GURPS General /gurpsgen/

>At least the muskets didn't blow up
All in due time, all in due time

RIP, Falkirk's player. Enjoy your full time employment! Still not sure where the GM is going with Falkirk's malady. I do know that I REALLY hope we don't have to fight him. With careful positioning Falkirk could do horrible damage to us even if he wasn't pumped full of evil magic.

Quick aside:

I feel like magic in Grimwyld is powerful but dangerous. Being sensitive to magic puts you in contact with forces much bigger then a human mind and risk getting wrecked. Spirits and daemons and forces your eyes can't see are everywhere and lots of them are very unfriendly.

>magic dust permeates her skin and she GETS PUMPED. RAW MAGIC IN HER VEINS.
Admit it. You're recreating Snowflame
comicvine.gamespot.com/snowflame/4005-73164/

Man you are not exaggerating. Hwany things have you met that weren't out to kill you and eat your soul?

The last one was.. uh.. A Minotaur beast-man.

That we shot, but healed. He provided vital information and we gave him some "Sorry we shot you" whisky. We are in the middle of a dark and ruined kingdom of bloodroot and monsters, so we aren't expecting many friendly encounters.

I am NOT.
YET, anyways.
But I get your point...

Hmmm

How would you assign a cost to a variation on Ritual Path Magic that uses different paths and effects? See the Summoning Ritual Path Magic variation in my PDF for example.

i'm not at home right now so can some user tell me if HT cover this?

youtube.com/watch?time_continue=399&v=UyBPaXbp7Qg

On a scale of DnD to Song of Swords, how realistic is melee combat in GURPS?

as much as you want it to be, thats the point about GURPS, you hand tailor the system for your game. Also SOS inst realistic at all

A lot of the elements in the fight in your gif have actual maneuvers or mechanics in GURPS, if not all.

Narrow hallways where you can knockback an enemy into a wall, and that prevent long weapons being used effectively
All-out attacks
Target chink in armor on neck with a stop-hit.
Wide swings that unready a weapon, requiring two turns to use.

>Also SOS inst realistic at all
Well I don't know shit about Early Modern combat, and since it marketed itself as being realistic...
Anyways, is there any way to make it like SOS, then?

Which book are those actions in. I only have BS, UT, Spaceships, and BT

SOS is fairly realistic but it's still got issues to resolve.

Knockback, Basic Set,
Consequences of being thrown to a wall, martial arts
attacking with the pommel, martial arts,
All-out attacks, everywhere
Targetting chinks, martial arts I think
The neck, basic set
Stop-hit, martial arts
Wide swings on heavy weapons requiring multiple turns, basic set.

Goddamn we got a Lord of Gets here.

All of them should be in basic set, except for stop-hits, which are in Martial Arts. I believe weapon length in narrow corridors is covered in Basic Set, as well. Read up on tactical combat and special combat situations.

Chinks are in basic set, specific chink locations could be in low-tech and martial arts.

GURPS melee combat is fairly realistic to begin with, but you can make it autistically realistic with the inclusion of harsh realism rules. I tend to throw in the bleeding rules box and call it a day, since that's plenty for my players.

Pretty much always 20-40 points in skills and techniques regardless of total points level.

20-40 points in disadvantages.

20-40% of your points in advantages.

Everything else in attributes.

>Lord of Gets
What?

It is *realistic*, it is deep and surely capable of being simulationist enough but its not that deep, you can kind of replicate a lot of real fighting styles with similar resultsexcept mordhau, but it is not THAT much deep, it isn't prepared to treat anything but combat well enough, god, even when doing that it fails sometimes, like most halfswording manouvers take way more than it should.

>is there any way to make it like SOS, then?
it is way deeper than SOS if you choose to, just start diving into martial arts and all the lowtech pyramids about combat. I'm a muh realism GM myself and i usually don't go deeper than the complete body hit location and combining techniques rules because shit becomes too much too quickly

this is a fucked up distribution desu

annon look at the numbers

Any comments about vehicles?

