GURPS Conversion: Charity Shrinesdaughter

Charity Shrinesdaughter was a much-loved character in one of our (many) Pathfinder campaigns. As often happens, I found something unsuitable for a player character and was inspired to work out how to use it for a player character.

In this case, the culprit was the Site-Bound oracle curse; a feature that keeps the oracle within a short distance of a particular spot to avoid wasting away to death within a few hours. Clearly, wildly inappropriate for a player character, who will need to bod about the countryside seeking adventure and excitement.

...a particular 10-foot square, you say.

A series of shenanigans followed, involving the mass of various kinds of soil, careful scrutiny of rules, and a painstaking exploitation of every single carrying capacity-boosting ability I could cram into a single penniless 1st level character. Charity Shrinesdaughter was up and running; or rather trudging, given she had to carry 1,000 cubic feet of earth around on her back. Possessed of phenomenal strength, blinding charisma, boundless energy and an absolutely monstrous appetite, she made up for it with a lack of common sense and a tendency to trip over her own feet.

If one curse wasn't enough, the gods also afflicted Charity with Legalistic, compelling her to try and fulfil any promises she made - and the aforesaid lack of common sense, plus being very kind and helpful, meant she made an awful lot of promises. There were hints throughout the campaign that those gods were probably the passionate, kindly Sarenrae and the Asmodeus, influencing poor Charity each in their own way. She did get fire magic out of the deal, though.

But how to do this in GURPS?

Let's start with some basics. We're looking at a Tech Level 3 setting, with Normal Mana (some people have the capability to cast spells, but most don't). Pathfinder PCs are significantly above human average, and I'll reflect that by choosing a 200-point limit for the character.

(I would also like to point out that I invented Charity looooong before hearing about Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon! I had the idea in October 2017, according to my chat history with Nathan! But it's good and I recommend it, and yes, Charity is similar to Lammis in many ways, although she was actually inspired by Miyako from Hidamari Sketch (right).)

The easy stuff

The first problem is that Site-Bound curse. It seems logical to model this with a Dependency (Rare, Hourly) for a mighty -120 points.

Yes, that dependency all by itself is smashing through the normal disadvantage limits and careening down the highway like an out-of-control rhinoceros. But don't worry; it'll soon get cancelled out, and something like Charity would need a forgiving GURPS GM in the first place.

Surprisingly Heavy

A 10-foot cube of soil weighs approximately 75,000 lb., or just shy of 38 tons. Soil is, it turns out, surprisingly heavy. To lift this much with only moderate impairment (Medium encumbrance), Charity will need an effective Strength of 354. The human norm, for what it's worth, is 10. In reality, we'll want her to be able to carry something other than her sacred earth cube, so let's go for ST 360 as a target.

Basic Lift is calculated as (STxST)/5 lb., while Medium encumbrance allows up to 3xBL. This means we need a BL of 25,000 lb., and we're looking for a Strength equal to the square root of (5 x 25,000) = 125,000. That calls for a ST of 353.5 and a bit.

Now, actually buying that Strength has three problems.

The first is that it would cost 3500 character points, from a typical budget of 150. Tricky under your conventional, earthly mathematics.

The second is that it would mean she had a ST of 360. That's enough to do 37 dice of damage with a single punch, for 130 points: obliterating a bus or a WW1 Renault FT17 tank, killing two-and-a-half full-grown elephants, or knocking a suddenly-deceased wild boar 10 yards away.

The third is that in GURPS, hit points (how much injury you can absorb) is directly based on Strength, for... presumably some reason. Giving Charity 350+ hit points would put her on par with light military vehicles, and give her good odds of taking a sniper rifle shot to the eyeball without serious injury.

Do you even lift, sis?

GURPS has an answer in the form of Lifting ST, an advantage costing 3 points per +1 ST for lifting things only. Buying that up would cost a mere 1,080 points - a bargain! But I don't actually need it for anything other than the shrine; in fact, in our game, Charity's incredible strength was bestowed specifically so she could carry the shrine around.

We can add a limitation: Accessibility (Only to carry shrine), which is specific enough that I feel justified in making it -80% cost (the maximum). She can't use this incredible lifting capacity for anything else; only what the gods demand. That's still 216 points, though.

What about looking into superheroes? Feats of strength are abundant in that genre. Sure enough, they have Super-Effort: a modifier specifically for Basic Lift, which allows you to vastly increase your strength when you use the Extra Effort rules. It modifies the cost of an ability by a massive 400%, though; and you always have the base amount of extra Basic Lift, which I don't want.

Extra Effort involves spending Fatigue Points to boost a specific action.

