What about GURPS?

[Username17]

What would you want points to mean that they don't?

How about... anything at all? That would be good. It would be good if point costs meant anything at all.

Now I could see an argument that things would be better if point costs at least mostly corresponded to utility, where things that were "better" cost more points. But sure, maybe you want a system where the point totals don't have fuck all to do with character power, but instead are a measure of actual character effort. Mastering the violin might not be particularly useful for an adventurer, but it is genuinely difficult and you might want points to correspond to that.

But in GURPS points try to mean both things, which means that they don't mean anything. Being naturally smart costs points because it makes your character better, but becoming an expert merchant is easier for naturally intelligent people so that then costs less points. That's completely fucked. The entire point accounting step is completely fucking meaningless, and it would seriously be better to just roll stats. When individual things are assigned point costs completely haphazardly based on perceived utility, difficulty of acquisition, or simple assumed game world rarity, the points are pointless. An ability might be nearly free because it's not hard for a character to acquire in the world, it might be expensive because it happens to be very powerful, or it might be medium priced because it's uncommon but well known in the world. And that could seriously be the same ability written up in different books. Or even the same book as is the case with some of the cyberware in GURPS Cyberpunk.

Is your argument that the skills don't mean anything? Because percent chance of success seems like a pretty concrete meaning, and that's what GURPS skill values give you. WoD skill values don't even get that far, because outside of combat (and often in) the target number and threshold are MC whimsy.

Percent chance of success means dick diddly if your levels of success are undefined.

Example: I want to cook something, so I roll a cooking test. First of all, GURPS only outputs two levels of success, which is bullshit. Secondly, the levels are called "success" and "failure." If I'm a skilled chef, wtf does it even mean to "fail" to cook? Bobby Flay probably doesn't fail to make food. He might fail to make things to his personal standard, heck he probably fails to make things that are up to his personal standard a fairly high percentage of the time (it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he felt that his personal standard of what food he makes should be was attained by only a small amount of the food he actually made).


Seriously: WTF.

Even a simple table of progressive awesomeness is about infinity times better than that.

Hits:	Awesomeness
0:	Not Awesome. Tying shoes, climbing stairs.
1:	Completely Pedestrian. Driving a car, Throwing Darts.
2:	Professional. Don't try this at home.
3:	Hard. Don't try this at all.
4:	Extreme.
5:	Crazy Extreme.
6:	Super Human. Does not need disclaimers because it is clearly impossible.

I cannot respect GURPS until it has something at least this useful to explain how skills work.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

First of all, GURPS only outputs two levels of success, which is bullshit. Secondly, the levels are called "success" and "failure."

Well, it also has 'critical success' and 'critical failure.'

[momothefiddler]

Momo, how would you describe an Administration skill 12 then, in the different settings ? What does it mean to the King steward from a Bronze Age Babylon, and to a computer AI from a 22th century low-orbit station ?

The Administration skill is pretty abstract - it gives you a reaction bonus with bureaucrats and it lets you understand how to minimize red tape. For the king's steward, that's talking to other humans and streamlining getting things a human wants, and for the AI that means talking to other AIs (I suppose) and streamlining the process to get what the AI wants. In either case it'll succeed three out of four times.

Shouldnt it have different meanings ? And the same goes for Engineering, Anthropology, Music, etc. Even a mundane skill like melee fighting could mean different things to different ages and cultures. No ?

And now Im wondering how to scale skill levels in a setting like Infinite Worlds. I mean, your melee fighting proficiency could mean a rating 15 in your hunter-gatherer tribe and age, but compared to a Spartan elite fighter from his age, it would hardly mean 10.

...No. A Spear skill of 10 means that, when you have a spear, you can hit the "vitals" on a training dummy nine times out of ten, you can do it without breaking form five times out of ten, and you can do it without breaking form or taking time to line up the shot less than two times out of ten. That is what Spear - 10 means. A Spartan elite fighter will probably be better with a weapon than the hunter-gatherer, yes, but that's reflected by having a higher skill level.

The same goes for most other skills - a 15 engineering from ancient rome should not equal a 15 engineering from a MIT engineer from XXI century.

But that's what it does mean! Granted, the MIT engineer won't be operating at an effective skill of 15. They'll have much better tools, much better assistants, more to build on, and so forth. In fact, I seriously doubt either person will have a 15 in the first place. But also, and this is important, a TL8 Engineer has the ability to engineer TL8 things. A TL 5 engineer can engineer TL 8 things at -15 and your roman engineer won't be able to design a microchip at all!

