Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
I'm starting my fifteenth GURPS campaign now, and that has not been my experience. Your phrase "with action-adventure elements" sets the bar low, perhaps lower than you imagine. In my campaigns, I'd say that Salle d'Armes, Sovereignty, Fixers, and Water Margin were action-adventure and had players inclined to prioritize that aspect, and that only Uplift and First Contact almost entirely lacked action-adventure elements; the other nine definitely had such elements. Virtually none of the characters had Luck. The death rates were extremely low; I've seen only a handfull of PC deaths in running campaigns since 1992.
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From reading what you write about your campaigns, it seems that the worlds they are set in are usually very forgiving and enemies extremely careful not to risk character death.
You are also willing to modify rules to ensure that career-ending crippling injuries (like
destroyed Leg) becomes merely inconvenient, like Lame (Crippled Leg). That's Luck by GM fiat instead of as a trait written down, but it's nonetheless pretty much the same thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
I think that you have now introduced a third category. I won't call it a straw man, because really someone might choose to run a campaign with bleeding rules and rules for risk of infection and so on. But my original distinction was between GURPS campaigns with Luck, and GURPS campaigns that use the base rules unmodified by anyone having Luck. The bleeding rules and such are not the base rules; they're an "extreme realism" option. The baseline rules are moderately realistic; Luck makes things less realistic. So in comparing how-thing-work-with-Luck and how-things-work-without-Luck-and-with-bleeding-and-so-on, you seem to be changing two variables, not just one. That doesn't make for an intellectually valid comparison. And you're leaving out the option that I normally take.
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The baseline rules aren't realistic at all. They are highly cinematic. Considering that you were saying that you preferred a more realistic style of play than Kromm, it's odd that you would choose the highly cinematic campaign switches.
In my experience, Luck as an allowed trait does very little damage to players' (and mine) view of the world as essentially realistic, albeit a place where the PCs, by dint of a metagame trait called Luck, are much more likely to be part of those fortunate few people who happen to survive more in their careers than others.
Having injury function as it does with all realism switches turned off is a lot worse. It makes blunt trauma to the head a safe method of turning people off for a while without risk of intracranial hemorraghing. For that matter, it makes low-caliber hollow-point bullets a safe and effective knock-out method. It also makes all high HT characters into Monty Python's Black Knight, who don't need to fear any injury short of total bodily destruction.
It's a lot sillier than using Luck.