I need to stat out a special vehicle and I'm trying to delay it as much as possible.

Just eyeball it.
What's so weird about it you can't make it 80% from something preexisting?

>On a scale of DnD to Song of Swords, how realistic is melee combat in GURPS?
On a scale of DnD to Sword Path Glory, would be righter to say.

On a scale for totally unrealistic to extremely realistic, gurps would be on the exact spot before games start getting realistic.

Curious:

Mindlink would enable you to use the other person's mental skills with penalties?

How would I do this, if not?

It's made of food. Our wizard is a dick, and our magic system is robust.

How autistically detailed do you need your vehicle to be?

No more then you could do so by getting directions from someone. In most cases you'd just be able to give them a bonus on the skill, not use yours. A GM might let you use your skills by giving them utterly detailed instructions though.

I think mindlink would let the other person use his skills through you.

He's working through an medium though, so that would warrant a penalty.

I've been reading through Ritual Path Magic and it seems to me that the rules for tapping energy sources are rather fucked for an open-magic fantasy campaign.

Voluntary sacrifice lets you build up essentially unlimited energy really quickly if you have enough people willing to help you and Natural Energy is pretty shit for casting spells but allows any mage to go around permanently fucking up farmland basically for free.

A lesser create matter ritual seems able to make 50 tons of consumables that last a month for 25 energy. That energy can be gathered from a dozen volunteers in a few seconds and within the hour they should be ready to go again. That's enough food, water and fuel for a village of several hundred people for a few weeks, using less than 10% of the population working for three hours.

The Verdant Fecundity ritual cast over a 1,000 yard radius (649 acres) is 49 energy. That's two dozen people with an hour of recovery time to double crop yields for the village.

There are probably dozens of buffs a friendly mage could come up with easily and they don't have to be subtle either. Less than 100 people can fuel a ritual that gives everyone in their village 100 points of advantages and boosted attributes.

These scale up easily too. It only takes a few dozen more people providing FP sacrifice to feed and bless an entire country.

If you want to make a setting abundant, you really do have to think about the implications got on agriculture, communication, science and architecture. Which is fun, and makes for an internally consistent setting!

An unmentioned assumption that RPM does though is that most mages for whatever reason don't want to be noticed by the world at large and would rather use their magic for selfish, non-profitable reasons.

Also check out Dungeon Fantasy 19. Apparently they've tweaked RPM to make it more sword&sorcery friendly.

Yep, the basic rules are pretty generous for rituals if a ritualist can get a large number of people to trust them.*

For "fuck that" games, make different energy sources require advantages. collecting energy from willing people might require a 5 to 100 point advantage, while ripping energy out of the land might take a 5 point advantage that gives you a very negative reputation if you get caught using it.

*A hard thing in some settings, given the common folk won't know what the ritualist is casting. If it's a lie, they could be using the energy for something very bad.. so a large group will only feed a ritualist they trust.

Keep in mind if you go around being the Crop Blessing guy they will get dependent on you, anyone interested in fucking up your settlement would kill you first, and people would have to trust you a lot to join in the physically exhausting ritual to power you up.

You might be in a REALLY NICE cage.. but it's going to be a safe cage and they will make sure you never get lost or hurt or leave for another settlement that might pay better.

Another basic assumption is that magic is rare. Ritualist, especially powerful ones, just aren't common enough to utterly change the shape of the world. You can change that though, if you like.

>A hard thing in some settings, given the common folk won't know what the ritualist is casting. If it's a lie, they could be using the energy for something very bad.. so a large group will only feed a ritualist they trust.

Going by the rules in RPM, you can't lie to people providing the energy about what the ritual does (although I guess that the average peasant wouldn't know that, so yes, he could be suspicious). Which means that kind of role is likely to be done by priests or similar who have a strong social contract with the local population.

>Keep in mind if you go around being the Crop Blessing guy they will get dependent on you, anyone interested in fucking up your settlement would kill you first, and people would have to trust you a lot to join in the physically exhausting ritual to power you up.

You only really need one competent wizard (or good grimoire) per political entity (kingdom or whatever) to make this kind of deal work though. You can cast a spell over any area you like so long as you have enough FP providers. You can offer pretty much any wages and level of protection up to that of the highest nobility in order to attract a suitable caster, because he will easily be worth it.

>Another basic assumption is that magic is rare. Ritualist, especially powerful ones, just aren't common enough to utterly change the shape of the world. You can change that though, if you like.

Most fantasy worlds have more than a handful of spellcasters though and that's enough to make a huge difference.

I think the easiest fix is simply to limit the number of people you can get FP from and maybe require that they have some level of skill or take some small risk.

STOP!

YES, YOU!

STOP SCROLLING!

Alright, now that I have your attention: If you don't care about Know Your Own Strength or use GCS, you can keep scrolling.

pastebin.com/eZyZbtAT I got help from a friend to quickly hack in KYOS Basic Lift and damage into GCS. Instructions on how to edit code are in the pastebin.

You may now resume your normal thread activities.

If you want a more "dungeon fantasy" style magic world with tons of professional mages, you might also simply not want to use RPM. Sorcery or even the vanilla magic might make for a better system in that style of setting.

Critical Failures are a key controlling factor for RPM. Having a 2% chance of being ground-zero for a hostile ritual with twice the power of the one you were planning is fairly unpleasant. If nothing else, it makes being a wizard or a FP-battery a very risky profession.

Another practical control factor will be demand of services.

Like, blessing crops is great and all, but lots of crops will do fine by their own. Meanwhile the lord of the land might wish to act as a patron for the mage because of the prestige that entails.

All of the mage professionals might end up having lordly patrons who mostly just leave them to their own devices, only commanding their services when there's a very large need for a mage.

Not that I know of. Just eyeballing it, I'd stat it like the Rigby Traveling Pistol, but give it Shots 5-8(3i), a higher price, and a Malf of 14 or 15.

Hell, that's a fair point. "One time in fifty shit gets fucked up bad" is quite the reason that people might be reluctant to use that.

More than just the energy, it being open-ended means you can do things like "turn the city into water" much more easily than you'd expect.

But in an Open Magic setting, civilisations and government mages would be setting up Great Wards with lots of minor positive effects across cities and the countryside, which would resist any attempt to lay a curse or teleport a dozen kinetic kill weapons above them or whatever.

Any single character would have a hell of a time trying to defeat those.

The chance of severe failure would make things be a bit more subtle - but there'd still be the Burning Kingdom, which critfailed its massive country-wide empowerment ritual and damned everything to a cursed half-life as flame skellingtons, or just a village mage that got ambitious and blighted the fields (I'm assuming there's a way to reverse defilement-for-energy, otherwise that can get out of hand).

>If you want to make a setting abundant, you really do have to think about the implications got on agriculture, communication, science and architecture. Which is fun, and makes for an internally consistent setting!

Thaumatology: Urban Magics has some thoughts on this kind of stuff, though much of it is regarding the default magic system.

Neat, thanks.

So, how restrictive is Hidebound in practice? I've been thinking about this because I want to know what a non-volitational AI can and cannot do without supervision.

It's a five-point disadvantage and most animals have it, so it's not going to be very restrictive. Beyond the skill penalty, it's likely to be mostly a preference for doing things the same way you always have. You should still be able to adapt to new situations eventually.

It's primarily a worldview of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Hidebound characters, including animals, will not change or innovate their approach to anything unless it ceases to work. They don't try to improve an approach or make it more efficient. Most learning is motivated by exterior factors, such as rewards dangled in front of them, pain and punishment, or the previous method no longer working.

In terms of AI, it's an AI that follows the procedure it knows works, because it doesn't have the programming or mental faculties to develop its own way to do it. It might, through trial and error, discover a new way to do something, but it will only attempt that if the old way stops working for some reason.

