How to make a Gurps setting work?

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

If everyone basically got the same rifle and weapons, as said, what the point in getting a different one?

Well, I dunno. What is the point?

I mean, in a fantasy campaign, or better yet a video game, you might carry a variety of weapons for different situations. Sword +3 for general use, Holy Mace for skeletons, Flametongue Dagger for mummies and ice elementals, etc. But the point of guns is just to put holes in people with little pieces of metal. There aren't really that many distinctly different ways to do that that actually make sense, and some are clearly better than others... like, you could have an assassin with a hidden crossbow for stealth kills, but no one's going to equip a military with those! Likewise there might be portable cannons for taking down steampunk mechs, but this is a specialist weapon, not something that someone would use like a battle rifle (let alone a sidearm).

Anyway, as soon as your players get the chance, they'll all probably use whichever is the best weapon (and players are good, though not infallible, at figuring out what that is). Which means you'll have created a bunch of detailed but less-good weapons for nothing. And for the rest of the campaign they'll make fun of every culture that uses the inferior weapons.

I guess you could just go nuts, and mostly decouple the effect of the weapon from its appearance. So take a "standard" pistol or rifle, whatever you think that is, and it has a certain set of stats (range, damage, etc) and all of the unique cultural weapons have those same stats, or close to them (minor variations are fine). This means you end up with giant revolvers that hold twelve shots, reload as fast as a rifle magazine, and do just as much damage as a rifle, with the same recoil, because they're really rifles in disguise. Or you can have the guy with the autocrossbow that just happens to do 6d pi per shot, because that's what all the battle rifles do. If you're willing to handwave realism concerns (crossbow bolts are much bigger than bullets; where does he keep them all??) then you can have whatever kind of crazy fluff appearance you want. This is basically what all those video games do when each character has a signature type of weapon; they all look different, but they all just have a stat for "weapon power" and maybe some kind of special effect (drains life, slows, elemental damage, etc) and all the attacks work exactly the same way.

It kills the point of exploring somewhat.

If the only good reason to explore the world is to see new weapons, I think you might want to spend some more time at the drawing board. Just sayin'.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

If everyone basically got the same rifle and weapons, as said, what the point in getting a different one?

In the historical late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the service weapons of many countries were also available for private purchase, in their home country and were thus available in other countries if anyone wanted to go to the effort. I have a 1907 London department store catalogue which doesn't list any foreign service rifles, but has the British one, in improved-quality grades, and pistols from several countries.

Apart from service weapons, which were all fairly similar because they were design to solve the same problem (cheap, light and handy enough to be carried on the march by a wide range of soldiers, doing enough damage to inflict casualties fairly reliably, very robust and reliable, and cheap) there was a very wide variety of sporting guns, specialised for hunting things from rabbits to elephants.

If you want your armies' service weapons to be very different, you need them to have significantly different requirements, which implies that their troops are much more varied than humans normally are from country to country, unless your senior generals and the politicians in charge of them have some quite impractical ideas.

If you want your PCs to have lots of choice in weapons, give them some unusual opponents, the chance to get sporting weapons that might be more effective against them, and tell them about the Weapon Bond perk. That's how the party in the campaign I was playing yesterday ended up as a WWII counter-intelligence group of six that uses three different kinds of pistol and two kinds of rifle, none of which are the standard service weapons.

[Crzyraccoon]

Well it all depends on the campaign itself, the more different it is from existing sources and the more genres/themes that is put into your campaign will bring in more paper work.

My present day horror campaign had little paperwork seen all of the information of the world was a click of a mouse while my fantasy space game had alot of different fantasy worlds, species and powers that need a load of paperwork.

[SteampengMK-1]

Originally Posted by Xplo

If the only good reason to explore the world is to see new weapons, I think you might want to spend some more time at the drawing board. Just sayin'.

Well It won't be just about finding firearms (there will be gadgets, Artifacts, ect). But why run around an battlefield looking for stuff instead of just getting out of it? If everyone is armed with the praticaly same weapons, it gets rids of an reason to do so. There may be some other reasons, but not much.

Why run over to that weapon, when you already got the exact same weapon?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

But why run around an battlefield looking for stuff instead of just getting out of it?

Duty, Sense of Duty, and the other reasons why people end up in armies? Almost nobody on a battlefield in your historical period was there for the loot, although they would take it if it was going.

We may be misunderstanding the atmosphere of your game. Is it meant to be Dieselpunk with the motivations of Dungeon Fantasy?

[SteampengMK-1]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Duty, Sense of Duty, and the other reasons why people end up in armies? Almost nobody on a battlefield in your historical period was there for the loot, although they would take it if it was going.

We may be misunderstanding the atmosphere of your game. Is it meant to be Dieselpunk with the motivations of Dungeon Fantasy?

well, I should explain slight more

It steampunk/Dieselpunk with element of science fantasy and Dungeon, but not in the normal sense.

The PCs, you see, may or not may have been apart of an Elite Time traveling Crime organization (which party clause the messed up timeline with everything form victorian era computers, magick, and light Rebo(Biopunk)-tech), and because of this, they are now going to be hunted down across time, space, and the outlands (basically something like the world of Submachine- Online flash game by Mateusz skutnik). Some of these PC however may be form are timeline or ones yet weirder.

Because of this, the players are trying to keep one step ahead of time traveling bounty hunters and the likes. They may however team up with other organizations in all this to get some sort of protection and some sort of pay form missions.

Time travel is mostly done from Warp-Nodes(Portals from one place/time to the other, connected via wormholes), or Temporal Warp Nodes(which can alter time/space in a certain area around an person), though some can go all out and merely use psi/magic powers (which none of the PC have, yet)

Some of the main influences for this setting was

Submachine(link above)
Time-spitters
SUPER-HOT(online flash game dealing with bullet time)

This should help.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

Well It won't be just about finding firearms (there will be gadgets, Artifacts, ect). But why run around an battlefield looking for stuff instead of just getting out of it? If everyone is armed with the praticaly same weapons, it gets rids of an reason to do so. There may be some other reasons, but not much.

Why run over to that weapon, when you already got the exact same weapon?

Generally speaking, looting is best done when the battlefield is no longer actively being fought over.

Also, generally speaking, there are uses for additional weapons, ammo, and general supplies even if they aren't higher level or otherwise preferable to the ones you already have.


Also, of course, 'practically the same' isn't quite the same thing as 'the same'. The other side's gun is probably generally similar but it might have some notable advantages. It also intrinsically has the advantage and disadvantage that it sounds like the other side's shooting and uses their ammo, which is frequently not interchangeable with your own ammo.

[SteampengMK-1]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Generally speaking, looting is best done when the battlefield is no longer actively being fought over.

Also, generally speaking, there are uses for additional weapons, ammo, and general supplies even if they aren't higher level or otherwise preferable to the ones you already have.


Also, of course, 'practically the same' isn't quite the same thing as 'the same'. The other side's gun is probably generally similar but it might have some notable advantages. It also intrinsically has the advantage and disadvantage that it sounds like the other side's shooting and uses their ammo, which is frequently not interchangeable with your own ammo.

Sorry about that, I really had to think about this.

In thinking about this, I might change system for GURPS to something else, Or might not.

On one hand, GURPS is the only system I won't likely have to modify like crazy, but on the other, the gurps-ness of the system is being somewhat to front loaded or something for me to too handle.

I also can't buy the books. Sure, I can find them laying around in places, but can't really do anything..."legal" with them that won't be called pirating.