[DF 1-3] Critique Five Pre-Gen Mass-Murdering Burglar Hobos

[ErhnamDJ]

For a knight, or maybe a holy warrior, I would recommend taking a look at the gnome. Their armor weight is significantly reduced from the tiny tools rules. You can easily deck them out in the heaviest armor you can afford and have them walk around nearly unencumbered.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

Big guys are a lot of fun but they're hell to armor and twice as expensive to heal (so you need 20+ HP just to even out the energy cost investment). Thinking "gigantism = super munchkin trait" is a mistake.

Nod. The barbarian gets Gigantism because a lightly armored big guy with big two-handed weapons and gobs of HP gets the most benefits with the least penalties. But that's just "not shooting yourself in the foot", not super munchkin cheating with both hands :)

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by chandley

Or, allow me to suggest going the other way: Shorties for the win

Dwarf Knight

You have Pickaxe Penchant listed at 1, but you calculated the bonus at +4. Is this just a typo, or do you need to find 30 more points?

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by aesir23

You have Pickaxe Penchant listed at 1, but you calculated the bonus at +4. Is this just a typo, or do you need to find 30 more points?

He's got a later Pickaxe Penchant at +3.

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by Stripe

He's got a later Pickaxe Penchant at +3.

Ah, missed that. It all makes sense now.

[Kuroshima]

In my experience, here are some race/template comboes that are pure munchkin fodder:

Gnome Barbarian: Still uses SM+1 weapons, but uses SM+0 armor. Healable as any other SM+0 delver. For those that like Knights of the Dinner Table, can you say Gnome Titan?

Dwarf Knight: Abuse the hell out of Pickaxe Penchant, use throwing axes as your ranged weapon, etc etc

Half Ogre Swashbuckler: Can you say Fezzik Montoya? You can afford weapon master, an extra attack, and the half ogre race without issues on the standard 250 points. You hit a lot, hit like a truck, and hit often.

<any, but notably mountain and wood> Elf Scout: and your bow skill is through the roof! Abuse Forest Guardian! Mountain Elves have the advantage of coming with 2 levels of it already, but mountain have one level of telescopic vision and can reach the same level of Forest Guardian than Wood Elves. Half elves come with neither, but they also don't have the crippling Sense of Duty.

Ogre Barbarian: If you're going to ditch armor because it's too heavy and expensive, at least get more bang for the buck!

Ogre Knight: ST 24 and weapon master? Where do I sign?

[hackbarth]

I made this same exercise of building chars with RAW DF 1-3 some time ago. By the time I had to equip them, I was less creative, but the result was these chars:

DF chars

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

As much as min-maxing uber-delvers is a lot of fun, and it can be instructive, I'm not sure the OP should do that for this situation.

It's pre-gen characters for people who've never played GURPS before. Handing them fairly complicated GURPS sheets is already going to be a lot to swallow at once. They'll need to figure out the character sheets and how to use what they've got.

Handing them min-maxed kill machines both makes their job a bit harder to do, and I think it puts GURPS in a bit of a bad light. I'd err on the side of somewhat simpler characters, with broad-strokes personalities (better 2-3 big disads that 7-8 small ones), and fairly simple equipment lists.

Here's what I mean:

Simpler Characters: Go for stuff like Knight w/greatsword or Swashbuckler with Rapier and Main Gauche or Wizard with a tight selection of spells ("Fire Wizard" not "Buff mage with Great Haste and Might and Flight"). Make sure they all have some kind of default action they can do. Also have them make a selection that shows some of the chargen options - have the knight take a Signature Gear sword or start with magic armor thanks to Trading Points for Money, make sure the wizard has a good power item (maybe done the same way) or some Gizmos (and a short list of stuff he can whip out easily with them), give someone Weath or Poverty, etc.
It doesn't matter if the characters are awesome or not, or the best they could be or not. It's a one-shot, so treat them as throwaways and make them interesting even at the cost of not being optimized.

Broad Strokes Personalities: It's tempting to give . Give them interesting stuff munchkin types might not take. Give that knight Wounded and Sense of Duty and say he took a spear to the hip saving his buddies, and everyone remembers that and so does his damn hip. Make the cleric a holy crusader against evil (Intolerance: Evil Religions, Sense of Duty: Co-Religionists, Fanaticism: Destroy the Evil God's Minions - that's -30 of your -50 right there). Give each one a cohesive set of disads that you can elevator pitch to someone when you hand them the sheet. "Sir Wodewick lost his Eye fighting orcs and he's been hunting them ever since."

You do want those disads to be non-crippling or non-controlling, though - penalties are fine but you don't want ones that severely limit the options of the players. That's a further argument against Berserk, too - it's a severe disadvantage, and once you go berserk you don't get Active Defenses anymore. So you miss out on learning how those work in play and reinforcing it. And you get told when it starts and when it ends, and how to act during it. Bleh. An NPC berserker is a good object lesson for why "All Out Attack" isn't the best maneuver to select turn in, turn out, though.


