Character Creation
Character Point Values
New characters in Legends of Night City will start with 150 character points. 100 starting character points and 50 character points of disadvantages. There will be a pool of 50 character points for “plot-magnet” disadvantages and group “Frequency of Appearance” advantages.
“Plot-magnet” disadvantages are mainly Dependent, Enemy, and Secret. These disadvantages, while being character centered, end up affecting the whole party negatively (An enemy might attack the party to get at their real target or put a dependent in danger that focuses the entire party’s attention).
Frequency of Appearance advantages are mainly Ally, Contact, and Patron. These advantages end up affecting the whole party positively (An Ally jumping into combat can turn the tide of battle for everyone or a ripperdoc contact might be able to provide services to the rest of the party as well). So what we end up with is a pool of 25 points per party member, separate from the starting character points (so a party of 4 has 100 points to use between them). Each player can take a Plot Magnet disadvantage if they wish. You can try to keep the individual point values even across all characters or discuss it with everyone first and spend the points unevenly. Then we use those disadvantage points to buy Frequency of Appearance advantages for the party. Group Patrons, Corporate Contacts, a Solo you knew during the war that owes a life debt to you, whatever. The remaining points left over are divvyed up between the players to use however they wish.
Each character may also add the Dramatic Death perk for free, because that’s awesome and thematically appropriate to the style of game we’re running.
Skill and Attribute Caps
During character creation, skills and attributes will all be capped at 14, though cyberware and some neural programs may boost values beyond this number. Your meat self, at creation, is capped at 14. During the course of the campaigns you will be able to exceed this cap in DX, IQ, HT, and any skills or techniques.
ST is capped at 30% of your starting ST. So if you start the campaign at 10 ST, the strongest you can naturally ever be is 13 ST. Though again, cyberware can break through this cap.
Wealth and Status
Edgerunning in 2075 is a dangerous proposition, and most people don’t want to do it, but are forced into it by necessity or circumstance. Money is a great motivator for getting into (and staying in) the lifestyle. As such I will be capping the Wealth and Status advantages to Comfortable Wealth and High Status 1 respectively. You may make a Corpo Agent but they’ll need to be very low on the ladder still.
Important Considerations
GURPS as a system lends itself to an immense amount of freedom and creativity. It is unique in that how and why your character has a particular skill or ability is just as important as the skill or ability itself. Since the system is extremely modular, nothing is hardwired into a particular relationship for your character. For example, having a high Guns skill by itself is fine, but as soon as you ask “How did your character learn that”, you start seeing connections to other areas of the character sheet. If they learned their skill in the military, they might have a related Contact or Ally advantage. If they’re still in the military, they should have a Rank or Duty. They might also have Combat Reflexes as a result of their military drills. Maybe they grew up as part of the Valentino’s street gang and learned there. Are they still a part of the gang with a Patron advantage? Or maybe they left the group and now have an Enemy for life. What does that mean for their Reputation in the neighborhood? In GURPS, flavor isn’t free, it’s the stuff that defines how and why your character is the way they are.
Advancement
This is probably my favorite mechanic in here. Character points are going to be both easier and harder to get, and there are several ways to do so.
Disadvantage Role Play
You get character points for role-playing your disadvantages. You’ll receive one character point per session if a disadvantage negatively impacted your character (i.e. failing an Addiction self-control roll, your Dependent was endangered and derailed the mission ,etc.). This incentivizes choosing disadvantages that actually come into play. These earned points can be used anywhere on your character sheet.
Diegetic Leveling
Rather than earning points for completing gigs, we’re going to be leveling dietetically, you improve what you use. So during a session if you make a successful Skill Check, Self-Control roll on a disadvantage, Attack Roll, or whatever, we will log those throughout the session. At the end, everyone will make experience checks to see what they learned. Rather than rolling under your skill to succeed, you will need to roll over your skill in this instance. If you do, you gain 1 character point in that skill. If you roll an 18, you get 2 points. You cannot lose points in any skills, even if you critically fail on this roll. There is no limit to the number of skills you can improve in this way per session. So if you use all of your combat skills in a gig, you have the opportunity to level all of them up. That being said, it will get harder and harder to increase skills that you get better at. You will plateau and need to work even harder to be even better. The points earned from Disadvantage Role Play however can be added to these higher skills.
Learning New Skills
You may instead forego rolling an experience check on a skill in order to attempt to learn a related skill or technique. There are two things to note however.
- The new skill must have a default with which you are familiar. For example, if you have Guns (Pistol) you can attempt to learn Guns (Rifle) since they default to each other. You may also learn skills with attribute defaults. For instance you could learn Anthropology since it defaults to IQ, and we all have that.
- The roll that you’re foregoing must be relevant to the skill you wish to learn. In the above example, you could forego a Guns (Pistol) experience check to learn Guns (Rifle) because they are related. Both skills default to each other and are DX based skills. You could not however forego a Guns (Pistol) experience check to learn Anthropology. Guns is a DX skill and Anthropology is an IQ skill.
In order to learn the new skill you will make a standard check against the relevant default. In the above examples, to learn Guns (Rifle) you would need to roll under your Guns (Pistol) skill or under your IQ to learn Anthropology.
The benefits of Diegetic Leveling is that you have an opportunity to earn more character points, faster, and it encourages you to explore your character’s skills and abilities more. Using this system I would advise everyone to take a look at techniques as you level as well. They give you far more options while using base combat skills like Guns, Brawling, or Karate.
Learning Skills Without Defaults
Skills that require extensive training don’t have default values. These skills need to be taught to you from someone who is able. To learn these skills you have to spend downtime training in them. Generally it takes 200 hours of training to learn a new skill without a default.
There will be tons of downtime between sessions available so this isn’t completely out of the question, but keep in mind that you more than likely will not be able to devote entire down time sessions to training skills. Money has to be earned to stay alive, you have to spend time resting to slowly recover HP, and training certain skills can be inherently dangerous. Sway Emotions and Sumo Wrestling are two potentially dangerous skills to train in.