---

What would you want points to mean that they don't?

How about... anything at all? That would be good. It would be good if point costs meant anything at all.

Now I could see an argument that things would be better if point costs at least mostly corresponded to utility, where things that were "better" cost more points. But sure, maybe you want a system where the point totals don't have fuck all to do with character power, but instead are a measure of actual character effort. Mastering the violin might not be particularly useful for an adventurer, but it is genuinely difficult and you might want points to correspond to that.

But in GURPS points try to mean both things, which means that they don't mean anything. Being naturally smart costs points because it makes your character better, but becoming an expert merchant is easier for naturally intelligent people so that then costs less points. That's completely fucked. The entire point accounting step is completely fucking meaningless, and it would seriously be better to just roll stats. When individual things are assigned point costs completely haphazardly based on perceived utility, difficulty of acquisition, or simple assumed game world rarity, the points are pointless. An ability might be nearly free because it's not hard for a character to acquire in the world, it might be expensive because it happens to be very powerful, or it might be medium priced because it's uncommon but well known in the world. And that could seriously be the same ability written up in different books. Or even the same book as is the case with some of the cyberware in GURPS Cyberpunk.

I'm told this is a big problem in 3rd edition. I don't know; I've never experienced it. In 4th, every time I've encountered an ability that could be written up a different way, they matched pretty well (frequently it's broken down in the book). Unaging, like I mentioned upthread, is a reasonable cost for Immunity to Aging Effects because that's what it is in a game as opposed to being super expensive because it's a huge deal in real life.

Skill difficulty still seems to be based on IRL difficulty, not game value. That's probably dumb, but it doesn't have a huge effect because Current Affairs - 15 is only coing to be three points less than Metallurgy - 15.

Is your argument that the skills don't mean anything? Because percent chance of success seems like a pretty concrete meaning, and that's what GURPS skill values give you. WoD skill values don't even get that far, because outside of combat (and often in) the target number and threshold are MC whimsy.

Percent chance of success means dick diddly if your levels of success are undefined.

Example: I want to cook something, so I roll a cooking test. First of all, GURPS only outputs two levels of success, which is bullshit. Secondly, the levels are called "success" and "failure." If I'm a skilled chef, wtf does it even mean to "fail" to cook? Bobby Flay probably doesn't fail to make food. He might fail to make things to his personal standard, heck he probably fails to make things that are up to his personal standard a fairly high percentage of the time (it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he felt that his personal standard of what food he makes should be was attained by only a small amount of the food he actually made).


Seriously: WTF.

Even a simple table of progressive awesomeness is about infinity times better than that.

Hits:	Awesomeness
0:	Not Awesome. Tying shoes, climbing stairs.
1:	Completely Pedestrian. Driving a car, Throwing Darts.
2:	Professional. Don't try this at home.
3:	Hard. Don't try this at all.
4:	Extreme.
5:	Crazy Extreme.
6:	Super Human. Does not need disclaimers because it is clearly impossible.

I cannot respect GURPS until it has something at least this useful to explain how skills work.

-Username17

Ah. In GURPS you decide hard the task is beforehand and then succeed or fail at that. I doubt Bobby Flay fries eggs and is dissatisfied unless they come out really good. He probably takes his Cooking - 13 and his equipment +2 and attempts something

-6 or -7 – Very Hard. Situations that even the masters might have second thoughts about. Example: A Driving roll in a high-speed chase during a blizzard.

...which gives him a 26%-38% chance of succeeding, or a 9%-16% chance of succeeding in some random dude's kitchen. Failure doesn't mean no food comes out, just that the intended meal was not obtained.

---

First of all, GURPS only outputs two levels of success, which is bullshit. Secondly, the levels are called "success" and "failure."

Well, it also has 'critical success' and 'critical failure.'

Neither of which are sufficiently likely to particularly count for what Frank's asking for.

[Username17]

Failure doesn't mean no food comes out, just that the intended meal was not obtained.