Alright, good to know.

I am planning on making my next GURPS character an ugly dude.

When was the last time that you made an ugly character? How did it go?

One of my players have a -6 penalty to reactions.

He keeps getting arrested by the authorities after panicky civilians call the cops on him for being so damn ugly.

How ugly would Nobby Nobbs be for any GURPS game?

I'm interested in doing a vietnam campaign as MACV-SOG, I've GMed as GURPS but I've read both Campaign and Character books, what I should be aware of?

I think Nobby has negative point total.

Hideous, with several odious habits to boot.

GURPS High-tech probably has the guns you want. I doubt you need much more than that. GURPS Tactical Shooting I guess if you want to make things really complicated for yourself and your players.

Odious Personal Habits (Folk Dancing)

Seals in Vietnam, while focused on Navy SEALS is probably a good start.
I imagine you'd also get some use from the 3rd Ed Covert Ops book. It's a pretty great read, and should give you some decent ideas. And converting from 3rd to 4th is a snap.

Appearance (Monstrous) probably wouldn't be an overstatement.

At the very least a negative version of the 'passing appearance' perk; he's generally suspected of being some other species, although nobody seems able to decide which one and only goblins and maybe gnolls would accept him.

Iirc, he carries some sort of certificate which states that he is in fact human.

Yeah, I chose MACV-SOG because I was thinking in "drop somehwere in the jungle and do spec-ops shit", does SEALs cover that?

Tactical shotting seems interesting, I have printed a hexagonal grid already.

>does SEALs cover that
Sure. Check out the table of contents.

So guys I started to design the first dungeon for my game however I don't know where to find traps for it.
Do I have to make them up my self or are there already a few balanced traps in a supplement or something somewhere ?

Dungeon Fantasy III, Pyramid #3/60 has an article, "It's a Trap" that has advice on building them, and a few already built traps.

Ok thanks bro.

Using Low-Tech, what would samurai armor count as? Segmented plate?

Samurai armor changed a lot over time. There's the really old super-boxy o-yori which I think is treated as segmented plate, the later armor styles that I think GURPS treats as scale/lamellar, and hell the period between the opening of European trade and the final death of the samurai caste saw samurai sporting European breastplates.

I know at least one of those types is covered in Low-Tech Loadouts. If all else fails, check wikipedia and use common sense.

Gray, my current PC for Grimwyld, is an ugly bastard by human standards with a muzzle, fangs and amber eyes. Between Appearance and Social Stigma he eats a -4 reaction from most people.

This is mostly a background matter, we don't spend much time among civilized folk, but it serves as a justification for why he spends time on dangerous quest, far from common people.

The annoying bit for me is that the versions covered in Low-Tech Loadouts are ones for the Kamakura period and the Nanboku-cho period. I'm still hoping there's a follow-on eventually that actually tackles fucking Sengoku period armor like pic related.

Are all of the Kickstarter things going to be sold at a later date? I want to back it for the books, but I don't want to blow $20 on a GM screen until I know that I actually have people in real life to play with ;_;.

My best guess for that would be Kabuto as in Low-Tech Instant Armor (which also covers the menpo and the nape and throat guards); Chest and Back as Medium Plate (other styles of dou might be Segmented Plate instead, a nanban-do would be Hardened Steel medium plate front and light plate back); Segmented Plate for the sode and kusazuri; the kote would be a complex mixup of mail and plates on the forearms, light mail on the elbows, and probably mail and plates or light mail again on the upper arms; lamellar or segmented plate for the haidate on the thighs, if worn; and the suneate would be mail and plates with knee guards of various type (kikko on that example, which I believe has rules somewhere).

Oh and the hands have Segmented Plate for the tekko, just covering the back of the hand and offering no protection to the rest. You can wear yugake with them but these gloves don't really protect (but by the same token, I don't think they'd give Ham-Fisted).

