GURPS General

Couldn't you always just bypass Search by being needlessly careful with it? It would only be helpful if you had to loot a body and immediately run of the second later because someone is there to mess with you, wouldn't it?

I think that would be covered by modifiers for time taken and the pressence of a "no stress" +4 penalty; the situation you described is the norm for most adventurers (no one wants to stay in a haunted crypt while the fighter double checks every or corpse for a few extra copper).

Yep. The only limit in the book is that you might need Intelligence Analyst to make sense of the information you spotted and for especially complicated stuff.

That's a good point, but keep in mind that Search is unneeded to find anything once they've got -3 or worse on Holdout.

So if you strip them down to their underwear they get -5 and can no longer hide anything bigger then a pea-sized jewel.

It's acutely easier then that. Any time Holdout hits -3 or worse any close Search automatically finds items (holdout can only hide things penalized that much from someone looking you over, not putting hands on you.)

Holdout gets penalties for size of item and your clothes. Strip someone naked and they take -7, meaning literally any item bigger then a postage stamp is automatically found. If they are still hiding something a body search gives you +3 Search vs their -7 Holdout.

Hey, Book of 9 Swords Guy: Have you looked at Path of War/Path of War Expanded? I imagine it would combine with your Bo9S supplement quite well.

Just a thought.

...

Does 4e will have a gurps vehicles book?

Creating a vehicle on 3e is EXACTLY what is like to try do create a fatal character (yes I already tried to do one fatal char).

>Does 4e will have a gurps vehicles book?
Spaceships (Modular ships), and a bunch of piecemeal half-assed alternatives to GURPS Vehicles.

Supposedly you can use 3e Vehicles easily enough, you just have to convert the weapons to 4e.

>3 different rolls for searching.
This is dumb.

GURPS doesn't have a finite skill list, does it?

Has anyone made a consolidated but still comprehensive skill list for GURPS?

1) One's an attribute, not a skill.
2) Observation is, as discussed, covers like 90% of "lookin' for shit" scenarios and Search is a niche skill with a deceptively broad name.

I'm kind of new to GURPS. I am the Forever GM of two groups. With one of those Groups I am going to start a new Campaign of epic proportions soon. No other system had the depth necessary to create the kind of characters we wanted and was still fun and well thought out, so we tryed out a lot of Systems and settled on GURPS after a one shot with GURPS lite to see if the base system was good. I am very pleased how the preparations are going so far, especially because we could build the kind of charaters we wanted. The other systems we would use normally would either require too much make believe (which is quite a thing to say for a group where everyone is in character the whole session and where a LOT of improv is going on), or not leave a lot of room for gradual and fine grained enaugh progress.

The problem I am facing now in doing more prep is that I have no idea where to start with vehicle creation. We are going to play with 4e and most of the campaign will be centred around a group on a sailing ship in a world that is in the Age of Sail and consists entirely of islands. Therefore there are going to be a LOT of ships and quite a bit of ship combat, which gets even more complex given that there are magic-like powers in this world capable of attacking ships and defending from cannon and gunfire. But from what I have heard, vehicle creation in GURPS is really fucky,

so:

- What do I need build Ships in 4e (which Supplements etc.)

- Where can i find out how the hell ship combat works?

- Common pitfalls in shipbuilding and ship combat?

Putting thread title in the name field
Goddamit, OP, do you make this on purpose?

It's not like its hard to find threads on this board from the catalog

Use Spaceships. I'm serious; between all the supplements and articles for the spaceship building system, the series has wood and wood/iron hulls, sails, TL4 weaponry, and all the miscelaneous bits to make seafaring ships a thing through the Spaceships section. That being said, you'll find a LOT of ships already made for you in Low Tech + its companion books; at the very least, look to those for guidance when building your own ships.

For combat, if you're using Spaceships, use, well, Spaceship's. There's a grid-based "tactical" version ruleset and the wholly "theatre of the mind" ruleset, plus some minor tweaks/variants for both. The chapter on vehicles in Campaigns also has a more barebones vehicular combat system, though in my opinion it's too light. Lastly, you *can* run the combat as any other combat by drawing the ship's deck on the grid and let the PCs dictate second-by-second action, but that's too extreme for me.

Most of the (space)ship building pitfalls I'm aware of have to do with lone missiles BTFOing any ship that lacks a good point-defense system, but obivously that's not an issue in an age of sail game.

