/GURPSGEN/

How do you do an AI character?

Would they only have Intelligence and then their other three would be based on what they're housed in?
How exactly do I stat that out?

I want my players to encounter an AI at some point, and intend for them to take her along with them, how would I make her an actual character instead of "Oh yeah, D.A.I.N.A. is there with you in whatever tech you have her interfaced with" what books should I look over?

You want Possession (Electronic) and the AI meta trait.

The "mind" itself determines IQ, but you have to pay for whatever frame you use to get around. It's easiest to just have your most common body/shell serve as your base stats and your other shells can be bought as allies you can jump into.

Your base frame can just be a box that holds your AI with zero DX or ST (You do need HP and HT to reflect how hard it is to destroy). In that case, all you come with by default is a basic set of sensors able to perceive like a human (unless you take traits that drop that) and a speaker that lets you talk to people.

>tfw super hyped to finally try gurps in my native language
>Go to local store, see books on a shelf with the name on it
>"Do you have the base book in French ?"
>"Hell no, this hasn't been translated since before you were born, all I have are American exports and I don't even have the base book anymore"
>PDF in French of any edition besides lite are impossible to find
>My group won't be able to work with all-english rules
My sadness is bottomless

>French
Well, on the bright side you guys seem to have shittons of other good rpg.

Like in real life, wealth status and rank are pseudo-linked. Wealth makes you afford the higher cost of living of higher status and a higher status allows acces to higher ranks in the army/state/church in status conscious societies. The same is true for negative status. If you look like you live under a bridge and have no permanent adress, it will be difficult to get even a minimum wage job.

Does GURPS have any rules for Decking/Running/Hacking that's more than just a skill roll, but isn't so tedious that it's basically a separate minigame that halts GM interaction with other players?

So just DAINA (name is a work in progress I'm currently experimenting with what sounds good, Data Archives Intelligent Network Assistant is my first idea, but Librarian Intelligence System Archive (LISA) and Archival Learning Integrated Computational Element (ALICE) are options as well, all of this is subject to change) would just have INT, her skills and her personality/mental based traits on her own when she exists as an abstract in a void?

But to exist in a world she could be stored on a data chip which would give her a form with 0 DX and ST but a few points of HT and maybe some physical traits, unhealing, no manipulators, etc, or into other electronic devices that would give ST, DX, HT and physical traits according to what she's put into?

>hacking
>not so simple as skill check
>not so complex as independent mechanic
Throw much more skill checks mixed with contests and counting different margins.

Try not to do acronyms as names. They always come off as forced and terrible.

Exactly this.

Since I'm fairly new to this, I didn't know about that, but now I'm interested.
Do you have examples in mind ?

Alright gents, GURPS outsider here. How do I run an Urban Fantasy game in the vein of Dresden Files / WoD only not a complete clusterfuck?

Yep. Note that in data chip form she's not alive, just a latent/inactive copy. She can't think, take actions or perceive the environment.

Loaded into a terminal with basic abilities then you don't need to throw on no manipulators/ect, as ST 0/DX 0 already prevent her from taking any physical actions and you should not take disadvantages that are rendered meaningless by other factors.

Note that she doesn't exist abstract in the void. She's always running on some hardware, and that hardware sets her physical stats. Make sure that the hardware you load her onto has wireless internet access and other communication so she can contact the outside world. Otherwise her ability to interact with things is going to be limited to suggesting actions to other people.

For example, Cortana from HALO: Loaded onto the Pillar of Autism, her body is a 1.1km Halcyon class light cruiser and she has a "if you statted this out the point level would be in the thousands" level of abilities, but her most common shell is the data processing layer of a suit of power armor, providing her with some electronic warfare gear and the ability to suggest to the spartan what to do, but that's about it.

When occupying a data chip, she's inert and helpless, unable to execute any code.

Have a strong idea of the power level you want.

Limit people, generally to civilian legal guns. Don't make them worry about the cops unless they go crazy, as needing to conceal things from cops can throw a wet blanket and turn half your game time to people doing shit to avoid leaving traces.

Just tell them that the cops activity avoid supernatural cases and don't follow up on them unless forced to.

