GURPS vs. Pathfinder / d20 / etc.?

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Archmage
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Post by Archmage »

CraigM wrote:
Archmage wrote:Edit: Oh, and the skill system is inane. I can't disagree with that.
How so? I'm very interested in what folks find mechanically unsettling about GURPS.
I played and am mostly familiar with GURPS 3rd, just FYI.

Okay, so you have four stats: Strength, Dexterity, IQ, and Health (ST, DX, IQ, and HT). Skills are either physical or mental, and they are graded as easy, average, hard, or very hard (E/A/H/VH). (NB: In GURPS 4e, skills are just easy/average/hard, and there's no physical/mental split. The table is also less inane.)

When you buy a skill, you pay 1, 2, 4, or 8 points for it depending on whether it's E/A/H/VH. At base cost, you get that skill equal to your stat. So if your DX is 14 and you spend 4 points on a Physical/Hard skill you get a skill of 14.

But wait! What if you don't want to spend that many points, or you want a better skill rating than that? You consult the skill costs table (you can work out the progression, but it diverges at high costs for VH skills).

So if you want that Physical/Hard skill at 15 (which is DX+1), you pay 8 points. You can pay 16 to get it up to 16 (DX+2). Or you can pay 2 points to get it at 13 (DX-1), or pay 1 point to get it at 12 (DX-2).

The best way to explain this to people is that there are two ways to approach skills: Decide what rating you want and then figure out how many points that costs, or figure out how many points you're willing to spend and then derive the rating from the table. Both work, but it's a convoluted process either way until you learn the table--it's basically half-cost to go down a rank and double-cost to go up a rank, but that's not actually 100% true and the whole thing is kind of a pain.

Luckily, the game tells you that rudimentary training with a skill is equal to rating 10, an expert is 16, and all sorts of other various benchmarks above and below. So what you want to do is have your player describe what they want ("I want to be an expert swordsman") and then you can figure out how many points it would cost for that character to have Broadsword - 16 based on their DX. Or whatever.

GURPS 3e had weird crap about "improving skills from defaults" that made learning to use a bastard sword easier if you already knew how to use a broadsword, but the math was really weird and I can't explain how it worked without the book in front of me. I can't find my core book, and these rules aren't in GURPS 3e Lite, but they're listed in some random sidebar in the skills chapter. I think GURPS 4e did away with this, but I'm not sure.

You really do have to go through and make a list of skills that will be useful or allowed in your game. Acrobatics might be useful in almost any genre, but Masonry or Occultism might not, and technological skills are for specific tech levels. So there's no generic "medicine" skill, there's Medicine/TL. Modern day is approximately TL7, so a 21st century doctor has training in Medicine/TL7. This is ostensibly so that characters from today's Earth marooned on desert islands or traveling through time can't use their modern-day medicine skills to accomplish jack shit using either coconuts and twine or electrofrobotzillating neurocardioverters as applicable (okay, they can try, but they're at a penalty...to be fair, they're better off than people with NO Medicine skill).

Also, there are advantages and disadvantages that can make skills cost more or less, respectively. Magical Aptitude is required to cast spells, but it also comes in three levels and adds to your IQ, but only for the purpose of learning spells. There's some inane Eidetic Memory advantage that cost either 30 or 60 points by itself but that either halved or quartered the costs of all non-magical mental skills, so you can save a whole pile of points if you're willing to spend time bean-counting.

Note that many skills can be used untrained, but "defaulting" on a skill results in a penalty ranging from -4 to -8 depending on how hard the skill is--you might seriously be trying to roll under a 4 on 3d6 to succeed at a hard skill untrained. Good luck.

What else do you want to know about? The combat mechanics? The magic/psionics/super-power systems? Equipment subsystems?
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Post by CraigM »

Archmage wrote:What else do you want to know about? The combat mechanics? The magic/psionics/super-power systems? Equipment subsystems?
First off, thank you. Yes, I did have some problems with the GURPS Skill system at first. Also, you're right on the one type of sword giving you a default on another type of sword (the example in 4e mentions a Broadsword being usable by a person with Short Sword, but at a -2 penalty (Short Sword -2) It gets a little fiddly around raising items from defaults, but overall the system makes sense to me.

I only have the P-word as a representative of D20 (yes, yes, I know; heretical. Ask WoTC about putting out some PDFs some time and we'll talk. ;)), so my understanding of skills in D20 may be limited, but it seemed to me that if you didn't have a particular skill on your sheet (like, say "able to tie shoes") that the likelihood of you being able to tie your own shoes would be pretty nil because of the penalties involved. Again, I may be mistaken here.