This right here is why GURPS is bullshit. Why roll under systems in general are bullshit. There is a vast spectrum of shittiness between "burnt cornflakes" and "the crust on the liquid center cake cracked slightly." If you can't tell me from a roll on my goddamn cooking test whether the food is edible or delicious or not, what the fuck is your die roll for? If I'm going to spend actual chargen time calculating my cooking value and then spend actual table time rolling a cooking result, that die roll had better fucking give me some fucking answers as to how good my fucking cooking was. Otherwise the game system is wasting my fucking time!

Even fucking Dungeons & Dragons can tell you at a glance whether a chef's product was "better" or "worse" than the one he made earlier. Binary success and failure is fucking bullshit. And when you apply it to tasks that really don't have obvious binary outputs, it's super duper bullshit. If "failing" the cooking doesn't even mean that there isn't dinner at the end, what the actual fuck is it supposed to mean? Fucking New World of Darkness is better than this garbage.

-Username17

[Antumbra]

DEGREE OF SUCCESS OR FAILURE

Once you have calculated effective skill by applying all relevant modifiers to base skill, roll 3d to determine the outcome. If the total rolled on the dice is less than or equal to your effective skill, you succeed, and the difference between your effective skill and your die roll is your margin of success.

Example: If you have effective skill 18 and roll a 12, you succeed; your margin of success is 6. If you roll higher than your effective skill, you fail, and the difference between the die roll and your effective skill is your margin of failure.

Example: If you have effective skill 9 and roll a 12, you fail; your margin of failure is 3.

Always note your margin of success or failure, as many rules use these margins to calculate results that matter in play. Even when the rules don’t call for these numbers, the GM might wish to reward a large margin of success with a particularly favorable outcome, or assess especially dire consequences for a large margin of failure!

Extremely high or low rolls have special effects – beyond those for normal success and failure – regardless of your exact margin of success or failure.

[momothefiddler]

Failure doesn't mean no food comes out, just that the intended meal was not obtained.

This right here is why GURPS is bullshit. Why roll under systems in general are bullshit. There is a vast spectrum of shittiness between "burnt cornflakes" and "the crust on the liquid center cake cracked slightly." If you can't tell me from a roll on my goddamn cooking test whether the food is edible or delicious or not, what the fuck is your die roll for? If I'm going to spend actual chargen time calculating my cooking value and then spend actual table time rolling a cooking result, that die roll had better fucking give me some fucking answers as to how good my fucking cooking was. Otherwise the game system is wasting my fucking time!

Even fucking Dungeons & Dragons can tell you at a glance whether a chef's product was "better" or "worse" than the one he made earlier. Binary success and failure is fucking bullshit.

Are the concepts of margin of success and margin of failure just utterly foreign to you?

You have a DC 15 Craft(Cake) check and you roll a 15? Your cake is fine. You have a DC 15 Craft(Cake) check and you rolled a 32? Your cake is excellent. Is there an objective scale of how much better the second cake is than the first, in either real life or D&D? No. But if you're playing loosely enough that you describe the cake after you roll, you can say it's a significantly cooler cake, even though your character would have needed to make the choice of what kind of cake to make before attempting to do so. So you can either require declaration beforehand (I'm making a _____ cake, which is DC 30) and risk failing, or you can just roll and pick the nicest kind of cake that would have given you.

Every single part of this has a counterpart in GURPS. Wanna handwave it and say that a MoS of 5 means you made a type of cake that would normally be a -5 to skill? Fine. The default is that you declare it beforehand and a success by 7 on store mix brownies isn't gonna get you anything more than "pretty good" store mix brownies, which is exactly analogous to rolling a 32 on a declared DC 15 cake. But if you want it to be more abstract, a MoS of 7 on "brownies" gives you "Very Hard. Situations that even the masters might have second thoughts about." brownies, whatever that means. I don't know enough about cooking to give good examples here.

And when you apply it to tasks that really don't have obvious binary outputs, it's super duper bullshit. If "failing" the cooking doesn't even mean that there isn't dinner at the end, what the actual fuck is it supposed to mean? Fucking New World of Darkness is better than this garbage.

I have definitely failed cooking rolls and still had something to eat, and I haven't spent much time cooking. I ate a ton of scrambled eggs while learning to fry eggs without breaking them, for instance - probably modeled as a failed roll that would have succeeded had I not taken the penalty to do something more difficult.
Besides, the Cooking skill "allows you to prepare a pleasing meal." My stepfather fails at that all the goddamn time, but we still have things to eat because he doesn't critically fail. Some days the margin of failure is 1, and people eat and move on. Some days his margin of failure is 5 and the leftovers sit in the refrigerator for a week.