It's like I have to change filters every time OP changes the format of the thread for no reason.

I literally just have "GURPS" in the filter and it has always been up top.

Then I got every thread that mention GURPS being on top. You see, user, you shouldn't touch my autism.

Well yeah, how else can your defend your systemfu when people post >inb4 GURPS?

Ok, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it, especially seeing as this advice is entirely non-obvious. It didn't even cross my mind to use spaceships for this, but it makes sense seeing how much spaceship stuff was released.

You sure?

I read some posts from the lowetech authors, and they said they didn't refer to spaceships at all, instead referring to historical information and writing game stats to match it based on historical data and rough physics calculations.

Well yeah, no duh the devs did actual real-world research to derive statblocks, but for players that want to build their own ships like user requested and *not* have to do similar research, spaceships is the way to go.

Again though, Low Tech (and LT Companion 2 & 3) have oodles of ships; reaslitically, few people can requisition a custom-made ship from a profession shipwright and will end up buying a "standard model" of ship (for as "standard" as you can get before the age of industrialization).

Hmm, thats true as well. Their first ship will most probably not be a custom one. I left them the option, but right in session 0 they were all:"Fuck earning money. Let's just steal a battleship!" If they still want to go through with that I could just give them a ready made battleship for the time being (If they manage to pull it off without being killed). Thanks for all the advice so far /gurpsgen/

There were more and less standard ships. By the mid 17th century larger ships were very complicated and things like displacement and stability calculations weren't around, so it was more an art then a science. People would base new ships on previous ships that had proven effective.

The height of this was likely the 74 gun ship of the line. Pretty much the archetypal heavy warship of the age of sail, the basic French pattern was copied endlessly by the British, Dutch, Spanish Protagease and even Germans.

>Boats on boats
>Boatception.

Large ships were acutely the first items to be created from common plans.

I will do a short time skip of two weeks between last week's session and the next session and my players want their PCs to learn a new skill. All of the skills they wanted to learn are only one point skills. Even so, the 200 hours of learning seem a bit crushing, specially their character have 12+ IQ. Is there a optional rule for something like an IQ based roll to improve learning time?

Just don't use the 200 hour 'rule' and let them spend the points.

They don't have points. That's why they asked to used the two week time span to train something. Otherwise, ti would be wasted time that could have gone to improve something else.

There's some optional rules:

1) Ignore learning times and just allow them to expend character points to improve, assuming they'd picked up the skills on the job.

This is simple, and absolutely minimized bookkeeping. All you have to do is check their sheets to make sure they have the right point totals.

2) Allow them to spend money or a favor or something to get a good trainer that reduces the training time required.

3) Hose-rule that they can intensively train 100 hours a week for a short time, but end up with some fatigue damage and can't keep it up for long.

If you don't have any ADD/Distractable/Lazy flaw shouldn't you be able to put in a 100 hour week as long as you can get food delivered and can sleep where you work? That's 9 hours a day off.

Refer to I'm letting them use points, bu currently, they don't have any, and they wanted to spend this time in learning something, instead of letting a two-week time lapse wasted

Two weeks is just enough to get 1 point. That can be important for a vital skill you don't want to default on. Beyond that, it's just not enough time.

Yes, I actually did look at them. They look much more over the top than ToB ones. Still, their conversion is planned, but doesn't have a high priority.

In the meantime, have shadow magic as Sorcery.

Take the printed stats for ships (Basic and Low-Tech mostly, maybe a few others here and there). Tweak them slightly if needed (this is the sailing ship Justice, the fastest ship EVAR!). Call it done and get back to playing.

I wonder what the people named on this cover actually think of it.
>Does it say we're the bad guys?
>What's even this, bamboo, asparagus? Why?

To whomever said the Detect Lies skill is affected by how well you can spot your target...no, it isn't.

Here are the modifiers listed under the Skill entry in GURPS Characters ->

"Modifiers: +1 for Sensitive or +3 for
Empathy (p. 51), or -3 for Low
Empathy (p. 142); +4 if your subject is
Easy to Read (p. 134). If the subject is
of a different species, the GM may
assess a penalty – see Physiology
Modifiers (p. 181)."

There's nothing about lighting conditions. You might have been thinking of the Body Language Skill (which IS affected by poor lighting/masks/voluminous clothing/etc).