If you have an opinion about anything else re: GURPS, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks again for all of the replies. I have to say that I've been quite pleased with the fairness of the responses.
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Post by kzt »

Generally people either seem to find Gurps magic very cool or repulsively awful. I've always like Gurps magic. The whole approach of prerequisites to learn the highly effective combat spells and being able to cast spells with vastly less effort as your skill increases to crazy levels just feels right to me.
Last edited by kzt on Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Vebyast »

I'm definitely on board with Gurps magic, especially as compared to DND's system(s). In DND, even a fifteenth-level wizard is on a five-minute workday. He has to spend one of his precious spell slots on anything, even the pitiful goblin in heavy plate that's blocking the corridor. In Gurps, on the other hand, a super-high-power wizard really feels like one. If your magic is high enough, you literally use telekinesis for everything because it's just that easy.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sat Mar 05, 2011 6:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by tussock »

GURPS is awesome, because that's what Reign of Steel is written for.

Maybe time travelling bounty hunters. Star Wars meets Battletech meets the Zombie Apocalypse powered by etherial nanobots. The rules, moreso with G4, scale quite well across the genres if you want to keep the same characters and mechanics on the way.

People are playing GURPS fantasy too, but I couldn't say why. It won't break as badly if someone finds an AK74, but it will if you let someone optimise their own character. Just put all your points into mind-control and rule the world in seven days.
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Post by Username17 »

TheWorid wrote:And Frank, just stop. You haven't read the book, and you're using "no one plays it" as your point of evidence. I know you don't like generic systems, and I understand and pretty much agree, but for all its flaws GURPS still has a lots of things going for it if you can stomach a lot of math.
I haven't read the 4th edition. I have read a lot of GURPS material, albeit almost all of it when Clinton was president. So tell me, which of the following are not still true in the current edition:
  • The game is primarily skill based, and based on a single pile of universal points. But the cost of a skill has absolutely nothing to do with how useful that skill is in the abstract or the projected campaign nor is said cost a good indicator of what your actual chance of activating that skill will be in play. The cost of the skill is instead based on a completely arbitrary assessment of how hard it would be to learn said skill, with a semi-exponential cost increase for bonuses, but 90% of your skill value comes from one of your attributes and that isn't cost dependent on how many skills it's boosting at all.
  • Given that the amount of points you spent have very little correlation with how useful your talents are or how likely you are to succeed when using your talents, it would seem that the point system is largely meaningless. But beyond that the primary draw of the game is the ability to have a party with a dinosaur riding cowboy, a suave computer hacker, and a fire sculpting bearded wizard in it. And yet: as should be blindingly obvious the computer hacker's abilities only matter at all within the confines of his own genre - if he goes out Weird West or dragon hunting in a cavern there are no computers with which he can interact and his abilities are useless. The cowboy is just as useless in the cyberpunk dystopia, because anonymity is the only defense when the government has literally millions of soldiers and CSI teams and neither his raptor nor his six shooters have any possibility of blending in to anything.
  • So the point totals are meaningless and making characters who can rationally be expected to adventure together is basically not going to happen, but on top of that if anyone ever uses any halfway decent weapon on you (whether that is a rifle shot or a magic lightning bolt), you're going down in one shot, and when that happens there is a very noticeable chance that you will suffer terminal bleeding and die.
So... 4th edition, which of those problems did they solve?

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Post by Vebyast »

FrankTrollman wrote:if anyone ever uses any halfway decent weapon on you (whether that is a rifle shot or a magic lightning bolt), you're going down in one shot, and when that happens there is a very noticeable chance that you will suffer terminal bleeding and die.[/list]
I've already answered these questions, but since you're asking so politely, I'll rephrase and consolidate my answers.

I can't remember enough of the details of the skill system off the top of my head to to definitively answer your first question. However, a much greater emphasis has been placed on advantages than you describe. A skill will let you solve a problem the way it was meant to be solved, while an advantage will give you a few completely new ways to solve any problem you run into. Advantages were greatly preferred in my group.


The third problem has been fixed (at the very least, it was fixed under the set of books my group played with). Most attacks against PCs are mitigated by buffs, readied distractions, good tactics, or advantages. Damage that gets through is healed by a caster or by the PC himself. Players have enough stamina, hit points, and defensive abillities that they can survive without much trouble.

