GURPS General - /gurpsgen/

not that user but i couldn't find anything, pehaps i'm just googling the wrong words.

If not GURPS, then what? If there's one thing even the haters agree on, it's that GURPS is ideal for modern oper8R games.

After The End covers post-apoc, but many of the issues come up during an apocalpse, too.

OK, I'll open my kimono a bit. My TL11 game is the end-state of a TL8 apocalpse where alien tech triggers chaos and awesomeness. GURPS is perfect because it lets me run a straight-up modern game and then spring the new TL on them unawares.

Why not tell us more about the game you want to run and we'll make suggestions?

Cyberpunk, space opera, modern era stuff. All kinds of genres and tones. Fun times.
I've actually never played a TL4 game. Closest I got was TL3. It was fantasy though, not historical.
I've been meaning to run TL2 fantasy, we'll see.

user didn't say he wanted operators operating operatingly. Maybe he wants big damn heroes battling hordes of mutants, saving the unmutated girl. Or nobodies trying to fight off or delay a horrifying apocalypse.

Well then let's see what game he wants to play. I'm all for helping.

So I looked at the Mega in the PDF and it looks like there are a lot of dupes. Without actually checking I'm not sure - are these dupes or is there a difference? They all seem to be the same size and same filename in the same folder.

Some guy a few days ago said he'd add in all his books, probably that.

if i have something like a Bill i can attack someone from behide an ally, right?

pseudoboo.blogspot.com/2016/09/ritual-path-magic-cheat-sheet.html

I think I have the final one page cheat sheet, no weird border glitches, required boilerplate texts, and numbers are all lined up correctly.

Sorry, had to do some real life stuff.

The original draft I had written up (and run past my semi-regular group, they approved but knew I wasn't ready) was about a group of emergency responders and other semi-prepared-but-not-military people surviving and fighting back in a Biblical-esque apocalypse. The war between heaven and hell spills over into Earth as hell's forces inhabit the dead, the angelic and demonic hosts work behind the scenes while regular ol' humans get caught in the crossfire.

Could GURPS do it? Sure. Is it way above the complexity level I'm looking for, especially with my players (whose high end of "I can understand the mechanics" is Dark Heresy with reminders)? Absolutely.

I am guilty of enjoying tl4 fantasy, but I've also run
TL3 zero fantasy + intrigue
TL5 Stargate 1888 high adventure
TL6 Weird war 2
TL7+ post apocalypse retroviruses mad max
TL8 cthulu time
TL8 xmen on pcp
TL8 ghostbusters
TL9 ghostbusters
TL9 space ADVENTURE!
TL10 operators operating operationally (in cybershells)

Yes. Melee does not receive a penalty for 'interposing characters' unless they're blocking your reach completely somehow. You're free to shank the guy behind someone else, assuming you can get to his hit locations.

Personally, if you wanted to do a campaign like this, GURPS would be my first pick. I suppose WoD would work, too, if your players were already familiar with it.

With GURPS, the trick is that the GM does most of the work before the campaign starts. That's its biggest strength (it can be anything) and its biggest weakness (GMs hate all that prep work and often try to wing it or push it down to their players).

Unless you're switching on high-detail rules like hit locations, or expect your players to come up with their own powers using the Basic Set, Powers, and other supplements, then you can keep the rules dead simple.

(The other path to temptation here is that GURPS gives you the ability to create hyper-detailed rules of your own via complex powers. Whereas the only abilities you have in most games at all are the simple ones. Create a simple power in GURPS and it's usually as or more straightforward than it would be in another system. Just because you COULD get tricky doesn't mean you SHOULD.)

I do suggest one optional rule: Abstract Range (from the Action series). It's derived from the SSR table but liberates you from it in favor of simple bands.

I pull abstract range for anything and everything. Not just GURPS.

The big issue with running it is planning out the campaign itself, honestly, not just the system. I don't know where to properly take it. But the group already looked at character generation and checked out once, so...

What magic system do you prefer?

Is it based on advantages or skills?

I'm working on a homebrew based on GURPS and D&D and I'm deciding between focusing more on Advantages or Skills for magic powers.

