Help Me Understand the GURPS Design Perspective

[Umbran]

I don't remember Edge, or any other luck-type stat, in 2E. Do you know when they added it? Because that seems like a pretty significant genre shift, to suddenly introduce a plot armor stat. Back in 2E, the mundane person simply had no chance against a street samurai, and that seemed like an important part of the setting.

I think Edge came up in 5e. And I don't think of it so much of a genre shift as realizing that their mechanics rather cut out large portions of the genre - the typical cyberpunk story has a fairly mundane character along as a viewpoint, after all.

Squirrel Girl defeated Galactus on screen, and it was satisfying. You might be thinking of her defeat over Thanos.

You ever notice how many of the Marvel biggest bads are... mostly purple?

For example, they describe why giant bugs can't exist due to square-cube law, and then make explicit exceptions for Pym particles and cosmic radiation.

I laud them for noting the actual sicnece, but... really, dude, this is still the Marvel universe. Iron Man gets to fly around all day without refueling, while everyone else has to put gas in the tanks of their cars. Don't try to tell me there's any consistency or sense to it in the long run.

Also, in the story where she defeats Galactus, she equates dietary calories to life energy for Galactus, which is pretty much nonsense, because if "energy you can get from oxidation" is Galactus' "life energy", then any and every gas giant would be a better target than a planet with lots of life on it.

So much for consistency

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Plot armor in a work of written fiction makes much more sense than plot armor in an rpg.

There is a premise, which not everyone will buy into, that the rules of an RPG reflect the natural laws of its setting. GURPS is solidly in that camp, and I'm right there with them on that. Rules that operate outside this context are anathema.

Do the natural laws of the DC Universe include plot armor? If so, then nobody within that universe has ever been able to detect it, which makes it extremely hard to codify into any ruleset. If not, then the writers are cheating a bunch in order to tell their stories; and GURPS doesn't abide cheating.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I laud them for noting the actual science, but... really, dude, this is still the Marvel universe. Iron Man gets to fly around all day without refueling, while everyone else has to put gas in the tanks of their cars. Don't try to tell me there's any consistency or sense to it in the long run.

The premise of a fictional world is that it could actually exist, though. That needs to be the case in order for us to role-play there, and pretend to be an actual person who actually lives there, rather than playing as narrative constructs. (You can't role-play as a narrative construct, because they don't have independent thought or agency.) And yes, this is extremely difficult for the Marvel universe, due to a variety of reasons.

Still, our options are to either try and reconcile these many issues, or concede that it's just a story. Only one of those options will allow for role-playing in-character within that world.

 

[pemerton]

In an RPG there typically isn't when the author wants it to...

Kinda my point about plot armor making more sense in comics than RPGs.

I don't follow this at all.

In the post you're quoting from, I went on to explain how decisions are made in RPGs when there is no table consensus, namely, via mechanical resolution. If that resolution allows Batman's wits to anticipate Superman's superfast punch, well, we have "plot armour" (in some generic sense) at work. All "plot armour" means here is a resolution system that gives Batman a chance of winning. I know two RPGs that can handle this pretty easily - Marvel Heroic RP, and HeroQuest revised. I suspect Fate could also, but makt that suggestion a bit more tentatively.

Batman may have plans, but his plans don’t always work.

And Superman may have superspeed, but he doesn't always get everything he wants either.

This is why RPGs have resolution mechanics. They resolve this uncertainty, most typically via the use of dice rolls.

EDIT: Ninja'd by @Umbran, although I might say that he was in turn ninja'd by my first post on the same point not too far upthread! @macd21 has also made a similar point about "plot points" in particular.

 

[Celebrim]

Batman may have plans, but his plans don’t always work.

In fact, they rarely work. They work only as often as often as would be interesting for the story. Batman's villains are regularly able to thwart the caped crusader despite having merely ordinary villainous skills which would present no real challenge to The Flash, Superman, or the like.

Likewise, whenever teamed up with Superman in the old comics, there would always be some contrivance where Superman would completely lose his powers and conveniently Batman would be there to save Superman. Of course, this would only happen while Superman was teamed up with Batman, and when Superman was out on his own facing beings of enormous power the ability to deprive Superman of his powers wasn't in the cards.