Also, DND is just as bad as Gurps on this count. A spellcasting enemy with the proper list will kill you in one hit. End of story. Given how much time you spend using it as an argument, I doubt you've forgotten about Color Spray being a first-level spell. Sure, a plasma rifle will probably kill you if you fail to dodge it, block it, hide from it, kill the bad guy using it, or have a healer around to heal you. On the other hand, an enemy first-level wizard will knock out two-thirds your party on his first round. You say tomato, I say tomato.



As for the second complaint, I think you're expecting something unreasonable and frankly ludicrous. The system is a "generic" framework in that you can use it to construct any setting and get a reasonable, playable, fun set of rules. If the GM attempts to design a story that could accommodate a dinosaur cowboy, a hacker, and a wizard, he can. However, because Gurps is customizable at a slightly lower level, taking a predetermined setting and throwing random characters at it is comparable to running DND3.x characters through an adventure designed for 4e. The rules are generally the same, in that you use a d20 to do stuff and things have an armor class, but expecting anything other than miserable failure is irrational and insane.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sat Mar 05, 2011 11:58 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Starmaker »

tussock wrote:Just put all your points into mind-control and rule the world in seven days.
This.

When I signed up for my first game of GURPS, without ever seeing the rulebooks, I leafed through the manuals and decided on a gish wielding a shortsword in close combat and shooting lightning bolts. Then I noticed my disadvantages, which I took for the coolness factor (no shadow, etc - I was twelve; other games or DMs would charge points for mary sue features or ban them outright; this is when I decided GURPS was the best game ever), gave me one hell of a social penalty. So I got Charm. I also took some utility stuff like Scrounging (best. skill. ever.), Air Walk and Air Form (I think these two were prerequisites for Lightning).

So after the first session, when I got jumped by an insane guy and held him off with Charm, the MC came to the forums whining like a bitch, "Oh gawd help me there's a munchkin player who wants to raep my carefully crafted campaign world what to do plz halp". The assholey regulars told him to make it so that the casting of Charm leaves me without spellcasting until I sleep for 8 hours. He also decided to give me half the points he gave to other players for "bad roleplaying" a.k.a. not picking my nose like every five minutes (I didn't take any quirks for that very reason; five more points for playing a dumbfuck? thank you, but I'll pass).

Frank:
All of this holds true in 4e (I own, and have read, Characters, Campaigns, Fantasy, Magic, Banestorm, and Infinite Worlds).
Last edited by Starmaker on Sat Mar 05, 2011 12:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Archmage »

Starmaker wrote:So after the first session, when I got jumped by an insane guy and held him off with Charm, the MC came to the forums whining like a bitch.
GURPS is a game system where I can actually feel good using the "if you had this problem, your MC is an idiot" defense of the system. At least in this particular case.

And he clearly was, if he was inclined to complain that you were ruining his game because you won an encounter. But more to the point, if the MC didn't want charm effects (or anything else) in his game, he needed to say so up-front. Saying "you can't take spell or advantage X" in GURPS is not the same thing as banning sourcebooks in D&D; this isn't like going out and buying Complete Divine and then being upset you can't use any of the PrCs or feats. You aren't going to be allowed to bring laser rifles to the fantasy game just because you own a copy of GURPS Hi-Tech. There's nothing genre-breaking about charm, so all I can conclude from your anecdote was that your MC was indeed a little bitch.

Frank gets half credit in my book. Nowhere in the GURPS rules does the game advertise that you can run a RIFTS-style adventure with characters from wildly different genres. The MC really does need to say at the outset that the game is wild-west themed and make a list of appropriate advantages, disadvantages, and skills and be involved in the creation of the PCs to make sure everything "fits."

But what the game claims you can do that you supposedly can't do with other systems is stuff like time travel. Your party of four cowboys can get transported to 65 million BCE or the bridge of the starship Enterprise and the game's rules will actually allow you to adjudicate the results. For comparison's sake, see the classic D&D module Expedition to Barrier Peaks, where trying to use a found laser pistol involves consulting a Gygaxian flowchart. In GURPS, your cowboy with Guns/TL5 or whatever recognizes that a laser pistol is a firearm and gets to try to use it at his skill minus a small penalty or something. You don't have to learn different rules for different genres, and the rules are portable enough that characters who find themselves displaced from their usual setting don't need to be radically converted to another system in order to be playable.

Now, telling your players they're going to play cowboys and then shunting them into Star Trek is a bitch move, because their PCs are going to have all kinds of skills that probably won't be useful in their new environment, but I suppose that in theory you could come up with situations that would make the ability to accurately lasso steer useful in a sci-fi setting.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

FrankTrollman wrote:So... 4th edition, which of those problems did they solve?
The first point has been somewhat addressed; the primary skill-giving attributes, Dex and Int, are double the cost of the other attributes.

