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Thursday, August 1, 2024

Favoring humans in GURPS DF

I think there are a few reasons people play non-humans in GURPS DF.

One is just the interest factor - why play fantasy and not play an elf, dwarf, cat-folk, half-demon air-infused dark one, etc.?

The second is pure munchkin. I've had people ask for races outside the DF Felltower list basically because it fit a particular build. Not as in, "It would be cooler if my guy was a half-giant/cat-folk/sea elf/whatever," but as in, "the point costs work out to make a more optimized guy if it was a half-giant/cat-folk/sea elf/whatever."

I'm guilty of both - Handsome the half-orc scout is such because it makes him cooler and because it was a good point buy.

It might be worth balancing the scales a bit. Sure, in theory, a point buy system means it doesn't matter if you're a dwarf, you paid for all of that stuff as the same rate as a human would. But in practice, you have a hard disadvantage limit and a race that comes with -20 in disadvantages and -5 in secondary stat reductions and comes with 45 points of cool stuff costs 20. You get +45 in cool stuff and pay 20 to get it.

Looking at DFRPG Adventurers, disadvantages run from -5 (half-elf) up to -22 (Cat-Folk) without counting attribute reductions, for most NPCs.

One option: Allow humans an expanded pool of disads. Instead of -50 (plus -5 in quirks), allow them -65 (plus -5 in quirks.)
To avoid sameness, the additional -15 points can come from either secondary characteristic reductions, off-template disadvantages, or on-template disadvantages.
Net/net, nonhumans are still a good deal. But humans now have 15 points to play with.

You could even go 20 points, but I think that makes some racial choises - like half-elf and gnome - a net loss unless they exactly match what you need from them. -15 seems like a good go.

I haven't tried this, but I have players who make characters for a hobby so I expect they'd be willing to give this a try. It might go a ways towards making humans a good basic choice in a way that they aren't when point-efficient and useful packages like dwarf (the single most popular) are out there.

4 comments:

  1. I lean towards counting racial disadvantages towards the limit. The label is just a special effect, not a mechanical thing.

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    1. For DF, though, that is tricky. All of the templates are already maxed out on disadvantages. So to play any non-human, you'd need to total up their disadvantages, swap them in for ones on the template, and then find enough spare points in Advantages (and the -5 from Quirks) to cover all of their cost-positive abilities. That's a bit of work, to say the least, especially if someone doesn't find generating PCs to be more fun than work. It also means quite a few template/race combos just won't work - you won't be able to free up enough points to do it.

      The "just a special effect" approach works better if you're generating all PCs from scratch without a template, in my opinion. Once DF has done some of the work for you, it's work done at cross-purposes to this approach.

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  2. I'll give it a shot! Of course, probably not going to get put into play any time soon.

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    Replies
    1. No, not likely. I skewed a lot of non-template things towards humans in DF Felltower already. But I think it's an idea worth exploring.

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