Buckets of Disadvantages?

We had "session zero" of Undercity Noir, which mostly involved discussing characters and getting a little additional prep-time for me, but part of the discussion turned to Templars and a perennial problem that faces them: fitting their disadvantages into a disadvantage point limit.  Templars are mystic warriors of a secret society, so that gives them a lot of disadvnatages! A Templar has a Secret that could get them killed: that they are Templars, which is a good -20 points.  And they have a Duty to their Templar Chapter, which is extremely hazardous, so it can easily clock in at another -15 to -20. They also tend to have Disciplines of Faith which will clock in easily at -10 points, which is required for them to access Communion, which is the whole point of being a Templar.  So we're already sitting at around -45 to -50 points.  That gives you at most -5 points to define whatever unique negative traits you have, and your quirks, and that's it.

"Why not use buckets of disadvantages?" Shinanoki suggested.  Well, he didn't use that term exactly, but that's exactly what I got from his suggestion.

See, GURPS suggests an upper-limit on disads, and I think it's wise for a few reasons.  

First, disadvantages in GURPS are GM-enforced.  Players have little incentive to enforce them themselves.  Sure, the good ones will, but unlike Fate or 7th Sea or Nobilis or a mess of newer games, there's no core incentive to remember that your character is an alcoholic, or to emphasize the disadvantage, especially in the middle of a situation where you really want to succeed, thus the GM must enforce it, and he needs to do that for everyone.  Thus, for every single disadvantage every PC has, the GM has to remember them.  If you have three players each with one disad, that's three disads the GM needs to remember; if you have 5 players with 5 disads, that's 25.  It explodes exponentially, so anything we can do to keep it from getting crazy is useful. Even if your players are good, the more disads they take, the more they have to remember, and GURPS is already a complicated game.  

Second, in practice, disads tend to "rotate." If you have an enemy, and a code of honor, and a bad temper and a duty, it's rare that you're going to be in a game where your enemy shows up and your code of honor is challenged, and someone pisses you off, and you have a task that causes a problem.  Clever GMs can work it all in, but likely not session after session for all the various PCs. Instead, you tend to get something more akin to what you see in TV shows, which is where the narrative spotlight focuses on one problem at a time: in this session, we fight the enemy, in that session, anger is a real problem, in the third session, we'll deep dive into what your code of honor really means, and in the fourth session, we'll create a difficult demand from your Duty. This works fine in systems where there is disad incentives built in: have a bad temper this session, get a bennie. But in GURPS, every disadvantage not in the spotlight is effectively free points. 

Which brings us to the last reason.  I think Dr. Kromm treats Disads as "additional budget" in practice. If you're 250 points with -50 in disads, you're practically a 300 point character.  That's because a well designed character will be created in such a way that their disads and ads focus in two different directions, and in practice, you'll generally attempt to run your character on their strengths not their weaknesses.  For example, few people make master swordsmen who are also Klutzes.  That would cancel out their swordsmanship! They generally make something more like a swordsman who is terrible at social things, or dumb as a sack of rocks, etc.  They are good at swordsmanship but bad at something else.  And they generally prefer it when the game is about their swordsmanship, rather than a comedy about a dumb guy with terrible manners who happens to be excellent at swordsmanship.  Thus, in practice, the character is a 300 point character who is, sometimes, a -50 point character in a fun situation.

So, in practice, unlimited disad points cause a lot of problems.  Players can get lost in the weeds, the GM can lose track of disads, and characters can start to break the system.  If one character is 250 with -50 points, and another character is 250 with -150 points, the second character tends to be too effective in their preferred field and too annoying to handle anywhere else.  

