Issues of Characterization

I'm sure I've rambled somewhere about how I always play the DM and how I read all the time and blah blah blah so its really hard for me to come up with and stick to an idea for a character. That's not really what this post is about, this is about the veritable stable of super-powered dudes I've come up with for the GURPS campaign.

The Brick: This was the first guy I came up with, and to be honest he still hold a special place in my heart for that reason. The idea was that he was an early attempt at engineering a super soldier from drugs and surgeries. He was a German soldier and joined the super soldier project because he felt it was his duty. The Germans bathed his skin and insides in various chemical concoctions and combined with surgeries to remove or alter the placement of his nerves he basically was immune to pain and injury. He couldn't feel, taste, or smell very much afterwards, but he could take a beating and dispense one as well. Then the Germans took the data from their experiments on him, improved upon their methods, and cast him aside. The muscle and adrenaline enhancing organs they'd grown and implanted in him were expensive though, so they intended on taking him apart piece by piece to reclaim and reuse them. Despite his patriotism, he disagreed with that and fled to America and joined the rebellion there for the purposes of self preservation. Despite fleeing those seeking his death, he still regrets having to become a traitor.

The Atlantean: I made him because I wanted a shark-man and a vampire that wasn't a cliche. His motives and abilities are as depicted in the Inconsistencies Continued story. He is actually an Atlantean prince, so he has the Trained By a Master advantage and lots of martial arts skills and techniques. Plus all the regeneration and immunity to pain that is depicted in the story. I believe he weighs in around 500 points and I'm pretty pleased with his accuracy to the image I had in my head.

Robama the Socialist Robot: Heh. I had fun thinking of the concept behind this guy, but it was hard to make him as I envisioned him. There are some spots where I could still trim the fat and he is extremely heavy in the disadvantage department, but I think his current 751 point form is a reasonable fit for the story version of him. Off the top of my head I could easily reduce his points by dropping him to a twenty in strength, which is still respectable and at the top end of the human norm, and replace it and a few fist-based advantages with a melee Innate Attack that deals crushing damage to represent his big tungsten fist. The difficulty with him is that between him and Jeremy's Driver character are about 350 points. That is a whole above average adventurer character. Jeremy could literally control two powerful characters and still come in under what my guy costs. The robot character in the GURPS manual is a whopping twelve hundred and thirty-six points though, so I think I did ok.

The Cryptographer: This guy was a cryptography. He decodes stuff. He had an extensive background in computer technologies and electronics and a wee bit of biology and medicine. I never really came up with a justification regarding the two fields being linked in his background. The gist of the idea (it is also based off a Cory Doctorow short story) was that he had "cracked" the cypher that was his genetic code, and to a lesser extent that of others. He had a lot of powers that based on manipulating his own body. He could control his temperature, ignore the need for food, sleep, and even oxygen. He could send his white blood cells into overdrive and cure diseases and he could also regenerate tissue. To a lesser extent he could perform healing on other meatbags. He could also "unzip" the DNA of others and turn them to gooey mush, that was an Innate Attack I came up with for him. Very very cheap and it did 10d6 points of damage, very difficult to use though.

The Brit: This guy was kind of inspired by Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The character has kind of a finicky relationship with time. He couldn't travel through time or see the future or anything, but he didn't always age at the same rate as others. He had Enhanced Time Sense to represent time moving into a bullet-time-like state to his perceptions. There were a few other little quirks, but it basically culminated in an Affliction that allowed him to age those he touched. It was kind of neat.

The Teleporter: I just wanted to do something neat with this character. He was centered on the Snatcher and Warp powers, which would allow him to pull objects from other places and also teleport around. There were no rules in the book for turning the Warp power into a tele-kick like Nightcrawler and Deadpool do so I kind of stopped working on it. I suppose if I wanted to I could use Affliction powers to similute lobbing an enemy into a hellish realm of insanity or an Innate Attack with lots of crushing damage to simulate my character teleporting endlessly through the sky to build up momentum and then teleporting right above an enemy and bringing all that momentum down on their head. It could work, its all about how you fluff that Innate Attack ability that really determines the look and feel of your character.

