Using Talent to tidy up GURPS statblocks

One of the downsides of GURPS is that while the system is largely "roll 3d6 under", statblocks are often fiddly. This is particularly true because GURPS likes to present lots of detail in its statblocks. You don't have First Aid 12, you have First Aid (E) IQ+1 [1]-12.

For the non-GURPSist, this is telling you First Aid, an Easy skill, with a relative level of IQ+1, on which you have spent 1 point, for a final current level of 12.

There are sometimes good reasons for this. When presenting a character template, the aim is to make it easy for you to adjust by moving or adding points, so you need to know how many points have been spent on things already. I'm less sure about the necessity for including skill difficulty and both final levels and relative levels. It comes up if your attributes change, though.

It occurred to me that, for many trope-based character concepts (which covers a great deal, for my characters at least), the Talents generally cover all the skills you need, particularly if you smash two together. Medic? Healer covers the treatment skills, with Empath if you're the friendly intuitive sort, and Academic if you're a research-minded doctor. Couldn't we present simplified statblocks that simply list Talents instead of skills?

A slight complication is that unless you've put points into a skill, you rely entirely on defaults (if any). The first point in a skill (making it "known") allows us to use the skill level derived from its difficulty class (Easy, Average, Hard, Very Hard).

But if we want every skill covered by a Talent, spending 1 point in each of them is more-or-less the same price as the first level of Talent (required specialties aside). So why not simplify character sheets by allowing the first level of Talent to count as the first point in the skill, and by removing the 4-level restriction on Talent?

This has the effect of making groups of related skills much cheaper to raise to a high level. Taking five Very Hard skills to IQ+4 costs 35 points via Talent, rather than 120 when bought individually. Isn't this a problem?

If all the skills are highly desirable, that may be a concern. A slight counterpoint is that Talent rarely covers a set of highly desirable skills without "dead weight" - if paying for skills normally, would the player choose to buy up Connoisseur to the same level as Two-Handed Axe/Mace?

Of course, a player who wants to raise twenty or more skills can simply buy up IQ or DX, with the same effective cost as above - and raise every other IQ- or DX-based skill into the bargain, #emph[and] every default based on the attribute, #emph[and] attribute rolls. For 100 points, the character has every IQ-based, Per-based, or Will-based skill - that is, the vast majority of non-combat skills - at 12 or better, resists Will-based attacks with 15, and excels at Fright Checks. Talent would raise twenty skills to the same level for the same price, without creating an all-round genius.

In general, consider that a player could legitimately spend a single point in every skill they want, then buy up an attribute and appropriate Talent. Unless it would be considerably cheaper to achieve the same effect by buying high levels of Talent and allowing Talent-as-improvement, there's little risk.

This is, in fact, exactly how spellcasters usually operate. Because spells are IQ-based and Magery raises all spells, the standard expectation is to put 1 point in each spell, buy as much Magery as permitted (because it's cheaper than IQ), and raise IQ. The cost of a single spell is negligible; as soon as you spend that first point, you have it at IQ+Magery-2. The side effect is indeed that spellcasters tend to be very good at every IQ-based skill, both due to high defaults, and because it's extremely cheap to spend 1 point per skill to get them at 12 or better, so you might as well. Building such a character is simply more efficient than other options.

Of course, standard spellcasters do need to spend points on individual spells, because prerequisite chains mean we need to know which spells they have learned. The same doesn't apply to skills. There seems to be no major downside to permitting Talent 1 to count as 1 point in each skill, triggering the difficulty-based level instead of defaults.

If a Talent applies to all specialties of a skill, and a character is likely to want several specialties rather than relying on defaults, this can result in significant discounts. Of course, there are often other routes to savings. For example, a mechanic aiming for IQ+2 in every specialty of power plants would need to buy up ten or more skills, at a cost of 160 points. Far cheaper to spent 32 points raising one specialty to IQ+6 and then rely on the skill-4 defaults, even though this isn't what the player really wants.

Still, the GM and player might agree to have one specialty as the lynchpin of the Talent, and rely on defaults for others. This doesn't always work, though; for example, Theology specialties don't default to one another. An alternative is to raise the price of a Talent that covers many specialties if they are relevant. In a game set entirely within a remote Buddhist monastery where foreigners never set foot, a monk's (frankly inexplicable) expertise in Malagasy animism and Norse Neo-Paganism are unlikely to crop up.

Isn't this just Wildcard Skills?

Not quite. Wildcard skills have a #emph[single] level, while this option for Talent still gives disparate skill levels based on difficulty and controlling attribute. Moreover, it doesn't have the cinematic aspect that wildcard skills often do, and doesn't require any GM attention to ensure it remains balanced compared with those using "standard" skill purchases. It just makes bookkeeping easier by removing the need to track how many points have been allocated to individual skills.

Isn't this just wildcard skills with the numbers filed off?

Not quite. Wildcard skills have a single level, while this option for Talent still gives disparate skill levels based on difficulty and controlling attribute. Moreover, it doesn't have the cinematic aspect that wildcard skills often do, and doesn't require any GM attention to ensure it remains balanced compared with those using "standard" skill purchases. It just makes bookkeeping easier by removing the need to track how many points have been allocated to individual skills. It still requires the player (or GM, for NPCs) to calculate the actual skill level as and when necessary - or to turn the compact Talent-based statblock into a more comprehensive one for play.

For truly simplified and compact statblocks, wildcard skills are superior.

An Example

Judy creates Professor Smedgewick, a slightly sinister occult detective. Rather than purchase any skills, she buys Close to Hell 6 and Natural Copper 3, for a total of 55 points. To create a keen-eyed detective, she raises Per to 12.

With Smedgewick's default IQ of 10, this gives Body Language-13, Criminology-11, Detect Lies-12, Exorcism-13, Hidden Lore (Demons)-14, Intelligence Analysis-10, Interrogation-11, Observation-13, Occultism-14, Psychology (Demons)-13, Religious Ritual-13, Savoir-Faire (Police)-12, Search-13, Shadowing-11, Streetwise-11, and Theology-13. He also has a useful default of Ritual Magic-7.

Smedgewick's background is Scottish Presbyterian, so Judy opts for his Religious Ritual and Theology to have the Christian specialisation. His Ritual Magic default has the corresponding specialisation ("Ritual Magic (The sort of occult shenanigans loosely inspired by Christian-derived folk belief that the Medieval clergy got up to)").

He is not otherwise particularly intellectual, and has no general academic expertise. If Judy wants him to remember facts easily, she buys Eidetic Memory.

What she actually writes down is: Per 12; Damage 1d-2/1d; BL 20; Basic Speed 5; Move 5; Close to Hell (Christian) 6; Natural Copper 3; Eidetic Memory; Higher Purpose (Solve occult crimes); Reputation -2 (Sceptics; 10 or less); Sense of Duty (Victims of occult crimes).

She doesn't particularly need to write down other stats, which are staying at 10. An experienced player could dispense with the default derived values (damage, lift, speed and move) as well. If we were adding the Professor to a scenario or NPC collection, we could similarly exclude them on the basis that the GM can trivially work them out.

31 days of chargen, day 16: solar investigator (Champions)

It's that time again...

Today I'm looking at Champions for the Hero System. Our "solar-themed investigator who brings light into dark places" will be rather more outwardly 'heroic' than previous incarnations.

I'm not doing anything fancy here - just a straight-up classic superhero with a secret identity, a costume, and an alliterative name. Mild-mannered schoolteacher Ardent Adams is secretly Daylight, who draws power from the rays of the sun and can unleash them in turn. I'm sticking with the low-powered superhero guidelines; Daylight isn't going to be beating up demigods and destroying the city in the process.

