/gurpsgen/ GURPS general

>high legality
Fucking autocorrect. I meant lethality.

High lethality is pretty easy to achieve if you keep PCs at a reasonable point total (100~150 if you don't want a meatgrinder, less if you do) and use optional rules like bleeding, accumulated wounds, and disease. Low-Tech combat is highly lethal, as well, so TL0~4 fantasy would work best. TL9+ fantasy would also work, since guns practically instagib you at that point with the proper ammunition in use.

I really do suggest cracking open GURPS Fantasy. Since it's meant to help you make your own fantasy setting, it talks a lot about the various genres of fantasy and has plenty of seeds to get you thinking. What do you find most interesting about high lethality and fantasy? That'd be a good place to start from.

I've been running GURPS for a while and well, I just want a change from what I normally do. It's like I never learned to really challenge my players. So I'd like to do that. I want a character surviving to mean something.

>I want a character surviving to mean something.
Well, overcorrecting with high lethality might not go over well with your players. Easing them into a dangerous world is a better idea, so they have time to acclimate to the consequences of failure. Let's see if I can come up with a good example...

Assume a standard Points of Light campaign setting, around TL3 but with schizo TL due to magic. The world is mostly overrun with dangerous creatures, be that undead, chaos hordes, orcs, demons, giants, fantastical beasts, etc.; the sapient races have holed themselves up in safe havens and are slowly working on expanding their territory. Travel between two of these points of light can be dangerous, especially if they are far apart.

The initial scare happens when the safe haven is broken into. The magic wards fail, there are cracks in the defensive walls, or perhaps it was some dark agent that managed to infiltrate and unleash horror. Whatever the reason, it affects the PC's livelihood by damaging their home and destroying things they care about, likely injuring some people if not killing them in the process. You show them the world is dangerous without directly maiming them (do this to NPCs).

Figure out a plot hook to get them to leave the city accompanied by more NPCs. These are your fodder to show that the outside world is dangerous. An ambush in the middle of the night that kills the NPC guards on watch, large monsters that eat through the (NPC-lead) caravan and close in on the PCs near the middle/back. When they're the only ones left alive, they can try to get home or press onward. Now's when you can start maiming them, storms ruining their camp so they lose sleep and FP, catch diseases from nasty goblin blades, break a leg from a fall down a cliffside, etc.

Make sense? I feel like Points of Light is pretty good for high lethality, since concentrated populations means interpersonal ties to PCs, which can lead to NPCs becoming PCs questing to save them.

I've been running something similar with Grimwyrd for a year and a bit now. My sweet spot was TL 4, guns, and lots of big scary monsters.

Sure, there is magic in the world, but for every elf with a healing talent or Greyhold alchemist, there were ten or twenty ravenous Beastmen, a dragon, demonic warlocks, and a plague to deal with too.

There have been plenty if close calls with nearly permanently crippled limbs and botched fireball dodges so far, but clutch "we sure are glad we saved this potion" healing moments have kept the PC's alive amidst the horrors.

(Also, I can't believe I rolled random hits to Aachens arm on three separate occasions. Mental)

>nearly permanently crippled limbs
Are you using any of the MA rules for permanent injuries?

GURPS never dies. It simply hibernates, and should be allowed to do so in peace.

Besides the obvious gregarious and chummy disadvantages are there any other traits a people instinctively tending towards friendliness and naivety should have?

Gullible and Honesty are prime candidates for naivety.

No mostly just basic set. Lots of failed major wound rolls in combat, but they often clutch the roll for permanency after. Or they got magic healed.

Are there any good rules for doing stuff like building worlds from scratch, running hexcrawl games, making players have to plan out long distance journeys and such?

I've been wanting to do a game about letting the players be treasure hunters in a kind of sandboxy open world.

Rules for diving especially would be appreciated.