EDIT: what Antumbra said

[silva]

Frank, you didnt know roll-under systems could have margins of success ? Really ?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Here's where I see roll-under being not as good as addition to reach target number, even when they're the same thing (in the algebraic sense).

To model a cooking challenge in d20, I can eyeball the difficulty of something like climbing a rope. and climbing a rock face without tools, and other examples that have already been modeled out for you. A 25 is "A rough surface, such as a natural rock wall or a brick wall." A job for a professional climber? So a 25 for a professional cook might cover something that takes both artistry and experience, and takes longer the less experienced you are, like a wedding cake.

There's no such eyeballing in GURPS. A wedding cake could be 10 under your Cooking skill, or 5, or anything else. You could penalize Cooking skill by an arbitrary amount for a more daunting task, but as a GM, I'm being relied upon to have some sort of logic to my rulings that, if called on, will look coherent with my other decisions. I could easily call a wedding cake -2 one day and -3 the next.

I feel with GURPS, I would never want to be a chef. What I might be, is Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a character who's a cook. A cook who, when ninjas burst into his kitchen, pulls out a kalashnikov from under the counter. My cooking skill isn't there to be used to overcome challenges on a regular basis. It's there to lend flavor to the day where the GM doesn't feel like running a combat so he lets me solve a problem with a bake sale.

[momothefiddler]

Here's where I see roll-under being not as good as addition to reach target number, even when they're the same thing (in the algebraic sense).

To model a cooking challenge in d20, I can eyeball the difficulty of something like climbing a rope. and climbing a rock face without tools, and other examples that have already been modeled out for you. A 25 is "A rough surface, such as a natural rock wall or a brick wall." A job for a professional climber? So a 25 for a professional cook might cover something that takes both artistry and experience, and takes longer the less experienced you are, like a wedding cake.

There's no such eyeballing in GURPS. A wedding cake could be 10 under your Cooking skill, or 5, or anything else. You could penalize Cooking skill by an arbitrary amount for a more daunting task, but as a GM, I'm being relied upon to have some sort of logic to my rulings that, if called on, will look coherent with my other decisions. I could easily call a wedding cake -2 one day and -3 the next.

I feel with GURPS, I would never want to be a chef. What I might be, is Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a character who's a cook. A cook who, when ninjas burst into his kitchen, pulls out a kalashnikov from under the counter. My cooking skill isn't there to be used to overcome challenges on a regular basis. It's there to lend flavor to the day where the GM doesn't feel like running a combat so he lets me solve a problem with a bake sale.

That quote I used in the cooking example for -6 or -7? It's part of a list of examples for +10 to -10. Unless it's some sort of cake worth televising, wedding cakes are comparatively easy. People make them on a regular basis for a career, though it is somewhat of a specialty. That puts it somewhere in here:

+4 or +5 –Easy. Most mundane tasks, including rolls made by ordinary people at day-to-day jobs. Example: A Driving roll to commute to work
in a small town.
+2 or +3 – Very Favorable. Mildly risky tasks that most people would undertake without hesitation. Example: A Driving roll to commute to work in a teeming metropolis.
+1 – Favorable. Tasks that most people would hesitate at, due to the risk, but that a career adventurer would regard as easy. Example: A Driving roll to compete in a road rally.

It definitely wouldn't be one of these:

-4 or -5 – Hard. Tasks so challenging that even an expert will look for alternatives. A true “master” is still unlikely to feel challenged. Example: A Driving roll to keep the car on the road while shooting a gun out the window during a highspeed chase.

-10 – Impossible. No sane person would attempt such a task. The GM may wish to forbid such attempts altogether. Example: A Driving roll to steer a car with the knees while firing a bazooka twohanded during a chase through a blizzard.

So I get that you don't have the feel for the appropriate penalties, just like I don't have a good feel for appropriate DCs in D&D, but that doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

d20 does have a "degree of success" not mentioned yet, too: "take 10" or "take 20". A pastry chef could probably take 10 indicate that making a wedding cake won't result in an episode of The Three Stooges. A master chef could 'take 20" to prepare a meal from pufferfish and not kill someone.

I feel those are important features of the system, because instead of those, often instead with games you'll get the advice "don't roll if the stakes aren't interesting" Worse yet, you might end up with something like Vampire: TM players who eschew rolling dice altogether, despite giving White Wolf money for their dice mechanics.