Then why do players always want more disads?  Well, to be sure, part of it is that they want to be more powerful characters.  This isn't just pure twinkery, and I think it's the incentive structure of GURPS: if you really want that 20 in Broadsword, you need to come up with just 4 more points, so you think very hard about what problems you could introduce for your character, and this creativity incentive is one of the things that help make GURPS characters so nuanced and interesting.  A limited budget, though, constrains their options.  I don't happen to see this as a problem (I often talk about how limitations foster creativity), and it forces players to prioritize their disadvantages and decide what they really want ("Well, I see him as honorable and angry, but I can't fit in both, but his sense of honor is fundamental while him being angry is just a little bit of fun, so perhaps I'll take that as a quirk"), but in situations like the templar, it can be crushing because all of your disadvantages were decided for you.  So while I think limitations are necessary, I wonder if applying the disadvantage limit as a blanket feature causes more problem than its worth.

For example, I see most players avoiding "flavorless" disadvantages in favor for "flavorful" disadvantages.  When is the last time you saw someone take a penalty to an attribute? I never see it.  People will say that it's because people don't want to be penalized in skills, but then they load up on disads like Gullible, Absent Minded, Short-Attention Span, Chummy, Klutz, etc, and then don't emphasize those skills.  Like the geeky character with DX 10 and no DX skills could take a penalty to DX, but they take Klutz instead, because if they need -20 points, randomly tripping and tossing books everywhere is way more fun than "-1 to DX rolls."  People would prefer to define their personality than, for example, their physique.

Buckets of points might solve a lot of this, and in a sense, Psi-Wars already uses them, as does GURPS in general, mostly in the form of racial templates. If you take a 0 point template with a -2 IQ and +2 DX (for example), you are +40 points "up" on a generic human when it comes to swordsmanship, and you did it via a racial template which was 0 points and thus didn't count against your disad limit.  Nobody says boo about it, though, because you only get one racial template, and it's easy to remember. "Oh, your one of those Redneck Elves, cool." We intuitively understand how they work.  I think we should still be careful with what disads we pile into a racial template (a complaint I've had about the Gaunt), but in general, they can all fit into one cognitive bucket "Oh, he's Gaunt, he be ugly."  They still create a problem in that players can get "too many points," but if we control the buckets, we can prevent characters from going crazy. If our total maximum is -100 points, but -50 points is tightly controlled then the extra -50 points is cognitively easier to understand (especially if they tend to be stuff like "-2 ST" and "I'm a templar").  There will be some people who try to maximize each bucket, which might not be reasonable, but I have no intention of writing an ironclad system that prevents any and all twinkery; instead, I'll give you tools to prevent the worst problems and highlight where people might be having a problem (and if we do it right, it'll rarely be a problem.)

So what buckets would we use?

Racial Disadvantage Bucket

Racial templates already have disadvantages in them that don't count against the disad limit unless they have no advantages to balance them out.  But this creates a rigid structure.  You can say, for example, that all Ranathim have Uncontrollable Appetites, but you can't say all Ranathim have some sort of passionate trait. The Ranathim and the Maradonian nobles both have the option of "exceeding the disad limit" with specific optional disads, because it makes sense for a particular race to have additional disadvantages that the player can choose, but sit on this grey area between "racial template" and "character trait."

If we follow the logic of that, we could allow any race to choose a modest set of disadvantages appropriate to their race.  For example: should Gaunt be Ugly or Hideous? Well, there are problems with assuming an entire race is Hideous, but surely there are more Hideous Gaunt than even Ugly humans. If we have to have a strict racial template, it's harder to decide, but with racial disadvantage bucket, we can more easily say "All Gaunt have this minimum appearance disadvantage, but here are some additional Gaunt problems that are so common you can pick from them as part of your racial disadvantage bucket."

Stature Disadvantage Bucket

Let's dive into a can of worms. I did some research into the sex differences of ST but never posted it, because it's one of those topics that spur huge discussions. It's perfectly reasonable to point out, for example, that women can be and often are stronger individually than individual men, and that there's a difference between upper body strength and lower body strength. It's also reasonable to point out that women are, on average, weaker than men (or more accurately, and pertinent to this topic, smaller than men).  You also get into the fact that PCs are heroes and thus inherently unusual: yes, a female tavern wench is probably weaker than one of the bar patrons, but does that mean a female PC is necessarily weaker than a male PC? There's also a self-selection process, like is a female barbarian really weaker than a male barbarian, or is she just rarer?  And what do we mean be ST? If a female martial artist is much smaller than a tubby neckbeard, should she actually be weaker than him given the fact that we expect her to floor him in one punch, while we expect him to wipe his brow after lifting his can of mountain dew to his lips, regardless of his height.

