GURPS Fantasy?

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Tue Dec 01, 2009 5:05 am

Has anyone here had any success in running a GURPS Fantasy game? One of the players in my (mostly defunct) gaming group has suggested that we use the GURPS rules and the GURPS: Supers powers to construct mages and super-powered warriors and the like. If this path only leads to madness, does anyone have any other suggestions for a good fantasy RPG system? The other idea being bandied about right now is Pathfinder, and as much fun as it might be to make a Wizard or a Cleric and rape the game, I'd prefer to play something where non-spellcasters can actually contribute.

Archmage · Post by **Archmage** » Tue Dec 01, 2009 6:27 am

I ran a (very brief) GURPS 3rd edition game in a fantasy setting. A bit of research into 4th edition suggests that a lot of things are pretty similar, so here's my take.

How the game plays is going to depend very heavily on the starting point totals for PCs. If you're doing standard 100-point characters you're honestly playing a pretty low-powered game by D&D standards. On the other hand, you're talking about GURPS Supers, which suggests that you're going to wind up going to crazytown with 300 to 500-point characters. At that point, depending on what your GM allows, you will seriously be playing Marvel superheroes who throw elephants and regenerate like Wolverine. Magic and superpowers in GURPS come in two general mechanical flavors: They cost fatigue, or they don't. By default, magic costs fatigue; super powers like eye lasers or flame breath don't.

You can play a good fantasy game in GURPS, but I'd like some more information about your group's style. If you really want to play hack-and-slash, low-point value GURPS games are probably going to be too lethal, but a higher-point game might work.

So, if your question is whether or not GURPS will lead to madness, my return question is: "What kind of game do you want to play?"

koz · Post by **koz** » Tue Dec 01, 2009 9:00 am

My friends and I have extensively messed around with GURPS. Essentially, much as with the HERO system, people only stay on the RNG (or any) RNG voluntarily. Thanks to the way the system is designed, you can, if you want, have completely gamebreaking attacks, skills in the stratosphere, etc. at almost any points value.

What you need to be very clear on is precisely what flies in your game and what doesn't. If you don't want people coming up with weird stuff, be sure that you agree what weird stuff is permissible, and set strict upper (and lower - nobody likes dying to arrows) boundaries to what people can and cannot build.

Likewise, people in GURPS are fragile. Bear this in mind - DnD tends to get us used to a certain level of toughness in characters that GURPS tries very hard not to permit. Generally, if you get hit, it hurts. Be sure that you and your players are on the same page about that as well. The same goes for healing - unless you want it au naturelle all the time (which, by the way, in GURPS is slow), be sure you make it clear that someone needs to be able to do it.

Lastly, it's essential that you agree what skills/abilities are going to be important in your game before you start making characters. GURPS skills take up seriously like a quarter of the book, and nothing beats the frustration of a player who thought that maxing out Gardening, Professional Skill (prostitute) and Erotic Art was a good idea in a campaign all about dungeon crawling.

Oh yeah, and play cinematic. Like, honestly - the cinematic rules are generally a good idea, as otherwise, your characters just die far too often. In fantasy, you want to suspend realism at least a little most of the time - and GURPS is just a tad too realistic played with the cinematic stuff.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Tue Dec 01, 2009 5:10 pm

I've been running an online GURPS 4th edition game in the D&D style (called "Dungeon Fantasy" in these parts) for about 18 months. It can work, but there are a lot of caveats:

* As people suggested, the only thing keeping the characters somewhat sane is GM oversight and a willingness to redesign problematic characters. If the GM expects a low-powered game with most of the orc fodder having weapon skills around 14 (perfectly reasonable "low skill" mooks) and then somebody drops 60 points to get Sword-25 and then goes around cutting off people's heads... it's legal by the rules, but the GM has to step in.
* There's not a lot of guidelines to how tough the opposition should be, because there's no way to measure how good the PCs are. Two different 200 point characters will have wildly different skills, defenses, damages, and armor. I've seen unwounded characters die from attacks that left their allies unscathed.
* The official magic system is pretty messed up. Some spells are wildly overpowered, and there are game winning combinations out there (such as Reverse Missile and Flight). High powered, non-magic characters last longer in GURPS than D&D, but the balance can be wacky. Again, GM oversight and a willingness to house rule/not abuse the rules is helpful.

If you're interested in playing GURPS, the Dungeon Fantasy series of PDFs are cheap and give excellent suggestions for creating stereotypical dungeon delvers and their opposition.

My group's wiki:
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Sag ... march_Wiki

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Wed Dec 02, 2009 3:45 pm

You can get around the slushiness of gurps by mandating a certain amount of ablative DR, regeneration and hard to kill for all characters.

But the main thing is to accept that the GM has to be given absolute say in character generation and development an that you might actually be better off letting him do it largely himself.

koz · Post by **koz** » Wed Dec 02, 2009 7:22 pm

ckafrica wrote: But the main thing is to accept that the GM has to be given absolute say in character generation and development an that you might actually be better off letting him do it largely himself.