Basically which is better?

The Turn Undead spell as a 5 point merit that uses the Theology IQ skill?
Or Turn Undead spell as an IQ/Hard skill itself?

I'm open to other suggestions.

>abstract range
I've never understood the need for this, playing on a battlemat, or online on Roll20. The linear measurement is right there available, and the chart is right there too. Bam. Done. Just ducking look it up.

I suppose abstract works best for more narrative scenes. Less minutiae during quick resolution and such.

Powers and magic as advantages/abilities, but drop the coupled skills. Unless you're cheapening the ability cost by making it fail sometimes dependant on a roll, and then you should use anything other than an improvable skill

We never use a battlemat. Abstract range is a lot better when all distances becomes "roughly approximately"

I prefer to not use a map because it encourages players away from the social/story elements and towards a combat/dungeon crawling mentality.

Those kinds of games are fun, too, don't get me wrong, but the more narrative games are rare and precious and draw players more in my experience.

Abstract range lets you play around a fireplace in a darkened room. It also encourages players to be less obsessed with fiddling with every possible bonus/penalty modifier.

Like mentioned, I never touch battlemats. Slows things down way too much in my experience. Just ballpark it, have a large band of ranges.

I also play over IRC (now Discord), so battlemats aren't a possibility in the first place.

It's nice, but whether the GM tells you "he's 40 yards away" or you measure it yourself, tables still have to be checked.
I just go with this, desu. Minus the actual numbers.

what are those 3 meals? 3k calories? inst that too much for that little wheight?

And unless you're running a dungeon crawl and are on the map all the time, the problem of initial ranges will always be at least a little arbitrary.

This is the best non-Basic Set rule in the game.

So who's contributed yet? And how much?

I'm going for the DM screen, the box set, and the PDFs.

Just the basic $50.

The rest is neat, but I'm in the UK, so I'm looking at a +$65 cost on top for shipping, which is a bit unpleasant for my poor graduate bank account.

To be honest, I'm not even the biggest DF fan, but I want to support SJGames here.

...aaagh fuck it, I'll go for the screen as well. Could be pretty useful for other campaigns anyway.

There's about 4000 calories per pound of pemmican, fat or oil. This means if you want to hit 2000-3000 you could, in a 1.5 pound daily ration, pack in half a pound of pemmican and have a pound of whatever you'd like.

If you prefer though, there's also 'travel rations' listed in Basic Set by Living Standard that are 14 pounds per week.

I've never played Dark Heresy, but GURPS is dead simple for the PLAYERS. You'll have to do quite a bit of leg work.

GURPS was my first ever system. I was ~13 or so, and I ran it for my 9 and 7 year old brothers. The basic mechanic is "roll 3D6 vs. your skill". That's it. Dead simple, and fun.

I will say that you'll probably have to help them with character creation, which is the only complex thing that players need to worry about.

try the Combat Writ Large pyramid article.

This week on Grimwyld it was a short session while our GM has to plan for house hunting. We also had a few people out.

Those that weren't around to play were left in the front room of the grim, mysterious building we'd entered by marking a rune on the door with dwarf blood along with the horses. With those guards it was time to go deeper inside.

This ran into the first problem: Stygian darkness. While elves and giant beastmen can see pretty well in low light they can't see shit in -10 Full On Fucking Dark, the preferred conditions for evil dwarves that built the place. Our dwarf gunner patiently waited while the big folk figured out some way to make a light.

The GM let us quickly rig a torch and advance into the dark.

Every detail we saw as we went deeper heightened the oppressive atmosphere of exploring a dark tomb. Another seal that demanded something to open was found, but we didn't try it yet because we weren't sure what it would open and it seemed to want something different from the dwarf blood we'd used to unlock the last one. A mold-filled room held a fresh fetid corpse being gnawed by rat-sized beetles that scattered and avoided the light. Everyone agreed that was full of NOPE and not to go in there.

