We had another new player come and join the table at the School Club today, someone who is totally new to the hobby. To create them a workable character at the table, I “eyeballed” some details to begin and then we added as we played. It was a lot of fun and the player says they want to play again.

Here’s how I did it:

• “Are you Strong, Fast, or Smart?” = ST 14, DX 12, or IQ 12.
• Give them HT 11
• “What weapon do you fight with?” = write that down at DX+2
• Give them that weapon, writing it on the equipment list
• Work out HP, Per, Will, and FP per usual
• Get playing!

The trick is to add details as they play the character. For example, at the moment when this character wanted to climb a wall I asked, “Is this something your character is good at?” Yes meant we gave them the skill, wrote on the sheet, and I set a level. In this case it was DX.

The same for gear: “Do you think your character has anything useful here?” Eventually, in this session, the player gave me a description of the character so we wrote down a whole bunch of stuff: wearing leather (armour), carrying a shoulder bag, has some torches in the bag, has a money pouch, wears a bandana.

Quirks? Well, this time we wrote down, “Always bears a bandana [-1]”. We figured out they are left-handed but that’s a free detail in GURPS. Stating they are “Illiterate” gave us a useful Disadvantage though. Details arising from play, roughly eyeballed on to the sheet: “She dresses a bit like a pirate” was a nice one.

At the end of the session, I said I would go build the character in more detail – explained Character Points, said they start with 62 points (meaningless to the player at this stage, but honest) – and asked if there was anything to add.

“Are they more of a fighty pirate or a thiefy pirate?”

“Thiefy.”

“Great! See you next week!”

Game on!