To play a little more strongly into the theme, I've decided Daylight's part of the world is plagued by shadow-monsters and vampires of various kinds. They certainly won't be the only challenge he faces, but they're a recurring theme. This makes it natural that he'd be drawn into superheroing. Maybe the critters are minions of a cabal of shadow-sorcerers, who knows?

Attributes

I don't see Adams as a particularly tough hero, just someone with some unusual powers. Drawing on the guidance from the Champions Guidelines Table, I boost his combat prowess and defences a little, and buy up all his attributes to 15 for a good all-round competence. Presence seems appropriate to a sun-themed character so that goes up to 25. This will also allow him to make effective Presence-based attacks to overawe, terrify or calm people (and therefore less need for violence).

Powers

Building powers is fiddly, but luckily I can draw on the big book of Champions Powers. I choose a selection from across the Light and Solar/Celestial groups. Eyes of Light makes him hard to dazzle or blind, and Summer's Warmth creates a stable warm environment around him. I also add 20 points of Power Defence against darkness, cold and shadow-based powers.

Time for something more active. Create Light is obviously required. I don't really want to go into the generic energy blaster line with this character though; something a bit more offbeat seems more interesting. So I do give him the ability to dazzle with a Flash cone of noonday sunlight, but also a Sunlit Step that allows him to step through patches of direct sunlight as a short-ranged teleport.

Since many of Daylight's adversaries will be shadowy or vampiric, I add a Dispel Darkness ability, as well as a Hand-To-Hand boost that deals 2d6 additional energy damage (-1/2, only against creatures vulnerable to sunlight) as Touch of the Sun. I decide to add a weak version of the Solar Storage power - Adams absorbs energy from the sun to power his flashier abilities, so he's dependent on being able to spend plenty of time in the sun, but can still go heroing underground or at night.

I'm not sure the Solar Storage is actually great value - it costs a fair bit and he could almost certainly just rely on his own endurance to do things. But it feels thematic and that's really more important here. Comments welcome!

Talents

These abilities give you minor advantages that aren't really powers. I decide Absolute Time Sense makes sense for a hero based on the sun.

Skills

Adams is a schoolteacher (specifically a high-school science teacher), so he doesn't need huge amounts of unusual skills. The Everyman skills that he gets by default cover most things. I decide to buy up his Professional Skill: Teacher a bit, and give him some other relevant skills like Bureaucracy, Oratory and Persuasion. He needs some actual Science Skills too, but not a huge amount. Also, a Fringe Benefit in the form of his Qualified Teacher Status.

This also seems like a place to play up the solar theme again, so I give him Knowledge Skills in "the Sun", "renewable energy" and "vampires". Adams didn't take the "straight to teaching" route, but spent some time working in the renewable energy field before changing career. A few points of social skills to use that striking Presence he has, some Mechanic to represent tinkering with scientific kit and suchlike in his professional life, and we're done.

Complications

As an inspirational teacher, naturally Adams' life has to be complicated by dealing with the personal issues of various students. They come to him after class, they turn up to watch their hero Daylight rescuing someone, he notices them getting into trouble somewhere when he needs to be chasing a fleeing baddie, and so on. This is a Floating Dependent Group (2 students, incompetent, frequently, unaware of adventuring). It's not always the same students, but there's always at least a couple of people he needs to watch out for.

Naturally, he's also got a Secret Identity like any self-respecting hero.

I decided not to give him an immediate family - he'll have relatives and friends who occasionally turn up, but nobody he's responsible for (i.e. no Dependents). This also helps with storylines: our charismatic, inspirational teacher can become entangled in any number of potential romantic incidents as the plot demands. Some of them, naturally, will turn out to be villains.

Future development

If I were playing with more points (I stuck to a basic 300), I'd aim to round Daylight out with more niche abilities: disinfecting through pulses of UV radiation, maybe making plants grow, and probably at some point an actual sunlight attack (Ultra Sunburn Attaaaaack!). Some kind of mirage or heat haze ability might make sense.

31 days of chargen: day 5, solar investigator (Pathfinder)

Late? I'm not, uh, late. But I'm going into Pathfinder for reasons that have nothing to do with it being 5 to 11 on day seven of this thing, honest. And so it's time for Arden Suncrowned to take the field.

Okay, for a solar-themed character, I'm going right for an Aasimar (human with vaguely celestial ancestry), which makes me Wise and Charismatic. I'll take the alternate racial trait that grants me a halo, because, you know, light. Once per day I can also use daylight as a spell-like ability.

After a ridiculous amount of faffing and changing my mind about fifteen times, I decide to make him an oracle (a kind of divine spellcaster, similar to a cleric, defined by a powerful curse and insight into a particular 'mystery'). He takes the Tongues curse, restricting him to babbling in Celestial at times of stress, and the Solar mystery (of course).

I go for a fairly boring set of stats, with a little Strength to fight with, enough Constitution to survive OK, and lots of Charisma.

Spells are next, so he takes a mixture of light-themed spells, plus some to encourage and protect his allies. Healing spells come automatically, thank goodness.

To round him out, it's feat time. I pick Solar Spell; this lets me spend a higher-level spell slot to bolster a light-themed spell (see?), making it dazzle enemies and significantly hamper creatures of darkness. I can slap this on a 0th-level light spell, letting me cause significant problems with a mere 1st-level spell slot.

At 3rd level I take Amplified Radiance, so if I stand near another aasimar our auras produce an emanation of daylight; creatures that take penalties in bright light take double those penalties instead. At 5th level, I grab Heavenly Radiance, giving me another daily use of my Daylight ability, and allowing me to expend either use to unleash a bolt of Searing Light instead.

Now let's pop back to that spell list and grab fear the sun, which lets me afflict enemies with light blindness, making them sensitive to bright light...

At this point I should be delving into weapons, armour, magic items and so on... but honestly, I can't be bothered. Sorry.

31 days of chargen: day 4, solar investigator (Modern Age)

Today's themes: Modern AGE and "A brave sun-themed investigator who brings light into dark places."

First, stats! I roll 3d6 for each of the nine stats, getting 12, 10, 11, 6, 15, 10, 15, 9, 14. Not bad! Nothing spectacularly good, but equally there are three solid stats and only one weakness. A 6 isn't even low enough to impose a penalty!

As it's a modern game, I think a crusading journalist would be a good fit for the theme. Ardent Sunning sheds light on current events, reveals dark secrets, and brings neglected issues to the attention of the public. This regularly gets him in trouble...

I'm going to use the option to swap numbers round, letting me shift good numbers into my Communications and Intelligence stats rather than fighting skills.

Next, background! Modern Age has you roll for social class (Middle Class) and lifestyle (Suburban). This gives me a roll on a table, plus the following:
Ability: +1 Communication
Focus: Communication (Etiquette) or Intelligence (Current Affairs)
Talent: Affluent or Contacts

I roll an Intelligence focus. Altogether, I end up with the Contacts talent (for knowing people who can do favours), Intelligence (Current Affairs), and Intelligence (Research). A focus gives +2 when rolling to do that subset of tasks, so I'll have a mighty +5 on a lot of journalistic work!

Next, Profession. The Middle-Class ones don't seem appropriate - but I can also pick from a lower social class, which contains Investigator, the one for journalists. Perfect. This gets me:
Focus: Communication (Investigation) or Perception (choose one)
Talent: Intrigue or Observation
Health: 15 + Con (26)
Resources: 4 (boosted to 5 because I'm picking from a lower social class list)

Well, definitely Communication (Investigation) for me, though Perception (Search) would be handy too. I'll take Observation to be better at ferreting out secrets, gaining the Perception (Empathy) focus.