My experience with GURPS mostly comes from a mini-campaign I played where we were all STALKERs hunting for loot in Pripyat. So everyone had a firearms skill, and there were no chefs. I've had experience with other roll under systems, primarily Warhammer, which is where my distaste for subtraction-based difficulty comes from.

[TarkisFlux]

Since Antumbra's quote mentions the existence of mechanics explicitly using MoS/MoF values, can someone throw down some examples? I can think of a bunch of things to do with them other than the obvious opposed roll thing, but I want to know what's actually in the rules. Anyone mind answering my general curiosity?

[silva]

My experience with GURPS mostly comes from a mini-campaign I played where we were all STALKERs hunting for loot in Pripyat. So everyone had a firearms skill, and there were no chefs.

Oh man, I would kill for playing in such a game. But the lack of survival skills in the group was a bad move on their part. None of them played Misery, damn it ??

[momothefiddler]

d20 does have a "degree of success" not mentioned yet, too: "take 10" or "take 20". A pastry chef could probably take 10 indicate that making a wedding cake won't result in an episode of The Three Stooges. A master chef could 'take 20" to prepare a meal from pufferfish and not kill someone.

My understanding is that you can't actually take 20 on preparing pufferfish because there are consequences on failure so your effective 20 attempts murders 19 people. I might be wrong there, though, and it's not a vital part of your point.

I feel those are important features of the system, because instead of those, often instead with games you'll get the advice "don't roll if the stakes aren't interesting" Worse yet, you might end up with something like Vampire: TM players who eschew rolling dice altogether, despite giving White Wolf money for their dice mechanics.

Wait, how is taking 10 good and "If you can succeed without notable luck and failing isn't a big deal, just assume you succeed" is bad? Further, how do those differ in any way?

My experience with GURPS mostly comes from a mini-campaign I played where we were all STALKERs hunting for loot in Pripyat. So everyone had a firearms skill, and there were no chefs. I've had experience with other roll under systems, primarily Warhammer, which is where my distaste for subtraction-based difficulty comes from.

The only Warhammer game I've played was Rogue Trader and I don't even remember what I hated about it but it was a terrible experience.

---

Since Antumbra's quote mentions the existence of mechanics explicitly using MoS/MoF values, can someone throw down some examples? I can think of a bunch of things to do with them other than the obvious opposed roll thing, but I want to know what's actually in the rules. Anyone mind answering my general curiosity?

I thought my cooking examples weren't bad, but here are some others:

• In various magic systems in Thaumatology, effects of a ritual are based on the MoS - in one instance, damaging spells will do 1d-2 on a MoS of 1 and 2d on a MoS of 4. Similarly, a MoS of 2 will get you an effect that lasts up to an hour, while a MoS of 6 will get you up to two weeks.
• Pay for freelance jobs gives you an amount for success on your job roll, adjusted by 10% per point of success (and -10% per point of failure)
• When you make a Fright Check, your MoF on the Will roll is added to your roll on the Fright Check table (where high is bad)
• A roll against Lifting increases your Basic Load by 5%*MoS for the purpose of lifting a heavy object.

[Nihnoz]

d20 does have a "degree of success" not
My experience with GURPS mostly comes from a mini-campaign I played where we were all STALKERs hunting for loot in Pripyat. So everyone had a firearms skill, and there were no chefs. I've had experience with other roll under systems, primarily Warhammer, which is where my distaste for subtraction-based difficulty comes from.

That campaign fell apart because I was expecting tactical firearm action but what I got was a combat system that made me want to die.

[A Man In Black]

This right here is why GURPS is bullshit. Why roll under systems in general are bullshit. There is a vast spectrum of shittiness between "burnt cornflakes" and "the crust on the liquid center cake cracked slightly." If you can't tell me from a roll on my goddamn cooking test whether the food is edible or delicious or not, what the fuck is your die roll for? If I'm going to spend actual chargen time calculating my cooking value and then spend actual table time rolling a cooking result, that die roll had better fucking give me some fucking answers as to how good my fucking cooking was. Otherwise the game system is wasting my fucking time!

