company in our state: A fixer. Yes, talked it over with the
others and especially the GM.

So we never did Live-Action Role-Playing, and there were accessible NPCs
who were way more competent fixers in the milieu.

Someday I'd like to play him in a game where inter- and intra-tribe
politics matters. White Wolf provides some rich background for this,
but I'm not good enough to produce an adventure from it.

--Harrison Debenham Redsmith, III, at your service. Call me Harry!

 

[Oberon]

Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (More info?)

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 01:48:38 -0400, "Dave"
<dgreenlaw_no_spam@rogers.com> wrote:

>Well, not so much least sensable, but I have been in two games now where I
>brought in a character, only to have it rendered useless by circumstances
>ingame.
>
>The first one was years ago when we were told to build characters for a
>modern game. So I built mine with all sorts of useful modern skills - I
>think she was a photojournalist or something - and a complete equipment
>list.
>
>Then, not even ten minutes into session one, we find our characters
>transported into a futuristic setting with only the clothes on our backs and
>what we were carrying, where we're caught in the middle of a galaxtic war!
>Trust me, I was NOT impressed!
>
>The next time was when I had to switch characters in an L5R game. I had
>been playing a Scorpian clan samurai character, and decided to switch over
>and play a Crain clan artisan. Unfortunatly, when I brought the character
>in, we were still in Winter Court, so I brought someone with lots of
>diplomatic and court intrigue skills into the game; next thing I know, our
>characters are off to a war skirmish setting, and I'm left there twiddling
>my thumbs most of the night because my character is berift of combat skills.
>
>(Yes, I had talked things over with the GM before bringing in the new
>character.)
>
>Dave

I think we've all had this kind of thing happen to us. It can be
pretty amusing to role-play your character but eventually it
dawns of you that a) the other PCs would not want to associate
with someone so useless and b) for your own safety you should
not be confronting Demons and Undead (for example) all the time
when you have neither combat skills nor any effective magic to
counter these creatures with. The narrative more or less demands
that you retire the character no matter how fond you are of
them. Looking back I find a good third of my characters are
useless to varying degrees.

 

[Guest]

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In article <1118723897.615117.88180@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> on 13
Jun 2005 21:38:17 -0700, shermanlee1@hotmail.com (Johnny1a) wrote:

> The point optimization discussion got me curious: what are the _least_
> sensible character concepts that people have encountered, etiher as GMs
> or players or other players, etc? (I mean for fairly serious
> characters and games, not intentional silliness.)

Fire mage with Pyromania. In a no-mana-zone, which he knew 90% of the
campaign would be in.

I learnt to rule out stupid characters after that.

--
Richard Gadsden
"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire