GURPS General /gurpsgen/

It says more that I expected that than my confusion, true.
I have joined some horrible games.
I have hosted some terrible games.
I made no assumption on his abilities; truly , I need to give more of a benefit of the doubt.

I'm on the chat. Where are you?

Yeah, it's pretty good, you can get it at:
warehouse23.com/products/gurps-dungeon-fantasy-monsters-3-born-of-myth-and-magic

Thank you

How does combat usually goes in gurps?

Melee
>I choose to swing my sword
>Roll against your longsword skill
>If success, you're good to hit
>Enemy roll an active defense
>If his success is larger, you missed or blocked, depending on what he used

Ranged is basically this with distance penalties applied

Could you pretty please upload it to the archive?

In general, it's over after a few solid hits, and the trick is making that solid hit before your enemy does.

With fantasy or other low-tech games, it can come down to "swing 'till you make it" or be a carefully thought out approach that whittles down your opponent's defenses (e.g. take out the foot, knock prone, then go for the final blow) depending on the tone/group/player. With TL5+ firearms, however, fights tend to be much more defensive, with fighters focusing on not getting hit much more than making their opponents easier to hit; cover, suppressing fire, and the brutal effect of most guns promote this mindset.

However, GURPS is nothing if not flexible; a gritty dark fantasy game could lead to much more defensive tactics, and a sufficiently cinematic ruleset for a modern game would promote crazy wuxia gunplay with PCs charging into fire, both barrels a-blazing. Character options are vital too; a berserker in heavy plate won't worry at all about being hit and focus entirely on killing enemies faster, for example.

>If his success is larger, you missed or blocked, depending on what he used
>If his success is larger,
>larger
Nnnnnnope. It's any success. A successful defense negates a successful attack, even if the attack roll succeeded by 6 and the defense roll just barely made it. The ONE condition this does not hold true with is Dodge vs. Rapid-Fire, where you dodge a number of shots equal to 1+Margin of Success; if the attacker rolls well enough to hit with six shots and you only succeed by 2, three bullets still find their mark.

>Nnnnnnope. It's any success.
I stand corrected then.

>>If his success is larger
Huh? Defense test is not contest.

To be fair, there's a variant rule somewhere that changes it to a quick contest of Weapon Skill vs. Defence. Which can be handy if you've got a lot of highly skilled opponents with good defences.

It's cool, there's a lot of material, so everyone inevitably borks up at least a handful of rules. Hell, there are groups that right now are using critical failures and successes on skill checks in D&D 3.PF.

I'm pretty sure my godaweful homebrew for GURPS: Fullmetal Alchemist is still floating around somewhere on the internet. I made it right after picking up my first GURPS book (the 3e Basic Set) and it was full of weird shit, one of which was alchemic attacks being resolved as a quick contest of Symbol Drawing vs. Dodge.

Sounds like retroactively spending your MoS on Deceptive Attack, which all in all isn't bad.
If it's pure 1:1 contest though, that will bork up the system's math, as defenses are almost always — I'm talking 99.9% of the time — going to be lower than attack skills.

>deleting homebrews
Why?

>Symbol Drawing vs. Dodge.
What if you didn't need to draw? Like, you could clasp your hands or having another mean, like Mustang and succh?

I'd think that parry/block would need to be full skill, with cumulative defense penalties doubled (though keeping it the same might be interesting if you want a really long slog of a fight)
Dodge I'm having trouble deciding what would be the most fair (speed +3)*2 or just speed*2, I feel like with the extreme cumulative penalties, the first is more fair, but if you leave cumulative penalties at the same level, the second is more fair.

Oh and likewise, if all penalties are doubled for cumulative active defenses (and probably, side attacks,) bonuses should be doubled too (retreat, dodge and drop, acrobatic dodge, etc.)

It's somewhere on an external drive. This was also a while ago, like four laptops ago.

I don't think I had rules for Edward's bullshit, but things like Mustang's glove were, if I recall correctly, treated like symbol tokens, meaning you still had to roll against Symbol Drawing to show how well you understood the underlying mechanics of alchemy/the transmutation you're attempting.

I'm taking a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to this; the existing system works fine, and this sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of payoff. That being said, if you were committed to making ATK/DEF a quick contest, I would go with Dodge = Basic Speed * 2, as (BS+3)*2 means the average person has a Dodge of 16, which is ludicrously high and all but ensures the first attack will be dodged no matter how harsh your cumulative penalties are.

