/gurpsgen/ GURPS General

For the characters? Lots and lots of Luck. Also, lots of HT.

For the players? Low power electric shock buzzers in their chairs for when your jump scare doesn't get the reaction you want.

It's one of those rules light narrative systems. At least that's how one of my players described it. I haven't played it yet.

I like to prep myself a little toolbox, and wing it using those notes.

What kind of stuff do you have for your toolbox?

I have a OneNote notebook with a world map, various locations for the players to happen upon if travelling gets boring, plenty of interesting enemies/mooks/NPCs to deal with, as well as loot and random encounters.

It's mostly for off-quests. For my main story-quests, I tend to plan around 3-5 outcomes.

I tend to carry a Kindle and a small notebook around with me, and I'll just write stuff that comes to mind. Little shit like popular cuisine and cultural differences can really bring a new city to life.

>Little shit like popular cuisine
That's a dope idea, I've never really given much thought to food

One of my players is going with the "BIG WEAPON HIT SHIT" archetype, and some of my descriptions of foods caught his interest.

His character is now trying to start a restaurant. It's a nice change of pace.

I like using the S/S/R table because memorising one table (with a regular progression) is easier than memorising two (one of them really arbitrary).

It does seem to work better with high numbers of shots, but even a slight increase in complexity for the GURPS combat system is a big issue because in my opinion it's pushing the limits of playability already.

It's kind of a big buff for rapid fire weapons, but I'm not sure it's an unjustified one.

If step 3 could be streamlined a bit, I think that would be a big help.

How about instead of dividing MoS by recoil, just deduct recoil from it? That seems just as plausible to me, given that recoil is a pretty abstract thing anyway.

And maybe Dodge could just take a penalty equal to the rapid fire bonus instead of the more complex system? Goes back to the usual GURPS practice of adding penalties before the roll and having active defences be all or nothing. Also allows you to put the Dodge roll before the calculation of the number of hits, possibly saving a little calculation time if they make the roll. Arguably cuts into realism though.

The other problem is that it makes shotguns loaded with birdshot even better. I think there needs to be a point at which they just switch to being a crushing attack with a fixed bonus to hit instead of a mass of pi- attacks.

...

>If step 3 could be streamlined a bit, I think that would be a big help.
Yeah, that could make it a tad quicker, which is always good. But I can't really see it being that big of a deal. I'm usually the GM, and I can do it quick enough in my head that it's not gonna be an issue.

Just thought I'd see what the general opinion was.

I don't even like weebshit and I love this.

enabling_gm.jpg

What places of Interest does a good fantasy town need?

My basic list is..

Seat of government/place of retreat. At least a decent fortified building, if not a manor house on the hill or castle, where people can go if Shit Gets Real. Also a place for the leader to live and depense justice from.

A market. This can just be a simple square where people sell things out of the back of wagons. Every day there should be a few food sellers, and at least monthly there should be a big market day when more rare things can be bought and sold.

Someplace to eat. The second business in human history was a restaurant to take advantage of the foot traffic from the brothel. This will generally be a focus of the town, maybe off the market square, because everyone needs a place to get a beer and some food.

A temple or church. People feel a need for faith, so someone is going to have to meet that. These are often pretty rich, and people will build one of these in a new place with shocking speed.

And for fantasy..

An aqueduct that brings water in and a sewer that takes water out, explaining why there isn't sewage in the streets, and where the ratmen live.

Some kind of magic. Maybe a library tower with a wizard or a witch's house in a stand of trees just outside of town. In low fantasy this might just be a rumor people say they don't believe.

Thanks man, this is a huge help to me.

But,
>The second business in human history was a restaurant to take advantage of the foot traffic from the brothel.

Is that true? That's fucking awesome, I've never heard the before.

Yo, guys, I like the standard rules on guns because they work well with human scale lifeforms...but there are some serious issues if PCs are squaring off against SM+5 multi-TON beasts.

I picked a SPINOSAURUS AEGYPTIACUS as the prehistoric monster to menace a bunch of hunters stranded in a gigantic dinosaur preserve.

GURPS Dinosaurs puts the Spinosaurus at ST 100-150 and 3-4 tons. A 3e to 4e ST conversion document tells me that they're at about ST 39 in 4e. Since HP is equal to ST, this means that a large specimen possesses HP 39. Newer scientific theories place the Spino at 7 to 20.9 tonnes (7.7 to 23.0 short tons), but I want to stick to rules canon for the following scenario.

I will assume the main body/torso DR is 4 for the sake of generosity (Lands out of Time states that a Tyrannosaurus Rex has DR 2 everywhere but the Skull..which is DR 4 total).

A bog standard 7.62x51mm NATO rifle is considered a respectable deer hunting weapon. Most specimens deal 7d pi damage (an average of 24.5). Crack open GURPS High-Tech if you want to see an example: the book's chock full of them.

Here's where the problem crops up. If you manage to hit the above roughly-concocted Spinosaurus with a 7.62 NATO round, you'd be dealing an average of 20.5 pi damage. That's a Major Wound and therefore a Health check to resist knockdown. HT 12 means it falls 25.9% of the time. HT 14, 9.3% of the time. One can attempt to tag the Vitals and roll at a reasonable Skill+2 (Vitals -3 + SM 5). That 12 is now a 7 (fails 83.8% of the time) and that 14 is now a 9 (fails 62.5% of the time).

We're talking about a firearm designed for hunting animals that weigh in at about 260 to 530 lbs being pitted against what is arguably the largest land predator that ever lived. I would HOPE the ancient terror is actually more durable than this.

Thoughts?

Previous thread drowned too fast, so...
How i can make game about hunting down and cool fight with Big Solitary Monsters and avoid eye shot problems, with mechanics for butchering for loot and profit?
Setting choice is between postapocalypse [easy -- grab Regin of Steel Robots and here we go] and magitek/dungeon punk fantasy [my players heavily likes to lose limbs and replacing them with cool implants, and sometime they never asked for this]
Im already paked things like Combat Writ Large [3-77], On Target [3-77], Broken Blade [3-87], LT Armor Design [3-52] and Scaling Weapons and Armor [LTC2] with calc sheets, [MA], [MA: TG].

Sounds fair to me, really. You said that NATO round was respectable for deer hunting so it makes sense that it would have trouble putting down a dino.

Just get a bigger gun.

Just say that their eyeshots arent as effective as they think, or make up an advantage that gives DR to the eyes.

As for the butchering, lowtech gives a butchering skill so you could just use that and make up the weights and values of the parts.

That's not "trouble", though. I pointed out how easy it is to fish for a failed Knockdown (and Stunning, come to think of it) roll with a deer cartridge against one of the biggest land carnivores to ever walk the Earth.

A bigger gun would be worse.

He isn't complaining that the dino is too hard to kill. He is complaining about the opposite - it is too easy to take out.

Use the Pyramid article with more survivable guns. It halves rifle damage and gives an armor modifier.

What books would you use for a Redwall game with gurps?

Reality check this by finding out how many shots it takes to down an elephant (6,000 -- 13,000 pounds so right in your range at the bottom end). IIRC most of those poachers use 7.62x39 or 7.62x51.

Also, being in deer hunting country, I'd say the .308 (damn near identical to the 7.62x51) is towards the upper end and pretty overkill for deer hunting even if it is very common. Little dick syndrome IMO.

Also, things get worse from your POV when you take vitals shots into account.

If you want to mitigate the problem give them some more DR or hardened DR (justified by most guns not having the penetration to hit something vital).

Big game hunting is (from what I hear) all about killing the thing from a distance with few shots before it can run up and ruin your day. Not about turning it to hamburger with RoF. Also, ye olde schoole elephant guns were such high caliber because they were low velocity. They were still about single shot kills as an ideal.

>Old elephant guns were low velocity.
600 Nitro Express can shoot though a half inch steel plate.

>How many shots to kill an elephant?
The AK-47 and AKM are common among poachers, but are too light to penetrate the skull and deal any damage. GURPS terms, an elephant skull should have enough DR to shrug off 7.62x39 and comparable intermediate rounds. They make up for this by shooting them a lot and make sloppy kills.

You aren't wrong about a single shot kill being the ideal, but should also note that the ability to put a dangerous animal down fast is vital when hunting large game. Elephants and cape buffalo can kill a human with ease.

In general, GURPS treats guns as being much more efficient then they really are.

>600 Nitro Express can shoot though a half inch steel plate.
Isn't that like the formula 1 racer of elephant guns? I don't have much experience with anything much above the 300 caliber range so I could very well be wrong.

>In general, GURPS treats guns as being much more efficient then they really are.
I couldn't agree more. Survivable Guns (Pyramid 3/44) is one of my favorite rules tweaks.

If the goal is barraging the beast as though hacking down a brick wall with a baseball bat you're left with three choices: reduce damage (maybe treat dinos as homogeneous for attacks below a certain damage threshold?), increase DR, or increase HP (and HT or Hard to Kill).

Keep in mind though that weapons almost always outstrip armor. We can oneshot a main battle tank given the proper equipment. We should be able to handle something made of squishy bits much more easily.

Maybe one theropod isn't going to get the results you want in your game. Better send 30.