But yeah, the part where 40 points will make you a really quite strong guy, which is super-useful in the stone age, useful in the modern military (can carry more gear) and useless on the starship Enterprise has never been addressed. Nor has the part where those same 40 points could otherwise be spent on enough Charisma bonus to break the reaction system clean in half.

Like HERO, GURPS really needs someone with enough system mastery to set limits, both upper (tone down the Charisma, guy) and lower (you need some way to not be found by the megacorp, dude). I don't know if it explicitly says so anywhere (like HERO does), but it needs to say it more and louder in any case.

That said, I use GURPS for stories where it would be appropriate for people to lose limbs. HERO doesn't really do that very well (that I've seen).
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Post by Kaelik »

Vebyast wrote:Also, DND is just as bad as Gurps on this count. A spellcasting enemy with the proper list will kill you in one hit. End of story. Given how much time you spend using it as an argument, I doubt you've forgotten about Color Spray being a first-level spell. Sure, a plasma rifle will probably kill you if you fail to dodge it, block it, hide from it, kill the bad guy using it, or have a healer around to heal you. On the other hand, an enemy first-level wizard will knock out two-thirds your party on his first round. You say tomato, I say tomato.
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Post by Vebyast »

Kaelik wrote:I really wish people would stop being this stupid. It would make my day.
I really wish people would actually present arguments that I could read, understand, and learn from. It would really make my day.
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Post by Kaelik »

Vebyast wrote:
Kaelik wrote:I really wish people would stop being this stupid. It would make my day.
I really wish people would actually present arguments that I could read, understand, and learn from. It would really make my day.
Okay, fine:

You: Wah! D&D 3e is all rocket taggy, and people die so easy.

Reality: You cited level fucking one, the level that is known for actually being the most rocket taggy part of D&D 3e. Meanwhile, at higher levels it is very rare, translation, will only ever happen if your MC is a chump, or you are, in which any real fight is going to be appreciably ended by a single spell, because things make saving throws, things have immunities, and you fight a number of things greater than 1, or that one automakes all saves. I'm going to go out on a limb, and admittedly not having played GURPS assume that like all games with attack rolls and damage, that hitting someone with a lightning strike or a laser rifle shot is a better than 40% chance, if you line of the shot and roll the die, which is actually the save chance of a spell. So yes, everyone who whines about how D&D 3e is so fucking rocket tag and every fights ends with initiative and a single spell, blah blah blah is fucking retarded, and has never actually played high level D&D.
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Post by Vebyast »

Thank you.

You make a big deal out of things in DND having immunities, good saving throws, and high AC. "Hit points" and "Being able to fail a save against Slay Living and survive anyway" are conspicuously absent from that list. In other words, you're saying that your only defense in DND is to not let attacks hit you.

I'm making a big deal out of things in Gurps having points in dodge or block, having immunities, or having advantages that give them significant tactical advantages. I'm not mentioning hit points because they don't matter. Yes, your only defense in Gurps is to not let attacks hit you. However, since the designers realized that, there are dozens of ways to keep enemies from hitting you, many of which are actually interesting and fun to play with (especially compared to DND's numerical saving-throw buffs and magic armor). Anybody that whines about how Gurps is so fucking rocket tag and every fight ends with initiative and a laser rifle and a single shot blah blah blah blah is fucking retarded and has never actually played Gurps beyond thirty character points.