Pick a magic system. I like Ritual Path Magic, as it lets anybody learn some basic spells but still makes someone that is a real wizard impressive. Limit the power level here, don't let people throw around greater effects casually.

Note that Monster Hunters is a GURPS line that fits this well. It's a bit high power, but might be worth checking out (observe the PDF).

Even more then other games, encourage people to have some kind of connection between characters and a past. Maybe give them an extra CP if they can identify how they have encountered and maybe worked with the others in the past. It's best not to have the first session be "badass hunter threatens to kill werewolf guy while vampire guy tries to eat witch"

...

In some socieities you get free Status just from Wealth, and generally the jobs you can pick from are locked by your Status. You are damn right, you can't get a Wealthy level job if you are a hobo.

But fuck it: A free, sweet house for Status/Wealth is a solid way to make players care. Status +1 coming with your own big, solid fortress of a house with a maid and a guard seems much nicer then a old school bus in the woods.

Right now, the setup is as follows:
>Dedicated hacker with specialized interfacing implants
>Full-body cyborg with Gatling Carbine and monowire katana
>Face that can go full Equilibrium when shit hits the fan
>Investigator with experience in "big game hunting"
>not!Samus with a battlesuit and heavy chain gun
>Utility gunner with a CAW, exotic ammo types, mines and grenades, and two automated drones to back him up.

Out of all of them, only the Hacker lacks in the good ol' ultraviolence department, and even she's a decent shot at Guns (Pistol)-13.

"Console Cowboys and Cyberspace Kung-Fu" breaks it up into a variety of techniques e.g. target machine is running Analysis-14 so you want to use your Spoof program. I'm currently keeping things light with cyberpsi abilities refluffed as specialist implants.

Really though, it's less about mechanical options and more about map/scenario design. Don't have your hacker go with the party and then make everyone wait while she takes out every door/camera/drone in the next room; "hurry up and wait" kills the tempo and brutalizes it's corpse. Instead, have her work in parallel with the team--while they're clearing the room, she's working on taking over the door, and while she's pulling vital files off the mainframe, the party is defending her from the final wave of security forces.

I've never looked into gurps, does it have stuff that is similar to adeptus mechanicus or just going full "the flesh is weak"?

It's easily done as advantages.

You can modify any advantage with the Cybernetic trait, and there's lots of cybernetics in Ultratech, Biotech and other books.

The clunky, primitive nature of 40k cybernetics would make them very well suited to causing disadvantages. A cybernetic limb might be stronger then the one it replaced (Left Arm ST+5) and hard to damage (DR 30, Left Arm only) but clumsy (Ham Fisted 2, Left Arm Only) and need servicing (Requires Maintenance).

I see
I dont really know about any of that but maybe I'll read some of the PDFs mentioned

Get 'em Lite and you source the complicated bits from English Basic Set. There would be a lot more pre build stuf for you to do--they can't make their own characters unless you're doing Modern, but you can converse with them and build based on what they want.

How well does magic fit into the gameplay? I've never done any games that allow spells and I'm afraid of it bogging down the game too much.

Would all spells need to be advantages or are there other ways to do it it? I was thinking of having magic require a resource to perform or a ritual, but I'm still trying to figure out how it would fit into a world of post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

Are ancient cthullu like entities overdone? I feel like some supernatural elements would be a nice addition, and some magic could be due to the entity's presence, while other magic could be more manipulation of tech like nano-bots and such.

Magic fits in, but you need to know what role magic fills in your setting. If it's meant to be the blasty sort, for example, Basic Set magic will disappoint you, but Sorcery won't.

There's a bunch of different magic systems, but none of them complicate gameplay too much, besides Ritual Path Magic. RPM's issue is figuring cost of spells on the fly and the roll-heavy nature of gathering energy. Incantation Magic streamlines that with a penalty to skill, but it has a linear power curve as each skill level offsets a set amount of energy in penalties, rather than suddenly granting x3 or more the energy with normal energy gathering.

Other than that, they're all easy. Basic Set magic is discrete spells-as-skills, each with their own effects. Sorcery is just advantages. Psionic Powers combines them by having you buy an advantage and a skill to use it effectively. Imbuements are much like Basic Set magic, except they're applying enhancements to weapons. And then there's the slew of alternative forms of Basic Set magic in Thaumatology.