It was while working on a portcullis that led deeper into the dark place that shit stirred behind us in the mold room. Huge bugs rushed out and everyone was real on edge at the idea those things were going to swarm us, but they scattered and out walked the Elf Vampire we'd thought we had killed.

That was the end of it. I liked the atmosphere here. It felt closed in, dangerous and mysterious.

>dark dungeon exploration
>full of NOPE monsters
>AND recurring npc's!
youtu.be/wlMwc1c0HRQ

What is the right swing damage for a ST 15 Weapon Master with a Greatsword?

2d+1 base, + 3 for the sword, +4 for weapon master = 2d+8?

Do you simplify that to 4d+1?

Not using a battlemap is fucking terrible to play in. It's like playing in a featureless vast plain of nothingness. Quite often there's no strategical manuevering and combat just becomes back and forth attacking.

What are you talking about? You can have terrain and stuff without keeping track of everything's exact location.

How do you have terrain if no one can see where it is?

Same as you can have PCs and NPC.

If your skill is at DX+2, yes, it will be +4 damage.
>Do you simplify that to 4d+1?
Yes, although it's optional.

I find that the issue isn't that going mapless is playing on a featureless plain, it's remembering what the battlefield looks like... which turns it into a featureless plain, no matter how good you are at description. You can't expect me to keep all of GURPS' combat options and rules in my head AND all of the features of the battlefield, from terrain to number of enemies to relative distance to my fellow PCs.

IME, a battlemap is an instant improvement for any combat, even if you don't use full-on tactical combat with facing and everything else. Just being able to see where everything is is a gigantic help, and it feels less like a vague mess where things happen just because.

On a different topic, I'm creating a race of sentient undead inspired by legos. They have total unhealing, but their bodies can be maintained/repaired/modified with surgery, using anything (living/dead flesh, prosthetics, plants, etc.), and it'll be the primary method of healing for them. Naturally, many of them will have at least some strange additions. I'm at a bit of a loss on how to handle this. Allow surgery to be used to heal HP like physician/first aid? Give them surgery-based Healing? Or maybe surgery-based Injury Tolerance (Independent Body Parts, Reattachement Only)? Surgery-based modular abilities/morph, to show their ability to be universal recipients of practically anything?

Can anyone explain the Malediction modifier to me? I can't figure out how much it's supposed to cost. I just want to turn an Innate Attack into a magical blast.

>magical blast
Gonna need at least some vague bullet points user

Male diction changes an attack from resolving with an attack roll, to(basically) resolving if the user succeeds on an opposed save(default:ht)

So instead of "I roll innate attack and throw a fireball" it's "I drop my hate-fire on them, and beat my roll by 3. Do they resist? "

If you wanna blast a buncha guys, add area effect or cone etc.
For other stuff like pain or hallucinations, add symptoms.
Get it?

Second to last paragraph of Malediction has the cost modifiers.

>magical blast
What do you mean by this? A D&D fireball is just a burning innate attack with area effect slapped on it. It's not a malediction.

I'd just kitbash a new rule for just them, with..

Can Be Repaired with: Surgery, Carpentry, Sculptor at a rate of 1 HP every half hour, crippled areas can be replaced if a replacement part is available in a half hour. Takes a penalty to use on yourself equal to HP lost. (10 point advantage)

Use Surgery, Carpentry or Sculptor to craft replacement parts for installation.

Maybe give them Modular Abilities too, to let them get new and interesting powers from the parts installed.

It made feel like those parts in Dragon's Dogma where you go into creepy as fuck places under the earth and there are rape happy ogres and grabby zombies around any corner. I kept expecting things to go Very Bad.

I am picking up this game for some Sword & Sorcery schlock, and nothing can stop me from doing so. I am curious however to hear how it handles magical transportation compared to other systems. One thing that really irritated me about D&D 3.5 was that for a lot of the 1-20 scale everyone would just wind walk, greater teleport, and ant carry+overland flight everywhere. I want to have a game where people actually hike through the woods, sleep under the stars, scale insurmountable mountains and actually go on an adventure when moving from point A to B. Does a game of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy typically go that way? If not, what methods are typically used for transportation?

>GURPS Dungeon Fantasy
If you're after S&S, Basic Set + Conan might be a better starting point.

I was afraid of having to just make up rules, but I suppose some things deserve it.

On second thought, actually, I could nick the rules from B484 on repairs to objects, which is pretty close to your ideas. 1HP*MoS on Surgery, Carpentry, Artist (Sculptor), etc. if they're above 0HP, crippled limbs need parts/complete replacement and roll whichever skill at -2, continue until it's at positive HP, etc.

I think Modular Abilities is the only way to do the "cool upgrades" from replacement parts and keep my sanity. Shouldn't be too expensive with all of the modifiers I'll be throwing on it. Thanks for the help.

Which one is better. GURPS Character Sheet or GURPS Character Assistant?

How do I get a horse in GURPS? Do I have to get an Ally or something?

Depends on what you want. I like GCS, but GCA has caught my eye since it can more easily integrate alternate rules (especially ones that mess with math). I just hate that it looks and feels like shareware from 1995, and I'm not fond of its character sheet output.

'Magical methods of transportation are banned in this game' is all you really need to say, and 'I don't want you to have them' is all the reasons your players need. Because GURPS wants you to have the exact game you want, it's almost explicitly said (and maybe it actually is, I don't remember), that you can remove any of it's parts and it will work all the same, and that, to be able to be run in a sane and enjoyable manner to the GM, a firm and adamant No is his right. The GURPS GM will eventually run into the player who mistakes 'you can use it to run anything' for 'you can play anything', and presents you his cyborg abomination for use in your TL/3 east Asia campaign... this analogue to the Rule Zero is the only thing that can save the GM in such a situation.

Yeah, I figured that I would be able to just ban them. I was just wondering which spells I would be looking at.

There's no consensus, though I think there is a slight preference for GCS over GCA around here. Either works fine, though, for most players.

In Dungeon Fantasy unless the GM introduces an artifact that allows for easy movement (like a flying ship, magic carpet, 1978 Police Interceptor Ford) then most travel is going to involve the old fashioned way of packing equipment, supplies and people and walking there.

A character can get magic that lets them move around more easily but it's a pretty big investment. You will pretty much never see people teleportation around.

If it's your Loyal and Trusted Steed, it's an ally, if it's just a replaceable horse you bought last week, just buy it with cash.

There's a few options, depending on your game.

If you want to spend $2000, you can just buy one. Taking a horse as an ally would be a good option if you want an especially powerful horse you have a strong rapport with, but your GM might not like the idea.

The last option is in settings where horse ownership is common among wealthy people you can own one as part of your household/assumed stuff if you have Wealth/Stats +1 or better and reserve 4/5ths of your starting wealth to represent your household. (An option for established characters).

>Loyal and trusted

Well, you could also take it with an appearance roll of 9+, so half the time when you whistle for it it doesn't show up.

And take it as a Enemy, so sometimes when it dose show up it is super pissed off and just wants to kick the shit out of you.

Many of the movement and gate spells. Cloud Vaulting and clever use of one of the shape terrain spells allowed my group to bypass a huge tract of land, for example. Alternatively, you could look into some of the other magic systems, although the standard Magic is so straightforward (and natively supported by DF) that it's probably better to just look at your player's list of spells and remove whatever seems out of place. As a rule, you should do this for all characters, GURPS chargen, even heavily templated like in DF, can have a lot of moving pieces, mistakes, and 'mistakes'. If it's total removal of all magical form of personal displacement, Teleportation and it's blocking spell Blink would be banned as well, although Blink is only short range I believe. You can wholesale remove entire colleges but in the context of dungeon delving, the removal of some key defensive spells like the arrow blocking ones could axe a wizard pretty bad. In the end though, it would be difficult to break the system too badly, and if you overdo it, I'm sure you can make it up to your players in some way or another.

An alternative to appearance rolls is loyalty rolls. Roll vs. the Appearance score to see if they'll obey you. Introduced in... DF15, I believe? I can't recall exactly where. I love that alternative rule, however, and it's made modern allies much more believable, since it's really easy to get ahold of people through modern technology.

Post your current character, /gurpsgen/.

What is the carrying capacity/encumbrance limit of a leather jacket?

Tech Level is Eight, if it matters.

Everything in this post is in reference to the Basic magic system; it's the one everyone's introduced to first, the one that's least "build from the ground up," and the system used in Dungeon Fantasy.

Magic helps but does not replace traditional transportation IIRC. I think that duration for spells like flight tend to be measured in minutes, meaning it's really not worth using for an entire trip and certainly not worth it to grant your entire party flight. There's also the issue of fatigue costs in that many spells call for not-insignificant FP expenditure.

In Dungeon Fantasy, spells with teleportation effects are outright banned as they circumvent adventures and kill tension 90% of the time (though villains have access to them in case they need a quick escape). Also worht noting that *all* DF templates, even the spindly wizard, sport ST, DX, and HT levels to be viable in most adventuring situations, making climbing and hiking possible.

I don't have my books on me, though, so all the above is pulled from memory; durations may be longer.

Properly tailored I'd allow it to act as a combo gadget with Load Bearing Gear for 20 pounds of capacity.

My Grimwyld character. My only regrets would be an occasional wish I'd gone for polearms or two handed sword and the name being too close to the kingdom we work for.

I keep starting characters and then stopping them before I get any farther than basic stats and a couple advantages because I have no campaign

>Not completing a character sheet only to file it away with the other three-dozen fully-fleshed-out characters that will never see the light of day because you don't have a group, each with their own motivations, flaws, and histories.
H...how does it f-feel to be such a p-pleb amirite?

That's alright, user! Just do it for fun. Making characters is fun.

Right?

I have a folder of a solid... probably 10-15 sheets that I'll never use. I enjoyed it, but I've kind of burnt myself out on building without a focus.

May have an upcoming TL8 apocalypse campaign to play in, though. Teaching the GM how to GURPS.

The longer I stare at this picture the harder for me to understand what the fuck artist was thinking.

Well, you may switch to bastard sword (with falchion blade) for little more damage.

Where do the various point "level bands" fall? What point level separates a regular guy from an everyman protagonist, street level heroes from superheroes, etc? Asking to help a friend set up his campaign.

See Power Level in Basic Set p. 487

Thanks. Haven't touched the books much in a while, looked at characters but not campaigns.

See extreme dismemberment on MA136. Then apply it to multiple people, except you need to roll to hit again.
I'd say it can continue for as long as there is excess damage (You subtract the amount of damage dealt in the previous strikes), but it should also be limited to a certain arc in front of the character, of course.

There's also cleaving strikes in DF11, p10. But I don't have that book.

You can also treat a group of enemies as a swarm. Dealing oodles of damage against a swarm would represent taking out multiple does in a single strike.

I'm happy with damage, it's mostly aesthetics and reach.. though I love smashing things with that huge shield.

Superheroes is a bit complicated. There's marvel-style "street level" superheroes that would fit neatly into 200 to 250 points, or dirty, grimey things like Netflicks Daredevil you could fit into 150 point levels, though it wouldn't be easy.

The only really practical long-distance travel spells not banned by default in Dungeon Fantasy are Cloud Vaulting and Flying Carpet. Neither of them are prerequisites for other spells, so you should be able to ban them with no problems.

The other common method of flying around is to get a creature to carry you. Fortunately, only one of the standard allies or summonable entities available in DF is capable of carrying a typical adventurer and flying; the Demon. I think it's fair enough to simply ban your PCs from summoning demons, but if you don't want to do that it's simple to change the template so that they can't fly or introduce serious complications for anyone dealing with infernal powers as a regular thing. In any event, demons are difficult to summon (and expensive to buy as allies), tricky to control and come with some built-in limitations (notably, pissing off most gods and reasonable people).

Can someone post a link of the trove also would I get problems if I took some templates from the 3rd edition for my 4th edition games?

Am I getting it wrong or do unbalanced weapons (such as axes, etc) suck, especially at higher strengths where the +1 or whatever damage they have over swords is a drop in the bucket?

Am I missing something?