As an aside, your assumption about Gurps having attack and damage rolls is incorrect. Gurps has attack and damage rolls, yes, but it also has defense rolls and tactical modifiers to most rolls.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:23 am, edited 5 times in total.
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FrankTrollman wrote: [*] Given that the amount of points you spent have very little correlation with how useful your talents are or how likely you are to succeed when using your talents, it would seem that the point system is largely meaningless. But beyond that the primary draw of the game is the ability to have a party with a dinosaur riding cowboy, a suave computer hacker, and a fire sculpting bearded wizard in it. And yet: as should be blindingly obvious the computer hacker's abilities only matter at all within the confines of his own genre - if he goes out Weird West or dragon hunting in a cavern there are no computers with which he can interact and his abilities are useless. The cowboy is just as useless in the cyberpunk dystopia, because anonymity is the only defense when the government has literally millions of soldiers and CSI teams and neither his raptor nor his six shooters have any possibility of blending in to anything.
This completely misses the point of GURPs. The idea isn't to have a dinosaur riding cowboy a hacker and a wizard shooting Martians together. It's that you can have a group of cowboys fight some cattle rustlers, a group of hackers and toughs take on a corporation or have a knight, a wizard and an overweight merchant fight a dragon. Mixing settings without telling the players doesn't work because it's just retarded, a 150 point cowboy is weaker than a 50 point Corporate Security agent and there's no really good way to fix that, but it's not a problem with the system. If the players are using characters that are ineffective then there was a breakdown in communication between the players and the MC. As long as that communication exists between the different participants there shouldn't be any issues.
Frank Trollman wrote:The game is primarily skill based, and based on a single pile of universal points. But the cost of a skill has absolutely nothing to do with how useful that skill is in the abstract or the projected campaign nor is said cost a good indicator of what your actual chance of activating that skill will be in play. The cost of the skill is instead based on a completely arbitrary assessment of how hard it would be to learn said skill, with a semi-exponential cost increase for bonuses, but 90% of your skill value comes from one of your attributes and that isn't cost dependent on how many skills it's boosting at all.
This isn't really true. The skills aren't based on some "completely arbitrary" assessment, they're generally based on the idea that skills that are more useful in an adventure built around them cost more. Karate is hard because a high level in it gives a decent advantage in any situation where concealability and combat go together. Brawling, however, is easy because it's less useful in primary combat (but it might be useful for a modern soldier or a Victorian scientist to know on the side). Similarly, Computer Use is easy because it's hard to really break a campaign with it, but Computer Programming is Hard because it could allow you to hack into a system or data mine for some piece of information, which could circumvent significant portions of an adventure.

Also, I've never seen a huge problem with GURPs combat. If you're running a campaign where everyone has Plasma Rifles either give the players heavy armor that will allow them to survive or roll up extra characters in case someone dies. Other than that you have a number of extra defensive options that people don't really have in DnD, such as active defense and accessible Damage Reduction (imagine dnd full plate having DR 15).

The main difference between DnD and GURPs is that GURPs attempts to provide a framework for resolving conflicts and DnD provides a framework for resolving fantasy miniature battles. GURPs will be inferior if you just want to figure out who is going to win that battle between fantasy miniatures every time, but it does a decent job of helping you simulate players moving through a world and doing things.
Last edited by Novembermike on Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Archmage »

On GURPS and armor. Note that I'm drawing from GURPS 3e here.

There are three types of damage in GURPS--crushing, cutting, and impaling. Crushing damage sucks and you don't want to intentionally use weapons that cause it. Cutting or impaling weapons deal bonus damage, but only damage that overcomes DR is multiplied. So if you whack a dude with a sword and deal 6 cutting damage and he has DR 4, the 2 points that get through are multiplied by 1.5x for a total of 3 hits. Impaling damage is doubled, but impaling weapons generally deal less outright damage to compensate, making them much better against unarmored targets and less useful against armored ones. Generally.

An attack in GURPS is an pseudo-opposed roll--weapon skill versus target's applicable defense skill. Defenses are generally lower than attacks--your Parry skill with most weapons is half your weapon skill. Defense-oriented weapons like the quarterstaff get 2/3rds parry. Both characters want to roll lower than their skill. If the attacker succeeds, he has a chance to hit, so the defender rolls. If he doesn't succeed, he misses, and the attacker doesn't need to do anything. If the defender succeeds on their roll, they avoid damage.

So realistically, the attacker is trying to roll something like 14 or less on 3d6 and will therefore almost always succeed unless modifiers get in the way (which are a much bigger factor in ranged combat, since you have to consider distance, cover, whether opponents are prone or crouching, etc). Armor in 3e also adds to your dodge rate with its PD, or passive defense, negating some attacks outright before DR is even considered.

In a fantasy setting, which is probably about TL3, a strong dude (ST 14) can swing a broadsword for 2d6+1 hits. A defender in plate mail will realistically negate the hit outright 50% of the time with an effective defense skill of 10 (6 from Dodge or Parry, 4 PD from the armor, more if he has a shield). The attacker rolls an average of 7 damage; 1 hit gets through plate's DR of 6. He'll be fine. Conversely, someone in leather (DR 2) is going to eat 5 hits on average, and the sword's cutting damage type means that's actually 8 hits. Your HT stat is also your hit point pool, so you can probably take like 12 hits before you go down. Armor is crazy good and very necessary for your survival; the math actually works out okay here. People who have plate have a huge advantage over people who don't have plate, but that's arguably reasonable--it does kind of bone the swashbuckler types, though.

