Ianto Jones, GURPS, and the value of a degree

Ianto Jones: Honours English Literature and History; Skypoint Chapter 8 p69

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I was figuring out how many GURPS character points my degree will be worth, because I am trying to figure out the GURPS RPG system character sheets for Team Torchwood. As you do. And I started with Ianto because he's so vaguely defined. To get Owen I can just slap a Medic template on a genius, same with Tosh and tech. Gwen is an average police template. No problems. But Ianto? I have to get creative to figure what skills he has at all. So I decided to start with his degree.

GURPS has rules about how many hours study converts to how many character points.

200 hours with a teacher is 1 point in a skill.
400 hours independent study is 1 point in a skill.

So how many of each in a degree?

At City College there are 360 credits in a BA(Hons) degree.
10 credits works out at 100 hours. 30 hours taught and 70 independent.

From that I work out one degree is 11.7 skill points, rounded up or down depending on how much independent study you put in to the nearest .5 points.
Also, I have 4 CP in English with Cultural Studies already.
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in GURPS terms not all degrees are equal, and I'd need to know where he was studying and what their taught/independent split was.

Hence the long list of universities below.
Narrowing it further needs either canon I'm forgetting or a bit of deciding.

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Next I shall go figure out how many skill points he acquired while working at Torchwood 1. He was there 2 years according to fragments. GURPS rules allow you to claim 8 hours a day and it takes 800 hours to get 1 skill point, because mostly you're doing the same things over and over again. GURPS book reckons this works out at 2 or 3 skill points a year. This doesn't take into account any particular training courses Torchwood might send him on.

After he got to Torchwood 3 he probably got the Jack Harkness special on gun use.
But even under the rules for intensive study, that's 100 hours for 1 point.
Do we think anyone at Torchwood has spent 100 hours with Jack teaching them to shoot? Or 50 even? How about 400 hours self taught? 200?
If not, they're probably using guns at default levels, as in, unskilled.
... this could explain a lot.

Of course the quickest way to get points is to do adventures, otherwise known as Torchwood episodes. But even then they'd only apply to skills actually practiced.

Does practicing with arcade games count? Count at a familiarity penalty?
This could be key for figuring Owen's skill levels...
But arcade game laser guns could be Beam Weapons, and it reckons those default to Guns at -4.
Guns default to DX-4. So you could default it off Beam Weapons soon as you improve that.
So serious hours invested would improve your default, but you'd still never be as good with an actual boom stick as you are with an arcade game. And that's without the extra -2 for specialties (pistol to rifle to SMG) and familiarity penalities.
... rules are really picky about weapon skills, cause you use them a lot.



ETA: for people linked in from the newsletter, try the Ianto tag for my later added bits. If you like random maths or GURPS or rpg rules or Ianto. Well, mostly GURPS and maths.

Redemption 09

I just realised I'm going to be at Redemption this time next week and I haven't thought about it at all.
Maybe I should look up the timetable and find out what actually happens...

Ianto Jones as a GURPS character

Today I have done a lot of silly fiddly pointless and repetitive maths.

I have figured out the maximum number of hours under GURPS rules that can be spent studying per year, how many points towards skills that could get you, how many hours you can study combined with a job, how many weeks of study-and-job one could combine with the university course I am on, and the maximum number of skills points per year someone combining a college course, holiday work, and independent study could therefore get. Plus the number of hours of independent study that could fit in the weekends, all of which should go on weekend things, like hiking and carousing and sex appeal and area knowledge of places with pubs in.

This gives me a ratio of points to spend on English, History, research, job skills, personal interest study, and weekend things.

I then calculated his two years at Torchwood 1 by the maximum hours of job and personal study and got how many points he could spend on the kind of things only Torchwood could teach, like hidden knowledge and interesting tech.

It works out as
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This doesn't take into account the first 18 years of his life, any potential gap year, any time spent neither in college nor at Torchwood, or the six months at Torchwood 3 before Gwen turned up which I am calculating seperately because we know his job changed.
Also because the Torchwood Archives I think says six months somewhere but that seems a very long time to keep your girlfriend in the basement.

There is absolutely no point making such calculations. This is why I did them. In a different mood I'd be doing celtic knots again.

Now I can take those points and plug them into the GURPS skills list.

If I was doing similar calculations for ( Read more... )

Ianto Jones as a GURPS character

Ianto Jones:
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Did I miss any obvious ones? Include ones I shouldn't?

It doesn't mean much without more GURPS rules math. ( Read more... )

I'd aim for a final points total more 'hero in training' than full on superhero. We have Jack for that. Figuring out his point total is going to be spectacular.