I don't entirely agree here - frankly, if you have decent people as players and everything is done out in the open, with GM oversight, absolute say and self-generation are largely not necessary. Of course, this is dependent on who you game with - if your co-players are mature, responsible adults who are willing to give a little to make sure that the game functions instead of turning into some sort of madness, then you've got one situation; if instead, they're not mature, not responsible, or simply don't know what they system is capable of, then ckafrica's suggestion is actually smarter - just let the players tell you what they want to do, and you can make it for them without exploding the RNG ten ways to Sunday.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed Dec 02, 2009 10:44 pm

I would suggest using GURPS 4e, it has more detail on the powers.

Fantasy is designed for either everyone or no one to start learning spells. Spells are great, but you can literally end up with the swiss-knife problem of always having a pocket solution. If that's a problem, Supers is the way to go.

Always read the sidebars, and always charge more for abilities as they head outside the curve.

-Crissa

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Thu Dec 03, 2009 6:37 am

I'm looking for something for players that are primarily interested in playing non-spellcasters that want to bonk people over the head. I appreciate the suggestions and feedback!

socrates999 · Post by **socrates999** » Thu Dec 03, 2009 11:27 am

It was a long time ago, but when I was running GURPS fantasy, the problem I ran into (in a largely humanoid game) was all combat being aimed shots at the leg. Not many HP in the leg. Can't stand up. Can't run away. Without good ranged weapon skills get hosed at a distance by the enemies. It was really hard to have someone with enough HP and or armor not to lose their leg in one hit (this goes for the PCs too, although wasn't quite as bad).

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Thu Dec 03, 2009 1:19 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote: I don't entirely agree here - frankly, if you have decent people as players and everything is done out in the open, with GM oversight, absolute say and self-generation are largely not necessary. Of course, this is dependent on who you game with - if your co-players are mature, responsible adults who are willing to give a little to make sure that the game functions instead of turning into some sort of madness, then you've got one situation; if instead, they're not mature, not responsible, or simply don't know what they system is capable of, then ckafrica's suggestion is actually smarter - just let the players tell you what they want to do, and you can make it for them without exploding the RNG ten ways to Sunday.

Well to the sense that the GM is going to be ultimately decide what is allowed in the game was more what I meant. It's no DnD where you can say what level and how to roll the stats and pretty much leave the rest up to the player. Even experience players who know the system pretty well are gonna have to be constantly checking in the GM to okay it. Certainly my experience (which was 3e GURPS in my mid teens) that giving a player a point restriction and the books , even only the books you were allowing, lead to crazy town, as much because they had no idea what they were doing. Yeah if you are confident your players will stay within the spirit of the setting you set forward you can simply supervise, but I would probably get the group to collaboratively frame their characters before they start making them with the explicit instructions that they should be on par in their abilities to contribute in the setting and your expectations. And definitely have a list of all acceptable abilities and where they are capped for creation.

Another thing that annoys me in GURPS is the skills and attributes. the skill list was balanced on the real world their concept of the real world difficulty rather than their usefulness. For example learning to sing is 4 times cheaper than an instrument even though they can be used to similar effect. Also it bases 99% of the skills on DX or IQ so every player maxes them out to save on skill points.

Seeing you can actually buy everything that all the attributes do separately; you could actually eliminate them outright and make character default at 10+ modifier to that skill. Consolidate the skill list a little and adjust the starting points a bit and you should be able to play an attributeless game without too much difficulty. I had it half done up before my hard drive blew up.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Thu Dec 03, 2009 4:11 pm

Ganbare Gincun wrote:I'm looking for something for players that are primarily interested in playing non-spellcasters that want to bonk people over the head. I appreciate the suggestions and feedback!

Get the Martial Arts supplement, as it goes into a lot of detail on how to bonk people over the head. Unarmed fighters are weak, but you can have a fair bit of difference between swashbuckler, 2 handed sword fighter, and axe-and-shield guy, each with their own tactics.

Without PC spellcasters to make things crazy complicated, and without enemy spellcasters to make your life difficult, you throw all kinds of melee foes and ranged foes at them. Giants are a lot more fun in GURPS than they are in D&D as GURPS has much better rules for fighting things with substantial height advantages.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Dec 03, 2009 4:47 pm

Giants are a lot more fun in GURPS than they are in D&D as GURPS has much better rules for fighting things with substantial height advantages.

Can you give an overview of them?

Archmage · Post by **Archmage** » Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:28 pm

mlangsdorf wrote:Get the Martial Arts supplement, as it goes into a lot of detail on how to bonk people over the head.

Following this, emphasize the sidebar note that a good swordsman isn't someone who has Broadsword-25. Even if you have DX 16, Broadsword-25 would cost 64 points! He might have Broadsword-16 or Broadsword-18 and then have trained in various maneuvers and have specific advantages.