In a TL9 sci-fi setting a blaster rifle deals 12d6 impaling damage, so Star Wars heroes who get shot are going to be literally vaporized when they eat an average of 84 hits (42 pre-damage multiplier). But wait! Surely ultra-tech armor is good enough to compensate? And it is. Military combat armor has DR 65. Like 0.001% of all successful hits with the blaster will put through even 1 hit of damage.

The caveat here is that GURPS uses hit location rules unless you're using the "basic" combat option. But with high-tech armor, you just can't do that if you want combat to be anything but people shooting each other ineffectually. That military armor's DR 65 only applies to the torso. The limbs have DR 50, the hands have DR 25, and helmet has DR 50 except for the faceplate, which has DR 35. So you don't actually shoot blindly in a sci-fi firefight. Every single attack you make must be an aimed shot targeting the hands or faceplate if you want a better than 10% chance of putting damage through. Sadly, I loaned out my core book to someone and can't look up the penalty for those called shots, but the fact is that it doesn't matter what the penalty is--you're going to deal with it, because the alternative is to shoot someone with a blaster all day and accomplish nothing.

Or you can get bigger weapons, which do exist at TL9--there's a heavy blaster rifle that deals 6d6 multiplied by 3, which has about a 50% shot at putting damage through on a successful hit to the torso, but you're really going to continue aiming for armor weak points and vaporize people's limbs (or face) instead.

4e might have fixed some of the math on this--they eliminated PD and shifted armor over to a purely DR system, but I think they increased skill-based and attribute-based defenses again, which means it probably works out about the same. PCs in GURPS need armor or they are going to die unless they have advantages that replace the benefits of worn protection (spells, super powers, whatever). This is fine if your MC is smart enough to understand it, but it presents a problem if they think plate and military armor are "special" and should be out of the reach of PCs.
Last edited by Archmage on Sun Mar 06, 2011 4:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Post by ckafrica »

FrankTrollman wrote: The game is primarily skill based, and based on a single pile of universal points. But the cost of a skill has absolutely nothing to do with how useful that skill is in the abstract or the projected campaign nor is said cost a good indicator of what your actual chance of activating that skill will be in play. The cost of the skill is instead based on a completely arbitrary assessment of how hard it would be to learn said skill, with a semi-exponential cost increase for bonuses, but 90% of your skill value comes from one of your attributes and that isn't cost dependent on how many skills it's boosting at all.
4E is mostly the same to 3e in this regard. You can spend 100s of points on being an expert in a bunch of skills that most of us would likely have given away as freebie background skills. Having an 18 in finger painting costs as much as your 18 in firearms.

That being said, there are rules to combine all those skills into single groups such as Science! or Fight! but they still are of equal value. In 4th Ed there is also something called talents which are bonuses to a group of skills which cost a flat rate to increase. How these skill groups get put together seems to be totally up to the MC and It seems to be a way to debone the IQ 8 barbarian from having to spend and exponentially large amount on getting their IQ based wilderness skills to a respectable level. but we're gonna allow things like this why not just forgo connecting skills to attributes in the first place?

Now you also have add maneuvers which are like skills to do specific combat actions. which means you can have a base stat of 18 on "power wedgy".

Given that the amount of points you spent have very little correlation with how useful your talents are or how likely you are to succeed when using your talents, it would seem that the point system is largely meaningless. But beyond that the primary draw of the game is the ability to have a party with a dinosaur riding cowboy, a suave computer hacker, and a fire sculpting bearded wizard in it. And yet: as should be blindingly obvious the computer hacker's abilities only matter at all within the confines of his own genre - if he goes out Weird West or dragon hunting in a cavern there are no computers with which he can interact and his abilities are useless. The cowboy is just as useless in the cyberpunk dystopia, because anonymity is the only defense when the government has literally millions of soldiers and CSI teams and neither his raptor nor his six shooters have any possibility of blending in to anything.
I'm not sure the game was ever really meant to be able to do this. Any of the setting books narrows what advantages disadvantages and skills that should be used.

