GURPS in Fallout, or Fallout in GURPS

When I decided to run another Fallout game, I wasn't sure if I wanted to use GURPS, Fudge, or the Fallout PnP game. I eventually decided to go with GURPS because I'm most familiar with it, and I felt that the "grittiness" of the system mixed well with Fallout.

There are some really great resources that others have put together for a GURPS Fallout game, and while looking through many of these I noticed there were a lot of folks trying to emulate the "perks" and other traits from the games in GURPS.

At first I was caught up with this idea, and started looking at what perks I wanted to bring over as meta-traits for my game. But after awhile, I started to feel that this idea was a bit silly.

Video games have been trying to emulate the table top for a long time. The original Fallout game was going to use GURPS, before the SPECIAL system, and even that has a lot of similarities still to GURPS. The Perks and Traits from Fallout are just takes on Advantages and other traits that can be taken in GURPS. They are far more restricted and limited though, as you'd expect in a video game.

So, why are we not trying to emulate in a table top RPG a system that was designed to emulate table top RPGs? This is chasing our tails!

I had to ask myself, do I want to use GURPS to play Fallout, or play GURPS in the Fallout setting? GURPS allows both, but in the end, I'd rather just use the setting and not worry about a set list of meta-traits.

GURPS Fallout Character Survey

For our next game we decided to play Fallout. Instead of the typical character creation session, I decided to give the players a "Character Interview" and then build the characters myself based on their results.

While I'm not 100% pleased with the final survey, it worked well enough for us to build characters. In the future I may revisit this survey and expand on it. Most of the questions come straight out of Basic Set, so I don't take full credit for this.

Below is the basic form, but I used Google Drive to host the form and record the responses. That can be seen HERE.

Generalized Utility Record and Personal Summery

Basic Information

Name:
Gender:
Age:

SPECIAL

How would your rate yourself? (Total should be around 40)
Strength (1-10)
Perception (1-10)
Endurance (1-10)
Charisma (1-10)
Intelligence (1-10)
Agility (1-10)
Luck (1-10)

Family

Father's Name:
Alive?
Father's Job Assignment:

Mother's Name:
Alive?
Mother's Job Assignment:

Describe your relationship with your parents.

Assignment History

What training have you received?

Do you have any self-taught skills?

What is your current job assignment?

What other job assignments have you held?

Relationships

Friends:

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers you could call friends:

Enemies:

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers you could call enemies:

Close Professional Associates::

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers who are your close professional associates:

Background and Interests

What were the most important moments of your life?

How would you describe your own code of morality?

What are you deep held beliefs?

Likes:

Dislikes:

Hobbies:

Other Interests:

What motivates you the most?

What are your plans for your life in the vault?