Not so much. NE guns are unnecked, heavy rounds. They were designed for smokeless powder (thus the name) and made decent ant-tank guns in a pinch. 600 NE is one of the most powerful and weapons that use it tend to be impractically heavy for anything but specialist tools for hunting big game or light armor.

For very, very fast big game rounds you get things like .375 H&H Magnum, something that sends a 15 gram round 900 meters per second.

There's a Pryamid article whose name escapes me, but it covers this topic exactly. The author's solution was to give high-SM targets free injury tolerance that divides incoming piercing damage. Admittedly, the article was more focused on stopping automatic rifles from shredding trains, but the mechanics should work for organic beings as well.

I'm the one who recommended Injury Tolerance above. I didn't remember this article so I went looking. I think you're referring to Pyramid 3/34 Eidetic Memory - Extreme Damage. Was that it?

The lightest weapon with any realistic hope to disable a MBT with one shot are barely man portable missile systems that check in around 25 kilos. Lighter anti-armor weapons are rarely effective, even with the comparatively primitive armor of Russian tanks.

Anti-missile systems promise to change things in interesting ways, with the potential to change the math to the point where four thousand kilo guns are the lightest effective anti-tank weapon.

>one shot are barely man portable
Yet still man portable and possible to one shot kill. Image the mess one would make of a T-Rex.

>Anti-missile systems
This is exactly what I used to justify military energy weapons in my last ultra-tech game. Up the effectiveness of such a system and it even shoots down bullets (handwavium about armor kept lasers from being pathetic).

That sounds correct, but I am away from my books at the moment.

There is that one about large objects like planes, but there is also a different Pyramid article that talks about alternate HP scaling for large and small animals, and talks about why the default scaling for creatures very small and very large is wonky. (Large creatures too fragile, small ones too tough) Gives a few different ways to fix that scaling if I remember correctly.

It even explicitly talks about elephants vs. Elephant guns, btw.

Can't remember which one though, sorry, but it is about fixing the exact problem in this thread.

My grep-fu has failed. All I can find is the reference I posted above to 3/34. What it describes is exactly the opposite:
>"it also makes large, normal animals too resilient. [...] The reverse will happen for small animals"

If you can find the article you're thinking of I'd love to read it.

So, I'm plotting a campaign setting I like to call "Knights of Cydonia". It's an old-west TL5 setting, but with very prominent martial arts schools, and the occasional "Lost Tech", which is TL10, but exceedingly rare, worth 32x its usual price.
Would you play in such a setting?

What books should I read if I want to make a pre-civil war American Adventure?!

Depends on how you plan to keep both six-shooters and martial arts fun and relevant.

From GURPS, you can read from High-tech and get an idea of the weapons during that era. Look through the 3e catalog for anything related to the civil war.

>Infinite Worlds: Weebs

How much damage would being thrown through a a plate glass window do? The collision rules say that damage is limited to the HP of the window, which wouldn't factor in being cut up by the glass.

I'd say that being thrown though a window is like being in a [1d] frag area. Unlikely to kill, likely to hurt.

Sure. I could get down for some crazy planetary romance stuff.

My first instinct would be to simply change the damage type to cutting.

Maybe if I wanted to be more detailed, I'd use the rules for Fragmentation Damage, but still have the type be cutting.

Maybe reduce the base damage a bit to compensate for the high damage you'd get from the cutting multiplier.

Meant to reply to

I'd drop it to 1d-3 cut; that x1.5 multiplier is intense, and being on fire deals only 1d-3 as well.

Which advantage would I need to give a creature if I want it's bones to be completely indestructible? As in, no way at all to break, damage or alter the bones in any way, not even with energy levels comparable supernovae or black holes.

Injury Tolerance (Unbreakable Bones) from Powers. It doesn't affect general injury, but your limbs cannot be crippled or removed.

Cool, thanks.

I was thinking that everyone trained in martial arts also takes a -5 Code of Honor that can be summed up as "If a martial artist challenges another martial artist to close combat, one can't just laugh and shoot the other."

Unkillable 2 also comes with this.. Kind of.

When killed, you become an indistructable skeleton and grow back any missing parts.

How do people organize the rule they're using?

Add that should anyone interfere in the duel, the survivor is required to deal with the interference. Otherwise you're going to get your non-martial artists PCs shoot the enemy martial artists.

>2017. People still playing GURPS.
Inconceivable

>bait
>this bad
Inconceivable

2017. People not playing GURPS.
Inconceivable

1) That doesn't mean guys with guns that aren't also trained in martial arts can just go lolbang.
2) You can shoot someone well before they can issue a challenge.
3) Honor and social constraints quickly fly out the window when shit gets real; on a related note, it's hard to swallow that literally everyone, including thugs, traitors, and all-around Bad Guys, has a Code of Honor that they will stick to even in the best of times, let alone when they're facing death and have a gun at their hip.