Now a Drive to establish what motivates me. After much havering I pick Judge, playing off the 'objective observation and learning stuff' angle. This nets me Knowledge, so I'm better at recalling information. It also gives me one of various rewards that depend on the setting - reputations, connections and so on - which I'll skip over.

To round things out, let's set up some background. Ardent has a degree in Environmental Science, and came into journalism gradually during 10 years working for sustainable energy firms. He retains a very strong interest in renewables, and tends to carry around solar chargers for his various devices. His work evolved into a broader interest in sustainability, communities, and inequality - as well as the corruption and entrenched interests that hinder progress, and public outreach. Occasional popular science columns and a couple of books grew into a career change.

31 days of chargen: day 3, Solar Investigator (GURPS)

At Whartson Hall's suggestion, I'm doing something a little different today - making the same character in different systems. Now, to be clear, I'm not trying to make exactly the same person with the same abilities. Rather, I want to make a character with the same themes, outlook and broad skillsets.

Since there's a LOT of variation in what different games permit, I want something that's generic enough to be very flexible. However, I also want something specific enough to make this a meaningful exercise! I decided to plump for this:

"A brave sun-themed investigator who brings light into dark places."

Those features might vary from being a solar-powered superhero to a priest of Ra to an explorer with a sun aesthetic who literally wanders around with a torch.

I'm starting with GURPS because I had it open at the time, okay?

GURPS: Ardent Helion

In a near-future setting, Ardent Helion is an agent of the Extrajudiciary, who travel between the worlds to deal with cold cases, legal mysteries and tricky situations.

This is a sci-fi setting, so I'm deliberately excluding magic.

Ardent begins with Expert Skill (Heliology), being deeply knowledgeable about suns: physics, mythology, roles in popular culture, he knows it all.

Let's throw in a bunch of investigative skills. He'll want high Perception for those, plus a little IQ. I'm also allocating some Strength, since sometimes he needs to roll up his sleeves to get the job done.

Most of those skills handily come under the Natural Copper talent, which I'll give him a couple of levels in.

Annoyingly, Ardent's Heliology is going to be expensive. I'd like him to have it at a good level, but don't want him to have particularly high IQ - he gets there by sharp eyes, guts and grit, not genius. There's probably a way to boost it, but I can't immediately think of one.

Disadvantages seem appropriate now as I'm starting to run low on points (I opted for the default GURPS Character Assistant values of 150pts, max 75pts of disadvantages). He needs a Duty (almost always), plus a Code of Honour (I used the Private Investigator one), and some Workaholic to fit the zealous detective mould. Let's also make him Overconfident, because those genre investigators are always getting into trouble, and he's always sure that justice and the Extrajudiciary will prevail. Since he's a law-upholding type, and importantly also not American, he's taking Pacifism (Cannot Kill). Finally, throw in some Flashbacks (Mild) for a bit of extra characterisation and to leaven his determination a little.

Now for some more skills. An investigator will definitely get into some brawls. Let's make Ardent a student of Space Jujutsu. He learns a reasonable amount of Judo, plus some Boxing, and refines his skills in tripping and arm-locking suspects. Uppercuts are necessary too, for the 'clean blow to the jaw' beloved of Dick Barton.

Perks time! I'm giving him an Accessory (Nanite Torch); he has 'solar nanites' in his body that he can activate to produce some light. Next, a custom variant: Sure-Footed (Low Gravity) for brawling on spacecraft and the like. This is just equivalent to the existing Naval Training perk, only for spaceships instead of ships. I'll follow that with Acceleration Tolerance for dealing with space travel, and Standard Operating Procedure (Sleeps With One Eye Open) so he's alert to possible danger.

I decide to boost his solar credentials by adding a blinding flash ability to his nanites. Once per hour, he can overcharge it to dazzle anyone nearby, though it's a big drain on his energy. I'd have liked a less drastic alternative than inflicting Blindness, but while there's probably something complicated I could have done with Obscure or penalties to Per, I can't be bothered...

OK, maybe I can. I steal the Flash power from Psionic Powers, removing the Environmental limitation and turning it into an Emanation (centred on him) with Dissipation (it's less overwhelming the further away you are). I also end up adding some Obscure Vision as an alternative ability, when he just wants to dazzle people without actually blinding them, perhaps as an intimidation tactic.

I like the idea of 'the cleaning power of daylight', so I'll throw in some Resistance against Disease and Poison, plus Healing (Disease and Afflictions, Contact Agent) - though the nanites require at least a minute to work, so it's not useful in combat. The healing ability is another Alternative Ability, but not the resistances - even if he's sending his nanites out to treat someone, he retains enough to protect himself.

I'd probably round him out with some actual Rank in an appropriate organization, a couple of hobby skills and another disadvantage, but I think I'm done for today.

---

Name: Ardent Helion

Race: Human

 

Attributes [70]

ST 12 [20]
DX 10
IQ 11 [20]
HT 10
 
HP 12
Will 14 [15]
Per 14 [15]
FP 10
 
Basic Lift 29
Damage 1d-1/1d+2
 
Basic Speed 5
Basic Move 5
 
Ground Move 5
Water Move 1

Advantages [49]

Natural Copper (2) [20]
Solar Nanites [29], which consists of:
--Affliction (Blinding) (1) (Area Effect (4 yd); Based On ST (Own Roll); Costs FP (+4); Blindness (+50) (Secondary, Variable); Dissipation; Emanation; Malediction (Receives -1/yd range); Nanotech; Reduced Duration (1/60 duration); Vision-Based (with Malediction) (One sense)) [17]
--Healing (Alternative Ability; Contact Agent; Cure Affliction; Disease Only; Nanotech; Takes Extra Time (x64)) [2]
--Obscure (Vision) (3) (Alternative Ability; Nanotech) [2]
--Resistant to Disease (+3 to resist) [3]
--Resistant to Poison (+3 to resist) [5]

Perks [4]

Acceleration Tolerance [1]
Sol Tattoo (Lantern) [1]
Standard Operating Procedure (One Eye Open) [1]
Sure-Footed (Low Gravity) [1]
 

Disadvantages [-60]

Code of Honor (Private Investigator) [-10]
Duty (Extrajudiciary Agent) (15 or less (almost always)) [-15]
Flashbacks (Mild) [-5]
Overconfidence (6 or less) [-10]
Pacifism (Cannot Kill) [-15]
Workaholic [-5]

Quirks [-2]

Delusion (I'm a Great Singer) [-1]
Responsive [-1]

Skills [86]

Arm Lock (Judo) Tech/A -  13 [2]
Body Language (Human) Per/A - Per+3 17 [4]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Boxing DX/A - DX+0 10 [2]
Breakfall (Judo) Tech/A -  13 [2]
Criminology/TL9 IQ/A - IQ+3 14 [4]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Detect Lies Per/H - Per+2 16 [4]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Diplomacy IQ/H - IQ+0 11 [4]
Escape DX/H - DX-2 8 [1]
Expert Skill (Heliology) IQ/H - IQ+4 15 [20]
Forced Entry DX/E - DX+0 10 [1]
Free Fall DX/A - DX+2 12 [8]
Holdout IQ/A - IQ-1 10 [1]
Interrogation IQ/A - IQ+3 14 [4]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Judo DX/H - DX+1 11 [8]
Judo Throw (Judo) Tech/H -  11 [2]
Law (Galactic) IQ/H - IQ-2 9 [1]
Lip Reading (Human) Per/A - Per+0 14 [2]
Observation Per/A - Per+2 16 [2]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Research/TL9 IQ/A - IQ-1 10 [1]
Search Per/A - Per+3 17 [4]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Shadowing IQ/A - IQ+2 13 [2]
---includes: +2 from 'Natural Copper'
Sweeping Kick (Judo) Tech/H -  11 [4]
Trip (Judo) Tech/H -  8 [2]
Uppercut (Boxing) Tech/A -  10 [1]

Stats [70]
Ads [49]
Disads [-60]
Quirks [-2]
Skills [86]
= Total [147]

31 Days of Chargen: day 2, Traveller

Today's themes are... Traveller and... well, you can't really have a theme in Traveller. Life just comes at you, fast. Although this is the Mongoose version, so at least death isn't coming at you during chargen any more.

