Critical Miss: Issue 5 (Ask Doctor Bubba)

Ask Doctor Bubba

Hi,

I play Merlin, my IQ in that system is around 13, my character's IQ is 32. How to play with it?

Difficult one. I usually play morons to avoid exactly this kind of problem. I hate to appear rude, but you say that your IQ in the RPG system is 13. What's that in real-world IQ? To put it bluntly, are you a person of average intelligence roleplaying a genius, or a moron attempting to roleplay a person of average intelligence?

Sometimes lesser gods come to ask her advice.

With me they're usually just coming to have a laugh. ("Here's one we fucked up earlier!").

Sometimes the party is in trouble, and she would be supposed to solve the problems or come up with something.

The key here is to say things which sound profound and mysterious, but are actually just vague and meaningless. Try watching the movie "Mystery Men" and in particular the character the Sphinx for ideas here.

I have serious problems with her. I am not sure I am playing her or she plays me since her IQ is much more high than my.

Actually now you're starting to sound like someone who is waving goodbye to reality and setting off into the woods. You're starting to scare me, so after advice from my solicitor, I'm going to break things off here.

Do you have any advice?

Szilard

I refer you back to my previous answer.

Our next letter comes from someone who has followed our idea of recreating yourself as a GURPS character and discovered the hideous flaw in this idea (you find out just what a pathetic little waste of space you are).

Inspired by Critical Miss's authors' GURPS character sheets, I have worked out one for myself and reached the astounding total of MINUS two hundred and twenty seven points. This means that the sum of myself and nine normal people is still slightly negative. Is this some kind of record?

- a pathetic individual

In a word yes. My character was originally heavily in the negatives, but the people doing it piled on a load of computer programming skills and other shit and managed to pull it back into the positives.

I'm truly interested in how you managed to get to -227 points. That must have involved some major league disabilities, problems and perversions. Could you send in some details?

And our final letter is from someone with a problem roleplaying group.

dear dr. bubba in my roleplaying group we have a problem. The GM(whomever it maybe for that week or running the campaign) keeps quitting any ideas on how to keep the game interesting for both the players and the GM any help would be appreciated.

Loki and the Puck

Dear Loki and the Puck

Number of campaigns I have started in recent times: 8 (Dark Sun Myriad playtest, Age of Aquarius playtest, Post-Nuke Myriad II playtest, Martian campaign, Post-Nuke 1962 GURPS, Alternity, Golden Heroes 60s, Aberrant).

Number that lasted more than 3 weeks: 1

Number that lasted more than 1 year: 0

That's basically a nerdy way of saying that I have no idea how to answer your question.

Ask me something about sex. I have no idea about that either, but it's a damn sight more interesting.

That's all...