Just use this rule from Action 2

...

How would YOU run a prehistoric campaign, /gurpsgen/?

I would add magical girls!

Pasting some design notes for a prehistory game that never got off the ground.

Books: Low-Tech; After the End 2 - The New World; #3/56: Prehistory

Starting Points: 20/-50... The party will be made up of young adults (~12-14) having just completed their rites of passage and ready to begin assisting with the band's day-to-day survival.
Required Templates: Caveman [-5]
Prescriptive Templates: None, but see "Caveman Fundamentals" (#3/56) for example templates that you should use as inspiration when building your own character.
No cinematic skills
Supernatural: Spirit Talking (Core: Medium; Auxillery: Spirit Empathy, See Invisible, and Hidden Lore)
Starting Funds: $250, can trade up to 5 character points for +$100 each; No leftover starting funds, use it or lose it!
Banned Traits: Wealth/Debt/Rank/any cash- or status-related traits; beyond that, use common sense.

Recommended Reading:
-Low-Tech Companion 1: Philosophers and Kings -- p. 4-5 cover politics in Band-level societies (which the PCs will belong to).
-Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics -- Read everything *besides* the rules for hunting/gathering (AtE uses nearly the same rules and is put together in an easier-to-understand way); this covers everything from cooking and food preservation to low-tech crafting.
-"Past Presents and Future," from #3/56 Prehistory -- gives details on the exchange economy used by low-tech band societies and what the game effects would be.
-"Caveman Fundamentals," from #3/56 Prehistory -- While only the Caveman template is *required*, the occupational templates should give a good idea as to what skills and advantages your character should aim for and what disadvantages are good ideas. Note that the Shaman template uses a different magic system than this game will; its more mundane traits are still good guidelines, however.

>cont (1/2)

Optional Rules in Play:
-FP and LFP (p. AtE:W24)
-Wasteland Hazards (p. AtE:TNW9)
-Boldly Going Forth: Survival (p. AtE:TNW30) WITH THE FOLLOWING CHANGES:
--Treat fishing as gathering, except it uses its own skill with equipment modifiers and does not poison on most critical failues; rather, the area cannot be fished in for the rest of the day.
--Use Environment Quality and Degredation (p. LTC:DLaE5)
--When hunting, success on Tracking by 0-4 locates small game, 5+ locates sign of large game, and a critical success *sights* large game. Large game will require 1d more hours of Tracking unless sighted directly.
--Butchering an animal takes a Survival or Professional Skill (Butchering) roll and results in 40% of the animal's weight becoming edible meat, +5% per point of success (max 70%). A failed roll results in on 20% being usable and a critical failure either wastes the carcas or produces dangerous (e.g. poisonous, diseased, etc.) meat. Other useful materials such as hides can also be diminished or lost on a failed roll.

>fin (2/2)

It's a design switch. PC's have a Code of Honor, NPCs are bound by Mook Chivalry rules that don't allow them to escalate the conflict beyond the point heroes do, unless it's iconic to their character.

IE: Members of the black snake gang have guns, but will go for fisticuffs unless the heroes shoot first. Ebony Cobra, deadly gunslinger and boss of the gang, can shoot first because that's his thing.

If you want to make it realistic just have everyone that goes lolbang end up dead or in prison within a week, but note that using a gun will almost certainly mean your character is out.

Sounds about right.

I have a player who insists on using Explosion for an innate attack with Jet. I originally told him that since Explosion and Area Effect were resolved identically, then Explosion should remain incompatible with Jet just as Area Effect is.

The main issue is that Jet functions exactly like a Melee Attack with extreme reach. And Area Effect expressly only allows the defense option "Dive for Cover", but looking over it again I'm not sure that this is necessarily the case for Explosion.

Since it only explodes on "The point of impact" it could reasonably assumed that it's still defended against just like any melee attack, but that the resulting AoE after resolving the hit would be more like an area of effect damage.

Would Jet + Explosion be viable?

What would that even LOOK like? Totally ignoring any questions with the mechanics, I can't even imagine what Jet+Explosion would look like.

Now, if he wants a Jet that explodes on contact, that's a Follow-Up, just like how explosive ammo works.

He described it as "An eletrical oversurge", where a stream of electricity hits the target and then surges in a small AoE surrounding whatever was hit.

It seemed to me that he mostly just wants the AoE for mechanical benefits, but he's adamant that this modifier best fits his 'vision' of the attack.

Sounds like a Follow Up. It won't explode until it hits.

I like steampunk.

Mutually exclusive. Explosive looks at area effects. Jet is a melee single target attack.