We begin by rolling stats - six sets of 2d6. This turns out to be possibly the best set of stats I have ever rolled: 8, 11, 11, 7, 7, 5. Normally I'd be hard-pressed to match that on 3d6, quite honestly. What a time to squander rolls! But shimmey yn tonn eddyr y lhong as y çheer, after all, and especially in Traveller chargen...

Character generation doesn't ask you to invent a homeworld, but that seems absolutely basic to me. I roll up the following anomaly:

My Homeworld

Size 6 : smaller than Earth
Atmosphere 9+6-7=8 : dense atmosphere – only highlands inhabited, no filters required
Hydrographics 10-7+8=11 : almost entirely water
Temperature 5 : temperate
Population 3-2 = 1 : a tiny farmstead or family
Government : there are 3 factions! Strengths 5, 3, 9
First faction 8-7+1 = 2 : democracy
Second faction 6-7+1 = 0: none
Third faction 7-1+1 = 1: corporation

My homeworld is just a little larger than Mars, with an atmosphere so dense that only the high ground is inhabitable; and in any case, virtually the entire the planet is submerged! To make matters weirder, the only inhabitants are a single tiny group, which is nevertheless splintered into rival political factions; the strongest is corporate loyalty, but popular vote and personal ties also play a major part.

I think I'm going to put this down as an actual family with maybe a few associates. Given the corporate ties and largely uninhabitable world, it makes sense to me that this is an outpost of sorts. It might be a research centre, a land-banking effort, or perhaps it's simply convenient to have a small admin team in this part of the sector for some reason. Either way, that's where I was born.

Technically I can move my stats around. But honestly? It makes sense that I wouldn't have much social standing, given the absolutely nowhereness of the world I come from. Meanwhile, the planet's harsh atmosphere, total lack of playmates, and 99.9% wilderness nature makes it natural that I'd grow up physically fit. My background nets me skills in Seafarer, Athletics and Animals.

It makes sense that my parents would want me to go into the company, so let's see how I do as a Citizen... well, I qualify spectacularly! Looks like they had earned some favours. I cruise through my first stint, gaining some extra Engineering training, but don't impress anyone. Well... this is boring, but Mum and Dad are persuasive... let's keep going.

I make it through another 4 years, but during this time political upheaval strikes my homeworld, and I'm caught up in the revolution! Erm... okay. Presented with a variety of skills to learn that might represent my involvement, I gain Advocate. My legal prowess defuses the situation (it's probably the biscuit rota, isn't it?) and I'm promoted for my trouble.

Sick of this nonsense, I decide to strike out for the wide open spaces. Or rather, Space. I wanna be a free trader! Mustering out lands me +1 Intelligence, and three ship shares (boring).

Easily convincing them to let me onto a free trader crew, I learn to use a Vacc-Suit (vital) and make some good deals, earning a promotion and some Persuasion. In my fourth term, all that cargo hauling has boosted my already-bulging muscles, getting me a net Str bonus! I run into legal trouble but gain Diplomat in the process of resolving it, and am promoted again - they finally let me Pilot (spacecraft)!

Now it's time for aging... but I remain unscathed (alas, that it were so easy in real life).

My fifth term I squander much of my profits on some bad deals, losing 2 Benefit rolls. Ah well. I get some Broker out of the deal. I also learn to use those guns, gaining a level of Gunner - and increase my reputation further, becoming an Experienced Free Trader with the prized Jack of All Trades 1! Aging finally catches up with me though, and I become a little less hardy, a little slower on the draw.

Nevertheless, I embark on a sixth term, learning to take care of passengers, taking some advanced classes in Electronics and getting promoted again. All that fiddling helps to restore my lost Dexterity, too! This is immediately lost again as I fail another aging roll, along with a point in my other physical stats.

Term seven. I have to fix my spaceship a few times, learning Mechanic. Further legal trouble is a minor obstacle, which a bit of Investigation easily resolved. I gain another 'promotion' and learn a language in the process. At this point I decide it's finally time to hang up the old hat and retire...

While I gambled away two Benefit rolls, I have six left (one per term, plus three bonus rolls for my rank, minus the two I lost) and a +1 on my rolls! Lovely jubbly. I end up with slightly more education, a Free Trader with 75% of the mortgage paid off, a gun, and a little cash.

Finally, we'd normally split a Skills Package between us. To represent this, I take two skills from the list: Gun Combat (so I can actually use that weapon) and Deception.

31 Days of Chargen: day 1, GURPS and bees

Kaye recently posted a character creation challenge thing, so I'm going to give that a go.

Today's themes are... GURPS and 'bees'.

Let's start with the fundamentals - no, not stats. We're going to want the Good With Bees perk, as well as an Immunity to Specific Poison (Bee and Wasp Stings). Arguably that's two poisons, but I think it's justifiable. If the setting features giant and monstrous bees and wasps, some negotiation with the GM would be appropriate.

Next, the Speak With Animals (Bees only) advantage, of course.

I'm deliberately not going the route of becoming a swarm, but I will adopt some bee-like traits. Those include Magnetic Field Sense from Powers: Enhanced Senses, and both Discriminatory Scent and Acute Taste and Smell, because bees have incredible olfactory abilities (they have been used to detect mines).

Skillswise, I'll start off with Profession (Beekeeper) and Veterinary (Bees). I also want Gardening, to keep my bees well-fed

I'm envisioning this as a sort of folklore-powered bee-master, so I'm going to take the Green Thumb* talent as well as Cunning Folk. This hints at other skills I should take: Animal Handling, Fortune-Telling, Herb Lore, Naturalist, Occultism, Poisons, and Weather Sense. As Poisons is an IQ-based skill, I opt for an optional specialty in 'Garden poisons' - the idea being to cover things plants that grow in gardens, poisons used by gardeners, and of course, bee venom.

*Green Fingers, for those of us in the UK...

Now it's time to gain some abilities. Let's have our beekeeper able to call up a cloud of buzzing, distracting bees. This seems like Obscure (Vision and Hearing), with Defensive and Ranged. I'm not entirely happy with that - Obscure has a special expensive version of Ranged:

Unlike the usual Ranged enhancement (p. 107), this modifier lets you use your ability again before its duration has expired (e.g., to simulate multiple smoke grenades); thus, it is more expensive.

Looking at the rules in the normal Ranged enhancement:

Duration is 10 seconds, unless the ability lists another duration (like Neutralize or Possession) or is instantaneous (like Healing), and you cannot use the ability again until all existing effects have worn off.

Yeah, that's much more appropriate - I've only got one cloud of bees, after all! So I'll make the GM call here and allow the normal version of Ranged. I'm also going to add the limitation Environmental (Not in strong wind), and the Homing enhancement, since my bees can zero in on their target.

Let's throw in a couple of disadvantages. Odious Personal Habit (attracts bees) seems right, and let's add Absent-Mindedness - our hero tends to drift off into musings. Since they're just a regular beekeeper, let's also include Pacifism (Self-Defence Only).

Throw in a few 'everyman' skills for being part of the community - talking to neighbours, selling honey and flowers, and so forth - and we're about done.