>building worlds from scratch
Space.
>running hexcrawl games
Google hexcrawl stuff, it's easy.
>making players have to plan out long distance journeys and such?
DF16 Wilderness Adventures, After the End.
>Rules for diving especially would be appreciated.
Pyramid 26 Underwater Adventures

I have idea of Fire Mage, who can heat up herself to get stronger&hotter attacks

So, say, he warmed up with succesfull "Flame Dart" shot, and for next 10 seconds he hot enough to be able to shoot "Flame Arrow". Or he can concecutive shot 5 "Flame Dart" (or hit 3 times with "Flame Arrow" within 30 seconds) and be able to unleash rain of flame datrs with "Flame Dart Assault" for 30 seconds.
As "Flame Arrow" and "Flame Dart Assault" is just straight upgrades to basic spell (gaining full dice or ROF), should i pay only difference cost ([2] and [2]) and buy it as enhancement advantages or buy them as individual advantages?
AA here i think won't work correct.
Also can my mage use DWA "Flame Dart"/"Flame Dart" or he need buy extra copy?

>Flame Dart (basic) IA: 1D-2 burn (Increased 1/2D Range: 10x +15%; Reuced Range, -10%; Overhead +30%) [3]

>Flame Arrow IA: 1D burn (Increased 1/2D Range: 10x +15%; Reuced Range, -10%; Overhead +30%, Trigger (10 second): Successful hit with Flame Dart, -40%) [5]

>Flame Dart Assault IA: 1D-2 burn (Increased 1/2D Range: 10x +15%; Reuced Range, -10%; Overhead +30%, Rapid Fire: 15 RoF +100%, Trigger (30 second, expiring): 5 concecutive uses of Flame Dart (basic) or successfull 3 hits with Flame Arrow ), -30%) [5]

Accessibility limitation, adjudicated by you GM

Hey /gurpsgen/, I'm hopefully gonna be running my first game in the next couple weeks, and I need some advice on points totals for the PCs.

Basic Set Characters recommends 100-200 points as "typical for career adventurers." I'm thinking of 125 and 25 for disads. Does that sound alright? Any advice on creating characters for a first time GURPS GM/players?

That's low powered but yes, totally serviceable. You'll have gritty down to earth specialized heroes.

Make sure to have a session zero so the players all fill the roles you're expecting

What's the game?

Is Dungeon Fantasy included in the main archive in the OP pdf or do I need to find it somewhere else?

>implying any of us ever played GURPS

What's the RAW way to be able to Move and Attack at no penalty? Do I just buy of the -4 to hit as a Hard technique, specialized by skill?

Heroic Charge, but it costs 1 FP, it's in Martial Arts.

>low powered
I might up the points a bit then, to 150 maybe? I don't believe I have enough GURPS experience to ensure the PCs don't end up getting screwed by my lack of foresight/experience balancing encounters.

>What's the game?
It's inspired by the slice-of-life watchtower thread that was on Veeky Forums way back; the PCs are new recruits, sent to man a watchtower in a remote province.
It's a homebrewed, pseudo-medieval setting, with no magic...until I get to grips with one of the magic systems, at which point some low-key magical shenanigans may begin occurring.

On that note, I'm tempted to start documenting the game, and whilst I don't expect anyone to bother reading it, what's the most popular blogging method for other GURPS folk?

150 is a good sweet spot. Do try to do a session zero though, it helps so much

Watchtower seems a neat dynamic; full home base? Or full on survival mode for them?

Also, if you wanna introduce "magic" set rules for character generation, and then slowly introduce powers later on. And then allow them to spend CP on discounted cool Advantages powered by it. Kinda exactly what I did with Grimwyrd
[Grey the Beastman developing from a fast healing brute into someone with spirit vision, blessed and an elemental ally, for example]

My personal AARing is just a WordPress. Most 4channers just prefer to see them pasted in here.

>do a session zero
I definitely will - I can't imagine the game getting off to a smooth start without one.

>full home base? Or full on survival mode for them?
A little of both; one of the players seems interested in creating a somewhat socially oriented character, so I'm planning on making some of the early challenges revolve around befriending the locals - but until then the PCs will have to rely on their own skills and wits.

>slowly introduce powers later on...
Sounds like a good plan! I'm already looking forward to seeing the players get to grips with their characters, and giving them an opportunity to reflect their development mechanically...although I may be counting my chickens a little early..

>My personal AARing is just a WordPress.
Excellent, cheers!

