Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1035365Can you make a GURPS character who doesn't have skills?

Yes.

Mythras is a skill-based system, so you basically can learn anything if you spend the time and Improvement points.

Want a Fighter with Thief and Ranger skills, as well as 5 different types of magical systems to cast spells from?   Sure. No problem.  You just have to spend a whole lot of time and Improvement Points.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1035365Can you make a GURPS character who doesn't have skills?

As David Johansen says, yes, you can. His example still has a number of skills.

I have actually seen multiple characters with zero skills in HERO system - for non-human characters of unusual background (i.e. robot, starship, energy being, etc.).

Quote from: jhkim;1035415As David Johansen says, yes, you can. His example still has a number of skills.

I have actually seen multiple characters with zero skills in HERO system - for non-human characters of unusual background (i.e. robot, starship, energy being, etc.).

The thing is that skill defaults are pretty punitive in GURPS, -5 for most average skills.  So yes, you can do a character who has no skills, take Joe here.

Joe 150 points

ST 11 [10];
DX 15 [100];
IQ 12 [40];
HT 10

• ;

Just for comparison he'd use a two handed sword at a skill of 10, just like 2 point Billy here.

ST 10

• ;

DX 10

• ;

IQ 10

• ;

HT 10

• ;

Skills:
Two Handed Sword 10 [2];

Now if Joe put one point into Two Handed Sword skill he'd have a 14 which is significantly better.  Joe and Billy are both game legal characters, they're just fairly ineffective ones, though Joe will improve rapidly as he spends experience points on skills.

Wizards are harder to do with few skills.  The core GURPS Magic system treats every spell as a skill but requires prerequisite trees to buy more powerful spells, take Alphredo Zauze here:

Alphredo Zauze
150 point Wizard

Attributes:
ST 9 [-10];
DX 11 [20];
IQ 14 [80];
HT 11 [10];

Perception 12 [-10];

Advantages:
Ancient Language (Accented/Fluent) [2/3]
Magical Aptitude 3 [35];

Disadvantages:
Chauvanistic [-5];
Over Confident [-5];
Addiction (pipe weed) [-5];

Skills:
Knife 12 [2];
Knife Throwing 12 [2];
History 12 [1];
Innate Attack (Fireball) 12 [4];
Thaumatology 11 [1];
Swimming 11 [1];

Spells:
Foolishness 15 [1];
Daze 15 [1];
Sleep 15 [1];
Mass Sleep 14 [1];
Detect Magic 15 [1]
Analyze Magic 15 [1];
Ward 15 [1];
Ignite Fire 15 [1];
Create Fire 15 [1];
Shape Fire 15 [1];
Fireball 15 [1];
Exploding Fireball 14 [1];
Apportation 15 [1];
Shield 15 [1];

Quote from: David Johansen;1035425The thing is that skill defaults are pretty punitive in GURPS, -5 for most average skills.  So yes, you can do a character who has no skills, take Joe here. [...]

Now if Joe put one point into Two Handed Sword skill he'd have a 14 which is significantly better.  Joe and Billy are both game legal characters, they're just fairly ineffective ones, though Joe will improve rapidly as he spends experience points on skills.

Yes, quite true, but you're responding in detail to a rhetorical counter-question from Gronan, drifting from the point of the thread, which is about whether a system really lets you customize your characters. Clearly GURPS lets you do anything, and in this case, even your response to the rhetorical counter-question results in (to me) interesting characters.

(The 150-point Joe character with no skills is "ineffective" at first, but put all his points into attributes, so he might be a clone grown in a vat from great genes, or someone conjured or victimized by magic who lost all his skills, but he's got more potential if/when he survives and learns things, than a 150-point character with skills.)

So, yes you can do it and it's weird but it's something somewhat interesting that behaves as expected and doesn't break the system.

And from a GURPS perspective looking back at the thread topic in comparison to D&D, it seems to me that D&D doesn't really let a PC have no skills (except from a rules-oriented perspective that D&D may have nothing called a skill?) as you need to choose a class which comes with a baked-in set of starting and future abilities (which would be skills in GURPS).

What I actually meant by the way, by asking if D&D let you have a hero without a class, was if there were the equivalent of a classless system where a character might be quite a capable and talented person, but not really fit any particular class archetype (rather like many actual people, it seems to me).

The question is, to me, not "which fantasy RPG lets me customize". They all do, to a degree.
The question is, to me (and YMMV) "which fantasy RPG presents me the right options of customization for the game I want to play".

This might sound esoteric, but consider this.
In a game like Maelstrom Domesday or Aquelarre, the customisation is about rolling or picking your traits, social class included, getting the stats that fit them, and using those to deal with the supernatural events (both are about "magic in a historical setting"), while doing your best to remain part of the setting's society.

In a game like Warhammer, you roll your traits, roll a career, and then hope the two match. If not, you can maybe change one stat to be average.
The game is getting the cards you were dealt, and doing the best with them. IME, the emphasis on the society of the Old World is often less.

In a game like Barbarians of Lemuria, you pick your stats (all 4 of them) and try to play smart enough with them to deal with the obstacles the Referee is going to throw your way. Also, try to live up to the example of S&S characters!

In a game like Exalted, I pick my stats and skills, then pick Charms that follow from them. Two swordsmen with Melee 5, Swords specialty might very well have wildly different combat styles, as reflected in their charms (say, one of them has defence up to Heavenly Guardian Defence, the other focuses on damage-adders). The game is about making the build that will allow you to do what you were planning to do in the game.


And with all of that in mind, my answer goes, unsurprisingly, to Aquelarre and Maelstrom Domesday. Because that's the kind of game I want to play now:D!
But it's not because they give me the most options. It's because they give me the options that I'd like to pick between, and prevent me from having to pick things I don't care about.
In a few months, though, my answer might well be different:p!