Do you have any other homebrew GURPS related stuff?

Yeah, totally agree with the idea of don't fix it since it isn't broke. I was just evaluating it as a mental exercise, and think it gets about impossible at the point where you integrate hit location and armor chink penalties.

Let's say my character is good at carrying stuff; a packmule even.
Is there any advantage/trait to demonstrate this besides Lifting ST?

Just settings, some made because I was bored, some as legitimate attempts for games that never got started, but none worth posting.

Ooh ouch yeah that'd be a humongous pain in the ass.

Maybe the Lifting skill? There's not a lot more out there as Lifting ST hits it right on the nose.

Same guy. If I'm making a merchant/party face at TL/4, would wrestling and brawling be enough to be useful at combat or should I take a weapon? Assume average DX and ST.

I imagine a merchant would probably at least have a knife in case of an emergency.

Like said, it's reasonable to have some sort of emergency weapon; at the very least, its good for finishing off foes you've pinned.

As Lifting ST affects grapples, I would say you may even become an accidental combat monster with a decent level of Wrestling and enough levels of Lifting ST. In fact, I think there was even a short greentext about the party Dwarf that acted as the loot packmule suddenly realizing how good he was at grappling and started popping goblin heads left and right.

However, rereading your post, it sounds like you're talking about two different characters/character concepts. In that case, Knife >>>>> Wrestling + Brawling. Wrestling requires you to stay in long protracted engagements, which is a horrible idea if combat is not your character's focus or you have nothing else to supplement it (like oodles of ST/Lifting ST). Brawling is little better, as the relatively low damage means it'll take awhile to knock an opponent down. In both cases, you'll be forced into close combat while enemies are likely to have at least Reach 1 weapons, thus putting you in danger before you can begin to threaten them.

Knives have imp injury type, making them much more deadly, and are DX (E), making it cheap to become decent in them. Upping to a Smallsword or Shortsword would also give you Reach 1 and access to decent cutting attacks, and both skill choices are still reasonable for a merchant.

>tl;dr if you don't plan on making your character combat focused, a weapon, even a tiny dagger, allows you to do damage and then get the hell out of there while your attacker is reeling. Leave the actual fighting to your hired muscle.

>pping to a Smallsword or Shortsword would also give you Reach 1
Large and Long knives have reach 1, the latter is basically a messer and can be used with both Knife and Shortsword skills.

Only with the cutting attacks, and IIRC those are fairly anemic at the ST levels a non-combat character will have.

I initially was going to praise the long and small knife for increasing reach but had to go back and change it.

Not really.
At ST 10 it would be 1d-1 cut vs 1d-2 imp

Then there's the trouble of defense options, like retreating, extra effort, cross parries and the likes.

My bad, I was only looking at Basic Set. The Large Knife there does sw-2 cut @ C,1 and thr imp @ C, and the Small Knife does sw-3 cut and thr-1 imp at the same reaches; in both cases, its the same damage with a worse injury multiplier for slightly better reach.

Still, the Long Knife does look like the best option; decent all-around stats and significantly more expensive than regular Large/Small Knives but a hell of a lot cheaper than a shortsword or smallsword.

Super drunk, and it's mah birthday.
Love you fuckin lovelies, with your gurpsin
You fuckin great guys
Love you

I troll a lot. But I fucking love you guys and I love gurps.

I've got a question, GURPS-friends

Say your character is TL n. Say it's time-travelling campaig or just IE setting. Say this character lands in TL n+y, where y is natural number higher than 0, so technically in world more advanced than his native TL.

Now normally when dealing with higher TL means you have a penalty to skills, -5/TL level. What about such character who lives in different TL for a while?
For lack of any better examples, Cap living in modern-day world, so skipping two TLs from WW2 to modern times and often experiencing stuff from even further TL.

Does it amount to standard penalties? Is there some counter to them? How to deal with this

I think this is covered explicitly somewhere in the book, but off the top of my head, I'd say it's treated as a more intense version of Familiarity; you can re-learn a TLn skill as its TLn+a version in less time than it would take for a layman with no background to learn it from scratch.

That's... not explaining much

The TL penalty applies to all technological skills, but you can learn DX-based skills of any TL as normal, providing you have a teacher. Conan the Barbarian could learn to fire a laser rifle if someone told him what a trigger is and how to sight it. All you have to do is find a teacher and pay the points. IQ-based technological skills require you to raise your personal TL before you can learn them (meaning you have to pay points). Basic Set p. 291 explains how to raise TL in play:

>Tech Level: You can raise your personal TL (see Technology Level, p. 22) by living in a society of a higher TL than your own – but only if you are free to attend that society’s schools and benefit from its conveniences (being an alien abductee, prisoner, etc. doesn’t count). The GM should consider limiting improvement to one TL per year of game time.