The Telekinetic: I have always loved psionics, the idea of a mind so powerful that can enforce its will on reality and alter its surroundings gets me a little stiff. Anyway. I started playing around with GURPS psionics and thought it might be neat to have a telekinetic that just whips shit around with their mind. The character behind the powers was a German "...with a bloodline so pure it would shame the Fuhrer..." He and his children had things growing in their brains that granted them their psionic powers. I wasn't too sure about the origin of the parasites, but I knew that in the character himself they had lived in their host too long to be safely harvested. In the character's children they hadn't fully fused to the host though, so the mad scientists of the Germans took the character's children and yanked out their parasites (killing them, but sacrifices must be made for the Fatherland) and thus a certain formerly blind individual gained the ability to shoot beams of disintegration from his eyes. I wasn't sure how I was going to go with this. I didn't know if he'd just be throwing telekinetic punches or what. There are some neat things you can do with telekinesis and the Psychokinetic talent. Like you can use the Binding advantage to entrap a foe in bands of psychic force and then just suffocate the life out of them. Where have I seen that before? You could use Innate Attack to do really big telekinetic punch damage or slashing damage or any damage really, or you can use the Damage Reduction power in conjuction with the Force Field modifier to throw up big defensive shields of telekinetic force. I'm sure you could add points to the Parry or Block defense as well and say your mind is knocking things aside. You could also just pick up knives and rocks and fling them at people. With enough points you can pick up people and throw them at people, but if the Steve Jackson Games forums are to be believed, its nearly impossible to make that an effective battle tactic.

So that is an elite cadre of dudes rolling around in my head and in my Excel spreadsheets. I still haven't really settled on what I'll be playing. Part of it is that I haven't played GURPS before so I don't know what works with what, or what may be a useless point sink. I don't particularly want to play anything normal like Jeremy and Dan seem to. I was under the impression that we chose Reich-5 partly because we could do super soldier crazy crap and we chose seven hundred and fifty points for the same reasons. The high point total is on me I freely admit, I was having trouble fitting first the brick and then the robot into lower end points so I pushed for five hundred and then seven fifty. Competent soldiers and adventurer types should be made at around two hundred points, three hundred if you want to get really fancy. Like I said earlier tonight to Eric, even with the Chevy from the FUTURE (for thirty points) and his "thermite" grenades (eighty-ish points), Jeremy's Driver (as depicted in Inconsistencies Continued) comes in around four hundred points, closer to three hundred though if I am remembering correctly.

I think I want to try psionics though. The robot is fun and everyone seems ok with playing lower point characters next to my tungsten clad beast, but I'm not. He has 21 points of damage reduction (-21 damage from most attacks), two levels of hardened (armor piercing attacks don't pierce his armor as easily), and he is unliving (takes a lot less damage from impaling and piercing attacks). He's hard to hurt. On top of this, his weapon limb can do upwards of one hundred damage on an average roll. I'm not sure what his damage output is over an area because I haven't looked up any of the rules about spraying bullets at an area, but against single targets it seems like he'll do respectable damage. I just don't want to be the guy that wanders into a room and everyone is bleeding out on the floor and in two rounds I take down all their enemies. That's boring and could get annoying. Eric says he plans to compensate for the robot's apparent might, but without every having run GURPS before we're looking at underkill or overkill or a one in a million dead on fair and balanced series of battles. Even if we're fighting a group of enemies with the same points total as us and the same size as us, that means each enemy is made up of more points than Dan or Jeremy's characters, and fewer points than my Robot. It just seems easier if all the players operate at the same points total.

Music: Discipline - Nine Inch Nails

Edit: For the sake of exactitude I have consulted my records. The Driver weighs in at 311 points. I could probably push it to 350 and have everything still within reason, except for his "thermite" grenades. Can you even make thermite in grenade form? I can't imagine it would be terribly effective, other than at ground zero. Thermite is basically just supposed to cut through stuff via extremely high temperatures. Whatever, its not like it matters, this is the world of Inconsistencies Continued.