Well perhaps that's not completely true there is this idea of an intertemporal time police unit that you could include anyone but it seemed to be more a way to display all the possible different settings it could cover than an honest expectation that people would play like that.
So the point totals are meaningless and making characters who can rationally be expected to adventure together is basically not going to happen, but on top of that if anyone ever uses any halfway decent weapon on you (whether that is a rifle shot or a magic lightning bolt), you're going down in one shot, and when that happens there is a very noticeable chance that you will suffer terminal bleeding and die.
Well the auto die can be mitigated by purchasing more damage resistance or more hit points for your character. before that was left strictly considered supernatural beyond one or 2 points but its now left more to the MC's discretion of how much he feels is reasonable to buy. There are quite a few options as to how you will make this increased damage capacity to best fit how you want it to operate
So... 4th edition, which of those problems did they solve?
4e did streamline quite a lot from combat to character generation but GURPS is still a game totally dependent on players and MC working closely together to make sure that the characters will fit and be able to contribute to the story for it to work. it requires players to explicitly agree to keep their characters within a certain set of parameters in order to keep on the same page

My experience was running 3e rather than 4e and I always found that it work best in fantasy settings especially for those that want a sword and sorcery campaign. The damage range tended to stay in the realm of the reasonable. Once you got into the realm of modern and high tech, the damage to hit points got ridiculous. It was almost like palladium MDC vs SDC in guaranteed death if you didn't have proper defense.
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Post by Fucks »

FrankTrollman wrote:The biggest problem with GURPS is this.
FrankTrollman wrote: I haven't read the 4th edition.
:jump: :rofl:
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Post by Starmaker »

Novembermike wrote:If the players are using characters that are ineffective then there was a breakdown in communication between the players and the MC. As long as that communication exists between the different participants there shouldn't be any issues.
...
The skills aren't based on some "completely arbitrary" assessment, they're generally based on the idea that skills that are more useful in an adventure built around them cost more.
I agree completely with what I quoted. Also, this is the problem with the system.

The skill prices are based on the difficulty of learning them in real life, which directly correlates to their usefulness in an adventure built around them, or vice versa.

Thus, if I want to invest points in a particular aspect of my character, the MC allows it if the points will be useful, or disallows it if he feel the points will go to waste and I'll gimp my character.

Which means two things.

First, depending on how accomodating the MC is, either communicates a *lot* about the future adventure (which may be not good) or shapes the adventure in a way that may be not good (I have trouble enough trying to put my knowledge of plasma physics to good use IRL and I certainly don't want to jump through hoops so that Bob can put his character's knowledge of plasma physics to good use in my gang war adventure).

This kills the variety in secondary skills and quirks. Say, I'm doing a cyber-espionage adventure. One dude invests heavily in coding. Another is focused on social engineering, maintains hundreds of fake profiles and has thousands of contacts. A third picks stuff here and there, stealth, weapon use, etc - a generalist. But no one can be a chess grand master, or a professional musician, or a weightlifter, or a nun. Why? Because this shit costs prohibitively too many points for a flavor skill. In real life, a rock star who moonlights as a hacker is a more enviable person than a college dropout hacker who spends his free time fapping to /u/. But a story has a beginning, an end, spotlight and downtime, and the difference between ("So guys, you have a free week, what do you do?") "I perform at a concert and go home with two hot fangirls" and "I post desu on facebook and get wasted" is not big enough to warrant paying half the point budget for it.

Second, once the adventure is over and a new one starts with the same characters, points have to be re-assessed. Now, suddenly, my CSIII is a point sink, and I either get permission to exchange it for Occult Lore, or create a new character.

Where the second consequence is concerned, I foresee two objections. (1) Don't run thematically different adventures with the same characters, and (2) If you can't redesign the characters and pretend they had Occult Lore all along you aren't really trying. Fuck that noise. Doing either of these (or reassigning point cost for different skills) defeats the whole purpose of a unified system.
Last edited by Starmaker on Sun Mar 06, 2011 10:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Fucks »

or 3) hand out free skill points for flavor skills.
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Post by tussock »

Archmage wrote:On GURPS and armor. Note that I'm drawing from GURPS 3e here.
I'll note where 4e fixes some of this, a little. It did help.
Armor in 3e also adds to your dodge rate with its PD, or passive defense, negating some attacks outright before DR is even considered.
That's one, the big PD is no more, just a little bonus from shields only. Defences in general are easier for light armour and harder in plate. It's still a bit too easy to stack a defence to the point that it nearly always works, but there's cheaper ways to break the game now.
Your HT stat is also your hit point pool, so you can probably take like 12 hits before you go down.
ST for hit points now, and it's cheap to buy a few extra. Crits ignore armour by default, so there's also that.
it does kind of bone the swashbuckler types, though.
You get that wicked high defence with the Rapier. It's parry or die, so you get an awesome parry, and tactics to suit with the running around and trying to put them at momentary disadvantage. Kinda works.
In a TL9 sci-fi setting a blaster rifle deals 12d6 impaling damage
No more. TL11 blaster rifles top out at 8d(5) burn for man portable, 6d(5) normally. TL 9 is lasers that are slightly better against chest armour than slugs, and slightly worse for face shots.

