Power Level
A crucial step in choosing a campaign type is determining the number of character points the PCs start out with. This has a direct impact on the campaign style: powerful heroes stampede through realistic challenges with cinematic ease, while a lighthearted romp for supers might be a deadly nightmare for normal humans.
As the GM, the surest way to choose a suitable power level is by "feel." During the course of your first few campaigns, you'll learn how your players spend their points – and how their PCs cope with the adventures you cook up. You can use this experience to choose a good power level for your next campaign. But that won't help you this time, so you might wish to choose the most appropriate power level off the list below.
Some example power levels, with suggested starting points for the heroes:
- Feeble (under 25 points): Small children, mindless thralls, zombies, etc. Unsuitable for PCs in any but the darkest or most humorous of campaigns.
- Average (25-50 points): Ordinary folks, such as accountants and cab drivers.
- Competent (50-75 points): Athletes, cops, wealthy gentry ... anyone who would have a clear edge over "average" people on an adventure.
- Exceptional (75-100 points): Star athletes, seasoned cops, etc. With a little experience, these individuals could become full-time adventurers.
- Heroic (100-200 points): People at the realistic pinnacle of physical, mental, or social achievement; e.g., Navy SEALs, world-class scientists, and millionaires. Most full-time adventurers start their careers at around 150 points.
- Larger-than-Life (200-300 points): Leading roles in kung fu movies, fantasy novels, etc. Typical of the professional adventurer who has already made a name for himself.
- Legendary (300-500 points): Protagonists of epic poems and folklore. This is the best power level for "gritty" supers and for mortals who rub shoulders with gods.
- Superhuman (500-1,000 points): Those who have transcended humanity (e.g., supers who can take on tanks barehanded) and powerful creatures of fantasy (e.g., dragons who can best entire armies).
- Godlike (over 1,000 points): True demigods who can do as they please most of the time.
High-Powered Campaigns
Player characters built on a high point total can tax the GM's ability to provide meaningful challenges, weaken the integrity of the game world, and push the limits of game balance. As a result, high-powered gaming merits special discussion.
"High-powered" is a subjective term – these guidelines assume PCs with well over 200 points. Even so, most of this advice stands at any power level!
Character-Design Problems
Some players spend lots of points in one area, resulting in PCs with abusive levels of ability. Others use their ample points to prepare for almost every conceivable situation, thereby poaching on the territory of more focused PCs. And still others try to do both, investing many points in a single trait and then coming up with "creative" ways to use that ability in place of almost everything else. A few countermeasures:
- Offer a broad selection of abilities. In a high-powered game, there should be all manner of expensive options available to soak up points: great wealth, exotic advantages, magic, psionics, powerful racial templates ... preferably several of these. Let your players know what is available, and use the expanded rules for special abilities whenever possible.
- Divide starting points between "base points" and "experience points." Consider giving the players only a fraction of their starting points to begin with. Ask them to create focused, balanced characters for your approval. Once you approve a PC, give the player the rest of his points to spend as if they were earned in play – which means he cannot acquire large numbers of new advantages, or new skills that don't fit his character story.
- Require certain abilities. Heroes can be worth a lot of points without giving the players control over every last point. A modest discretionary budget in combination with a fixed set of abilities works well. For instance, every super might have a package of "mutant abilities" (effectively a racial template) and get 200 points to spend however he wants; every commando might start with a 100-point "basic training" template and get 50 points to customize with.
- Require certain categories of abilities. If required abilities seem too rigid, consider requiring PCs to have a certain number of points in a few classes of abilities. For instance, secret agents might have to spend at least 10% of their points on each of "social traits," "combat abilities," and "technical skills"; supers might have to spend at least 20% of their points on each of an attack, a defense, and a movement power.
- Limit attribute levels. Attributes affect so many things in the game that a PC with lots of points in attributes can sometimes cause problems. To combat this, set an upper limit on individual attribute scores or on total points allowed in attributes.
- Emphasize the value of relative skill level. When a character concept calls for many skills, there is a temptation to buy high attributes and put relatively few points into skills. This might be a cheap way to get good skill levels, but it leads to "attribute inflation." To encourage more balanced designs, tell your players that you intend to make heavy use of the Relative Skill Level rules.
GM Limitations
Even balanced high-powered PCs can wreak havoc on your adventure or game world if you aren't ready for them! Here are a few ways to prepare for a high-powered game:
- Know the heroes' abilities. There is a lot of information on the character sheet of a powerful PC. If you are not familiar with all of it, the game can grind to a halt when the player invokes a rarely used ability. Even worse, a forgotten ability can lay waste to your careful plans!
- Know the rules. The more abilities the heroes have, the greater the number of special rules that will see use during the game. Do your reading before the game begins. This keeps things moving and prevents players who like to abuse high-powered abilities from ruining the game for everyone.
- 'Fit the challenges to the heroes. Read through your campaign notes with the PCs' character sheets in hand. This simple procedure will often alert you to foes, mysteries, and dangers that will not challenge the heroes' abilities, and gives you an opportunity to patch these holes before the players drive trucks through them.
- Present a variety of challenges. Make sure the heroes cannot meet every challenge with Guns-20 or Fast-Talk-25. Run the game in such a way that single-focus characters have to rely on their friends for help. At the same time, be sure that a few success rolls involve sufficiently large penalties that jack-of-all-trades characters have to defer to the true experts in the group.
- Know the stakes. Campaign power level doesn't just determine the heroes' abilities and the scale of the threats they face – it sets an upper limit on any imbalance between the two. Challenges that are merely amusingly weak or annoyingly tough in a low-powered game might become boringor lethal when scaled up to a higher-powered one. Be ready to think on your feet! If the heroes are chewing up the opposition so easily that the players are yawning, have tougher reinforcements show up; if they are getting mauled, give them a lucky break.
- Be flexible. Powerful PCs can do more, which makes it tricky to second-guess them. Again, you must think on your feet. Don't penalize your players when they finesse your plot with their abilities ... but when they use their powers as blunt instruments to knock holes in the plot, be ready to come up with creative countermeasures that look like you planned them all along.
System Limitations
GURPS is designed to work at any power level, but it is impossible to offer a special rule for every combination of "problem abilities" possible in a high-powered game. When the rules do not handle a situation well, try one of these fixes:
- Use optional rules. In many cases, optional rules exist specifically to deal with high-powered characters – for instance, Maintaining Skills. Such rules can often make the difference between a playable and unplayable game.
- Exercise judgment. If a rule implicitly assumes a certain power level, and the PCs are beyond this, feel free to extrapolate. For instance, Task Difficulty lists penalties down to -10, but if your campaign includes heroes with skills of 25 or 30, there is nothing wrong with assigning a penalty of -15 or -20!