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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 450540" data-attributes="member: 8158">The flesh wounds rule was one of the things I was alluding to when I mentioned "tacked-on as some sort of bastardization of the core rules". Instead of having a core mechanic for wound recovery, your character gets a second wind by selling off his XP. Exchanging the long-term benefit of improving a character for the short-term benefit of healing some damage seems to be about as good an idea as cashing in your 401k to invest in a product called "I Can't Believe It's Not Ipecac!" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The GURPS approach to incorporating cinematic elements isn't exactly elegant. Like I said, it usually involves layering a bunch of outrageously expensive advantages, perks, and skills. Like the GURPS Martials Arts book (big yin-yang symbol on the cover) my group tried to incorporate into our fantasy campain. IIRC, it allows characters in cinemetic campaigns to pay 40, 60, or 80 points for advantages like "Trained by a Master", and all of the insanely pricey Super Martial Arts skills. Of course, they do HAVE to be expensive, to reflect the fact that they're more powerful than the regular stuff available to characters. Now, if the GM decides to hand out more points to starting characters, does that solve everything? Sounds like an easy solution, but in practice it was very problematic for my group, because it knocked the point cost of all the core skills, advantages, and perks out-of-whack. For instance, say we have two martial artists. One guy spends a big chunk of his points to get trained by a master, and another doesn't. The former has a few neat larger-than-life rules that apply (like multiple parry attempts per round) to him but only mediocre levels of skill in Karate and Judo, while the latter dumps mondo points into buying up raw skill, which winds up being about 8-10 points higher than the cinematic fighter. Do you see the non sequitor there?IMO, the obsession with realism is too much a part of GURPS' foundation to be fixed by slapping on a coat of cinematic paint. Take the skills system for example. The cost of raising a skill is dependent upon whether the skill is physical or mental, and how"easy" or "hard" the skill is to learn. An incredbly puissant weapon skill winds up costing peanuts relative to a marginally useful academic skill (e.g. Mathematics). That skill cost system is suitable for games with a high level of realism, because they don't need to be carefully balanced. After all, life's not fair. In a modern setting a guy who's skilled with small arms can blow away a karate expert, despite any discrepency in how many points were spent on their respective Physical/Easy and Physical/Hard skills, and it's not considered unfair. Nor is it considered "min-maxing" when more people in the real world start using guns instead of martial artists because it's a "better buy". All of that has to change when you start trying to emulate the level of action from a comic book or a wild martial arts flick. Once you take the focus away from realism, making "Incredibly Puissant Weapon" a cheaper skill than Mathematics stops making sense. If you're designing a universal role-playing system, point costs should reflect game balance, not realism (or rather, some game designer's notions of what constitutes realism).That's a pretty good analysis--enough to motivate me to dig out my GURPS book and give it a second look--but I still stand by what I said before; it's still not that difficult for our GURPS warrior to wind up in a situation where that shield doesn't keep him from getting gacked, and when that happens he'll regret not tanking up. At least the D&D character's AC is a relatively constant thing and he probably won't even be 1st-level for longer than a couple of sessions. I don't really like to make comparisons to D&D combat, because, well, I have issues with D&D's combat system as well. It's just at the other end of the spectrum.Thank for the re-primer. When I was playing GURPS Fantasy, magic skills of 20-22 were dirt common, thanks to IQ's of 16+ and the Magery advantages. As you point out though, that was a while back.Helps much, thanks. And yes, you pegged it, we used the 2nd Edition fantasy book (although we also made use of the 3rd edition book, with all the different archetypical characters floating in bubbles).</blockquote>

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