The Weapon Master advantage is especially appropriate for the type of campaign you're looking for. I'm not sure if it was changed for 4th, but in 3rd ed, Weapon Master granted substantial damage bonuses and allows for D&D-style multiple attacks if a character's skill rank is high, which gives your heroes a huge advantage over mooks. It also allows you to meet the prerequisites for Esoteric Skills like Blind Fighting, Immovable Stance, Mental Strength, and Power Blow. If you want really versatile fighter-types, encourage people to take ranks in Boxing or Brawling or even Karate (reflavored as needed).

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Fri Dec 04, 2009 3:55 pm

The rules interactions for giants in GURPS are a little complicated, but here goes:

Hit Points are based on Strength, and because of the square-cube law, each doubling in height requires that you more than double Strength. So a 12' tall giant hits for a ton of damage and can take an large amount of punishment.

The game has rules for crippling limbs, but the threshold is generally HP/2: you're probably not doing enough damage in a single hit to cut out a giant's legs. It also has rules for vital shots which do massive damage, but a giant's vitals are probably out of reach unless you climb on him - his head is literally out of reach of human swordsman.

Meanwhile, because you're so short, it's easier for the giant to hit your head, and given that he can already reduce you to a smear by crushing your ribcage, you really don't want him to hit your head.

And the giant's massive weapons generally weigh to much to be parried by your weapons, so instead of getting your good primary defenses, you're relying on your weak dodge.

A fight against giants turns into a very high stakes contest, where the PCs are dancing around, trying to avoid being pulped while whittling away at the giant's massive pile of HP. Sooner or later, some crazy guy is going to try to climb up the giant and start stabbing it in the heart, which is nicely iconic and cool.

Weapon Master in 4th ed doesn't give as many over the top attacks as it did in 3rd, but it's still a big advantage: extra damage and 1-2 extra attacks at a slight penalty.

Dungeon Fantasy encourages all fighting PCs to have some unarmed skills, even if they don't come up. But then again, a half dozen kobolds jumping on a PC with grappling attempts is a serious threat in GURPS.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Fri Dec 04, 2009 6:35 pm

One has to remember that the philosophy behind GURPS seems to have been to make a realistic game rather than a playable one. Yet at the same time it is very modular so that you can potentially ignore sections which are giving you problems. It really is more a toolkit to make up your own games.

Archmage · Post by **Archmage** » Fri Dec 04, 2009 9:22 pm

ckafrica wrote:One has to remember that the philosophy behind GURPS seems to have been to make a realistic game rather than a playable one. Yet at the same time it is very modular so that you can potentially ignore sections which are giving you problems. It really is more a toolkit to make up your own games.

I'll second that. The most successful game I ran using the system as a base was actually an anime-style fantasy-mecha hybrid using very cinematic rules adjustments and having the players build their mecha like characters. (I consulted GURPS Mecha for some of the basics, but GURPS Mecha's design process is outrageously complicated and requires you to "estimate" a lot of really weird stuff. What's the volume of your average giant robot in cubic meters?)

You can play a stupidly-detailed game with GURPS, or you can use its 3d6 bell-curve task resolution mechanic and some of the other neat features and play a more streamlined game. A lot of the game's rules are explicitly described as being optional, so pick and choose until the game you're playing feels the way you want it to.

koz · Post by **koz** » Sat Dec 05, 2009 10:12 pm

ckafrica wrote:One has to remember that the philosophy behind GURPS seems to have been to make a realistic game rather than a playable one. Yet at the same time it is very modular so that you can potentially ignore sections which are giving you problems. It really is more a toolkit to make up your own games.

I'll third that. GURPS is as much about what you leave out as what you include, and in all honesty, you probably can simplify away much of what it currently has in it without losing anything in your particular game. Honestly, do you really care that someone can dig their BL in cubic feet per hour? I sure don't, and unless you're playing Tunnellers and Trenches, neither should you.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 6:20 am

I loved playing Traveller in GURPS. It really is the system if you're a total tech nerd.

-Crissa

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:47 am

What's the volume of your average giant robot in cubic meters?

Your basic 20 meter tall robot (5 stories or so) is about 120 cubic meters. Godzilla is 10,000 cubic meters, and a double-man-height set of clunky power armor is 8 cubic meters. A Battletech Warhammer Heavy Assault Mech is about 36 cubic meters.

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:52 am

1) How do you figure that?

2) I posted that shortened skill list you wanted in the other thread. I'm working on full writeups for all the skills and should have them or most of them by tomorrow.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:01 am

The average human is 0.07 cubic meters. You can scale up from there.

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:05 am

How interesting. Aren't most BattleTech mechs more bulky than a similarly scaled human though? Weapons pods and such.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:59 pm

Lokathor wrote:How interesting. Aren't most BattleTech mechs more bulky than a similarly scaled human though? Weapons pods and such.

I think, think, that the weapon pods and such will mostly change mass and interior available space, not volume, though that's mostly for concealed weapon pods and such...

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:08 pm

Good sir I do not have LRM 20 pods on my shoulders.
http://files.nebulastation.net/madcat_03.jpg

Though after reviewing most mechs, it seems the Madcat/Timberwolf is the exception.