This may be a little premature to be worrying about, but are there any pitfalls to watch out for with a low-tech game?

>pitfalls
Healing is entirely dependant on immediate first aid, with little effect from medical help. Often, luck and rest keeps you alive.

Also, guns kill.

To translate that into practical terms, damn near require any PC meant for frontline fighting to have (Very) Fit and (Very) Rapid Healing on top of Ht 12+. A good set of armor is worth its weight in gold. Luck and Combat Reflex's survivability boosts cannot be overstated.

GURPS 4th Edition -> Dungeon Fantasy. pastebin.com/raw/r3xVyT5H Here's an archive you can search for 4e books. If anyone wants to expand it to the rest of the folders, they can.

We need to add Fantasy Tech 2 there.

Group of strangers including a washed up old cop with shakey hands, a spoiled teenage girl and a Canadian Navy sailor in a hospital on a winter night in 1980 Montreal, caught between a monstrous vampire, her human servant and a pair of young, well armed but very trigger happy vampire hunters. Nearly got exploded. The sailor did get caught in the explosion when a hunter used a grenade on the vampire, unwilling to leave a knocked out Hunter.

So just the old man, getting half dragged by the teenage girl, survived.

This isn't strictly true. If you don't take a lot of huge hits, Very/Fit isn't really needed, and while Very Rapid Healing is good, it's not a big upgrade from Rapid Healing. That +5 to HT means you will almost never fail the roll to recover, so it saves you from a lot of problems. This comes down to the combat pace: Are you okay with a PC being down for 2 weeks to heal after a fight?

Luck and Combat Reflexes are wonderful.

Feel free to buy it and upload it, my man.

Sweet Jesus that sounds like a recipe for disaster and just the right amount of crazy to be fun as hell :D

That gonna be a running game we can hear about?

Xenophilia too.

GM did tease is as a session -1 for Dresden Files 1980. I wouldn't mind trying more of it.

>I don't believe I have enough GURPS experience to ensure the PCs don't end up getting screwed by my lack of foresight/experience balancing encounters.

The best fix for this is to give all the players a couple of levels of Luck for free (and maybe a level of Serendipity). Or raise their point total by 30-45 points and make the above mandatory. Both ways amount to the same thing.

Also suggest they save a few points aside for use with Flesh Wounds (B417) but limit their use to only critical stuff such as against headshots or crits. Things that would be insta-kill otherwise.

If you do those things it's fine to break out the ol' ultra-violence secure in the knowledge that you've given the players all the tools they need to survive it (at least long enough to run away).

Luck and a few levels of Destiny (the variant that gives points for buying success and other impulse buys) are great buffers against lethality.

>Dresden Files 1980
I didn't know I wanted this until I heard it

Aw yiss

Anyone got any funny pictures related to GURPS?

The classic.

Been working on a kind of flooded world, post-apocalyptic setting, and have some kinks I've been wanting to iron out, some thoughts I've been stuck on.

For the most part, all inhabitants of this new world are freed from old facilities and labs and have no memory of any world before, trying to carve out an existence for themselves where they can. I want to get the scavenger aesthetic without them being entirely primitive, though I'm not entirely sure how viable it would be for them to no just reverse engineer the forgotten futurtech that is around them unless they are somehow limited by like a lack of resources being available to them.

Also in a weird conundrum of wanting the old world to be pretty futuristic, but then have a lot of the tech availible to the players be more crude and more like our times, in a Mad Max or Waterworld sort of way, and seaplanes and flying boats like pic related be able to show up.
I guess that could be explained by skilled engineers making shit out of scrap parts, though having planes armed with guns would kind of clash with the idea of not having guns be too widely availible and make players resort to other options like melee weapons, bows and slings, and any guns being mostly either very crude makeshift weapons, aged salvage or rare relics of the past. Unless the guns used on aircraft was simply too heavy/bulky for adventurers to feasibly lug around.

And then the final problem I've been thinking about has been the presence of supernatural events and magic in the setting, I have two ideas for how it began, with the mundane one being far more boring of course, but I still don't know how I feel about the supernatural shit showing up, the idea being some kind of entity was responsible for the warping and corruption of people and areas of the world which lead to the apocalypse and some future dangerous encounters for the new world's inhabitants, and a set of dark magic to go along with the entity's presence.