Welp, just realised that unbalanced doesn't mean unready, but still.

Not really. Unbalanced weapons almost always have a VERY low cost for their damage output, meaning you can stack on a lot of quality modifiers without breaking the bank. Furthermore, if you look at PKitty's rules for heavier weapons or Low-Tech Companion 2's rules for bigger weapons, you can scale weapons to huge STs; that +1 or +2 an axe or mace enjoys over a sword can be scaled up to +3 to +6 or so, and again the generally low cost of such a weapon means that it's cheap to make big ones.

They are also normally paired with shields, making their lack of a party less of an issue, and many have access to options swords lack like sw imp or the hook technique.

Also you can avoid the lack of parry by taking a minor penalty to your damage and doing a defensive attack, so if you're in a situation where you really need to have a parry available it's not that much of an issue.

+1 damage is almost never "a drop in the bucket." HP values rarely stray too far away from 10-12 unless you're talking about giant monsters and vehicles, so that +1 damage normally equates to taking off an extra 8-10% of the target's HP. It can also make the difference between penetrating DR and not, or the diference between a solid blow and a truly fight-ending Major Wound or Crippling Injury.

>Can someone post a link of the trove?
Yes. They already did. In the OP.

>would I get problems if I took some templates from the 3rd edition for my 4th edition games?

Yes, unless you converted them. Many traits changed their points value between editions and some of them were replaced by different ones, work differently, etc.

For the same price as a good sword you can generally get a fine axe, so it's more like +2 damage. However, not getting a parry is a big deal, so most fighters will go for swords or spears given the choice.

Axes work well if:

You aren't planning to use active defences (e.g. you are a berserker or wear enough armour that you can afford to go all-out most of the time).
You are a two-weapon fighter and the second weapon is used to parry (typically either a balanced weapon used with axe/mace like the hatchet or a main-gauche).
You rely on blocks for your defence. This obviously requires a shield and usually works best for low skill fighters who need the DB and wouldn't be able to do multiple parries anyway.
You rely on dodging for your defence. Typical only seen on high-powered characters.
You rely on reach to keep yourself safe. This is mostly useful for polearm fighters.

Consider that there's no Throwing (Swords) skill.

Likewise, consider the pick and warhammer from Low-Tech. They are both swing impaling and reduce chink penalties by -2, each at a fraction of the cost with better damage/wounding modifier than an estoc, and not some rinky-dink knife that'll break if it so much as looks at a proper sword. Even using defensive attacks, picks (and definitely warhammers) keep up with an estoc for damage. Not to mention both can get stuck, which means an ST roll/QC for free damage. Yes, please.

I'm still waiting for someone to play a pc with those weapons. I keep getting sword board tanks and gunners though. :/

OP only posted some kickstarter link though.
Also if I wanted to convert 3e to 4e how would I go about that ?

You're retarded.
Look at the op 'image'

>You rely on dodging for your defence. Typical only seen on high-powered characters.
A one-handed weapon allows the use of a shield, which benefits Dodge as well. A DB 2 shield gives a bog-standard character Dodge 10 before any retreat bonuses, and a DB 3 shield boosts it up to 11 (the penalty for large shields can be ignored with a perk that any serious shield fighter will have regardless of powerlevel).

Oh right thanks

Pick/Morningstar & Board are two of my favorite loadouts for low-tech characters. Cheap, effective, reliable, with plenty of cash left over for a nice set of armor, even at TL2.

I've never been big on swords. Flails, though? I love flails. Absolutely love them. Parry and block penalties? Outright negate fencing weapons (or, using A Matter of Inches, heavily penalizing them)? Being able to telegraphic to make up for your low skill level and strike at vital targets, while still imparting a penalty to defenses, or making it a wash? Yes, please.

I love polearms too, but I've never had the chance to be the halberdier in a party.

I've always wanted to do Flail and Shield.

Beat followed by a Counterattack Returning Strike looks like too much fun.

I just like having a spear and hiding behind meat sh-trusted party members.

>Not sporting a longspear and an actual large shield of bronze and oxhide
Disgusting.