How could I build a character like Rayman? Disembodied hands and feet that are still attached to his body through an invisible bond, specifically, the rest of his abilities aren't really what I'm looking for, but just the hands/feet part

Well, that's a clear advantage for Detect Lies then. It works just as well on the phone as it dose in person.

Body Language is still better for most characters, but there's more reason to bother with Detect Lies.

He basically still *has* arms right? The intangible tether has a fixed length?

Or can his hands and feet be like a football fields length away from his body?

I'm inclined to say you could largely leave it as is and build a regular character, and arms and legs just couldn't be called shotted (a minor advantage).

How do I do 'boss monsters', /gurspgen/? I specifically want to run a campaign around hunting colossi, but I don't want it to be a fight against a giant sack of HP.
What sort of interesting, tactical decisions can I try to incorporate to make the fight less "Is it still up? I attack."?

It only has few weak spots where their attacks will cause serious injury. Make sure to mention that most giants will be like this. Shadow of Collosus did it right. Treat them more like a set of challenges to reach the weakspot than a fight, perhaps?

The arms are completely intangible and they do have a fixed length unless you count when he fires his fist but I don't really care for that bit yet. It would also be immune to large area attacks and other things that could damage all body parts, though. Perhaps a portion of his body is insubstantial, but I'm not sure how you'd stat that.

A professional human (or *insert species-of-choice here*) lie-detector would do well to invest in both Skills.

Is there anything (aside from the ones mentioned in the Skills) that can stop you from applying both Skills to see if someone is lying? Couldn't you just roll both against their one roll?

Hey, I've a question - I know some of the GURPS books are crazy good reference material, but could you guys point me to the ones that are best and/or most interesting and entertaining? I know the hacking one is ridiculously researched, and that tactical ops is great too, but which ones as well? Disregarding mechanics entirely, I just want some cool and informative reading material, preferrably real world related.

forgot to mention that I'm also lookign for general inspiration from them, so the ones that present the setting material well are good to go, too

Fantasy and Space give good overviews of fantasy, and sci-fi settings respectively.

Of particular interest is that Fantasy talks about different "eras" of fantasy - the distinction between Bronze Age heroic fantasy with city-states, vast unknown continents and active, interfering gods; and the more D&D-esque sword & sorcery fantasy with gems and gold flowing like water and magic ruins hidden beneath every town. It talks about setting assumptions and rules and checks needed to maintain the feel you want. If you want a setting more believable than D&D, it talks about the effects of magic on society, especially warfare (traditional castles are no good against gryphon cavalry or fireballs raining from above), but also the small-scale, such as how it affects farmers' crop yields.

Space talks about the merits of interplanetary and interstellar sci-fi, the effects of faster-than-light travel and communications (and what happens if one exists but the other doesn't, or if one is much faster than the other) as well as how to handle your unobtainium, especially if it's sine qua non of one of your core technologies (e.g. requiring exotic matter mined from neutron stars for warp drives). It tries to make an attempt at talking about how polities and nation-states might take shape or change over interstellar distances, but a whole lot of that is conjecture.

>preferrably real world related

Oops, didn't read that. Try Technomancer, which is 3e, for a cool take on what would happen if the atomic bomb unleashed magic into the world. Monster Hunters is a kind of monster-of-the-week modern supernatural thing, with an air kind of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural, though it tends more towards mechanics than setting I think. It does have stuff to say on alien infiltration/abduction settings for XCOM-style stuff in the Applied Xenology book. A lot of the Pyramids have small setting examples in them, so check some of the issues who have themes for what you want.

Is there a Logistics skill somewhere? i can't find it anywhere and google doesn't help me.

What would the Logistics skill cover? I'd say it is likely a mix of skills, probably including Acounting and Administration among others.

"what goes where, and when", making sure the right things are on the right place, is that under administration?

hm. So, if I may, basically if i want to get inspiration in a particular field, all I should do is to just get whatever sounds like it? Like the investigation book for investigations, etc? Are all of those well written?

It may be that way. Its entry is relatively short and not particularly descriptive after all. Administration is about running a large organisation and doesn't day much else. It likely included Logistics as a part.

I finally received my second-hand set of GURPS 4e books today.

Managed to get my hands on Basic Set: Characters x2 (one undamaged, one with loose pages), Basic Set: Campaigns, Banestorm, Fantasy, Magic, and the GM screen plus GURPS Lite. It cost me 50 yuropbux, or about 55 dollars.