Despite a lot of searching, I can't find anything on adding Super-Effort without the constant benefit. The intuitive way to do this is with Accessibility (Only to carry shrine, -80%) on the Lifting ST, but because of the way modifiers are calculated, that's traded off with the cost of Super-Effort for an overall +320% cost. That may be right(?), but it doesn't feel right; the very strict restriction on the entire power barely reduces the overall cost very much.

I'm going to do something controversial (and possibly horrify poor Roger) by applying the limitation to both Lifting ST and Super-Effort. Reducing the cost of both by 80% brings it down to a manageable 66 points. This still doesn't help with the unwanted Basic Lift, though...

OK, judgement call time. I've just remembered that the "maximum -80%" mitigation applies to the overall cost of an advantage, not to a specific mitigation! I do not want the Basic Lift to apply anywhere except when lifting the shrine, and the Super-Effort is restricted to that use as well, making both of very limited use. I therefore decide to apply a -400% limitatation to the entire advantage; this cancels out the cost of Super-Effort and leaves us with an acceptable 66 points for the whole thing, without (I hope) doing violence to Roger's feelings.

Oh, and I need to tag on Cosmic (+50%) to allow me to take Reduced Fatigue Cost (+20%), otherwise carrying the shrine around will cost me 1 FP per minute! The final tally is 113 points. That's pleasingly close to cancelling out the disadvantage. Thankfully, the Super-Effort rules supersede the ordinary Extra Effort rules, so I don't need to worry about failing the Will roll to pick up my luggage and getting a serious injury.

Charity ends up with Lifting ST 22 (Accessibility, Only to lift shrine; Cosmic; Divine; Reduced Fatigue Cost 1; Super-Effort) [113].

Edit: shortly after writing this section, I realised that I'd messed up the rules for Super-Effort. For some reason I'd got it into my head that I needed to hit effective ST of 36; I don't know why. So I don't need Lifting ST +22, only +14.

The scaling on Super-Effort means the closest I can get is Lifting ST +14, which will turn into +500 when Charity uses Extra Effort. This makes her very good at lifting, with a BL of 156 allowing her to wander around with a motorbike on her shoulder - but not so good at lifting that it feels completely ridiculous.

Since the only use for all this strength is to lift the shrine, I add Accessibility (Only to carry shrine) to the Super-Effort modifier, at -90%. That seems like a reasonable way of handling that, since I'm okay with letting the rest of the Lifting ST make her good at carrying things.

Oh, and I need to tag on Cosmic (+50%) to allow me to take Reduced Fatigue Cost (+20%), otherwise carrying the shrine around will cost me 1 FP per minute! The final tally is 114 points. That's pleasingly close to cancelling out the disadvantage. Thankfully, the Super-Effort rules supersede the ordinary Extra Effort rules, so I don't need to worry about failing the Will roll to pick up my luggage and getting a serious injury.

There's more. I suddenly remember that Lifting ST is slightly more complicated than it sounds: it also enhances your ability to grapple and choke! Super-Effort explicitly doesn't contribute, but I don't particularly want Charity to be a brutal wrestler either. Let's slap on an Accessibility (Not for combat, -40%).

Charity ends up with Lifting ST +14 (Accessibility, not for combat -40%; Cosmic +50%; Divine; Reduced Fatigue Cost 1 +20%; Super-Effort +400% (Accessibility, only to lift shrine, -90%)) [89].

That seems... okay? And it does allow the enormous penalty from Site-Bound to give Charity a few bonus points, which is nice. Carrying around 38 tons of soil in a 10-foot cube causes challenges that aren't really accounted for by Dependency, and which I'm not entirely sure how to model. For example: very few doors are big enough for you to carry a 10-foot cube inside.

Lighten Burden

On reflection, it strikes me that another way to handle Charity's carrying capacity would be to reduce the weight of the soil itself. A version of Lighten Burden, maybe?

The 10' cube would have a SM of +4, making it a royal pain to cast spells on. 2 levels of the Huge Subjects perk reduce that to +2, so the cost of Lighten Burden would be 15 to cast, 8 to maintain. That's a lot.

Also, the spell only has a duration of 10 minutes. Since FP can only be recovered while not walking around, that's a big problem for maintainance.

Well, we can do this. It's not pretty, but we can. Let's take Lighten Burden Will-50 (Accessibility, Only to carry shrine -90%).* The high skill will reduce our cost by -1 at 15, and an additional -1 every 5 levels thereafter. This works out at 28 points. We can now maintain the spell as we walk around, while the initial cost is reduced to only 7 FP.

The Accessibility discount here is basically a wild guess. I cannot find any guidance on the appropriate pricing for "spell only effective on a single object and with no combat or social utility". I think it's going to be completely down to the GM.

You're also not meant to put enhancements and limitations on skills, but that ship has sailed, my friends. It is invisible over the distant horizon.