Even fucking Dungeons & Dragons can tell you at a glance whether a chef's product was "better" or "worse" than the one he made earlier. Binary success and failure is fucking bullshit. And when you apply it to tasks that really don't have obvious binary outputs, it's super duper bullshit. If "failing" the cooking doesn't even mean that there isn't dinner at the end, what the actual fuck is it supposed to mean? Fucking New World of Darkness is better than this garbage.

-Username17

Margin of success is exactly as defined and abstract in both games. It's just a different formula.

D20: Margin = (roll + skill) - DC
GURPS: Margin = skill - difficulty - roll

Both games give you bullshit binary results, and in both games DC and difficulty are essentially a GM call for the vast majority of things. I really don't see how GURPS is somehow much worse.

[TarkisFlux]

I thought my cooking examples weren't bad, but here are some others:

• In various magic systems in Thaumatology, effects of a ritual are based on the MoS - in one instance, damaging spells will do 1d-2 on a MoS of 1 and 2d on a MoS of 4. Similarly, a MoS of 2 will get you an effect that lasts up to an hour, while a MoS of 6 will get you up to two weeks.
• Pay for freelance jobs gives you an amount for success on your job roll, adjusted by 10% per point of success (and -10% per point of failure)
• When you make a Fright Check, your MoF on the Will roll is added to your roll on the Fright Check table (where high is bad)
• A roll against Lifting increases your Basic Load by 5%*MoS for the purpose of lifting a heavy object.

Your cooking example used words like "handwave" and "probably modeled", and did not fill me with confidence. I couldn't tell if the discussed soft fail / great success states were proscribed outcomes per rules, or regular variety mindcaulk to fill in uses for them since the rules talk about them mattering. Those other examples are helpful though. Thanks

[Antumbra]

Since Antumbra's quote mentions the existence of mechanics explicitly using MoS/MoF values, can someone throw down some examples? I can think of a bunch of things to do with them other than the obvious opposed roll thing, but I want to know what's actually in the rules. Anyone mind answering my general curiosity?

Sure - I thought it might get too long if I added examples. Or I was feeling lazy. Not too many skills have specific special effects with MoS, but it still determines victory in a contest and they may have special applications - Law can be used as an Influence skill in the courtroom.

• Attack Skills: On a Feint MoS is subtracted from the target's defense against you on the next turn. MoS also determines the number of hits with automatics (based on its recoil value, Rcl 2 means every 2 MoS is an extra hit). MoS on Dodge reduces the number of hits you take from automatics 1:1.
• Persuade: MoS adds to reaction rolls from the audience.
• Panhandling: You earn MoS*$2 per hour
• Repairs: MoS*1 HP restored per repair attempt.
• Spellcasting: Lots, but MoS for a spell determines how easy it is to dispel or screw with. Divination and Communication spells will usually give clearer results.
• Poisons, Drugs and Status Effects: MoF is often used for durations and such.

[silva]

That campaign fell apart because I was expecting tactical firearm action but what I got was a combat system that made me want to die.

I hear you. That was the same reason our Cyberpunk and Transhuman Campaign games died too. Gurps 1-sec turns combat is the most boring Ive ever seen.

[tussock]

When GURPS says you have a margin of success, it usually means the DM should MTP up some extra effects of success or failure if it seems like it might matter. In some places (particularly combat stuff) they do it for you, but mostly not.


But like any game where the penalties and meaning of success and failure in the first place are often arbitrary and undefined, you can just find that your Cooking-12 skill can fail and work anyway because the GM wants things to move along, or succeed and not be good enough to get the job done yet because the GM also wants a Savoir-Faire roll at -10 or whatever.

Which is what it is. A good GM will let your specialities work, keep the game moving, and have the world make sense as everyone understands it, all at the same time.

[Antumbra]

I hear you. That was the same reason our Cyberpunk and Transhuman Campaign games died too. Gurps 1-sec turns combat is the most boring Ive ever seen.

It worked out fairly punchy for my Technomancer game - I made sure people knew that it was totally okay and recommended to spend rounds seeking cover and aiming, which takes no time at all to adjudicate, that they knew the rolls they needed to do their core shticks and that we would gloss over precise movement.

I'd done this mostly because they (and I) were all new to the system and things were leading towards a complex ambush - four cars of gunmen, and a rigged garage to trap the party in their van for long enough to position.

It went smoothly, and having it be in 1-second ticks did - I thought - make it more realistic and interesting. Despite having up to 8 combatants who used cover and aiming as well (the party made some very good choices that split the assaulting force up) it didn't take any longer than my experience with DnD or Shadowrun combat rounds.