A year is probably realistic but you should feel free to vary the time to whatever you need. I think a few months should be the minimum though, maybe one month in a cinematic game.

So, sticking with Cap example - you would be unable to catch up with non-DX skills

After a year or so, Cap would be at the point where he could use a smartphone or a laptop, but up until then he'd be useless at any IQ-based technological skills.

When in our previous campaign we got stranded on an uninhabitable island and struggled to get food, we made a joke about using a spell to locate bananas. That got me thinking and I realized I want to play as a food mage. A greasy fat older dude who can only use Magic to make food. I also love the fact that the food college is the least respected among spellcasters.

So I did it. I started playing as a food mage. I tried making him powerful in non—combat situations with high Acting, Public Speaking, Fast Talk, etc. Unfortunately, Magic costs a lot of pts. and such, I can't be as effective as a diplomat with 21lvl. Fast Talk and reaction mod. +6. So in order to be not completely useless, I picked a couple spells from Light/Darkness. My character has a disadvantage Pacisift (Cannot Kill) so that's what I figured would help me the most.

Now, I love playing a dickish food—mage, and not worrying about starving sounds amazing, but I feel like eventually I'll be dead weight to my combat focused party. What should I do to not seem like I'm leeching off? Do I become the party's diplomat and run away at the slightest hint of danger? Or do I just run away from the party, get a winemaker's license and start selling Fool's Banquet food and turning Water to Wine? I figured in about a decade of gametime I could afford a small mercenary band that would complete quests for me. Assuming I don't die of high cholesterol before that.

Learn to create a ton of carrots out of thin air, drop it all on enemies.

Aren't there a handful of adventuring-useful spells scattered across the college? If not, branch out to other colleges while maintaining the food theme, e.g. Create Fire to cook food AND burn enemies.

What's a good level of cinematic-ness for martial characters if casters would be using Sorcery? I'm planning for a high fantasy game, but I normally run low+dark fantasy, so my usual standby of brutal martial combat + slow and risky and subtle magic won't work here.

Just be pic related

>uses dash as hyphen
Stop this.

Cover floor and enemies in alcohol to make them flammable.
Create peas under their legs to trip them.

Look up the Cheese school. It was printed in an older Pyramid, so it's legit.

Fuck fireball, Cheeseball is where it's at.

200+50 is usually more than enough. 250+50 and you are in Predator territory. 300+50 and you are low-tier supers/Steven Seagal

sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=510

I picked basically every food spell in the Magic book and almost everything there is either Create Food or Make food better. It also is very vague on WHAT food can I make, but I think the GM is into the idea enough to let me pick.

The peas on the ground idea is dope.

Is there a way to create alcohol out of water? Wine isn't really flammable.

GOAT

>Is there a way to create alcohol out of water? Wine isn't really flammable.
Magic, sex-bomb

Was looking for rules or campaign options, not point values, sorry. High point values don't help balance martial vs. caster; a 350-point swordsman is capable of a LOT of stuff, but in a campaign that uses Last Gasp, Bleeding, Blunt Trauma and Edged Weapons, etc., he is going to pale in comparison to a 350-point sorcerer simply because of the restrictions placed on the swordsman.

Short version is that I want to avoid the PF issue where level 20 wizard ≠ level 20 fighter.

Try looking at the DF Sorcerer template in Pyramid #3/82 Magical Creations. Along with the template itself, there are some recommended limits for sorcerers to keep them in-line with DF's power level (limiting damage to 1d+1 per level of Sorcerous Talent comes to mind). Assuming your martial are at least as cinematic as the Knight, Swashbuckler, or Eldritch Knight, you should be fine and not see too many power gap issues.

>High point values don't help balance martial vs. caster
Just to remind you - we are talking about GURPS, not D&D. Please don't even pretend there is any "matrial vs caster" issue, or leave the thread right now. There is reaction, movement space and time, stealth, shooting things from safe distance and DOZENS of options that are more than obvious.
The issue doesn't exist within GURPS. Hell, it doesn't exist in any other games than D&D and its clones.

user, do you even Supers? Literally entire line of GURPS games about people punching the living crap out of magic users, powerful mutants, aliens and giant robots armed with lasers and you are going to bullshit us about "martial vs. caster"
Don't you have some PT thread to shitpost in?