Simpler equipment: Just the basic adventurer's pack from Loadouts is good enough for their "basic" gear, and then avoid doing stuff like layering armor (except maybe the head, just show it can be done) or buying magic armor with different DR on different pieces, or giving them a too-huge assortment of stuff ("You have one of each nageteppo, one pack of caltrops, one of each of four different grenades, and three personal weapons. What do you have readied?" "Uh. . . .")


Don't optimize their carried stuff so that one more pound puts them over the limit, as they'll pick up treasure and be bummed that their character's Dodge and Move change. Rather put them in the middle of an encumbrance level if possible, so they have a minimum of number changes on their sheet during play.


Oh, and to make it clearly not "D&D" give someone a bow and a bunch of Monster Drool - "Of course monster hunters poison their arrows. No, there isn't a 50% chance an NPC will see the poison and raise a hue and cry for the watch while attacking you."



All in all, this is a chance to show off GURPS to people, not a challenge to build the best character.

[chandley]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

Simpler equipment: Just the basic adventurer's pack from Loadouts is good enough for their "basic" gear, and then avoid doing stuff like layering armor (except maybe the head, just show it can be done) or buying magic armor with different DR on different pieces, or giving them a too-huge assortment of stuff ("You have one of each nageteppo, one pack of caltrops, one of each of four different grenades, and three personal weapons. What do you have readied?" "Uh. . . .")


Don't optimize their carried stuff so that one more pound puts them over the limit, as they'll pick up treasure and be bummed that their character's Dodge and Move change. Rather put them in the middle of an encumbrance level if possible, so they have a minimum of number changes on their sheet during play.

This is the only thing that Dwarf Knight fails on from this list. For those that want to use him under these constraints, remove the pick head and spear head from the Dwarven Axe (not really DF 1-3 + Basic compliant anyway) and drop it as signature gear. It now costs $810. Use those 4 points to buy more stuff, thus putting this character firmly into medium encumbrance, Dodge drops to 8, move to 3. Drop weapon bond to buy another background skill (Intimidation might not be a bad choice). Another throwing axe, a fine, balanced, dwarven Pick, a fine, balanced dwarven mace, and drop the chain lanyard and you have spent $4962 of your $5000, added 11.5 lbs of weight (to 125.5), leaving you 48.5lbs left in medium. Every last one of your weapons uses the same skill, including the same fast-draw skill (for switching them around). Effective weapon skill for the axe, the pick, and the mace, used 1handed, is 25. Adjust the "named moves" appropriately. Yes, he has three personal weapons, but come on, its not THAT complicated to say "do you want to hack it, squish it, or impale it".


Now you have the classic dwarf. Hes grumpy, greedy, and likes to drink a lot. He can answer questions about mines and ores (Prospecting) if he can get a look at em, and has a weapon type for everything you might encounter. You have the named moves as your "default actions" in a fight. And you are both simple to play and roleplay, AND munchkin-lite.

:)

[Stripe]

Don't have much time to read the replies. Will do so tomorrow. But, thanks everyone, for the help and advice.

I'll admit, I'm a little nervous. Everyone's using pre-gens and the dungeon still isn't 100% finished or play-tested. Hopefully, this week I'll be able to get everything done. I've been writing this dungeon for about a year, so this isn't a quickly-thrown together idea, but some of the details aren't polished. I need the pre-gens first so that I can play-test the combat.

I didn't have time to work on the characters today, though I would very much have liked to have don so.

It looks like it's going to be a party of four on Sunday, April 8: (Half-ogre?) Barbarian; dwarf Knight; female (wood?) elf Scout; and a (human?) Cleric. Since there's no thief, I'm going to make the Scout as thief-like as possible.

Of course, we still may get a fifth, but I doubt it.

One of the players will be my friend with whom I'm currently visiting. The other three, I won't have ever met until we sit down at the table to play.

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

All in all, this is a chance to show off GURPS to people, not a challenge to build the best character.

Very, very true, and that's one of the two reasons I'm re-making Chandley's dwarf killing machine; to make certain I understand everything about him myself. But, Chandley's right; really the only thing I saw that was complicated was the multi-weapon axe.

I don't mind people in this thread going wild with the min-maxing -- as long as they stick with RAW DF 1-3. But, what actually makes it into my game will be simple characters. Since I've never made DF characters, I need to build upon others experience to make certain I'm going in the right direction. Chandley showed just how well a dwarf with pickaxe penchant works, so I'm making a dwarf knight in that fashion.

As far as personalities are going to be concerned, I'll probably pick the disadvantages with them at the table. "You wanted to play the elf Scout? Tell me about their personality. Oh yes? How does this disadvantage sound? The pre-gen comes with this disadvantage. Is that alright?"

After some character tweaking and discussion, we'll run through the basics of combat and success rolls (e.g., climbing). Then, on to the dungeon!