I prefer energy-gathering RPM and Psionic Powers. Sorcery is good, but I'm more of a fan of just straight-up Powers as Advantages. I don't like Basic Set magic because it's a ton of homework and one of the major reasons I quit D&D was homework.

>Are ancient cthullu like entities overdone?
They are. You can still do them, as long as you make it entertaining. Corrupting magic (from Thaumatology) would be a good fit for elder gods. Or a Pact on advantages requiring ritualistic sacrifice to maintain powers.

I'm still not sure exactly how I want the old one type thing to fit in and be entertaining/not too cliche, I'm thinking maybe like a powerful psionic hivemind type being, could be alien or something that evolved naturally.

The planet this takes place on was once a lush, jungle covered Earth-like (think of Venus in old sci-fi) until some event caused it to become a dried up hell-greenhouse (think Venus as we know it), the entity would have come to the planet in the lush stage of development, and likely cause it's transition to the next stage, or something else destroyed the planet and made it into a dried out hellscape to stop the entity.
Since then the entity has laid dormant, in dried spores or eggs, or some sort of hibernation pod, unable to act, until humans come along as say "Hey, we can terraform this" and undo the hellscape transformation, making the planet livable again, but with water and life on the planet again, the old one can come out of it's hibernation again, and shit starts to hit the fan, at first his presence is subtle, some people hear voices, supernatural things happen in area near his prison, the government forms an SCP/X-files type program to study and contain these incidents, as it becomes closer to awakening shit gets worse, sea levels rise, earthquakes knock land into the sea, people are mutated and corrupted, cults form and strike out at society, and the planet starts to become unlivable to humans.
In an all out war between the humans and the old one, they manage to shatter the being as their final strike, separating it into pieces and scattering them in containment facilties across the planet. This effectively defeats it, at least greatly limiting it's power as long as containment holds. The planet it left flooded and in ruins from a combination of natural disaster and war, and it is seen as a huge mistake entirely by the government.

Or that's just an idea right now.
1/2

I'm thinking as for when the player characters exist on the planet, some determined scientists gene-mod new species of post-humans to carry on in this new environment, but these projects are most abandonned and left on their own as humanity pulls out of the planet. Many many years later what remains of these projects are expelled from cryro sleep or other methods of suspended animation and wander their way into the world, without much to guide them, being uneducated and basically born yesterday, they try to understand the world around them, eventually forming new societies where they can survive, and then thrive. Once organized and functioning they make it main goal to try and reclaim the technology their ancestors left scattered about and make the planet a nice place to live again, however, unknown to them, the containment facilties that have held the shattered entity are nearing their last legs after the countless years.

I dunno, just think it could be something neat to mess with.

Sounds like you have a pretty fun campaign set up to me. I think I'll take that idea for an eventual Doom-inspired game.

Don't worry too much about "cliches" or other self-doubt traps. Never think that your game will automatically be better if you don't use a cliche, because your game's quality depends on your ability, not the cliches and tropes you avoid or subvert. As long as it's fun, it doesn't matter how derivitive your game is.

These are all good points, but other than that Heraldry on the armor mentioned, how would anyone know or care what Status a player is?

The only way I can think of to make it matter is as follows: unless a player can prove who their lord is, or that they are a lord themselves, the local ruler can demand whatever the hell they want from them, as they are clearly vagabonds.

Different status levels dress, talk and act differently. Anybody with Status +1 or higher is going to look like it and likely have a way to prove it in the form of a signet, heraldry or stupid looking hat, depending on culture.

Even wearing the same armor someone with Status +2 and Status -1 are going to look quite different. A surcoat marked with a coat of arms on the knight, while the low class man wears chain mail covered by a cheap homespun talbrid of undyed fabric.

i can't access mega right now, is pic related in the archives?

Yes.

Older GURPS Books > Licensed Properties

How are your low status/wealth people getting armor? Shit's expensive, yo.

I guess that's true, but then there's also nothing stopping a player from spending all their money on a piece of fancy armor to lie their way into Status.

This is TL4, as in early 16th century-esque, so the starting welath is $2000.