I suppose you could use a variant of the JarJar Binks fan theory her to justify it, in as much as maybe Batman was arranging for Clark to lose his powers while pretending to be helpful, which would in fact suggest Batman was incredibly capable since he could keep coming up with ways to reduce Superman to a mere mortal that the villains Superman normally faced - even geniuses like Lex Luthor and Brainiac - could never have come up with.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And here I'd say you've put your finger on a problem. You have a group that has adapted to one specific mode of play and wants to see everything through that mode of play. I can think of no RPG that uses fully automatic modern guns and has you roll once per bullet, which is what they would apparently have demanded. And they must have been playing extremely slow fighters to only swing their swords once or twice per six seconds or even per minute.

The problem here is not M&M - ordinary people don't have this problem. It's the bad habits they'd picked up from D&D that in the context of D&D make no sense anyway.

He closest I can think of off the top of my head is HERO (and possibly Spycraft). Where additional hits in M&M Autofire adds a little extra damage based how well you rolled on a single attack, HERO adds the full effect of the power- you roll all the attack dice, you generate additional triggered/linked effects, etc.*

When presented with the difference, the players affected by the M&M rule expressed a strong preference for the HERO version. Actually rolling those dice resulting from additional hits feels more like real, discrete successful attacks, at least to some. (Myself included.)

But if you aren't trying to replicate what happens in the setting why are you using that setting at all other than to deconstruct it?

Plot armor is a device the author uses to protect a key character or characters. In RPGs, that’s most directly analogous to DM fiat, not so much a mechanic someone incorporates into a character.

As such, it can exist in any RPG in which a game master chooses to use it.

Luck, Edge, etc, are close, but they’re usually not as final or powerful as actual plot armor.



* It‘s been several years, so I don’t recall whether additional hits with M&M Autofire also generated additional possible linked/triggered effects.

 

[pemerton]

Plot armor is a device the author uses to protect a key character or characters. In RPGs, that’s most directly analogous to DM fiat, not so much a mechanic someone incorporates into a character.

It can easily be a player-side mechanic. Eg in Burning Wheel, if a PC suffers a mortal wound the player may spend a Persona point to have his/her PC survive (this is the "will to live" rule).

One consequence of this mechanic is that if a player spends his/her last Persona point to buff his/her dice pool in a conflict, you know s/he really means it!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It can easily be a player-side mechanic. Eg in Burning Wheel, if a PC suffers a mortal wound the player may spend a Persona point to have his/her PC survive (this is the "will to live" rule).

One consequence of this mechanic is that if a player spends his/her last Persona point to buff his/her dice pool in a conflict, you know s/he really means it!

i agree that it can be, but if we’re talking about a mechanic whereby a hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane character- IOW, a Batman, not a Longshot- can thwart a “trillion mph” punch, that’s a system I personally wouldn’t want to be playing.

 

[aramis erak]

I think several people are forgetting... Batman ALWAYS prevails in the end... but his opponents are then entrusted to Arkham Asylum. And that's his weakness: He trusts the system to keep these super-potent nutjobs off the street, and Arkham keeps failing to do so. Repeatedly. Again, and again.

The one thing Bats is consistently blind to is the failure of others to be at his level and to do their part.

There's not likely anyone who can play Bruce/Bats the way he needs in a gritty ruleset; he's almost always the smartest guy in the room until the villains show. And then, most of the time, he still is. But Smart and Prepared fall victim to human frailties of others.

In MHRP, Bats can plot-point a needed item that, in GURPS, would need a creation roll beforehand.
In Hero System, Bats is a guy with a gadget pool that hasn't been limited to "prepared first only"... and some excellent stats and wealth, and massive piles of all-combat levels.

It's also worth noting: DC has been done in Cortex Plus. In fact, the first CP ruleset was a DC property: Smallville. MHRP wasn't just a hit on its own; it was a system related to DC, but tuned to be Marvel in tone and execution.

 

[macd21]

i agree that it can be, but if we’re talking about a mechanic whereby a hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane character- IOW, a Batman, not a Longshot- can thwart a “trillion mph” punch, that’s a system I personally wouldn’t want to be playing.

See, I’d rather a system where he can. It feels appropriate for the genre.