Hello again!
Posted by Numion:
Everyone says that GURPS = realistic, but I don't know. Isn't it actually next to impossible to kill anyone with one bullet because of the blow-through rule?
This IS realistic. Very few gunshot wounds kill instantly, and those are mostly the ones that hit vital organs (taken into account in GURPS with hefty multipliers to both damage and blow-through limits). Most others that kill do so over a longer time by bleeding out the victim, which GURPS also has rules to simulate.
Posted by mmadsen:
I haven't done the math myself, but someone has, and I remember his conclusion was that feinting does not help. You're better off taking the opportunity to attack instead -- and hope for a critical hit against a high-defense foe.
High-defense foes generally come in two flavors: chumps with good armor and (probably) shields, and major villains who are the PCs equals (or superiors) in combat skill. As I mentioned in the passage you quoted, Feinting will typically do wonders against the first sort, while being pretty much useless against the second. This seems entirely logical - why should a character expect to get easy shots in on an opponent who is evenly matched in skill? You still have a better chance of taking such an opponent down with a lucky early hit than you have of taking down an opposing high-level Fighter in D&D with a single early hit (unless yer packin' a Vorpal Sword...
). The gripe just switches from "it takes forever to land a solid hit on this guy" to "it takes forever to wear down this guy's mega Hit Points". And given the abstract nature of the D&D Hit Point system, only the last 2 or 3 hits or so of the barrage it takes to kill a skilled Fighter are "real" damaging hits, anyway.
Posted by Celebrim:
It is just good enough to provoke an infinite barrage of house rules, yet it has never been extensively revised. No attempt has ever been made to slow down the rules bloat and trim the fat; instead, it offers up a buffet of rules for everyone.
Yes, this is exactly what I meant by "crufty". And it doesn't help that among the extra rules are a thorough mix of the brilliant and the wretched, or that the some of the most wretched were used for key concepts in an early sourcebook (
GURPS Supers) and thus were taken for use by later writers until they were finally absorbed into the "core" rules in the Compendia... Still, GURPS was designed for modularity and picking-and-choosing your own level of detail, so it's generally not hard to ignore the bad rules and use the better ones to take their places. And even the worst of the GURPS rules seldom annoy me as much as the straitjackets (slightly looser-fitting for D&D 3E) that are Character Classes.
Again, hope this helps!