Was that a fair price, in hindsight?

I bought my Basic Set new and it cost me about 50 euro. I think you got plenty for what you paid.

It would probably be Professional Skill (Logistics). Accounting, Administration, etc. are (in rules terms) specialisations of the same skill for different professions - Professional Skill is there as a placeholder for anything they didn't specifically cover.
You might also like to have a look in the Spaceships book about Traders and whatnot, whatever it's called - it's got rules for speculative trade in there, so it's probably got something that covers what you want.

I'm being a bit nitpicky, but I think Expert Skill (Logistics) would be better. Professional Skill is IQ/A and meant to simulate some day-job skill not covered by other skills, such as being a barber, bartender, florist, or game designer. Expert Skill, on the other hand, is IQ/H and meant to be "cross-disciplinary knowledge," which I think fits logistics better seeing that, as you said, it covers aspects of Administration (are things running smoothly?), Accounting (are things running efficiently/without much loss?), and even Strategy in some cases (can we logistically support these troops over here?), among others without necessarily requiring *all* aspects of the listed skills.

I've read and reread my copy of Swashbucklers so many times that the binding is falling apart. It's definitely one of my favorite books.

Thats a great deal
I'm in Canada, and our conversion rate to U$D fucked us for years. Each of my copies of those books cost me about 40$ a pop. Fuck your luck.

SO, the healer is getting his work made for him; the party got fried by a witch with black lightning last session. She managed to fry one dwarf nearly dead, and toasted the other's arm nearly clean off! A few failed HT rolls later (and I mean, super failed. 16's all over on the dice) and now he has a crippled left arm! Thank god for the healer advantage; First dwarf is on his feet within a few minutes, but a few failed rolls by the healer means the second one with a bacon arm is out of luck for the moment.

Thank god retries are only penalized in a one-day period :P

Any of your parties receive hilarious terrible injuries? (do not google 'electrical burns' by the by)

I haven't ever played GURPS before and I'm looking for a new system to try out, could somebody outline some of the pros and cons of GURPS?

>You can make whatever you want for any goddamn campaign setting ever
-You have to know what you want, and aim for it. Very GM heavy on the game work there
>Which is not to say theres too much work, as theres tons of supplements for every setting
-Some of which kinda suck in areas (ultratech, no vehicles book yet)
>But the setting books themselves are amazingly well written and researched. the design team is amazing

Long and short, theres a lot to gurps, like LEGO. If you like building stuff, and making things from the ground up, then its for you.

Click it
It is a .PDF

Pros: if you like customizing things, GURPS is built for that. It's got systems for creating spells and powers with a simulacrum of balance, multiple ways to skin the same cat so you can choose the one that's appropriate for your play style.
Eg: hiking can be done by simply rolling dice against a hiking skill, or by doing some in depth calculations of terrain, fatigue, weather, leadership capability, survival skill, and navigation.
Cons:
If you don't want to use one of the established lines that do a lot of the work for you in establishing which rules are appropriate (eg, action, after the end [post apocalypse], dungeon fantasy [sword and sorcery dungeon crawls], or monster hunters [modern day Buffy the vampire slayer like stuff]) it might take a while to spin up enough system mastery to put together your setting of choice.

>spin up enough system mastery
rule of thumb when youre just setting things up with gurps? Pick a number, have them roll 3d6, make a note and move on
then, after the game, do a bit of reading up on the thing that caught you up, and learn. Its how I found my blindspots.

thanks anons

Much obliged

Welp, tried making a small urban SWAT mech using 3e Mecha, using pec related as inspiration; holy shit I can see why the old method was unpopular. I realized I could have afforded to make a set of arms much stronger five steps ago, but by then it was already too much work to go back and fix it, so now the arms are incredibly tiny in comparison to about everything else about the mech.

None of it was *hard* by any stretch, but it was tedious even with the tables and a calculator. An automated spreadsheet would do wonders.

Addendum: Having finished it, the arms are hilariously spindly; going by the book, even the heavier ST40 arms have Reach 0. Without a spreadsheet to automate the process though, I really don't feel like trying it again despite me understanding the system better and probably being able to get something closer to what I wanted this time around.

Using Vehicles 3e or the Mecha rules?
Because for Vehicles, there's the GVB program. It's great.

I glanced through Vehicles and was having trouble finding mech-related things, so I used Mecha instead; from what I can tell it's the same system and Mecha just streamlined the options to legs, arms, and other giant robot things instead of types of wheels, treads, propellers, and other things you would want for normal vehicles but not mechs.