---

Name: Beemaster
Race: Human

Attributes [60]

ST 10
DX 10
IQ 12 [40]
HT 11 [10]
HP 10
Will 12
Per 14 [10]
FP 11

Basic Lift 20
Damage 1d-2/1d

Basic Speed 5.25
Basic Move 5
Ground Move 5
Water Move 1

TL: 7 [0]

Advantages [95]

Acute Taste and Smell (3) [6]
Cunning Folk (3) [30]
Detect (Magnetic Fields) (Occasional) (Biological (Passive); Reflexive) [14]
Discriminatory Smell (Biological (Passive)) [15]
Green Thumb (2) [10]
Obscure Vision (3) (Defensive; Environmental (Not in strong wind) (Occasional); Extended (Hearing) (+1); Homing (+1); Ranged) [15]
Speak With Bees (Specialized: one species) [5]

Perks [2]

Good with (Bees) [1]
Immunity to Bee and wasp stings [1]

Disadvantages [-40]

Absent-Mindedness [-15]
Code of Honor (Beekeeper's) [-5]
Odious Personal Habit (Attracts bees) (-1) [-5]
Pacifism (Self-Defense Only) [-15]

Quirks [-1]

Humble [-1]

Skills [33]

Animal Handling (Bees) IQ/A - IQ+2 14 [1]
---includes: +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Area Knowledge (local) IQ/E - IQ+1 13 [2]
Astronomy/TL7 (Observational) IQ/A - IQ-1 11 [1]
Body Language (Human) Per/A - Per+0 14 [2]
Carousing HT/E - HT+0 11 [1]
Current Affairs/TL7 (local region) IQ/E - IQ+0 12 [1]
Current Affairs/TL7 (People) IQ/E - IQ+0 12 [1]
Detect Lies Per/H - Per-2 12 [1]
Diplomacy IQ/H - IQ-2 10 [1]
Farming/TL7 (Horticulture) IQ/E - IQ+2 14 [1]
---includes: +2 from 'Green Thumb'
Fortune-Telling (Augury) IQ/A - IQ+2 14 [1]
---includes: +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Gardening IQ/E - IQ+3 15 [2]
---includes: +2 from 'Green Thumb'
Herb Lore/TL7 IQ/VH - IQ+2 14 [1]
---includes: +2 from 'Green Thumb', +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Hiking HT/A - HT-1 10 [1]
Housekeeping IQ/E - IQ+0 12 [1]
Merchant (Honey and Flowers) IQ/E - IQ+0 12 [1]
Naturalist (Earth) IQ/H - IQ+3 15 [1]
---includes: +2 from 'Green Thumb', +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Occultism IQ/A - IQ+3 15 [2]
---includes: +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Pharmacy/TL7 (Herbal) IQ/H - IQ-2 10 [1]
Poisons/TL7 (Garden) IQ/A - IQ+3 15 [2]
---includes: +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Professional Skill (Beekeeper) IQ/A - IQ+1 13 [4]
Public Speaking (Storytelling) IQ/E - IQ+0 12 [1]
Tracking Per/A - Per-1 13 [1]
Veterinary/TL7 (Bees) IQ/H - IQ+1 13 [1]
---includes: +3 from 'Cunning Folk'
Weather Sense IQ/A - IQ+2 14 [1]
---includes: +3 from 'Cunning Folk'

Costs Summary

Stats [60]
Ads [95]
Disads [-40]
Quirks [-1]
Skills [33]
= Total [149]

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.

Creating a Vampire character

This is a post I started a while ago, and never got round to posting. Might as well slap it up here. The Vampire game in question did start, and I did run this character, but sadly we folded a few sessions in due to player availability and stuff.

As I've mentioned before, I'm in a couple of VOIP games these days, which are currently my only viable roleplaying option. We've been doing sizeable campaigns, but we talked a bit about the difficulties of running VOIP games, and what might work better. More on that another time...

Spinning off from that, we've been talking about pitching games for future sessions, and one idea that came up was doing a very straight-down-the-line White Wolf game.

As you might have noticed, I am weirdly invested in the idea of White Wolf but so far disappointed by the reality. I had a sneaking, wavering suspicion that this might be partly because of our approach.  

See, we're all rather inclined to get a bit meta, and a bit parodic, and not to take games very seriously. The fact that those friends have played a lot of RPGs, and a lot of White Wolf games, is a factor in this; they've done the basics before. But I have to ask myself whether it's reasonable to expect a game to be satisfying if you don't allow yourself to actually buy into it, or invest the effort to try and play the game sincerely.

I don't think there's anything wrong with playing games offhandedly and not very seriously, you can play however you want. I generally do. I just think you won't necessarily see what people get out of a game if you don't try to roll with it.

My previous stabs at playing White Wolf games have involved:

• losing all patience with the vast backstory element of Demon: the Fallen, playing a demonic Hugh Jackman-Wolverine attending a conference of ex-Catholic priests, and not really engaging with the game
• grasping the only obvious bit of Demon: the Descent with both hands, playing a Matrix Hugh Jackman-ecoterrorist, and revelling in how broken the game was
• picking up Changeling, talking about how cool it sounded, getting about twenty pages in and experiencing a sudden catastrophic plunge in interest until I put it back on the shelf.

Vampire is the oldest, most refined of the games. The system is built specifically to run Vampire. Vampires are the best-established of the supernatural creatures here, and the closest to actually being remotely like their folklorific source material, which means I have some chance of understanding what I'm supposed to do with them. Let's try this.

I am, therefore, going to try reading through the book and making a character, following strictly the instructions in the rulebook and trying to neither abandon them in a fit of pique, nor insist on over-literal interpretation that makes them look more broken than they might be. The objective here is to make a character that I might (but may not) actually play in a serious game.

Wish me luck.

---

The very rough premise that was mentioned for the hypothetical campaign is a long-term, straight-down-the-line historical Vampire game starting in sometime the early modern period.

It Begins: A Chapter Title With No Relation To Its Contents

Oh for crying out loud White Wolf, will you just give your chapters useful freaking names already.

I'm using a PDF here. Everything is called "The Pontification of the Bones" or "Exfoliation of Mortality" or something, and nothing is called "Chapter X: Making a character". At least there aren't six chapters of game fiction...

Step One: Character Concept

At this first stage, come up with a rough idea of who you want to play. Who was she in life? What kind of vampire is she?

For some reason, the idea of playing a musician came to me, so I'm going to jump on that as a concept. A talented musician who attracts the notice of a vampire, enters their patronage, and the patron is reluctant enough to let them die that they eventually Embrace them (see, I picked up some terminology already) while they're still at the height of their talent.

The campaign (sorry, "Chronicle") is probably going to be historical, so I need a suitable instrument that a normal person might have access to. Let's say violin. Fiddlers are always a good bet, plus you've got a very wide range of musical styles available. They'd recently been invented as this game behind. Let's go with... work-hard, play-hard fiddler.

I tried, but I just can't think of any Aspirations right now. I don't really know how I could without knowing more about the campaign, and indeed the game as a whole.

Okay, I'm also supposed to pick a vampire type. I'm pleased to see that they do all sound reasonably interesting.

 The Daeva (charisma-vampires) seem like the most obvious patrons to choose a musician. Ventrue could also work. Actually I suspect they could all work... ah, I'm actually going to go with Mekhet and stop worrying about it, it's getting late. They have that obsession thing going, it sounds good, and I always like sneaky characters. Plus the whole occult investigation this is probably the single most approachable angle on RPGs for me.

Step Two: Select Attributes

Now, we step into the most basic traits that define the character’s capability.

As always, we're expected to do this before we look at any powers. Sigh.

