Point buys-PCs and Adventures

[Omegaman]

How do you decide what level is good for PCs? I like realistic adventures in most ways as far as mechanics go, but I do like the PCs to be able to accomplish things that the ordinary man could not. I always assumed 100 pts would be a standard starting character, but after reading the book it seems that they suggest people mostly like to start at 250pts, which seems really high to me. I have never done this before and so would like some thoughts on it.

Also, how do you design adventures for this system? In D&D it's all CR based. What is a good challenge for the PCs in this game. Is a character of equal points considered a huge challenge to defeat? What if defeat is not based on combat, but on social interaction? Is it still too/not enough powerful?

I am going to run a D&D adventure saga, but will convert all the crunch to GURPS and so I need to know some ideas on how to do that without creating encounters WAAAY too difficult or ridiculously easy.

Any ideas, thoughts, recriminations?

[fmitchell]

I haven't GM-ed GURPS in a while, but last time I checked a 100pt character is a very competent normal, while a 250pt character is in pulp hero range. So it depends what kind of campaign you're going to run.

As far as "challenge ratings" go, character points are decent measure of toughness, although two 50 pt characters aren't equal to one 100 pt character. Each character can attack independently, has his/her/its own hit points, etc. Also, a lot depends on equipment: a heavily armored knight worth 50 or 75 pts could take out lightly armored 100 pt characters, especially if those 100 pt characters have more skills besides fighting. Really, there's no formulaic way to gauge the toughness of an encounter, but as a rule of thumb the PCs should either face one really tough character (twice their average point totals or more), half their number of equivalent characters, or at least one 25- to 50pt combat-oriented NPC per PC.

Also, if you try to create every single NPC from scratch you'll go nuts. Keep a file of generic "mooks" that you can recycle from adventure to adventure. For minor NPCs in non-combat roles, just give them a few skills and maybe an advantage. An idea I've been toying around with is to simply give a character with 10s all around a single Wildcard skill based on his/her/its role in the adventure, e.g. Merchant! 12 so every skill the PC uses meets a roll against 12. Only really important NPCs deserve the same complexity as PCs.

[fmitchell]

Here's a thread from the SJ Games mailing list on the same subject:

http://mail.sjgames.com/pipermail/gurpsnet-l/2003-October/003571.html