In addition to that dark magic, I've been trying to think of if I wanted to have the presence of a nanobot or superscience based "magic" that players could have access to as well, regardless of the supernatural presence in the setting or not, as this would be tech based and mostly just regarded as magic due to the culture that has developed around it. Wizard staffs and talismans would be stuff like smartwatches and radio systems and other such devices that allows them to manipulate the nanites, which would exist as a small fine dust in it's basic state and function basically as physical, mana.

Though I'm not too familiar with magic in GURPS, I'd like this route to be mostly utility powers and vague functions and make players have to get crafty with their use of their spells in order to make it have offensive capability, if I have it present at all.

And Pagoda of Worlds and the DFRPG stuff.

What books would you advice for a game that starts as X-Files and (probably) turns into X-Com later?
Is it old Illuminati and Black Ops?

...

From the GURPS Wishlist

High tech and basic set. Add as needed

There is Mysteries book, although I cannot comment on quality/usefulness.
Monster Hunters 5 for aliens, but keep in mind those are designed for 400+ points supernatural characters.
Consider Horror for horror game, duh.

>High tech and basic set
That was a given but thanks

Thanks too. Never heard about these two

Also transhuman space: transhuman mysteries (heard it's nice addition to mysteries book experience) and 3e black ops. Action series also have are fine compilation of rules for such game too.

MH2 also has solid investigation rules.

Sorry, I was being too terse. What I mean is that High Tech and Basic Set really can do this alone. You can add more to it but those two will do it all alone.

This is really cool user, I don't know why you got no replies. I think magic is probably a bit too much in these kind of things. Perhaps just have all 'old-tech' as magic. Plane guns being too heavy is a pretty safe bet - you can have super strong bosses use them as well if you want.

Nanobot 'magic' is great imo, you can do something like rogue AIs in the vein of 40k's machine spirits.

If it's a flooded world, guns may not be rare, but bullets sure as hell will be. You'd only be able to scavenge them and make them by melting down copper and lead from scrap. Lead would be a problem since not too much is made out of it, and copper is primarily used in wiring which corrodes away rather quickly in a salt water environment. Bullets themselves don't do so well when underwater for a while either.

So yeah, you'd have a few factions hoarding what bullets they have, and most combat being done by muscle powered weapons or airguns.

The dark magic itself would mostly be rare and practiced by only a select few, and otherwise the supernatural critters would just provide additional spooks for the players and eventually a BBEG in what would otherwise be a simple sandbox hexcrawl adventure with no immediate goals other than what the players make for themselves.

I do like the "old world tech as magic" aspect. Was thinking of having some "wizards" not even be nanobot manipulators and just be engineers who have got old mundane things like flamethrowers working when no one else is expecting it.

I picture there not being much in the way of salvage in terms of stuff that actually functions. The futuretech in the world is most likely head and shoulders above anything they could hope to reverse engineer with their current understanding of technology. Ceramics and polymer composites and weird exotic metallurgical compounds that is simply so advanced it's barely compatible with their native tech even as salvage. The only real stuff would be repurposing scrap to build things and then universal things like solar panels, rubber, power tools and internal combustion engines. Some industrial equipment was probably rugged enough to survive and some electronics have been preserved in forgotten, sealed up science labs.

Guns would probably be mostly limited to crude muzzle loaders and such, with no real machining factories existing basically every item would be an artisan product of a dedicated gunsmith or other sort of craftsman, so firearms are rare and expensive, and making them with hand tools to fit old guns is hard, tricky work.
I imagine air and naval battles to be more restrained with boarding actions being common, the guns are used conservatively and a lot of the focus is on being able to steal, or at least salvage a lot from the enemy ship due to the amount of work that goes into building air and seacraft

Trying to make gunpowder in a flooded world would be an adventure in itself though. Potassium nitrate you can get easily enough from seabird droppings, but coal? Burning what few trees you have for charcoal? And trying to get sulphur? And if industrial equipment survives, using it to make machinetools is practically the first use it'd be put to.