Of course, then came graduation and I haven't had an RL group since, so my actual experience with GURPS in play is rather limited.

[Username17]

If you can't see why doing margin of success/failure is essentially incompatible with pre-roll difficulty modifiers on a curved roll, you should take a math course. Doing all of that THAC0 style with subtracting subtractions is just retarded.

GURPS is an uninspiring piece of 80s game design. The basic systems of handling things are unnecessarily complicated and give results that aren't as useful as they should be. There was a reason why we thought it was going to be the future in 1988, and there is also a reason why by 1994 we all knew that it wasn't and never was going to be.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

If you can't see why doing margin of success/failure is essentially incompatible with pre-roll difficulty modifiers on a curved roll, you should take a math course.

I have taken a math course. It isn't essentially incompatible at all. Margins of success aren't linear, but they work exactly the same way that modifiers do, so once you understand that +1 isn't one fifth of +5, then you also understand the difference between succeeding by 1 and succeeding by 5.

Also, "if you can't see" is some disingenuous bullshit. If you have an argument, make it. Don't vaguely imply that you have some sort of argument and make everyone guess whatever's going on in your head.

GURPS is an uninspiring piece of 80s game design. The basic systems of handling things are unnecessarily complicated and give results that aren't as useful as they should be. There was a reason why we thought it was going to be the future in 1988, and there is also a reason why by 1994 we all knew that it wasn't and never was going to be.

No argument here.

[momothefiddler]

Your cooking example used words like "handwave" and "probably modeled", and did not fill me with confidence. I couldn't tell if the discussed soft fail / great success states were proscribed outcomes per rules, or regular variety mindcaulk to fill in uses for them since the rules talk about them mattering. Those other examples are helpful though. Thanks

That's a valid distinction. Cooking does not have specific rules for MoS and I have to use the generic difficulty list, so it's admittedly less precisely defined.

---

That campaign fell apart because I was expecting tactical firearm action but what I got was a combat system that made me want to die.

I hear you. That was the same reason our Cyberpunk and Transhuman Campaign games died too. Gurps 1-sec turns combat is the most boring Ive ever seen.

I don't get this at all. As long as you get rid of the idea that every round has to involve damaging your opponent, I've found it goes more smoothly. Sure, you're going around the table two or three times to cover the same amount of "action", but if you haven't settled down into a routine, it's a lot easier to decide and adjust your one action based on other peoples' one actions than it is to decide two or three and adjust it based on the two or three of the person immediately before you, and if you have settled in, the turns themselves still go faster because they consist of a couple lines of conversation and possibly a move or a pair of die rolls. It's really very quick and having more turns that come more frequently is far more engaging than waiting for four people to figure out two or three actions each. And I'm comparing my experiences with people unfamiliar with GURPS to those with people unfamiliar with D&D and familiar with familiar, not just "people who know GURPS are faster than people who don't know D&D".

I will grant that while people still expect to do damage every turn and everything devolves into completely tactics-less move-and-attacks, it's unpleasant(you need those tactics), confusing(move-and-attack is an extra option on top of the basic system you're not familiar with), and unsuccessful(generally fatally). I don't think the system should have to compensate for the expectations engendered by another system, but it would probably be nice for the system or the MC to emphasize the viability of nondamaging combat actions.

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When GURPS says you have a margin of success, it usually means the DM should MTP up some extra effects of success or failure if it seems like it might matter. In some places (particularly combat stuff) they do it for you, but mostly not.


But like any game where the penalties and meaning of success and failure in the first place are often arbitrary and undefined, you can just find that your Cooking-12 skill can fail and work anyway because the GM wants things to move along, or succeed and not be good enough to get the job done yet because the GM also wants a Savoir-Faire roll at -10 or whatever.

Which is what it is. A good GM will let your specialities work, keep the game moving, and have the world make sense as everyone understands it, all at the same time.

While all this is true, I don't know what you're trying to say and none of it seems particularly system-specific. An I missing something?

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Of course, then came graduation and I haven't had an RL group since, so my actual experience with GURPS in play is rather limited.

Yeah. I haven't had an irl GURPS group for years. It's sad.