Calm the fuck down son. The issue doesn't exist by default, but it CAN if you take D&D's retarded approach of "martials are limited by reality, casters can shit out pocket universes by the truckload."

Asking for which cinematic rules you should use to make sure that your swordswingers don't get outpaced by the spellslingers is totally fine. If you're using an exceptionally powerful or open-ended magic system, you should boost mundane characters a little bit with a healthy serving of cinematic rules and character options; at the very least, you shouldn't make their shit harder with pro-realism rules like he mentioned (Last Gasp and BT&EW especially).

Batman and Superman are balanced against each other when and only when they share the same point value AND the universe run on cinematic logic that allows a gadget-happy punch-ninja to go toe to toe with the same enemies facing a flying super-durable super-strong laser-shooting godking; if Batman had to operate under realistic injury and combat rules, spending all those points on Wealth, Gadgets, and Karate would have been inferior to Superman's spending them on DR, Super ST, Innate Attack, and Flight.

>The issue doesn't exist
>But you can always import it from other game
What for?
No, really, what the fuck for?

God, I fucking hate when 3.5 crowd emerges from their hug-box and starts spreading their bullshit around

Step 1) Unbunch your panties
Step 2) There is no step two, just calm your tits.

Dude is normally used to running low/dark fantasy games and wants to run high fantasy. He wants to know what rules he should incorporate to make sure it's high fantasy for everyone. Since his GMing experience seems to be focused around only the pro-realism ultra-gritty optional rules, he wants a recommendation of cinematic optional rules.

To answer your question (since it seems the other faggots won't and would rather jerk off their persecution boner), either set it to Dungeon Fantasy levels of cinematic like suggested, or let default unrestricted sorcerers rub shoulders with wuxia/chambara martials (p. MA128) if you want it to be super-high action-heavy fantasy. Also imbuements. Always imbuements.

Let me get this straight. You want to play under high-point cinematic rules and you are seriously asking how "martials" are suppose to beat "casters"?
Gee, maybe with the sole fact it's cinematic game? You never read Action or something?

>I'm seriously not defending myself
>This is different user defending me, really!
>Stop it senpai! No bully!

Have a look at some of the power ups for DF martial characters. There's a heap in the Way Of The Warrior issue of Pyramid.
Just, let them take abilities which let them exceed the limits of regular people without seeming inherently magical or anything. Let them parry fireballs with their swords, do crazy jump-based move and attack maneuvers.

So when someone calls you out on being an overemotional reactionary faggot, your response is to scream samefag?

Thanks, I'll look into those. Using DF as a base doesn't sound like a bad start at all.

Only when it's a case of samefaggotry

I'm in the IRC room now. If I can't get enough people to commit today, I'll post on Game Finder. In the meantime, I'll be working on the Roll20 room and making a twitter for the game.

Remember, GURPSfriends, you can play whichever way makes ya happy. Maybe in your world there's a martial/caster divide? You decide. It's your world.

>Iron man"I need you to check the breaker! How is it?"
>Cap "it seems to run on some sort of...electricity?"

Great scene in that movie, IMHO. Very much so reinforced to reality of being unfrozen decades later.

Dehydration and Starvation are two pretty effective straight up battle spells, and then there is poisoning food.

...

user. That's not skipping TLs, that's just not having the relevant engineering skill. I doubt many people have the TL8+1^ skills needed to understand much of the helicarrier. Iron Man could've asked any of the other Avengers and have the same answer.

I just mentally orchestrated in my head what I think would be an awesome boss fight, but I dunno if my players will be able to do it.

The players complete a ritual at the top of a tower, which summons the giant jelly from Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1... outside of the tower, with entrances too small for the jelly to do anything but prod and jostle.

This also summons a horde of doomchildren who slowly swarm the tower.

The players throw the doomchildren at the jelly, and kill it with the explosions. Looking at the stats, they have a ton of striking st, but pitiful resistance to wrestling skills.

How obtuse of a strategy is this, and what kind of hints could I give for this to be an effective strategy? Or should I abandon this thought altogether?

>Low-Performance Spacecraft accelerates at less
than 0.1G
>High-Performance Spacecraft: Any space vehicle that accelerates at 0.1G or more.

What's "G"?

G force probably.

