Levels in GURPS - Why and how?

Levels in GURPS - Why and how?

GURPS is a point-buy classless system, so the concept of the character level does not exist. Character points do not measure the character's power. We all know this. The more I lurk within the BrOSR circles, the more I understand why D&D was written the way it was - more and more things begin to make sense. As I think that I get closer and closer to being able to run a proper BrOSR-style game using GURPS, I realize that there's still a lot of work to do, as GURPS is missing some crucial parts for that sort of thing. One of them is character levels, actually. I'm not good with words, but I will try to explain why they are necessary. Once we understand why exactly they are necessary, we will understand what is missing and how to fix it without introducing actual character levels.

Danny McFie of the Axioms of an Addled Antillectual fame did a colossal amount of work translating ACKS levels into GURPS point values for the purpose of enabling character progression via Gold-as-XP. This was one of my stumbling blocks, and I greatly appreciate his efforts. However, not long ago, I realized that while that conversion works well for what it is intended for, i.e. player character progression (especially if you excise social traits from your point value for this purpose), it might not be enough for some other aspects of the game where levels are important.

Another monumental piece of work that made me realize all that was the Drakonheim AAR by RuleOfThule. When you read success stories about what D&D is supposed to be played like, you always want to know the details of how that was accomplished. So I did exactly that and checked the various rules DM Serious wrote up. Later I would realize that I didn't even need to go this far, rereading AD&D DMG or ACKS II JJ would've been enough.

Level matters not only for the purpose of character advancement, but also for the purpose of demographics, treasure generation, and, most importantly, factions. For example, ACKS JJ has very good guidelines for how many adventurers of a particular class and level can be found in a settlement of a particular size. If we use point values, then it does not tell us anything. A 12th-level wizard may be an actual archmage with dozens of spells and 20+ in spellcasting skills, but also could be just a random guy with a single cantrip, but who has 80 points in Guns. When you have rules for faction generation, the level must be used as a stand-in for power. If you are making a mage guild, the leader must be a better mage than the underlings. An orc warchief must be a better fighter than an orc subboss. The same applies to player characters and their henchmen. As for magic item generation (this is something I've been postponing for longer than a year already), characters of higher level should have more magic items. Yet again, this is something that comes up when you generate a faction or even an encounter.

So, what is the way out of this? In my opinion, the better way for this purpose is to define a list of milestones for each occupational template (read "class"). You should understand what makes a paladin a paladin and a wizard a wizard. GURPS gives guidelines for what skill levels are appropriate for different descriptive categories of mastery, so we could borrow these guidelines. In addition to skill levels, certain advantages and points spent on some skills/advantages could be a measure of "experience". This is somewhat similar to how GURPS Martial Arts suggests dealing with style perks - a perk per 10 (or was that 20?) points in the style skills (this is something everyone seems to ignore, alongside with the styles themselves). This is a lot of work, but I believe that it's worth it, because then you'll actually have a practically useful way of generating characters of different power levels on the fly and not spend hours or even days creating one. As for the milestones themselves - I'll work on them a bit later, as I have some other things that require my attention right now.