A Steel breatplate is only $500. Combined with limb armor, it'll maybe all total up to 1000. This leaves them money over for a sword and shield, a backpack, travel rations, a tent, and personal basics, with pocket change to spare. They won't exactly look like paupers.

Status +1 clothes cost $2400, or $1200 for summer wear. It's not exactly something a person can buy casually. Their friends/people that know them are also likely to treat them like an asshole for putting on airs. This gets worse away from zero. A Wealth -1 / Status -1 person would be looking at clothes that cost more then twice their starting wealth.

I'd also note that you could CLAIM status, but it's going to be a hard lie to pull off unless you've got the right skills, and if exposed could be embarrassing when someone exposes you and your new posh friends learn that you are the bastard son of a prostitute rather then a gentlemen of quality breeding.

Cyberpunk pregen user again. I need some ideas to fill out equipment lists. The hacker's got a holdout pistol, plenty of ammo, an armored bodysuit, and a chameleon cloak; what else do I need to give her?

A computer.

Fucking WOW I feel super smart right now. Gracias, user.

Please excuse me while I add that to the sheet before committing sudoku.

Ahhh, now we're getting somewhere. I'd forgotten about clothes, I just assumed that the players started out wearing basic clothes based on their Status and/or Wealth.

Follow-up question, another thought has come to me. What about taxes? Are taxes included in the Cost of Living?

Okay, one down, five to go.

Taxes are typically included in COL and job payment, though special taxes like a "war tax" a TL 4 government might pass requiring $200 from every landowner as a one time payment to fit out a fleet to protect the homeland could come up in game.

By default everyone starts with a wardrobe of clothes, 1-4 basic outfits, maybe a formal outfit and a winter outfit. It's only for your status however, so if you are Status -2 it's going to be shoddy, much patched and old clothes someone else threw out.

Looks good. Capable, but the rest of the team is going to be able to get her into place to use her powers.

Consider dropping her Will and Per to 14 to protect the Investigator's niche as hard-boiled and keen-eyed. That will leave you with a whopping 20 points left over, but I have no clue what you'd spend it on as I'm not seeing any huge gaps (though if she uses gamerspeak, she should have at least a point in Games (Vidya) or something similar).

How good are the early firearms (musket, flintlocks) in GURPS? I have a GM who wants to include them into an upcoming fantasy campaign and, truthfully, I'm concerned there won't be any reason for people to use any weapons aside from guns in combat.

Maybe give her Demotions (Fireworks) and a collection of pyro toys like smoke bombs, noisemakers, flares, burner-phone remote detonators and sparklers? Plays into the trickster part and gives her a non-computer thing to mess with people.

Where can I find rules which emulate the effect of volley fire? I'm planning on GMing a game set in the Napoleonic era of warfare.

>how would anyone know or care what Status a player is

Bearing, dress, habits, manners, knowledge of everyday things appropriate to your Status, and in general just being able to fit-in with your social peers.

They're okay. They're not real reliable, and take forever to reload though.

You can only expect to get off maybe one or two shots before you need to draw steel.

How crunchy do you want to get? You could go full crunch and just have a bunch of dudes use Wait maneuvers and use the rules for scattering/hitting the wrong target from Badic Set to represent group vs group massed shooting. On the flip side, you could use the rules for mobs/hordes from Zombies; the group attacks as one collective unit with a RoF equal to the number of units in the horde (times the weapons' actual RoF if it has any), and every interval of Major Wound taken takes someone in the group out e.g. a unit made of five soldiers armed with RoF 3 rifles and having 12 HP each attacks as a group with RoF 15 and loses one soldier for every 7 injury the group suffers.

Your basic flintlock musket with prepared rounds (a bit of paper with pre-measured powder, paper for wadding and a bullet) can deal 4d pi++ damage with acc 2 out to 100 yards. It takes 15 seconds to reload, but you can get that down to 10 with Fast Draw (Ammo)

That's pretty damn good. BUT.. it weighs like a bitch, at 13 pounds, and 10 seconds makes it take a long time to reload. For most people it's impractical to carry two, so you will want to take your time and make that first shot really count. It's cheap, however, at just $200.