Acceleration due to gravity, same as G in any physics equation.

Puzzle bosses are fun, but avoid "one solution only" types of puzzles, because those turn into a game of "guess what the GM is thinking"; if the party really wants to try a frontal assault, they should be able to (it should be hard as FUCK though, because that's a really dumb plan).

Does the party have experience with Doomchildren? Try using the Mario puzzle/gimmick system: introduce the gimmick safely, introduce it with consequences, put a twist on the gimmick, use the gimmick to defeat the boss, abandon gimmick. Putting this into practice, it may end up looking something like this.
1) Party sees doomchildren early on, but don't engage them. Maybe they see them fighting something else, or they get killed in an accident. Either way, they see the on-death explosion.
2) Party fights a decent number of doomchildren; if they can set up a chain reaction, the fight will be super easy.
3) Party needs to use the explosive force to remove some sort of barrier like a damaged wall, or do something else similar that cements the idea that doomchildren can be used offensively.
4) Party needs to sling doomchildren at the giant jelly boss.

So, the acceleration varies according to the gravity of the celestial body that they currently are at?

Thanks for the thoughts, those suggestions line up a bit with what I was thinking I'd do. I was going to have another monster blow up a ton and cause a chain reaction, the only thing I had difficulty with is thinking of a good way to communicate, "you guys are easily capable of grappling and throwing these guys," without outright saying it.

I definitely am thinking of reasonable contingencies. One player has Area Knowledge for the area so I'm going to let that player exposition the major bad stuff because she "just knows it" and have a few tools around to brute force it (EG, it can't be hit with metal weapons without surge aura counter-attack, so I'll make sure that they go through a room in the tower with wooden weapons, and hope they remember it, maybe an armory with some arrowheads that do crushing damage instead because it is homogenous.)
The one player that *might* have a reasonably easy time of fighting it in a brute-force "hit it until it dies" approach is an artillery mage that has a lot of attacks it is not especially resistant to.

Earth's gravity is 1G which is also expressed as 9.81m/s^2 or 10 yards/second^2. It's just a convenient unit to express acceleration in.

>Hiking distance is Move*10
>A regular character can walk 50 miles per day
Isn't this a little absurd or am I reading the rules wrong?

I'm building a light and darkness mage, my primary thing is darkness. Mind it's not the only spell college my character has.
But what would be something impressive for the battlefield one could do? Other mages get rain of fire, volcano and different things. Whats something interesting a darkness focuessed mage could aspire to?

>Within an area, every enemy is struck blind, with cloying black shadows stretching across their faces like living things

Wilderness Survival for dungeon fantasy would say that the average person can hike 8 hours a day (no survival skill) and on decently leveled roads, (1.00x speed) could go (move/2 * 1.00 * 8) = 20 miles a day in nominal conditions.

What I quoted is from the core book.

Yeah, I'm looking at that now. It seems a tad bit unrealistic unless this Joe Average was somehow walking constantly without stopping... I'd say a conservative guess would probably be about 3 miles an hour on any terrain slightly challenging, and 16 hours if he hiked non-stop... so that comes to 48 miles. Probably suffered a lot of fatigue damage though... but sleep can supposedly fix that.

Is there any real difference, game-wise, between tracked & half-tracked vehicles for roll resolutions or skill modifiers?

Purely crunch-wise to drive - not really, unless GM decides to make terrain rolls.
Crunch-wise to repair - yeah, since half-tracked are slightly harder to repair and take more time.

And besides, why would you want to drive half-tracked, fluff-wise, in the first place?

please refrain from frogposting in the future

>GM decides to make terrain rolls
Would half-tracked be at an additional -2 on rough terrain?

As far as I know, GURPS does not have a separate skill for driving tracked and wheeled vehicles, while main advantage of half-tracks is how they can be operated by someone with just bog-standard driving license. Hence half-tracks don't make any difference in skills.

They DO however make a difference in maintaince, as you will need higher skill due to more complex drive, need more parts, it's MUCH easier to immobilise and it's not as effective as fully-tracked vehicle in rough terrain (still better than wheeled ones, but just barely).
Oh, and they are almost exclusively late TL6, early TL7.

Get yourself 8-wheeled armoured vehicle or tank, but don't bother with half-tracks

Is there a place in the books that has a table with the radius that specific light sources illuminate?

Basic Set, table about light sources?

Yeah. T don't remember where that is.

Multiples of Earth's gravity.

Get Shadow-Slay from Death Magic.