GURPS Advantages

Advantages for characters using the GURPS role-playing game system.

Common Sense

Anyone who actually allows / uses this advantage, please rewrite this article if your experience is substantially different from the following.

The Common Sense advantage seems largely useless, as an IQ roll to realize he's about to do something stupid is a courtesy that ought to be granted to any PC. The net effect of Common Sense is to penalize a character by 10 points for being played by an inexperienced, bad, or dumb player.

Counteropinion: My experience differs. You'd be ASTOUNDED at how often experienced gamers can get on the wrong track. Simply giving the players correct information doesn't work, it makes you the GM a railroading GM. Now if they have paid the points the characters are now entitled to that correction.

Call it pride on the players part. It's the difference between receiving an insurance check after a disaster and getting charity.

Definitely have to agree with the counter. Not all gamers are created equal. Both might be equally intelligent and have wildly different views on things. A very common area where this kind of thing comes up is the use of Tactics. GM thinks X is the best course for the players to set, player A believes Y is best. Player A is confident, leads team to do Y. GM is all upset becasue players ignored obvious tactics and kills off the team. Player A is upset because his great tactics were ignored. Everyone ends up losing. Common Sense could avoid that kind of situation, where player 'knows' he's right, so isn't going to ask for any rolls. On the other hand, I think the first poster was saying that in his/her gming style, they'd just make the roll anyhow, common sense or not. IE: Everyone gets the advantage for free, why make anyone pay for it.