Can anyone share their experiences with Incantation Magic?

GURPS Asparagus best supplement

One of my players critically failed 3 times in one session. It was GREAT.

I'll be starting a campaign soon that involves a TL4 fantasy world holding out against numerically superior and occasionally technologically superior extradimensional invaders. The way they do this depends heavily on RPM.

Remember that it can be taught to non mages, who with a grimoire or magic circle can cast decent spells.

In Energy Accumulation, you roll several times to gather energy, not just once. Critical failures are way more than 1:50 odds, but the system was built with that in mind as well.

The basic sets default setting is realistic with a few switches that can easily make it cinematic. Martial Arts add to this allowing you take your game either extremely realistic or extremely cinematic.

Are there any books that deal with doing OSR style hexcrawls? I kind of want to make a big world map composed entirely out of hexes.

He's not too bad. Luckily there's a helmet

Also, the elf makes up for everyone else

Does she literally walk around half-naked or is it "artist's interpretation"?

Yep, super low carry capacity. Often has just underclothes and basics plus armor.

No bonuses to active defense from it tho.

Most elves are like that.

Her original art (which may have been a centaur from a profile angle?)

is GURPS a good starter for someones first tabletop role playing game? It always seemed to fascinate me with its universality and reading the basic set seems really interesting.

Yes. GURPS Lite is free, simple, and is everything that you need to actually play. It is easy to branch off from, though it depends on what type of campaign you are trying to run.

Fuck yeah it is. Hell, it was my first GMing system too!

Just make sure to have a goal for the campaign itself. GURPS is notorious for going off the rails of the GM forgets to keep choices on point for the setting material.

thank you both very much, i meant as a player though

As a player I it is pretty straightfoward. The only part that can get hard is character creation. If you are using templates or something (IE the classes and races in Dungeon Fantasy) then that becomes easy as well. The game itself runs very smoothly.

Yeah as user says, CharGen cam be a slog. My best solution was always to one on one session with a player to both guide creation and to provide immediate setting feedback as it's built. If your gm is running something new, ask him for a sit-down of at least an hour or so.

(Also, CharGen software is a godsend. GCS and GCA4 are both awesome.)

As a player, character generation is like it's own game. You have a budget and a dream, and then you try to see how far you can take both. Learning how to optimize point expenditure is rewarding.

That said, I typically build characters for people new to GURPS. I talk with them about what they want from their character, who they are, etc., and I build it. They're never upset about the character's competency, since I know exactly what they need and can build for it. Someone new could easily misbuild if they aren't following a template.

In play, GURPS is typically a breeze. All of that chargen isn't wasted as you frontload a lot of work, which makes mechanics in play smooth and intuitive. Rolling vs. skill is simple and resolves fast.

Combat can be overwhelming for a new player, especially if your GM is using all combat options out of the box. There are a few key concepts to GURPS combat that every player should understand:
>0. GURPS is based off of reality, even if it takes liberties here and there.
This means that, if you can do it in real life, you can do it in GURPS. If you can't do it in real life, you can still do it in GURPS, as long as you're in the right campaign for it.
This also means that real-life strategies are generally applicable to GURPS. Ganging on people in a fight is good! being ganged up on is bad.

>1. Every round of combat is 1 second long.
This can take time getting used to if you're coming from D&D or the like. You have one second, each turn, to perform a single Maneuver. It may feel like you're "wasting" turns by taking Aim, Move, Ready, etc. maneuvers; you aren't. Think about what someone could (somewhat) realistically do in a single second. That's about what you can do in a GURPS combat.

>2. You don't need to use every option available to you.
Just focus on getting used to Move and Attack maneuvers first. Don't worry about all-out attacks, waits, or anything else. Get used to the flow of attacks, active defenses, and movement.

You'll play other, more mainstream games later and get really buthurt about how arbitrary their mechanics feel and how limiting they are, particularly if you play something with character classes.

It's a great system to start with. You may as well start right, after all.