From: tmyoung@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Thomas M. Young)
Subject: Re: Playing yourself in GURPS
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 92 17:03:46 EDT

ztsindi@ubvmsc.cc.buffalo.edu (The Independents - SUNY Buffalo) writes:
>
> 	One neat-o thing we've done with GURPS is to make up a 
> character based as closely as possible on ourselves. Then we play 
> those characters through one night games against villians we already
> have made up as NPC's. It was interesting to see that since I was in
> the Army Reserve I could choose a proficiency with the M-16. One of
> our players is a Black Belt in Karate so he got a proficiency in that.
> Of course when we went up against the Super with Psionics it got hairy
> real fast. Anyone else ever try this?

You bet, but with mixed results.  There is no problem making up a set of
stats and/or advantages/disadvantages, but when it comes to skills, a few
problems crop up.  The 200 hours per character point in skills rule is
broken; take out your transcript and count up hours.  If you're a grad
student, you've got at least 120 semester-hours of college under your belt,
and at 3 semester hours -> 1 character point (as suggested in BASIC), you
get pretty high point values.  Our group has a few grad students, a medical
doctor, and some returning-to-school-after-working types.  The doctor can
document 4 years of college, 4 years of med-school, 1 year internship, 2yrs
residency, and with the hours put in at each place, can easily justify
100+ points in medical skills alone. It gets scary.

We went overboard in our gang, and actually got IQ tested, physical exams
for health, etc.  The results were in fair agreement with game effects, but
not for skills, as previously mentioned.  The other tendency was to take too
many skills that you once had, but really don't anymore.  The rule for skill
atrophy (sp?) is buried in the Special Ops supplement, and most games 
disreguard it anyway.  Danger areas (requiring GM intervention or group vote)
are languages, scientific specialties, and medical specialties.  To keep the
game simple, many things were "lumped" under single broad skill categories
like Mathematics or Physics, which correspond to college majors while the
point system assumes skills are more narrow, about like individual courses.  
As a result, if you major in Math, and have taken 21 hours so far (7 char.
points), what you did in reality was put maybe 3 points in calculus, 1 in
modern algebra, 1 in differential equations, 1 in logic, 1 in linear algebra.
Your skill is likely to be IQ-2 to IQ or so in each specialty.  There is no
such problem with skills that are more narrowly defined in the book.

In spite of these hitches, we had a good time - the "role playing" aspect was
enhanced, since we tended to put ourselves in our character's place more
easily.  The flip side of that was that in our group we were a little less
rambo oriented - we have few combat skills as a group (some martial artists,
but we were strictly non-cinematic).  Plot hooks and such that a GM usually
uses to get his game to flow nicely will not be routinely successful - we
tended to do what a real person would do. We witnessed a mugging, so we just 
called the cops - not typical party actions, but realistic.  Things did get
 more interesting after a few sessions.

 Tom Young                
 tmyoung@rodan.acs.syr.edu