GURPS-Share your thoughts

[Renshai]

Jurgen,
I can understand your approach and I gave that alot of thought, however... when creating a 150pt character (the suggested standard) it is very easy to create a character that has a 16 or 17 skill rating. If such skill ratings are so rare I don't this would be the case. Now, I could see increasing the skill cost for skills over 13 and then you could achieve that sort of "rarity" of high skill that you suggest. As the game is written it is insanely easy to get scores in that range and still have a very well rounded character skill wise.

There really is something I like about GURPS, and believe me I'm not looking for reasons to dislike it... this continues to be a huge problem for me though. Strangely though, I never see it addressed on any of the GURPS forums. For a while I thought it was just me or that I was doing something wrong.

Thanks for your comments!

Ren

 

[painandgreed]

I haven't played 4E but GURPS does what it means to do pretty well. I had good games both in a time travel game as well as a military sniper campaign with no issues. You might like the system. You might hate the system. Even a system meant to tackle all genres is not going to please all people. I has classless point based characters that can't take too much damage usually and a 3d6 mechanic that ends up in bell curves. If you want a "lucky shot can kill" type system, it does that. If you want something else, there are probably ways to do it. Neither means that you're automatically going to like the way it is done.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Jurgen,
I can understand your approach and I gave that alot of thought, however... when creating a 150pt character (the suggested standard) it is very easy to create a character that has a 16 or 17 skill rating. If such skill ratings are so rare I don't this would be the case. Now, I could see increasing the skill cost for skills over 13 and then you could achieve that sort of "rarity" of high skill that you suggest. As the game is written it is insanely easy to get scores in that range and still have a very well rounded character skill wise.

Well, 150 points is already rather heroic - these are highly competent people who have had fairly intensive training, or very high inherent potential." Average people" are probably 25 points, max, and your standard guard or thug probably shouldn't have much more than that. IIRC, each skill point is supposed to represent 200 hours of training, and only true professionals practice much more than those 200 hours...

150 point characters would be the equivalent of level 6 D&D characters - not tough enough yet to play in the "big leagues", but far above most other people.

Out of interest, what kinds of attributes and skill levels did you give your character?

 

[Jim Hague]

I'll chime in here, having run GURPS 3rd for nearly 10 years.

IME, folks that add all of the optional rules from supplements are asking for trouble. The non-core rules aren't balanced against anything but the setting they're in, so you end up mixing and matching to your peril. At that end of the spectrum, trying to run a multi-book, multi-genre campaign becomes crazymaking. Ultimately, it's that feature that caused me to abandon GURPS in the first place - partially due to rules bloat, which was my fault, but also because the rules weren't universally balanced, giving lie the the 'Universal' part of the game.

GURPS is like a lot of other generic systems - it represents a given mean of characters very well, and starts to lose useability and coherency outside that range. 3rd was balanced (more or less) for characters between 100-200 points. Beyond that, it doesn't work terribly well. And nowhere is this more clear than GURPS combat.

Example: The PCs, trapped on a crippled Russian submarine, are attacked by a squad of transgenic octopus/human hybrids sent by the bad guys. These hybrids took about two hours to stat out properly, and rang in at 500 points, roughly. PCs ranged from 400 to 475 points, with a gaggle of 50 point Russian sailors backing them up. PCs get initiative. Hybrids die in a single round, even allowing for cover, armor and tactics. Well, there went that encounter.

All of that being said, the GURPS genre supplements (Horror being my fave) are almost universally beyond reproach and consistently excellent. It sounds like damning with faint praise, but I can't recommend the supplements enough.

 

[Renshai]

Jurgen,
I'm afraid this was a couple of months ago, before Hurrican Rita turned my home town into a large wreck. I've since formatted my machine and don't have those characters anymore.

So would you suggest starting charcters off at 100 or 75 points?

If you did have 150 point characters and you reached the climax of a campaign and they were pitted against a number of foes that were roughly their equivalent, wouldn't you have a drawn out fight on your hands, due to the high parry/dodge skills of their opponents?