That's even assuming gunpowder gets rediscovered with those hurdles to jump. And it's far more likely to find ammo than a working/repairable plane or boat. You can handwave these arguments away, but handwaving isn't a satisfactory explanation and your group's gonna want one more than ;it doesn't fit my vision'.

You need to start from the base assumptions of your setting and work forward.

>The dark magic itself would mostly be rare and practiced by only a select few, and otherwise the supernatural critters would just provide additional spooks for the players and eventually a BBEG in what would otherwise be a simple sandbox hexcrawl adventure with no immediate goals other than what the players make for themselves.
>I do like the "old world tech as magic" aspect. Was thinking of having some "wizards" not even be nanobot manipulators and just be engineers who have got old mundane things like flamethrowers working when no one else is expecting it.

How about "dark magic" and supernatural entities simply be superscience gene-modification/radioactive mutations. That's dark enough and keeps the aesthetic. Also potential explanation for the state of the world.

Frankly, in such a setting all supernatural stuff could be explained away as psionic phenomena, which pseudo-scientific to begin with and is indistinguishable from magic unless magic is also present.

And given that this setting is supposed to have nanite-based "magic" too, all the psi stuff could be just a natural ability to connect to the nanosphere of the planet. Like an emitting node in the brain

>Burning what few trees you have for charcoal? And trying to get sulphur?
Well there are larger continents, but they're dangerous and basically for experienced explorers only, being poison swamps, thick jungles, treacherous cliff and chasm filled highlands and vast desolate deserts. People mostly stay to the oceans and island chains becsuse they are far safer and more livable.

I'm imagining, with only rare exceptions, the stuff they would dredge on a typical scav run is mostly scrap metal and shells of old thing, hence the rusted scrapmetal aesthetic of their planes and boats, and actual restorable tech few and far between.
I also imagine traditional bullet guns to be a rarity, most rounds they'd find underwater would be long dead cells for energy weapons, waterlogged remains of caseless ammo and such, and plastic cased bullets for odd futuristic guns, though a few normal rounds would still exist of course, but be mostly niche purpose or only used by select groups in the old world.

The original idea was some kind of psionic alien entity with great corruptive power, in an Eldritch Lovecraftian old one kind of way, which was awoken by the new activity on the recently transformed and colonized planet it was imprisoned on. Using these new resources given to it, it began to twist and corrupt the world to it's desires and lead to the apocalyptic cataclysm as the old world people fought against it. This conflict though, it what lead to exodus of the planet, the state it's in now and the supernatural occurrences, places and creatures.

I find it an interesting idea but I dunno.

Bump

Have a picture of GURPS Complete Edition in print

You can produce the nitric acid, cellulose and sulfuric acid from algae and petroleum, available from either seeps on the surface of water or from oil rigs on the surface of the water.

Those don't make black powder, but black powder kind of sucks. It will made modern smokeless powder and explosives.

>Drilling for petroleum in the post apoc
>When machinery is supposed to be rare and rusted out.

I don't buy it user. And most of the seeps and other easily extractable fossil fuels are gone long before an apocalypse rolls about. Oil Rigs are neither simple nor easy to build, restore, and -keep from exploding-.

So really, they won't be doing any of that without more handwaving.

Are there any rules for a character helping another in combat? Like feints/distract on another persons skill.

Teamwork perks let you transfer feint bonuses to allies against the same target. Simply focusing the party's attacks on a single target forces them to eat penalties to their Parry. Also, weaker combatants with cutting weapons can try to cripple limbs/extremities and set the big bruiser is for an easy kill.

I know there's also a Pyramid article that covers teamwork in more depth and includes rules for cinematic leadership and direction.

>Setup Attacks (Delayed Gratification, Pyramid #3/52 - Low Tech II
>Fighting Smart (After the End 2 - The New World)
>Coordinated Attacks (Powers)
Probably more can be found in Action and Monster Hunters.

Article's name is "Team Up!" from Pyramid #3/65 Alternate GURPS III

I think your setting is safe and consistent as long as you don't have too many settlements above, say, 1000 people. There will be a few people who can handle, repair and perhaps even ghetto-craft futuretech in every village, but overall a low population density should completely ensure technological stagnation in the short term.

