GURPS-Share your thoughts

[mmu1]

Or that perhaps the GM was playing the Ogres as BIG DUMB BRUTES. This means that they would not be using any kind of tactic, no matter how "common sense" we might think it is.

Which makes all-out attacks all the more likely, in my opinion - charging in club swinging, with no concern for your own safety because you're big and have thick skin seems very much like a dumb brute thing to do. It's trying to dodge and parry that's out of character. True, they might very well not be coordinated - but it takes no particular intelligence to gang up on a single enemy... wolves can manage it, so why not ogres?

I could be wrong about this particular combat, but I don't think I'm wrong in this: GURPS is completely unsuited for playing games pitting a group of adventurers against monsters and encounters adapted from D&D, if you use the rules as written. The system is, simply put, deadlier by an order of magnitude.

 

[tetsujin28]

Though the Ghostbusters incarnation of D6 was rather fun to play and GM....

You mean more that the d6 incarnation of Ghostbusters wasn't fun to play.

 

[tetsujin28]

I could be wrong about this particular combat, but I don't think I'm wrong in this: GURPS is completely unsuited for playing games pitting a group of adventurers against monsters and encounters adapted from D&D, if you use the rules as written. The system is, simply put, deadlier by an order of magnitude.

True. But that's a point thing. Start the PCs off with 200 + disads, and you've got a pretty good approximation of a 10th-level party. But yes, strangely enough, you can't just port D&D over to GURPS and expect it to run the same. They're different games, with different design philosophies.

 

[mmu1]

True. But that's a point thing. Start the PCs off with 200 + disads, and you've got a pretty good approximation of a 10th-level party. But yes, strangely enough, you can't just port D&D over to GURPS and expect it to run the same. They're different games, with different design philosophies.

Heh... Fair enough, I suppose my point - rather than the obvious fact you can't just port over D&D to GURPS and expect it to work - was that, despite GURPS supposedly being universal, there are just types of games you can't play with it - at least not without changing it so much you'd be better off with a different system to begin with.

Mutants and Masterminds, which was mentioned several times in this thread, makes for a much more universal system, despite not having been designed that way from the ground up.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

(I don't mean this as a personal attack - and I realize that there might have been circumstances I'm not aware of - but on the surface, reading about something like a combat between PCs and multiple ogres sort of makes me cringe. The fact there were no multiple fatalties as a result of fighting extremely strong monsters so tough they could be hit multiple times and keep on making their Health rolls to avoid passing out or dying tells me either punches were pulled, or the PCs were godlike. Four brutes that use even rudimentary tactics and can shrug off tons damage = let's all full-out attack one PC at the same time since we won't be able to dodge their blows anyway, so what do we need an active defense for = one dead PC)

Well, first of all, as others have noted the ogres weren't the brightest, so the PCs were able to use superior tactics and hold them off at a choke point that only two of the ogres were being able to attack them at once. That did help a lot.

Secondly, the PCs were highly competent - two 230 point combat monsters and a very good healer who did it best to keep them upright (though after the combat, he was the only one standing for some time...).

Just to give you an example, one of the fighters (a shifter) has ST 15, DX 14, HT 13, Buckler-16, Spear-17 and 5 Extra Hit Points (giving him a total of 20). He is one tough guy, and able to fight odds that would be overwhelming for ordinary humans. Still, this fight even wore him down (and he lost his shield).

And they have decided not to fight the remaining ogres who returned to the lair - the combat was too close for their liking...

Which also makes complete GURPS one of those settings that's absolutely murderous (for either the PCs or NPCs) if someone on one side of the table is significantly better at gaming the system, playing the game, roll-playing, whatever you want to call it. In D&D, if you don't plan your tactics well, you take an AOO. In GURPS, if you don't plan your tactics well, the first hit you take puts you out of the fight.

Not neccessarily so, if you have a high HT or Strong Will. Unlike D&D, when you reach a certain injury level, you won't pass out automatically - you can roll each round to see if you remain standing. And if your HT is high enough, you can last for a long time (just ask me about the Trollslayer in our GURPS Warhammer campaign and the 30 goblins some time...).

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Me personally, I'm a sucker for pulpy horror, conspiracy horror...you may begin to see a pattern here.

Hmmm... Something like that could be arranged.

Anyone else interested?

 

[tetsujin28]

Heh... Fair enough, I suppose my point - rather than the obvious fact you can't just port over D&D to GURPS and expect it to work - was that, despite GURPS supposedly being universal, there are just types of games you can't play with it - at least not without changing it so much you'd be better off with a different system to begin with.