>3e
Oh gods the pain
My favorite game Ive run in recent memory was where the party made street urchins and derilicts with 25/-50, and started with -1 wealth built in. They get 'recruited' by the local police, rounded up, and shuffled off to work off their debts.
They get handed to an eccentric man with a weird European accent, named Nicola Tesla.

He shoves them into strange canvas and brass pressure suits, then into big robot mecha.

And thus began the craziest mecha game I ever ran; The Diesel-Jet Mecha of Nicola Tesla, Against the World!

That beign said, I'll look at GVB when I get home, thanks for the suggestion!

Note for the anons who were looking for the alternate version of the OP PDF: this is it.

Yeah, 3e is pants. I've tried working with it too, but it's like, HOW am I supposed to imagine what base stats I need for my mecha? Because that's what I have to decide first of all, but the ramifications of my shitty decision will force me to scrap the project at the end and start over again.

Stop assuming I'm an actual vehicle engineer 3e Mecha.

Is anyone here hosting a game in need of players? I don't want to be "forever GM" anymore ;___;

It's a good thing you have a healer. I'm in a game with only a doctor that goes by the nickname "the butcher" where the new guy got his arm broken in the very first scene he was introduced.

He's been down one arm for weeks while it heals. It's not helped by the giant berserker woman in the group keeps beating him whenever she gets bored. (She's also the one that broke his arm in the first place)

Hahaha
Party DYNAMICS

Pyramid #51 has a simplified mecha design system that might be worth your time.

Oh my god I love this article

I'm also a fan. That's why I mentioned it. :)

You know it seems a little odd to me that particle beams don't have radiation effects at all.

Feel free to add the RAD modifier! I'm sure they only cut it for bookkeeping/scope

Oh yeah I'm very aware of that and I love that article too; I'd use it if it wasn't TL 10 and went lower than SM+3 (this is for a cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk game and even SM+3 is pushing it in terms of practical size).

Speaking of crippling traumas, can I use disadvantages to make RPM spells cheaper? E.g. grant Regrowth/Regeneration but with downside of stun/paralysis/etc. Like putting character into healing cocoon.

Thanks. I didn't notice the differing filesize.

Saved.

How hard would it be to expand that article to handle smaller mecha? (I've done a lot of homebrewing for other games, but I'm not familiar enough with GURPS to homebrew for it yet.)

Nope, and they actually add energy. However, if your drawback makes sense, it *could* (depending on the GM) drop it from a Greater effect to a Lesser one. My GM let me do that a couple times, like when I added a large amount of Arm ST (One arm) but the spell caused Severe Pain for like five minutes afterward as the bones and muscles returned to their natural state. Like most things with RPM, it's a case-by-case basis requiring significant GM oversight.

I suppose I could, though it'd mostly be guesswork for me. Still, I'll give it a shot and post my results (if any) here.

Well hey now, that's mechanical the size of a car, so that suits with Ghost in the Shell or Appleseed.
Smaller dudes sm 0 to 2 fit for cyborg rules; at that point you might as well just make pcs. Or someone in ultratech armor

>Size of a car
Jeez, yeah I didn't think about it that way, I guess you're right; SM+3 is normally over 20 feet tall/long, but I forgot about the +1/+2 to SM for boxy shape, so I guess those three-to-five-yard tall suits do still count as SM+3 because of how wide/bulky they are. Still need to bump down the TL level, but that should be easy enough. Thanks user!

This did initially start as an exercise for replacing/expanding the ultratech powered armor list, though. There is a "battlesuit" option in 3e Mecha, maybe it'll be simpler? I mean, it probably won't be, but a man can dream, can't he?

What is the big issue with Ultra tech, anyways?

I've seen you guys mention you don't like it a couple times, and I'm curious why.

It was not nearly as well researched nor as generic as it should have been. It also (due to being released several years earlier) doesn't balance against High-Tech (TL8 weapons have more options, often better damage and capacity, and are cheaper than TL9 or 10; neither armor nor gadgets compare favorably either).

>Still need to bump down the TL level,
When doubt, bloat the prices or make it heavier. God forbid, cut DR or ST by 0.75

Best thing ever though is an ETC version of a high tech rifle.

Polish antitank rifle with APHCDS rounds? You could kill a building!