I'm actually using my two-part chargen system to approach this character. I make the mortal Mental, Physical and Social, assuming that I need a fair bit of dexterity for fiddling and a decent chunk of sense to make a living, while social graces are less important.

Step Three: Select Skills

Next, you’ll select your character’s Skills... When choosing Skills, think about your character’s background.

Skills go into a hefty chunk of Performance, a range of awareness-type physical skills to represent general perceptivity and understanding the audience, and I have to spend a few on a smattering of knowledge skills that aren't really appropriate - it's okay, that'll be fine with the vampire overlaid.

Mekhet seem to be all shadows, spying and secret knowledge, so I'll go heavily into that, but I do want to make sure I preserve that precious Performance.

And then I suddenly realise - no thanks to White Wolf - that the skills in this game are completely different. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but there doesn't seem to be a character sheet at all in this PDF, so it was just easier to use an existing one, and I didn't come across a skills list until I actually went to check a definition and found it was completely different. Thanks.

With some effort, I dig up a character sheet someone else has put on the internet, and use that. I notice the Attributes have also changed. Sigh. At least I can use my existing calculations as a basis...

So I end up with lots of Expression (seems to be what governs playing music here), some general stealth-type stuff for being a Mekhet, and some studious skills for the same reason.

Step Four: Skill Specialties

Skill Specialties allow you to refine a few Skills, and show where your character truly shines. They reflect a narrow focus and expertise in a given Skill.

Obviously I pick Fiddle for my first specialty. I also go with Empathy: Read Audience (which seems like a vital skill for a performer, and also generally useful for social interactions) and Stealth: Downstaging, because blending in seems more like my style than being really sneaky.

Step Five: Add Kindred Template

We have the flesh and blood. Now, we add the fangs.

Having picked a Mekhet, I (will) get a free dot in either Intelligence or Wits; I'm going with Wits as that seems more like my style.

I'm not picking a Covenant because I'm assuming we'll probably do some kind of prologue and I'll pick one when I'm actually a vampire, based on how they approach us.

Masks and Dirges

Now Masks and Dirges. These are supposedly about what you try to seem like, and how you really are? I'd pick a Virtue and Vice for my mortal bit, but... can't be bothered, it's late. Courtesan looks like the right Mask for a musician, and maintaining that guise seems appropriate for trying to hang on to humanity. And...

Okay, I really don't get this. There's just one big list of things here. It seems like it would have been really super helpful if White Wolf have given us two lists: things they thought were suitable as the bearing Kindred present to the world. It’s the façade, the pretty lie. It’s the excuse for why he can’t stay for breakfast in the morning. It’s the reason she gives the cab driver for dropping her off near an abandoned warehouse at odd hours of the night. It’s his excuse for barely touching his dinner. and things they thought, in almost total contrast, were suitable as the truth behind the lies. It’s the vampire’s secret self; it’s who he is when the lights are off and nobody is present to witness his dirtiest moments. It’s his dark indulgence. It’s the self-loathing she will never admit. It’s his desire for an end. It’s her need for companionship.

Looking at the rulebook, it seems I could perfectly reasonably select Monster as my Mask, and Jester as my Dirge. This would make me a person who overtly "exists to torment, frighten, and destroy" but secretly "never takes the world seriously... looks for the absurd in everything, and shows it to the world". I can just about see that in some kind of Shakespearean drama, but it doesn't seem like their intention.

Ah, hell with it. I'm going with Courtesan/Spy. It's a classic combination.

Touchstone

Your character’s Touchstone is a person, place, or thing that reminds her of her humanity, and helps keep her grounded.

Touchstone! That reminds me of that one character from that Shakespeare play I haven't seen, but it was on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. I need one. I'm going for a simple one: an old musician friend, perhaps my teacher, who still ekes out a meagre living entertaining.

Disciplines

Disciplines are extensions of the Blood. They are ways the Beast’s tendrils creep out into the world to manipulate, to pervert, and to destroy... Choose three dots in Disciplines. At least two must be from the vampire’s in-clan Disciplines. The third dot may be from any Discipline.

Finally! Some vampiric powers. As a Mekhet, I have access to Auspex, Celerity and Obfuscate (okay, I have access to some other stuff too, but those are the basics).

Auspex seems to be about scrying, basically. Celerity is being fast. Obfuscate is hiding stuff.

I don't hugely see super-speed as being appropriate, but then it might be an asset to a fiddler...

Auspex is kind of cool, though it seems a bit limited - it seems to overlap a lot with effects I'd expect from a standard skill roll, and only one use per scene is free so that doesn't compensate.

Obfuscate is cool, this is the kind of thing I enjoy anyway.

I'm going to go for one two dots of Obfuscate, and one dot of Auspex. I would totally go for the out-of-Clan thing, except that none of them are particularly tempting me. I liked the sound of Awe, but the Majesty tree isn't particularly gripping me, and the effects are much more useful if you're going to put more dots in anyway. Plus, I have 5 dots in Expression that should allow me to impress people, thanks.

Blood Potency

I also take my dot of Blood Potency. Don't understand this yet, but don't care.

Step Six: Merits

Yay, I like this bit usually.

I'm sad that you can't have supernatural powers. It's not that I specifically want any, but I really, really don't see any good reason why someone with supernatural powers can't become a vampire and retain them. You already have supernatural powers for being a vampire. What's the big?

I struggle quite a bit with the Merits. Lots of them are clan-specific (and I think only one is for Mekhet?), while a large chunk of the others provide either status points or Covenant benefits. For the purposes of this chargen, which is only tentatively associated with an actual campaign and where I don't have much specific background yet, I'm assuming I'm not yet in a Covenant. It feels to me that, if you're playing a first game of Vampire, and from scratch, getting Embraced and being inducted into a Covenant are going to be significant things, and ought to be in-game things I go through. Presumably after a few games you kind of know how things go.

Anyway, I manage to find a set of human-type Merits, involving other musicians who owe me favours, Inspiring (I'm hoping I can tie this into my music, but may have to rethink later), Barfly because musician, and Sleight of Hand - this latter being a mixture of "on general principles, take larcenous abilities", not being sure what else to do, and it seeming like a reasonable choice for a musician who sort of scratches a living in the Elizabethan age (though when the campaign starts, I discover another Mekhet has taken this and I ditch to avoid too much overlap, since makes a lot of sense for his character). I really couldn't decide what to do with my last dot and left it.

I'm working on the assumption that the GM Storyteller will let me convert some of these Merits into more vampiric things relatively soon if that seems like a good idea. I just prefer to start with stuff my human character might actually have, partly out of verisimilitude, and partly because I don't really know how any of this vampire society stuff works.

Commentary

The thing that struck me first about the process - okay, second, just after the unhelpful chapter titles - was that this process is actually not hugely helpful for creating a vampire, at least not to me. See, what it doesn't do is lead you through the actual "becoming a vampire" thing. That's a pretty huge omission.

What I'd have liked to see is some time spend talking you through why, and how, mortals might end up becoming a vampire in the first place. And there doesn't seem to be. There's some specific thoughts in each, um, clan chapter, but I don't immediately see a "why are you a vampire anyway?" bit.

I also really struggle with the whole Aspirations bit, because that just seems very difficult for a new player to guess. What's going to be relevant in this campaign? What's a suitable Aspiration? It seems like you need to know a lot about the setting and the campaign before you can make informed decisions here.

Next, I'd like to point out that the header font is quite hard to read and that's deeply unhelpful.

As usual, there's also a difficulty in that information about clans is scattered. There's the overview sections to give flavour, but you don't know what you can actually game-mechanically do until you find the powers section, nor do you know what the disadvantages are until you research them. I'd have liked a better idea of what powers do within the clan section, because powers are arranged by discipline and it's annoying to cross-reference. I know they want to be all flavourful, but sometimes just telling you what you will be able to do is the right way.