A bow on the other hand can hit for 1d+1 IMP damage* for an ST 10 man out to 200 yards, twice the range of the gun, and has acc 3 rather then 2. It can be reloaded in 2 seconds, or 1 with Fast Draw ammo. It's also much quieter then the firearm and won't produce a cloud of dark smoke that gives away your position. The bow, however, cost $900.

The gun is a great, GREAT weapon for a man that will fire once at close range then go into close combat. It lets him seriously injure or kill one target without aiming at anything but the torso. He and his friends can mass-fire at the highest threat target then go into a brawl with an advantage.

The bow is great for a ranged specialist. They can kill with a well aimed shot to the vitals and can sustain a high to very high rate of fire.

*He can get an extra +1 from Fine arrows, at $6 a shot.

Anybody here ever try running a campaign based off of Gantz using GURPS? How would you implement the suits well?

>use the rules for scattering/hitting the wrong target from Badic Set

What page number can I find those rules on?

I'd prefer to go with the first option but simplify it. It's a play by post game on a forum with a built in dice system so I could easily just string and stratify rolls together (i.e. set A fires and reloads while set B fires, rinse and repeat until either the enemy is dead or it becomes time for bayonet fighting).

How much should a Civil War era Union army uniform weight?

"Hitting the Wrong Target" and "Overshooting and Stray Shots" are on p. B389-390. Scattering is on p. B414.

Thanks.

Doesn't your wealth automatically include appropriate clothes?

Are these good house rules for more deadly combat?

If you get hit in the torso, then do the following:

1: Roll 1d6. If a 1 is rolled, then you got shot in the vitals.

2: Torso damage does not exceed the targets HP.

3: Any damage that would exceed it, however, is turned into a negative modifier for bleeding-out rolls.

1 is from HT162, 2 is from HT162, and 3 is from HT162. You're asking if official rules are good houserules?

I don't know what's more spectacular, that he reinvented some very popular lethality-reducing rules from scratch, or that he did so in an attempt to increase lethality.

How are they lethality reducing?

>2. Torso damage does not exceed the targets hp

Considering you can take up to the full 5x hp to kill you in one go with normal rules, that reduces lethality.

Rifle before these rules: 7d damage, averages 25 or so injury. That triggers a death check for the majority of people. Rolling 13+ means death, which happens about 26% of the time.

Rifle after these rules: 7d damage, caps at 10 injury. No death check, but you bleed out ten minutes later. 16.67% chance of a vitals hit means 75 damage average, which is enough to instantly drop someone to -5xHP (killing them).

HT162's rules reduce the likelihood from being killed from 26% to 16.67%.

What does Semi-Upright mean if I want to use a weapon like a polearm?

While you do have a 1:6 chance of accidentally hitting the vitals, the majority of shots have a strict cap. This stops high-end rifles from gibbing people with stomach shots.

I suppose "delayed lethality" is more appropriate, though, as bleeding is very dangerous. Still, capping high-velocity large-caliber rounds at HP can be the equivalent of having them roll all 1s and 2s for damage, and for insane shit like UT's Anti-Materiel Rifle (to say nothing of it's ETC or ETK variants), the cap results in a fraction of a point of damage per die.

In that case, I'll drop out #2 & #3 and make the new #2 read:

>Any damage that would exceed the target''s HP also incurs a negative modifier, being of equivalent number by which it surpasses HP, for bleeding-out rolls.

Why do you want to make firearms unrealistically lethal, even moreso than Basic Set?

Thanks, I couldn't find anything about taxes in the book.

I ran a campaign where we used matchlock guns. They're great for NPCs; the point expenditure to get a decent skill with them is much lower than for other weapons, they do good damage, and they're cheap.

For PCs, you needn't worry. Bows and Crossbows are much better, since skill and money costs are much less of a concern.

Isn't that sort of thing handled by Savoir-Faire?

J-Joush? Is that you?

You're capped at 40% Move with your polearm.

Might as well just use TL11 disintegrator rays then. Guns don't automatically kill with each hit.
Savoir-Faire is for cultural familiarities, not firearms.

Do I need DX12?

Do you consider a polearm a small object in your neck of the woods?

So I *can't* move with my polearm in my hands?Because it's not a small object, so therefore I can't walk around with it.