Anyhoo, DR 100 vs the blaster for a TL11 battlesuit, so 8d -20 damage, x1, and you'd take 2-3 hits to drop, and many more to kill. So man-portable stuff basically works, they actually ran the numbers and stuff.
military armor's DR 65
The armour divisors are ubiquitous at high TLs now, and the multipliers after penetration are mostly gone, unless you're still facing big slugs (which won't penetrate at high TLs).
PCs in GURPS need armor or they are going to die unless they have advantages that replace the benefits of worn protection (spells, super powers, whatever). This is fine if your MC is smart enough to understand it, but it presents a problem if they think plate and military armor are "special" and should be out of the reach of PCs.
The cool thing is you only need military grade armour against military grade weapons. The easily available weapons just aren't all that dangerous, they just leave them around 3d with a big armour divisor and no damage multiple.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

Archmage wrote: 4e might have fixed some of the math on this--they eliminated PD and shifted armor over to a purely DR system, but I think they increased skill-based and attribute-based defenses again, which means it probably works out about the same. PCs in GURPS need armor or they are going to die unless they have advantages that replace the benefits of worn protection (spells, super powers, whatever). This is fine if your MC is smart enough to understand it, but it presents a problem if they think plate and military armor are "special" and should be out of the reach of PCs.
It's possible (but somewhat expensive) to unarmored Dodge Monkey: High Basic Speed (from high DX and HT), extra Basic Speed, Combat Reflexes, Enhanced Dodge, and Acrobatics for Acrobatic Dodge and Retreating. I've seen light armor swashbucklers with Dodge 12+ survive and contribute in games where the heavy armor fighters had 30 HP and DR 14+. It's tricky, but not impossible. In straight melee combat, a skilled Weapons Master can have a parry of 17+, and reasonably be immune to the attacks from 2-3 skilled attackers at a time.

Also, 4e reduced the damage of a lot of ultra tech weapons like lasers and blasters into the 3d to 10d range, but added Armor Divisors to give them better penetration. Still, taking cover in modern or sci-fi ranged combat is pretty much mandatory unless you have Jedi like powers and can parry bullets.
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Post by Novembermike »

tussock wrote:
PCs in GURPS need armor or they are going to die unless they have advantages that replace the benefits of worn protection (spells, super powers, whatever). This is fine if your MC is smart enough to understand it, but it presents a problem if they think plate and military armor are "special" and should be out of the reach of PCs.
The cool thing is you only need military grade armour against military grade weapons. The easily available weapons just aren't all that dangerous, they just leave them around 3d with a big armour divisor and no damage multiple.
Yeah, this is a major theme with gurps. It does a pretty damn good job if you keep the setting straight (modern police is a different setting than modern police is a different setting than modern zombie apocalypse). It only really breaks when you try to have a cop fight on the front lines (he's not a good enough shot or equipped well enough to do anything real) or a soldier try to solve a mystery (he doesn't have the contacts or the forensic skills).
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Post by Swordslinger »

FrankTrollman wrote: I don't really know what GURPS is for. The promise is and always has been doing "everything" - but systems don't actually do that. I haven't read 4th edition GURPS at all. There didn't seem to be any point. What with the fact that the GURPS experiment was a failure and no one plays it.
I always saw GURPS as an attempt to simulate a live action TV show or movie. So whether you wanted to to Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Heroes or Stargate SG-1 you could do it in GURPS.

Everything is based around a general realistic setup. If you get shot without some kind of armor, you're going to get fucked up. If you get caught in a bomb blast you're probably going to die.

The main issue with GURPS though is that it doesn't have any form of plot armor for important characters, something that any kind of TV show definitely has. It's not a bad system, but it could use some kind of Edge mechanic.
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Post by kzt »

Starmaker wrote: Thus, if I want to invest points in a particular aspect of my character, the MC allows it if the points will be useful, or disallows it if he feel the points will go to waste and I'll gimp my character.
Characters can always choose to buy skills that are essentially pointless, but they should be warned that it's pointless.

In many games flavor skills are often free. If you characters hobby is lockpicking and bypassing alarm systems you lose, but renaissance history, cabinetmaking or underwater welding is just fine. If you want to be a world renowned expert that's another matter, but expertise itself isn't that useful.
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