Skills: Not having a character sheet with your game is unforgivably stupid, seriously. I assumed - perhaps rashly, but not unreasonably I think - that these would be interchangeable between White Wolf games, whereas actually the skill list is a different length and skills are categorised completely differently. Interestingly(?) it looks like Demon characters get screwed over, because they have the same number of points to allocate amongst about 50% more skills.

Disciplines: I'd just like to insert my usual rant about how telling players to select Skills and Attributes based on your character's (mortal) background is a lovely idea, but is genuinely inappropriate in a game where these will determine your ability to actually do any of the vampiric stuff that is the whole premise of the game.

Vampire Masks and Dirges

So earlier I tried out some character generation for Vampire: the Requiem and ran into some trouble with Masks and Dirges. I just want to dig a little bit further into that.

Here, for background, I present the text of these mechanics.

Mask is the bearing Kindred present to the world. It’s the façade, the pretty lie. It’s the excuse for why he can’t stay for breakfast in the morning. It’s the reason she gives the cab driver for dropping her off near an abandoned warehouse at odd hours of the night. It’s his excuse for barely touching his dinner. The First Tradition reads: “Do not reveal your nature to those not of the Blood. Doing so forfeits your claim to the Blood.” Kindred take this concept seriously, and extend it beyond the purview of their unnatural existences. Revealing oneself is a form of vulnerability. Vulnerability is a quick route to Final Death. Any time a vampire overcomes a small hurdle in defense of her Mask, she gains a point of Willpower. When committing atrocious or existentially risky acts in defense of her Mask, she regains all her spent Willpower points.

The Dirge is the truth behind the lies. It’s the vampire’s secret self; it’s who he is when the lights are off and nobody is present to witness his dirtiest moments. It’s his dark indulgence. It’s the self-loathing she will never admit. It’s his desire for an end. It’s her need for companionship.

A Dirge gives the Kindred a sense of identity. After all, her very existence is a lie. In the Danse Macabre, truth is rarely more than a pipe dream. For most vampires, honesty only exists within oneself. Defending that internal honesty helps her to maintain perspective. Any time a vampire withdraws from his outside life in defense of his truer self, he gains a point of Willpower. When committing terrible, damning acts in defense of his personal identity, he regains all his spent Willpower points.

Not the Man I Used to Be: a plug-in approach to World of Darkness chargen

So obviously I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about White Wolf stuff, what with the sci-fi game and all the nitpicking.

One of the things that's come up repeatedly, and is a regular source of bafflement-slash-frustration to me, is that sometimes White Wolf seem to have completely forgotten their own fluff when writing the rules. Or perhaps simply couldn't be bothered to try and implement these rules. Although the fact that Vampire, the very first game, has sort of the same problem, suggests that they never really thought about it.

I'll talk about Demon, because these two are basically the most egregious cases, but it applies in varying degrees to some of the other games. The issue I'm talking about here is how they mechanically handle becoming a supernatural being.

My feat are killing me

Henceforth a long, rambly exposition around the topic of feats.

So for whatever reason I've been messing around with a lot of D&D 5e chargen recently. I've put together about 20 different characters for various reasons, ranging from "this idea entertains me" to "I wonder if this is mechanically possible".

For example, I started wondering how feasible it is in 5e to make single-class parties. That is to say, parties composed entirely of characters from one class, with no multiclassing permitted. Because subclasses grant certain odd capabilities, this isn't quite as mad as it sounds. You can't make a party that replicates the classic Fighter Thief Wizard Cleric pattern, but you can arrange them in other ways.

Wild Talents in yellow

So it looks like we might end up running Definitely Not X-Men for Wild Talents, and based on my previous posts Dan suggested that trying to stat up characters you already have in mind is the way to get into the system. He's been playing with making X-Men characters. That seems eminently sensible. Wild Talents is pretty much made for running some humans with a bunch of special powers.

Naturally I consider this laughably childish in its simplicity, so instead I am going to play at making the Adeptus Astartes for Wild Talents. What could possibly go wrong?

Demon: the Descent is bad at character generation

So I'm in a bad mood today, and also playing with Demon: the Descent, and as a natural outcome of these activities I just want to take a few minutes to lay out in detail how the character generation instructions for Demon: the Descent are approaching a platonic ideal of wrongness. I have touched on this matter before.

Character generation rules always have problems, it's true. There's very rarely a way to make a character in one single pass - revisiting and revision are almost always needed, except in games with very light character mechanisation. But White Wolf seem to be singularly bad at chargen, and in their rules for both Demon games I feel they have reached a real nadir. This seems to stem, ultimately, from their abject refusal to acknowledge how their own game works, but some parts seem impossible to explain except by sheer incompetence.

Let us begin.

Character Creation, as outlined by White Wolf, has nine steps:

1. Character Concept
2. Select Attributes
3. Select Skills
4. Select Skill Specialties
5. Apply Demon Template
6. Select Merits
7. Determine Advantages
8. Age and Experience
9. The Fall

And here's a quick precis of the game, just in case. In Demon: the Descent you play a sort of Agent Smith. The God-Machine (SkyNet) is real and secretly rules the universe, or most of it, in a reality that's a conspiracy theorist's wet nightmare. You were an agent of the God-Machine, or "angel", a kind of biomechanical-metaphysical entity doing certain tasks. You used artifical human identities as necessary, creating, donning and doffing them whenever required. Then something went wrong in your programming, and you went rogue, a state called "demon". Now you're on the loose with your own motivations, and at least some of your old reality-warping power, in whatever human identity you were last assigned.

You don't have to be evil to work here: not a D&D warlock

So, making random characters is a thing I like to do sometimes. A while ago, back during the days of 4E, I had quite a few character concepts knocking around. This was true even though I never got to play in a single game, as I was DMing.

One of these was a fiendish warlock idea. The 4E warlock, for those who don't know, had its own array of class-specific powers like all the other classes, and this meant the different warlock pacts could really go to town with thematic abilities. All of them were interesting, but the fiend stuck with me. It had powers like summoning demonic claws to rend people, drain their life to heal yourself, curse them and wreck their mind with terrible illusions until they carve themselves up, feed (bits of) your own soul to a demon to harm an enemy... Good stuff.

The idea that particularly appealed to me was someone who completely accidentally ended up in a fiendish pact. It's just nicely different. Specifically, I had this idea for a servant in a rich household, who stumbles across a diabolical ritual and ends up receiving the fiend's gifts in place of her master - because of course, fiends love to twist the rules. Naturally, she's then left fleeing from a sinister devil cult whose members could be lurking anywhere. I liked the idea of someone left to defend herself reluctantly with unwanted evil powers, and probably ending up in a destructive spiral.

Since 5e features the warlock too, and equivalent pacts, I thought I'd try building her here. Our current campaign is about 5th level, so I decided to go for a 5th-level character. Also, this tends to be quite enlightening about your capabilities, whereas 1st level can be somewhat uninformative.

After a while bashing stats around, I realised that it's actually quite difficult to build this warlock. There are two problems here.

Warlocked in

The first and primary problem is that essentially, the point of being a warlock is that you cast hex on people and maintain it more or less permanently to boost your damage, and then use eldritch blast to deal said damage. Eldritch blast allows you to hit multiple targets as you level up, rather than increasing damage for one target; the warlock also has a choice of beneficial upgrades that affect only eldritch blast, not any other cantrips. In particular, you can take an option that adds your Charisma bonus to each hit, which together with its long range quickly makes eldritch blast the deadliest cantrip out there - you can very quickly be dealing 1d10+3+1d6 (as good as a 1st-level spell), and this increases rapidly, hitting 2d10+2d6+6 at 5th level (average 24). Another option adds pushback, although there are fewer upgrades in 5e than the 3rd edition warlock. Warlocks are really good at this.