Reasonably, you wouldn't know Savior-Faire (High Society) unless you were high society, just like only someone from a seafaring civilization is likely to learn Shiphandling. Beyond that, the difference between SF and simply having high Status is the degree of knowledge and how well they can use it; a spoiled brat or libertine probably can't (or maybe simply doesn't) use traditional greetings and etiquette to butter up fellow nobles (remember that SF is first and foremost an influence skill, not a knowledge skill; it exists to butter up to a subculture or class of people).

Polearms are big and unwieldy, dude. A halberd is 12 pounds, and even a dueling glaive is 6. They're long and cumbersome. I wouldn't let you do it with objects weighing more than one or two pounds, or BL/10 if I wanted to scale it up.

So is wrong. Gotcha.

I read Semi-Upright as "you walk awkwardly upright at 40% Move, or at full Move if empty handed OR carrying only small objects at DX 12."

With a polearm, you're stuck doing a slow-ass gorilla swagger forever.

You can walk upright with a polearm as much as you like, but unless you're a giant with giant ST, you're not going to be able to carry it in your hands while moving on all fours. A knife? Sure, but not a polearm.

I want to run a GrimDark setting game.

Take it from someone that has walked the same dark path: lethality is not the main part grimdark. Amping up lethality to redonk levels will not make the setting more gritty, it will just make your players frustrated and teach them to not give a shit about their characters because at any moment a mook can instagib them with a shot to the toe. Give them limitations. Make them struggle. Make them suffer. Don't just kill them outright though because that makes for a boring, frustrating game.

Pic (or at least flavor text) related

Wow that post came out 100 times more tryhard than I intended.

tl;dr I tried going ultra-lethal and my campaign crashed and burned because no one like making new characters and getting invested in them only to lose them in dumb undramatic ways every other week. Play down lethality (of the PCs at least) and play up other aspects of why your setting sucks to live in.

How would you play a character with complete amnesia in a sense, say they'd have their base instinct, verbal communication, maybe some survival skills, but otherwise nothing else, illiterate, uneducated, lost and confused, thrust into a world with no knowledge of it.

Would they just be a real low point count character or how would it work?

Does group basics survival gear include the stuff in personal basics survival gear?

It sounds like a newborn or even an animal in an adult human body, so yeah, really low point total unless your amnesiac has some powerful ability locked away and/or are peak/superhuman physically.

I don't *think* so, but I'm not sure. I've always treated group basic as things the entire party only needs one of--e.g. a cooking pot--and personal basics as things every individual needs their own of--e.g. eating utensils, bar of soap, etc.

If I want to, as a GM, make the Bandolier function like a backpack for ammunition how many pounds would be realistic for a TL 5 Bandolier?

How would I make a medium grade one suitable for mid-1800's era soldiers?

HT lists a TL5 cartridge bandoleer as weighing 1 lb. and holding up to 50 rounds (p. HT54).

I'd pick and choose stuff from the Expedition Gear section of High-Tech. Actually, it looks like they provide stuff for you on p. HT58.

Don't.

Grimdark works best with systems that aren't as front-loaded as GURPS. Sytems where building a character is a matter of minutes.

Use actual Dark Heresy or other 40k systems for that.

No, just status, but in most societies Wealth gives automatic Status at higher levels.

You could learn to pass as higher Status, especially if you grew up around them. If you were the son of a man that taught a prince swordsmanship, spending a lot of time around and befriending a young noble, you might pick up the skills and manners needed to pretend to be noble.

Or if you were a 19th century daughter of a rich merchant you might get the same tutors and governess as nobles, to the point that you could easily pass as a noble for everything except having a title, and all you need to fix that is to find a poor pretty noblemen willing to marry a rich girl.

>Joush

Guilty as charged. The question reminded me of someone.

So like Tarzan? Lord Grayson lost in the jungle, unable to even remember how to speak until his memory is restored?

I feel like group basics is things like cooking kit, some tools, pegs, rope, tarp and stuff like that, while personal basics are things like your own cup, toothbrush, razor, a knife and fire starter.

About 5 pounds of ammunition. The belt itself could support more weight then that, but that's about what you can physically fit on a bandiloader.

>So like Tarzan?
Yeah basically.

All you need is a British speech therapist guy, a bet and six months.