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If you can't see why doing margin of success/failure is essentially incompatible with pre-roll difficulty modifiers on a curved roll, you should take a math course. Doing all of that THAC0 style with subtracting subtractions is just retarded.

I've probably not taken quite as many math courses as you have, but I'm pretty sure I've taken plenty to understand MoS/difficulty/curved rolls, so please, feel free to provide specific mathematical reasoning as opposed to waving vaguely in the direction of "math" as though I'll shy away from the fearsome specter.

GURPS is an uninspiring piece of 80s game design. The basic systems of handling things are unnecessarily complicated and give results that aren't as useful as they should be. There was a reason why we thought it was going to be the future in 1988, and there is also a reason why by 1994 we all knew that it wasn't and never was going to be.

I want more specific complaints than this. You seem to feel very strongly that GURPS is shit, but you also are failing to respond to me. You said GURPS didn't model varying standards of cooking; I showed you how it handled that. You ignored that to fixate on the idea that someone could fail a cooking roll and still get something edible (which seems completely reasonable, considering your first argument that people have different standards of cooking); I showed that that is the case in D&D and real life as well. Now you throw this at me. I respect your opinions in a lot of cases and you do a good job talking about things you know about, but I'm getting the distinct impression that you have a grudge against GURPS and you're refusing to let it go in favor of something as silly as evidence. Either slow down and address the actual issues you brought up or explain your actual problem with it, but this thing where you bring up new and vaguer points every time your previous one is addressed has to stop.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Subtraction IS system specific, or at least, a common artifact of roll-under. Subtraction sucks, yo.

If you put a "play" button on a device, you'll likely put it in the shape of a triangle, or label a button with a picture of a triangle, pointing right. It's functionally identical to using a smiley face as the icon instead, but the triangle interacts more directly with the human brain.

On a DC 20 challenge is always 5% less likely to succeed than a DC 15. However, it gets significantly harder to offer that kind of transparency when you throw subtraction, difficulty modifiers, and bell curves in to the mix. It's a perfect storm for confusion. Even more so if you can get screwed after you succeeded by not succeeding with a high enough MoS.

Remove a few of those elements, and it gets a lot clearer. Fate uses a bell curve, but it uses easily read dice, static target numbers, a static, trinary measure of results, and results can be shifted after the dice land (whereas the opportunity cost of aiming can't be refunded if you roll an 18 when you fire).

[momothefiddler]

Subtraction IS system specific, or at least, a common artifact of roll-under. Subtraction sucks, yo.

If you put a "play" button on a device, you'll likely put it in the shape of a triangle, or label a button with a picture of a triangle, pointing right. It's functionally identical to using a smiley face as the icon instead, but the triangle interacts more directly with the human brain.

Roll-over is better than roll-under because bigger is better. Okay.

On a DC 20 challenge is always 5% less likely to succeed than a DC 15. However, it gets significantly harder to offer that kind of transparency when you throw subtraction, difficulty modifiers, and bell curves in to the mix. It's a perfect storm for confusion. Even more so if you can get screwed after you succeeded by not succeeding with a high enough MoS.

Your example isn't strictly true (a +16 will shift that percentage some), but I'll agree that a linear single-die setup is more straightforward for success calculations than a curved multi-die setup. It has some benefit, though, and at worst results in the little lookup table on p171 (which is actually a loss of nothing for most people I've played with, who already can't multiply a number by 5%).

But that's completely orthogonal to subtraction, difficulty modifiers, MoS, and post-success adjudication.

Remove a few of those elements, and it gets a lot clearer. Fate uses a bell curve, but it uses easily read dice, static target numbers, a static, trinary measure of results, and results can be shifted after the dice land (whereas the opportunity cost of aiming can't be refunded if you roll an 18 when you fire).

Easily read dice are nice.
Low granularity in results is not for everyone; Frank wants his cakes to be different from each other without being on fire, for instance. It streamlines things (which is a large part of the point of FATE from what I can tell) but it does not do so losslessly.
Shifting results after the dice land is entirely a narrative thing. Sometimes you miss, which means you've wasted the time you spent aiming, the time you spent firing, the money you spent on ritually-engraved silver bullets, whatever. Aiming makes you more likely to hit at the cost of an action. Power Attack gives you more potential damage at the cost of making you less likely to hit. I don't see how this is inherently a bad thing. Of note is the fact that GURPS does have rules for adjusting the dice after they land, some (luck) better than others (buying success).