Again, you can create the equivalent of D&D parties. You just have to know what point level you're looking at. A beginning GURPS PC is a lot more competent than a beginning D&D one. Conversely, you have to give out a larger amount of XP than is normal in GURPS for PCs to keep up with D&D's level abilities. This doesn't mean that GURPS can't do the same thing that D&D does. It just means that it can't do it the same way.

Mutants and Masterminds, which was mentioned several times in this thread, makes for a much more universal system, despite not having been designed that way from the ground up.

I'm not sure I agree, and I'm a huge M&M fan. It doesn't do gritty well. It can do pulp, but that's not the same thing. But M&M can indeed do a pretty darn good imitation of D&D (thus the creation of the Blue Rose/True20 engine).

It really just comes down to the fact that every game is going to put its own personality stamp on any game run with it. A GURPS dungeon-crawl game is still going to feel like GURPS, and D&D in space is still going to feel like D&D. The difference is that GURPS is designed to have changes happen to it. D&D complains a bit more, due to it being a more dedicated and focused game.

 

[Stormrunner]

OK, my 0.02 here, as someone who played GURPS 3e for 15+ years (only reason I'm not playing now is lack of a group) AND owns most of the WotC d20 books except for the setting-specific FR and Eberron stuff.

GURPS tries to be "universal", but I suspect that's something that may not be possible for ANY game system. Similar to Goedel's theorem that any "language" (including mathematics) will have at least one possible valid "sentence" (equation, whatever) that doesn't "parse". (e.g. "This sentence is false." is neither false nor true in English, despite being "valid" - following all the rules for sentence structure.), IMO any game system is going to have at least one setting it doesn't simulate well.

GURPS works very well for grim-and-gritty, low-magic campaigns. X-Files? Saving Private Ryan? King Arthur? Cthulhu? Constantine? Dracula? Firefly? Babylon 5? Sam Spade? All good.

Star Wars? Star Trek? Lord of the Rings? Battletech? Warhammer? Batman? D&D? Sin City? Cyberpunk? Not quite so good, but doable.

X-Men? Thor? Dr. Strange? Superman? The Matrix? Wuxia? Slayers? Not really up to it.

Generally, the farther away from "standard human" a character's race/skills/powers are, the harder it is to simulate him in GURPS. The system handles swinging a sword or shooting a pistol quite well, but doesn't scale well to swinging a battleship or shooting a Wave Motion Gun.

What I really like about GURPS is the level of research and playtesting that goes into it, which is one of the reasons the supplements are so good. Subscribers to the Pyramid boards can preview, playtest, and suggest edits for upcoming books - I've got my name on the credit pages of a couple of supplements that way. This allows the supplements to take advantage of the collective knowledge base. In the Space playtests, for example, we had a couple of posters who were actual astronomers and physicists in their day jobs. This tends to weed out the most broken/unrealistic stuff. Not that there AREN'T broken combos - but they tend to come about when you combine stuff from different books/genres. This is also probably the reason GURPS works better with more "realistic" genres. If something has real-world stats (e.g., fuel consumption of an M60 tank), somebody will probably post it and the book will be tweaked accordingly. But there are no real-world sentient AI programs, or people who can lift a battleship, so any stats on such abilities are purely off-the-top-of-the-head and cannot be fact-checked.

In my experience, playing a GURPS character doesn't require any more math than playing a D&D character - both tend to require summing up a lot of modifiers. Creating a GURPS character is a little more complex - but more flexible, and for the most part, it's a one-time cost: you do the calculation, write the resulting number on your sheet, and just use that number from then on, no need to redo the calculation each time. It's the GM who needs a calculator when designing adventures (but much less so when running them).

I play both, I like both. Which is better, a knife or a spoon? Depends on whether you're eating steak or ice cream.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

GURPS works very well for grim-and-gritty, low-magic campaigns. X-Files? Saving Private Ryan? King Arthur? Cthulhu? Constantine? Dracula? Firefly? Babylon 5? Sam Spade? All good.

Star Wars? Star Trek? Lord of the Rings? Battletech? Warhammer? Batman? D&D? Sin City? Cyberpunk? Not quite so good, but doable.

X-Men? Thor? Dr. Strange? Superman? The Matrix? Wuxia? Slayers? Not really up to it.

The new edition does seem to work better for high-powered stuff, though.

But admittedly, I haven't run adventures for characters for higher than 230 points...

(Oh, and GURPS runs perfectly for Warhammer - I should know, I have run two campaigns for it. And if Warhammer isn't the prime example for "grim-and-gritty", I don't know what it is...)

 

[bodhi]

As a GM I wouldn't allow it save for a few concepts where it made sense in character for the person in question to calculate the odds.

Do you have many players that want to play C-3PO or Spock?