But I started the research into it in the first place because of physicality.  I'm less concerned with whether female characters are weaker than male characters than I am with the fact that people tend to picture them as smaller, but rarely communicate this effectively in the game. 

Height difference

RPGs are a very abstract medium already, and they're one that demand we think about the reality of the circumstances.  Picture a character you played in a recent campaign talking to someone of the opposite gender in the game, a well-known PC or NPC.  Imagine it and step out and look at them.  Is he looking down at her, and her up at him, are they looking straight across at one another? Can he easily pick her up and carry her if necessary? Can she easily carry him?  What do you see? My guess is it's not even something you thought about before... but maybe you should!  Maybe it would be useful to have a sense of how large the characters are to one another. Perhaps one character can perch on the shoulders of another.  Perhaps one character is just monstrously heavy and hard to move.  Do we even think about that sort of thing?

In some games, it doesn't matter.  Neither 7th Sea nor D&D care how tall your character is. But GURPS does.  It determines your ST, and they have traits like skinny, compact frame, gracile, overweight, etc.  And these matter, because we can calculate the encumbrance of characters around, and we can fine tune the physique of our characters.  We do it with aliens! I include all sorts of "cosmetic" features, but we rarely do it with our own characters.

Framing it as a gender issue is deceptive.  There are short men! When's the last time you saw someone go out of their way to give their male character ST 9 and point out that he was a little short? And it's not just ST.  I've never seen someone take Skinny or Overweight. It just never comes up.  Part of it is because they picture their characters as good looking, and that tends towards the higher ST and away from traits like overweight or skinny, but GURPS doesn't really draw your attention to the physicality of your character unless someone points out the Height/Weight chart and asks you to work on those.

If we had a seperate lens of disadvantage bucket for "stature" that didn't count against your disad limit, I think people might fine tune their builds a little more.  This makes it a little complex, but the benefit is people begin to think about what their character looks like and how that impacts the game. You get more conscious choice as to height and weight.  Players might start to think about things like "My space knight is built like a delicate ballerina" or "My smuggler is sensitive about being short" or "My psychic looks like she could really eat a hamburger" which aren't things that come up as often.

If you look at the full version of the height chart above, Leia clocks in at 5'1", Luke at 5'9", and Han at 6'1". If we use the ST charts directly, going for average height (which is not necessarily appropriate, but it's good for comparison), Leia is about ST 7 (I think 8 would be reasonable), Luke clocks in at ST 10, and Han at an impressive ST 12.  The height-difference in the kiss between Han and Leia becomes more obvious, and if we assume the average Stormtrooper is ST 11 (as is typical for soldiers), then Leia's "Aren't you a bit short for a Stormtrooper" becomes clearer. These differences are obvious to us as we watch the films: Leia manages to impress others with her sheer presence not her height (this makes the battle of wills between her and Darth Vader, who is 6'6", nearly a foot and a half taller, much more impressive).  Han is a man who could knock someone out in a bar brawl, and Luke is a farm boy who can't yet stand up to the height of someone like the more impressive Han.  But does this sort of thing come up often in games? How many ST 8 Psi-Wars Diplomats do you see? I don't see any.  Perhaps we should change that.

Social Standing Bucket

When people talk about disads, they almost always mean mental disads, and sometimes "supernatural weaknesses." If I tell you to pick out some disadvantages, people generally think in terms of what their character's personality is like, or in a supers or horror game, some supernatural weakness, like a vulnerability to kryptonite or a dread of garlic.  Things like "You're a member of a secret cabal of wizards, so you have Duty and a Secret" are almost a secondary consideration.  They feel almost like a template, like the social equivalent to a racial template: a knight just has this bundle of traits, while a cleric just has that bundle of traits. To have those hit the disad limit is particularly galling, because they feel required.