However, the flipside is that the warlock has very few other options, and most are flat-out worse from a mechanical perspective.

Hex can be maintained more or less forever, barring a failed concentration check. It transfers between targets on death, unlike any other spell except the similarly-intended hunter's mark, and it can lie fallow between combats only to be resumed as needed. Of the warlock's handful of other spells, nothing else comes close to being this all-round useful. Don't get me wrong, there are good spells in there, but the trade-off against hex's always-on damage boost is a heavy one. It seems pretty clear that the core warlock design, where spells are regained on a short rest but you have very few, is intended to ensure that warlocks can always have hex available, with other spells being a handy extra, a niche effect or a utility slot.

Added to this is the fact that hex takes your concentration slot, which means it's a pretty suboptimal decision to focus on any other spell that requires concentration. Charm person, hold person, fly, anything that enchants or boosts or does pretty much anything other than damage is unwise. Casting one of these will interrupt your hex, meaning you'll lose a long-term benefit for a short-term one that might not even work. After all, most of those require saving throws, and often allow multiple saves (as 5e has wisely tries to cut back on stunlocks), and only work on certain targets, whereas hex just flat-out works. Since you have very few spells known in the first place, choosing these is a big gamble or commits you to what's probably a suboptimal playstyle.

The scaling spellslots helps - casting hold person at 5th level is nice. But is the possibility of paralysing four humanoids (who get saving throws every round) worth the tradeoff of guaranteed extra damage against all creature types for basically every attack you make until your next short rest? Opportunity costs become a big concern for the warlock. Don't get me wrong, sometimes one of these spells will be exactly what you want. The difficulty is the combination of very limited spells known, the fact that casting any concentration spell means you lost a huge damage buff, and the way virtually any spell has a much more niche use than hex. There's a lot of reasons to favour simple, widely-applicable non-concentration spells.

The second factor is that the warlock's choice of spells is very limited, and specifically their cantrips. There's no solid alternative to taking eldritch blast. You can, of course, but you'll lose a lot of offensive capability without having much way of compensating. The fact that you can't use invocations to boost anything but eldritch blast particularly discourages any other approach. Your non-combat cantrips are minor buffs that don't offer much active capability, so there's not really any other obvious combination of abilities to build a playstyle around. If you aren't zapping things with eldritch blast, what exactly are you going to do? And if you are doing that, then taking hex is very much the optimal choice. And if you're using hex, then casting other concentration spells is nerfing yourself.

This is, I think, possibly a mistake? It seems to lock the warlock into a single niche far more firmly than any other class. The pacts offer a few more spell options, but don't fundamentally change the way warlocks work. Again, several are concentration spells that seem a poor choice given the fairly clear assumption that warlocks are running hex.

Dude, where's my curse?

So the other issue I ran into was that while I loved the flavour of a fiend-pacted warlock, the expected warlock mechanic of constantly hurling bolts of magical energy at people is very much not what I had in mind. Does that spell "sinister pact with a demon" to you? I mean, it can, there's plenty of basis for evil-powered superhumans, but that's not the image I get. I'm thinking darkness. I'm thinking lies. I'm thinking deception, and head games, and dread, and power over people, and blights and curses and afflictions. Sure, I'm also thinking fire and brimstone, but bolts of magic? Not really. Spooky young girl pactee does not hurl force lightning. She preys on your fears, or she conjures up claws of darkness to drag you into hell. Honestly, the bolt-hurling thing almost feels more like sorcery, all about inner reserves of raw magical power.

In all honesty, quite similar things apply to other pacts. If you've made a pact with things from beyond space and time, I expect you to warp reality and drive people insane, and conjure up monstrosities, rather than blast them with lasers. Fey, of course, are notorious for raining bolts of eldritch power down upon people - oh no, wait, they wrap people in illusions and transformations and enchantments, and turn the wild against them. The various pacts give you a slightly different group of spells to choose from, but don't seem to significantly change your capabilities.

In fairness, again, this is partly because warlocks depend on two different subclassing mechanics, the Patron and the Pact. Mostly the breakdown seems to be melee-based warlocks vs. zappy warlocks, with their patron-flavoured abilities mostly subsidiary.

It's possible to eventually burn an invocation slot to buy the ability to cast either bane (a level 1 spell) or bestow curse (a level 3 spell) once per day, using a spell slot in the process from your incredibly limited supply. That is a very expensive ability. It is, of course, getting auto-levelled to 5th level, which makes it quite good. Probably not good enough to be worth losing a spell slot and an invocation to gain a decent debuff on up to 4 enemies at the cost of (once again) dropping hex, though, to be honest. Bestow curse is a little better, but has similar issues - notably, one of its uses is to essentially duplicate hex on a single target.

Other invocation abilities include things like at-will illusion, seeing through even magical darkness, levitation, at-will armour. These don't burn any spell slots and can be used constantly. The bane spells are useful, no doubt about it, but it feels like an extremely begruding tradeoff that's strictly worse than these abilities.

Building a Servant of Darkness

I spent quite a while trying to knock my warlock into shape. I faffed about with the Arcane Initiate feat to obtain alternative cantrips. I played with multiclassing. And then I realised I was doing it wrong.

I want my warlock to whisper dark secrets that drive you mad, to bend people to her will, to hold them helpless, twist fate against them, blight them with afflictions. I don't want her walking around energetically hurling magic; I want a simple glance from her demon-lit eyes to send them fleeing.

You know who can do all that stuff? The bard.

I'm serious. Look at the bard spell lists. For a start, let's note that bards get far more spells because they're designed for a different niche. We begin with vicious mockery, rather weak (1d4) as cantrips go but with a reasonable rider of disadvantage for the target, and needing only verbal components. Very flavourful, just what I wanted. Minor illusion is a good extra here for those "Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant" moments. On the real spell front, we have bane, charm person, disguise self, dissonant whispers, faerie fire, feather fall, Tasha's hideous laughter, crown of madness, enthrall, heat metal (how daemonic is that? frying someone in their own armour?), hold person, suggestion, bestow curse, fear, speak with dead (being dead is no defence against a demon), animate objects, geas, eyebite...

Even most of the other bard abilities feel appropriate. Being surprisingly good at all skills? Drawing on diabolical knowledge. The bardic inspiration ability feels a little odd, until you get the College of Lore and use it exclusively to make your enemies fail at everything by mocking them, which fits perfectly. The only one that seems a little odd is the free healing for allies, and you can view even that as being just one of the many fringe benefits of association with diabolical power, call now to see how much you could gain, operators are standing by! Essentially it's the patron advertising to the character's social circle.

Annoyingly, there's still a few very evocative spells that aren't available to bards. Flesh to stone, create undead, any ability whatsoever to get an actual demon to help you. The fire end of things is very limited. Still, it seems a lot better than the warlock at portraying the classic servant of demonic powers. Ironic really.

My current inclination is actually to think that multiclassing is the way to get all the key spells, but that bard needs to be the basis. The Magic Initiate feat looks promising, as it would give access to produce flame (but none of the druid 1st-level abilities are very thematic) or to thaumaturgy and command from the cleric list, both of which are highly desirable. As usual, the best option for spell breadth is to multiclass into wizard and pick up those lovely fire spells. This would, amongst other things, help reduce your dependence on enchantments - I don't have the current monster manual, but in older editions a worryingly large number of things were immune to these spells. The light domain cleric is also potentially a very nice match, if you completely ignore all that fluff about deities.