Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5499186" data-attributes="member: 93119">I'll expand on this a bit and to explain in a little more detail GURPS resolution mechanics for those unfamiliar. In GURPS skill checks are rolled against your intrinsic skill level rather than some sort of external difficulty. In D&D you roll against a DC provided by the DM, adding your skill ranks and other modifiers to a D20 roll. Rolling higher than the DC means your skill check is successful. In GURPS skill checks are different, your skill ranks are your DC for rolls. If you've got say Lockpicking-14 you roll 3D6 and a roll of 14 or less succeeds. There's times when the GM will add a modifier to the check but typically you roll against that number. With Lockpicking-14 you've got roughly a 90% chance of success every time you make that skill check. This would likely make you a master locksmith. A 3.5E Rogue with Open Lock doesn't get into 90% territory for average locks until they're about level 14 (level 12 with masterwork thieves tools). Using D&D skill logic every talented locksmith in the city would have to be at least level 14 rogue (with an 7D6 sneak attack) just to stay in business. In GURPS a 25-50 point NPC can be a master locksmith but not terribly good at combat with broadswords or small machine guns.I see the word "effective" thrown around a bit in this thread without an explanation of what sort of effectiveness is meant. It's like comparing two unit-less numbers. Since D&D is a dungeon fantasy RPG and is often dealing with things that happen in and around dungeons. A character can be "effective" at crawling through dungeons and swinging a sword but less "effective" at disabling magical traps or deciphering ancient runes. You can optimize a character for combat but you need to hope they don't trip any magical land mines while they hack merrily away with their sword. Is that character more "effective" than the one optimized for finding and disabling traps or casting protective spells?Back to GURPS, while you can of course run a dungeon fantasy game where points dropped into a skill like Public Speaking would be wasted. However because the system isn't tailored specifically for dungeon fantasy settings (like D&D) you can run a game where a broadsword skill will never be used but Public Speaking or Research will be used all the time. This related to classes in that classes in general tend to be tailored pretty specifically for the setting they're going to be used in. A D&D fighter is a class whose features work really well for traipsing around dungeons and killing orcs but would be totally out of place in a d20 Modern game where the prime focus of the campaign was computer hacking, just as a d20 Modern hacker class wouldn't do too well against those bloodthirsty orcs.You need to be careful about eliminating classes in a system whose feats and skills are tailored around classes existing. A classless system is definitely more flexible but with that flexibility comes the ability to make characters that are useless in nearly all situations. The 3E Rogue and Bard are good examples of this problem. It's easy (and tempting) for people playing these classes to attempt to generalize and put a single skill point at a time into skills trying to get the maximum number of trained skills. Doing so means they spend most of their time only marginally better at any of their skills than a completely untrained character. Towards level 20 they are skill powerhouses but they probably won't have made it that far being that they likely got killed by a magical trap around level 3.</blockquote>

Verification