A kindly GM might allow Huge Subjects 4, reducing the cost of the spell to 5 to cast, 3 to maintain, and requiring only Lighten Burden Will-25 to be maintained without extra cost. This would cost only 8 for the spell and 4 for the perks.

With the weight of the shrine reduced to a mere 37,500 lb., we need only 250 ST. Aaaand... the overall effect of that extremely convoluted plan is to reduce the amount of Lifting ST needed for our original plan by a mighty... 1 level. This saves 6 points, making the plan overall cost 6 points more than simple Lifting ST.

If there were an enhanced version of Lighten Burden, we could pay more to reduce the weight further. Unfortunately, nothing like that seems to exist. Adjustable Spells from Thaumatology won't do it, as besides the cost, I can't find any enhancements that would increase the weight reduction anyway. Except possibly Cosmic.

Supernatural Strength?

What if we built this as a power instead?

The most logical option looks like Control Gravity (from Powers). This has a base cost of 20, and we'd need to hit 10 levels to reduce the weight by 100% - reducing it by 90% would leave 7,500 lb. which remains impossible to lift. So we're looking at 200 points, plus the need to make it Independent (+40%) so Charity doesn't need to concentrate all the time. 280 points then. Here, the cost would depend entirely on the GM's verdict on how much Accessibility discount applies. It's essentially a fiat cost. I have honestly no idea. Somewhere between 56 and 280 points is within easy GURPS tolerance, but this is a hyper-specific power.

Workarounds

An alternative to this is to deal with the fatigue another way entirely. OK, so using Super-Effort is going to soak up 1 FP per minute? Fine. I'll just have to regenerate it.

Regeneration (Fast) (Accessibility, Only to carry shrine -90%; Divine, -10%) allows regeneration of 1 FP/minute, exactly the rate of FP loss from Super-Effort. This costs 10 points.

It allows us to drop Cosmic and Reduced Fatigue Cost from the Lifting ST, leaving Lifting ST 14 (Accessibility, Only to carry shrine -90%; Divine -10%; Super-Effort (AOtcs -90%)) for 34 points.

The whole package costs 44 points, and allows Charity to spend 1 FP and a turn to lift her cube of earth, then carry it around as a Medium load for...

actually, you know what? I'm wrong. Lifting ST 14 (Super-Effort) gives her an effective +500 to ST, which means she can lift the cube as light encumbrance. Fantastic!

...as a Light load without taxing her energy at all, and without requiring any rolls that might awkwardly fail. She can lift as much as a normal strong person (ST 14) but doesn't have any preposterous ability beyond the shrine.

Promises, promises

Charity's next problem is that pesky probably-Asmodean secondary curse, which leaves her sickened whenever she breaks her word.

Honestly, this one is a poser. The obvious approach seems to be a version of Chronic Pain, except there doesn't seem to be a way to trigger it. Vows are treated as purely social in nature and don't discuss hard consequences. Pact requires adherence to a supernatural agreement, but takes away benefits when broken rather than imposing harm.

I scour Steve Jackson Games forums for quite a while, discovering interesting ideas like Weakness (Affliction) and this alternative that seem like they should have been in the rules all along, or John Dallman's discussion of Chronic Pain which has some useful ideas.

In the end, I opt for a Chronic Pain (Severe) (Constant; 24 hours; Mitigator (Keep Word) -70%) for -36 points. The 24-hour duration is a custom one as the longest in the book is 8 hours for 2x cost; I decided to be conservative and put it as a 3x cost.

Spellcasting

As an Oracle, in Pathfinder Charity is a Charisma-based spellcaster. This means her spellcasting capabilities depend on her "personality, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and appearance" (that last one is well dodgy, like).

Here I run into a problem, because GURPS magic plants its flag firmly in the camp of the scholarly wizard. Spellcasting is based on IQ, the mental statistic, which also governs overall intelligence and ability with a huge range of skills. It's "brainpower, including creativity, intuition, memory, perception, reason, sanity, and willpower".

The problem is, that isn't like Charity at all. She has very little schooling and isn't studious at all. Boosting her IQ will make her good at a whole host of skills I don't want her to have, as well as giving her reasoning prowess that the original Charity lacked.

Doesn't GURPS have a way to make a mage who isn't a genius?

The obvious answer is Magery, an advantage which specifically boosts magical ability alone. Or rather, in Charity's case, Power Investiture, which is the same thing but for divine magic. It seems all well and good, except that GURPS suggests capping these at a maximum of 3 levels. As Roger taught me, for spellcasting you really want to aim for Magery + IQ - 2 >= 15 as hitting the 15 mark makes a couple of useful rules kick in. If I'm reliant only on Power Investiture, I'd need 7 levels to hit that point, which many GMs wouldn't allow.