Even a basic mining/factory town had thousands of residents and those just ultimately produced one or two simple commodities like coal or machine parts for the 19th century economies.
I guess it's different if there are entire automated mining and manufacturing complexes which only need a few buttons pushed or a new energy grid to become operational, in that case I recommend looking at Blame for inspiration.

Not to mention, Venus wouldn't have any fossil fuels to begin with.

You can also two-handed grab someone's arm. This keeps them from retreating, they eat -4 DX and can't use that arm until they break free. If you aren't very strong they might do this easily.. but that won't help them much if your friend took the chance to All Out Attack them when their defenses were penalized and they can't parry.

ran my first game using GURPs the other day

friends are playing as a German WW2 tank operator turned NYPD rookie detective with his partner being the generic jaded homicide detective

for everyones first time playing things went well but i think im gonna remake the characters for them since they dont really feel like detectives

the system didnt get in the way of the narrative at all which i was worried about

>the system didnt get in the way of the narrative at all which i was worried about
>playing simulationist as fuck system
>guys it just me or in system is quite bad with narrative

He's saying that the system didn't interfere with his narrative, I think

>the system didnt get in the way of the narrative at all which i was worried about
I'm glad you had a good experience. Good luck, and don't feel sheepish about retooling whatever you need to in the first few sessions of a new campaign, especially with it being your very first experience with the system. As a matter of fact, I build characters like that for my players quite often after approving a given concept for a campaign premise. It's not a rule, they can build one themselves if they like, but most are happy to approve or tweak a sheet I put together to match their concept.

See attached a PDF of a nice fan-made, purely verbal character walkthrough for prospective players (not designed by me, just a very nice tool). It is designed to help the GM ask the right questions and interpret plain words into a fairly well-fleshed character, and it was designed specifically for GURPS.

Anyway, yeah. GURPS actually works great in terms of of moving the game along and supporting the narrative, in my personal experience.
To be fair, I have been running it off and on for around 15 years though. But even back then it wasn't any more difficult (though I've obviously refined my technique some since then), always seemed to feel "right" during play for me and those I was running for / playing with, even now (my brother, and two different groups I'm running face-to-face); with the exception of a single person who I am reasonably certain was already determined to hate it, anyway.

Oh, and P.S.: the PDF has nifty little drop-downs and form-fillable fields, too.

>as you don't have too many settlements above, say, 1000 people
Yeah, I was imagining most settlement as being largely tribal, with populations measuring more in the dozens than anything else, cities with populations in the multiple hundreds would be a rarity.

oh this is gonna be useful thanks user, for backstories I tried something a bit different and gave their characters tarot readings and built it from there, worked pretty well but I think it fits more for fantasy

You're welcome, it's done very well for me. The tarot idea you used is neat, though.

I like coming up with alternate GURPS chargen methods in general, actually (somewhat inspired by the "Pointless x" articles in Pyramid). I've started putting together two different lifepath systems actually (based on Burning Wheel and Traveller style), it's actually been way easier drumming stuff up than I expected and I haven't had to design much at all so far because there are SO many templates out there already, just have to design and organize the systems themselves (I'll post them here once/if I ever finish fleshing them out).

Also a completely random-roll system for quick peasant-level characters, no point accounting and even random attributes/advantages/disadvantages/gear; designed to approximate 150 point characters. Again, lots of the work done for me; some fellow out there even had a spreadsheet already put together for most of such an endeavor.
The goal of this being to let me play "classic" OSR-style dungeon funnels with a zany variety of characters, and seeing which one who is lucky enough to survive and be the character you want to continue play as.

Reading gurps magic right now and holy shit this is good. Makes me want to make either a Medieval Fantasy or Sci Fi fantasy setting and play this game.

Might just get some dudes on game finder to play with me but eh who knows maybe my old role playing group would like to give it a whirl.

Good luck with that. I'm doing a very low magic game right now, less with wizards then players uncovering and studying individual spells to give them an edge over monsters and cultist.