So what if we treated them like racial templates and made them "bundled traits?" Psi-Wars is already moving in this direction with the lenses it applies to templates.  An Maradonian Space Knight has different social traits and obligations than a "Street Knight," and a Saruthim Bounty Hunter has a different package of traits than a Rogue Bounty Hunter who lacks even a license.  We could make it official and give it its own bucket that people can draw on.

The Rest of the Disadvantages

Finally, we could allow players to choose whatever disadvantage that doesn't fall into these buckets.  Sure, they can double up on stuff, like take even more social obligation, or even weirder stature traits, or even more racial disadvantages, but in the end, what they're doing is defining their character that way.  One character might be bad-tempered-but-honorable, while another character might be defined as a particularly disgusting looking Gaunt.  The "rest of your disadvantages" is how you choose to define your character beyond the generic traits associated with their social obligations, their race and the finnicky stature traits you picked up.

The temptation is to make these -50 points, but I wonder if we could shrink that limit further. I think the full -50 points is there to give players the chance to hit all of the above at a reasonable point value.  But if we break them into buckets, do we need a full -50 of personality defects? I don't think so.  Why not -20 or -25? That's enough for Bad Temper and Code of Honor Chivalry, or Impulsiveness, Chummy and Overconfidence.  You can do quite some character defining without a full additional -50 points.

As an aside, I feel like too many GURPS players overlook quirks. I've been writing up NPCs, and I often find a quirk or two goes a very long way to define the character.  We tend to think of them the way 3e did, which is "sometimes your character says silly things" or "My character happens to prefer redheads," but Power-Ups 6 did a lot to really help show that they can define your character just without controlling your character.  A character who "Prefers redheads" shouldn't just have this as a casual thing, it can be a defining trait. If a PC takes "Prefers redheads" he's definitely telegraphing something to his GM, and the GM should definitely consider a femme fatale with rich red hair and a splash of freckles on her already beautiful face.  Then we get into even more defining quirks, like "Mind-Numbing Magnetism: Talkative" or "Fashion Disaster" or "Easily Influenced (Posh)" and so on, which tell you a lot about the character, offer good RP hooks, and make for a fun character, but don't dominate the character the way "Odious Personal Habit (Talkative) or (Fashion Disaster)" or "Oblivious" would.  By limiting the number of "other" disadvantages, we can keep the complexity levels down, encourage people to flesh their characters out with quirks, and keep their overall point totals down.

Should we use Disadvantage Buckets?

I don't know.  I quite like the idea of buckets, but I'd have to work my way through it to get a sense of it.  I would definitely like to encourage players to think about their character's stature and give them more flexibility with how they interact with the character's race, and I'd like to both cut down on the amount of crazy PCs have while making it easier to access social standing problems without punishing the character by removing their personality.  But it'll take quite some work to integrate these with the templates and we might end up making something that's much more complicated than it needs to be, so I'd want to keep it simple.  The point of this post is to muse through some things that one of my player's inspired, and to put it out there, so the rest of you could chew on it, and think through how better to reflect these traits.  So I don't know if it's a good idea or not.

My instinct, though, is something like this:

• Up to -10 in additional racial disadvantages (or perhaps just -5?)
• A full discussion of stature traits, both advantages and disadvantages, with up to -10 in additional points.
• Social traits that are required taken as a block.  I don't know what the limit would be. _-25? -50?
• All the rest of the budget in generic disadvantages, which can be anything (not just flavorful personality traits).  Characters should be able to have at least -50 points, but perhaps no more than -75 or -100 if they go hog wild on all the traits. The "rest of the traits" should balance that out.

It's tempting to say "Look, just increase the disad limit to -75 points" or something, but there are certain things I'd like to highlight and draw people's attention too, especially stature and just increasing the limit doesn't do that and risks players going nuts with traits they really shouldn't go nuts with.  That's fine if a GM steps in, but having some tools to make that easier would help.  These buckets of disads should be one such tool, not some new, weird, arbitrary limitation.

I'll have to think on it.