Thaumatology has many suggestions for variant magic, including basing it on other attributes. There isn't really a Charisma-like thing in GURPS at all. I mean, there's the advantage Charisma, which helps you get on with and impress people, but you can't base magical ability on an advantage; it needs an attribute.

To be fair, you could base magical ability on an advantage. Arguably Magery does this, especially in the "10 + Magery" version suggested in Thaumatology.

If I were implementing a really charismaticness-based magic system, I'd want it to require some kind of attribute and also levels of GURPS!Charisma. The obvious one seems to be Will, which is a secondary attribute of IQ. Will governs a few skills, but not many; it wouldn't make a decent mage automatically a leading scholar, which is an improvement already.

Thaumatology and the SJG forums alike point out that using Will makes it much cheaper for mages to buy up their key attributes. This is true; but it's also worth pointing out that the reason IQ is so expensive is that a huge number of skills are IQ-based (most of the others are DX-based). Buying up IQ to be a better wizard is expensive because it makes you good at about half the skills in the game, as well as all of your spells. Will is a lot less expensive because it won't improve many skills.

It doesn't entirely make sense to argue that IQ is expensive because it boosts spellcasting, either, because the cost of IQ doesn't seem to change in campaigns without magic. The cost of IQ includes its benefits to both skills and spellcasting. The price of IQ possibly should vary in those campaigns, but it doesn't.

I decide to do exactly that. Will-based spellcasting, with the requirement of equal levels of Charisma. Charity gains Charisma 4, which gives her the naive charm and inspirational presence of the Pathfinder original.

Spell systems

If I want to mimic Oracle spellcasting, is the default spell system from GURPS the way to go? Pathfinder oracles can learn any of the clerical spells, and use them without preparation, but know very few spells (whereas clerics know all of them, but need to pray for them in advance). Default magic gives access to any spell, but also means learning numerous spells as prerequisites. Clerical magic greatly limits the selection of spells to fit a deity - oracles specifically don't serve a particular deity, so that isn't ideal.

However, Pathfinder clerics get multiple overlapping spells - healing spells of different potencies, stronger or weaker protective spells, and so on. Oracles also get a limited set of spells themed to their 'mystery' - in Charity's case, this is fire, of course. I think what I'll do is make several small groups of spells that she's eligible for, and she can pick from those.

Divine Spells: Final Rest, Sense Spirit, Turn Spirit, Affect Spirits, Turn Zombie, and Banish allow a servant of the gods to manage unholy influences. Purify Air, Purify Earth, Purify Food and Purify Water provide for the people when other things are scarce. Deities might also grant Armour to protect their oracle, and Light (and its variants) to guide the way.

Oracular Spells: Great Voice seems perfect for making public proclamations. History, Ancient History, and Prehistory will reveal secrets, as will Compel Truth. Divination is obviously appropriate. Lend Language and Borrow Language allow communication.

Healing Spells: oracles automatically learn to heal. Most of these are appropriate, but not Share Energy.

Fate Spells: blessings and curses, great and small, are thematic for an oracle. Since GURPS doesn't have much in the way of luck spells, let's go for spells that have similar results. Compel Lie, Spasm, Tanglefoot, and Fumble are good minor curses, while Curse is the big one. Boost spells are a good option for 'lucky chance', and Bless is a generic blessing. Suspend Curse and Remove Curse represent an oracle's ability to free people from divine punishments. Bladeturning and Turn Blade seem appropriate for the oracle's defences. Madness and Permanent Madness are mythologically appropriate.

Law Spells:

Mystery of Fire: this is the distinctive sphere of Charity's gifts. In Pathfinder, it grants both spells and supernatural powers. I give Charity a minor Innate Attack (Burning, Melee C), as well as Extra Basic Move for the quickness of flame; the whole package gets Divine (-10%).

Stuff

Signature Gear: 75,000 tons of very specific soil

Since Charity's life depends on staying near her cube of soil, we need to make it Signature Gear.

You know, I have absolutely no idea how to price this. The thing is, it's a completely irreplaceable item, but also one that's got no particular inherent value.

For want of a better idea, I'm going to call this a perk.

I'll also go ahead and spend the points for her to have a Signature Gear heirloom staff with elaborate carvings, a gift from her unknown parents (who dropped her off at the shrine and disappeared).

Wrapping Up

To my surprise, I can actually build Charity at 150 points (including skills and spells) - assuming, of course, that my version of the carrying-75,000-lb. ability gets past the GM.

Here's a draft character sheet. I've grouped Charity's abilities for convenience in the Character Builder - this means both the groups and the abilities show up on her sheet, so the costs don't look right. Anything beginning with - (like -Mystery of Flame) is just a group name.