Thanks!
Todd

 

[Numion]

What then is a good Story Hour thread (one that might somewhat resemble a good novel, let's say)?

Well, a story hour is other people playing the game. Again, I would like my game to play like a game I was playing, not other people.

So by the same token, you'd rather play a video game than play D&D?

It was probably poor word choice on my part, but that was why I said "play out" rather than "play". When the session is complete, the feedback I've received is that the players weren't pulled out of the role-playing experience due to some wonky game mechanic or abstracted rule.

As an example, I've noticed that when people write up their D&D story hours, they detail the character injuries from combat, etc. Many of the writers are quite gifted and it reads like a novel as you'd expect. However, the writer is filling in the blanks regarding wound detail, the pain the characters fight through, etc. The game doesn't provide for that level of detail.

This is the first time someone equated more detailed rules to a higher level of storytelling. Let's not confuse different styles here with novel-likeness. D&D characters can due to the HP system take a beating and still function. Gurps has the ever popular and realistic 'death spiral'. Neither has anything to do with a good story. They just address different genres. In plenty of books and movies the hero can take an unnatural beating and still proceed to administer thorough asskicking. Not realistic, but no means absent from literature. As to the detail of rules - I think it's up to imagination. A D&D swordstrike is to me, in my mind, as vivid and detailed as the Gurps swordstrike to back with 3 cracked spinal columns and one slipped disk is to you.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Jurgen,
I'm afraid this was a couple of months ago, before Hurrican Rita turned my home town into a large wreck. I've since formatted my machine and don't have those characters anymore.

I'm sorry to hear that.

So would you suggest starting charcters off at 100 or 75 points?

That all depends on what you want for your campaign - how you want to start it off. 75 or 100 point characters gives you rather ordinary if competent people who are caught up in exceptional circumstances. 150 points gives you characters who are definitely larger than life, though by no means immortal.

If you did have 150 point characters and you reached the climax of a campaign and they were pitted against a number of foes that were roughly their equivalent, wouldn't you have a drawn out fight on your hands, due to the high parry/dodge skills of their opponents?

That depends entirely on how the fight is staged. If you have the exact number of opponents who are all equal to each other, then it will probably boil down who first gets lucky and downs his opponent. After this, the side that won that particular duel will likely have two fighters ganging up on a single fighter on the other side, and proceed to make short work of him (remember what I said about not letting yourself get surrounded?), thus freeing up another fighter...

But frankly, fights between completely matched opponents are boring. Far more interesting are fights with one or two rather competent enemies, and a larger number of less competent henchmen. And it is likely that the party will have a number of less melee competent characters as well - archers or wizards for example. Now the fight becomes a race which side can exploit the other side's weak points first. And that is how a fight should be - dynamic, interesting, and requiring intelligent tactics to win.

Oh, and 150 character points need not be the end of a campaign. In fact, I started my current GURPS Eberron campaign with 150, and now the characters have about 220 points each - and I can still challenge them without too many problems. Like I said, planning GURPS campaigns and adventures requires a different mindset than D&D campaigns. There isn't any power level at which characters are supposed to start or end a campaign...

 

[Renshai]

Thanks for your input Jurgen, its really helped me a take a different look at the game.

Todd

 

[Conaill]

My group has often said that GURPS plays out like a novel, while D&D plays out like a video game.

If a game plays like a novel, I'd rather go read one.

Heh - If a game plays like a video game, I'd rather go play one.

I have to agree with Azgulor on this one. It's a pretty accurate and concise description of my experiences with both systems over several years of playing both.

... and I do like reading novels better than playing video games...

 

[jcfiala]

I've got a metric ton of GURPS books, but never felt the need to actually run anything with them. They're interesting and fun to read, but in my decades of gaming, I've never felt the pull to run it. They don't inspire me like other games do.

D20? I've run three or four campaigns. Cthulhu? Two or three. Convention games? BESM, D20, Space Munchkin, Cthulhu, Cthulhu...

They don't call to me as a GM. So, now that there's a 4th edition, I'm pretty much moving on to buying books that actually get used.