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1035365Can you make a GURPS character who doesn't have skills?

Yes, here's a 150 pts character:)!
St 11 (10 pts)
Dx 16 (120 pts)
Iq 10 (0 pts)
Ht 12 (20 pts)

Combat Reflexes (15 pts)
Code of Honor (-10 pts)
5 Quirks

Not really optimised, but that's what you get for being equally good at everything;). And he's got a rather funny case of "equally good at attack and defence", given that his attack with many weapons is 11, and his Dodge is also 11!
What he really needs is an Easy weapon, and space to Retreat for a Dodge of 14:D!

Quote from: CRKrueger;1035401How do you pronounce that in Bulgarian?

Using IPA it would be (Voiced labiodental fricative) (Open-mid back rounded vowel) (Palatal approximant) (velar nasal). Sorry, the forum doesn't allow me to post the actual signs!

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1035087OD&D.  It lets you imagine your character to be almost anything within a few broad archetypes, and the rules don't interfere.

Agreed. But Lion & Dragon does it even better!

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035764Agreed. But Lion & Dragon does it even better!

  The game that randomizes just about everything but sex is the game that allows for the most customization?

  If you say so ...

Earthdawn.

I don't know everything about 3rd and 4th because I stopped at Classic but they seemed to have more customization than prior versions (instead of set talents at each circle/level you can pick from a menu).  You can get all or some of the talents for each discipline, you can add extra disciplines, discipline talents often have talent knacks (I'm not sure if these survived to 3rd and 4th) which are like feats, and you can always get skills instead of talents.  It's a point buy system so you gain legend points which you can then spend on raising various stats.  On top of that legend points can be used to increase magical item abilities or weave threads to various patterns (items, people, or places).  There's also blood magic which you can use to get fantasy equivalents of cyberware or to swear oaths and pacts (darker stuff is available but not usually encouraged for PCs).

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1035809The game that randomizes just about everything but sex is the game that allows for the most customization?

  If you say so ...

If you'd read it, you'd know why.

I recently got a chance to playtest my game, Homunculi, at a convention.
I thought the players would complain about the lack of options. My game has only one playable race, no classes, no skills, and no feats. They seemed pretty happy with the level of customization though. We actually had a really diverse party. The players might have had a lack of options in certain respects, but they also had a lack of restrictions.

RunningLaser - what exactly do you mean "customizing your PC"? In what way? Chargen? During play?

Quote from: tenbones;1036130RunningLaser - what exactly do you mean "customizing your PC"? In what way? Chargen? During play?

Most people here seem to mean "rules enforced mechanical differences."

Quote from: tenbones;1036130RunningLaser - what exactly do you mean "customizing your PC"? In what way? Chargen? During play?

I was mostly thinking during character generation.  To help clarify a bit, if you had a very specific idea for a character in a fantasy game, not so much what you were hoping for them to become during play, but how they begin.  

Gronan, I could see with OD&D being very abstracted, any idea for a fighter type would work fine.  Not certain about things outside of that.

If your background idea is that your character was a wizard's apprentice who during a surbprise goblin attack before he could do much training suffered from a magical fire bolt and lab explosion that destroyed one of his eyes, left him hard of hearing, badly scarred, and with a fear of fire, an uncontrollable hatred for goblins, and has a low skill level in a few spells but also has unusually high magic resistance from the lab explosion side-effects and wields his slain mentor's magical staff as a bludgeon, you can do that in D&D or GURPS.

In D&D it seems to me (a D&D-avoider who may be wrong about details) that you'd need to have the PC be a Magic User to be able to use the spells at all, and then you might actually be entitled to more spells than your story accounted for. Or maybe you just say the magic system means you can't really have learned the ability to cast anything, so you pick another class and can't cast anything. And it'd make most sense if you rolled low Charisma to match your scarring (or if you rolled high, I guess you're super-charming despite your scars). Your DM would need to approve you starting with a magic staff, and for balance might want to not make it very good, or say since you're not a wizard you don't even know if it's magical or not. In 0D&D I gather it's just a weapon which like all weapons does d6 and has no particular difference from other weapons.

On the other hand, the DM and player might simply invent their own effects on the spot for all those details if/when they seem relevant.

In GURPS, all the things I described could have specific logical effects, which are all readily detailed in the rules. One Eye affects depth perception and ranged accuracy and peripheral vision (making it harder to attack or defend yourself towards the side missing the eye), and impairs your visual reaction modifier unless you're attractive. Hard of Hearing reduces your Perception of sounds. Scarring generally reduces your appearance and physical reaction modifiers. Fear of fire will require a Will check to get involved with fire, and worsen your reactions to scary fire situations, for which there's an entire Fright Check system. Hatred of Goblins could be a quirk or can involve mechanical compulsive behavior and Will checks to not behave with hostility to them. Taking a low level in spells with let you try to cast them but you'll be obvious and may likely fail when you try, but doesn't force you ever learn any more magic. Magic Resistance is an advantage you can take, and you can add details to it if you want to. The magic staff could have whatever magic - with all the disadvantages you start with, you could choose to have it be something powerful and valuable if the GM approves. Or you might decide you want your character to have other talents, or both. The physical shape of the staff itself, and the skill you use to fight with it, will also have concrete effects on how your character can perform in combat.

In other words, while you can have that background in either game, in D&D the rules themselves mostly don't provide many detailed effects that are unique to your character (but the DM and/or player might think up effects of them), while in GURPS the rules specify effects that are very specific and detailed and might not be something any other character in the campaign has.

Different people (at different times and for different situations) may prefer one or the other.