Toying with Advantages & Attributes in GURPS

        I have always enjoyed the idea of character appearance affecting all sorts of things in role-playing games. When I first started playing D&D 5e, it always seemed that everyone was attractive, or at least not unattractive. "Yes, my half-orc has fair skin and beautiful eyes" was something that always irked me the wrong way. That was one of my (at the time) few gripes with D&D 5e, before I switched to GURPS, 4th Edition.

Comeliness: Comeliness reflects physical attractiveness, social grace, and personal beauty of the character. It is used to determine initial reactions to the character, and characters with a high comeliness may affect the wills and actions of others. While charisma deals specifically with leadership and interactions between characters, comeliness deals with attractiveness and first impressions.

Unearthed Arcana (1e), Gary Gygax

        I enjoyed GURPS, enough to make it a major part of my life, playing two to four times a week with friends and sometimes family. There were few gripes that I had initially, though as time went on there were a few that I had, which were nullified when I decided to pick up GUPRS Power-Ups 9: Alternate Attributes. PU9 is one of those books that really changed how I thought of GURPS as a whole. Of course, I knew you could modify attributes, but the suggestions and detail in that book were astonishing!

And they say GURPS has a lot of tables!

        One of the things I noticed in that book, however, was the lack of mention of a "Comeliness", "Appearance" or "Beauty" attribute. Sure, Charisma makes the mention, but that isn't quite what I wanted. I am not a huge fan of how Appearance works in base GURPS, mostly because the attribute was multiples of four (instead of five) and had odd rankings. Recently, I picked PU9 and my copy of Unearthed Arcana back up and started toying with things.

         I liked what got, which was a basic appearance attribute that gave you a reaction modifier equal to the Attribute-10. You could also have it start at 0 and not require the "-10" step, but it makes some calculations on the players' side more easy, like determining the maximum appearance level for a given character. However, that wasn't all that I wanted to do!

Statistics
        Statistics are basic measures of a character's ability to do things. The higher the statistic, the better the character's performance.
Strength affects your skill in combat.
I.Q. and Piety influence your ability to cast and resist spells.
Vitality affects your ability to withstand damage.
Agility helps you avoid attacks and open treasure chests.
Luck comes to your aid in many mysterious ways. 

 Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord Manual

        When I was a wee lad, one of the first computer role-playing games my Dad showed my brother and I was Wizardry I for the Nintendo. I have talked about it before, but Wizardry is one of those games that you have fun with every so often when you forget the bull-honkey that happens in the game, you dump ten hours into farming Murphy's Ghost, and then get party wiped trying to get deeper in the dungeon, and quit, just to do it all again a few months later.

"Mapiro Mahama Diromat!"

        However, one of the most interesting parts of Wizardry 1 to me, was the inclusion of the Piety stat. Wizardry didn't need a Charisma attribute, because it wasn't that type of game, and they probably had the same feelings that I did (albeit for a different game): why does a Wizard's and a Cleric's Spells rely on the same attribute?

         Obviously, this game has done wonders to how I think about role-playing games and I still think about it. One of those things I routinely think about is the fact that both a Wizard's and a Cleric's spells in GURPS rely on IQ. I dislike that so much, that I didn't just move them to a separate attribute (i.e. Quintessence), I made them both into their OWN attributes! Magic and Piety (or Faith) is usually what I have in my more attribute heavy games.

The Evil Wizard known as Werdna

        I know there is at least ONE person who has played in my games and is groaning right now, asking what purpose this serves. For one, in games that use the Last Gasp (which we have used but might not use in the future), it makes Magic either useless or a no-brainer, because it needs to either use FP, ER, or AP as the power reserve. If you are using Quintessence, that is solved. Same here, however, a Wizard won't be as powerful as a same-level Cleric if he attempts to become something like a Mystic Theurge, serving as a form of Niche Protection.

        This does introduce some problems, like Magery and Power Investiture becoming the same thing as their attribute and becoming unnecessary, but in my opinion, that is fine, as I just meshed them together with their respective attributes. Effectively, the levels are calculated the same way as the appearance attribute: Magery/PI = Attribute-10. This means your highest-tier Magic-User High Elf could get up to something like Magery 7! Wowza! I am not super worried about min-maxing like that though, as I am big on templates in a lot of my games.

        I have been working on my house-rules again, if it wasn't evident by this post, and I put out a poll to my players to ask them how they feel about all KINDS of things that I could add into or remove from the house-rules. It really depends on what I feel like running and the bandwidth that I have as a GM along with what the players can manage; the bandwidth of the players is just as important as the bandwidth of the GM.