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#71 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Oh, and yes, the intent is that it costs more to work on something with an ungodly high CF than to work on the same basic item without – that is, if you want your item to come back with its modifiers intact. If you don't mind the craftsperson messing up the balance, damaging the materials that make the thing fine, chipping off the gold, etc., you can get the work done for less. You'll also lose all modifiers you didn't include in the price calculation for the work. So if you're okay with your bow coming back as a plain old composite bow but with the ST you want, feel free to pay $90.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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#72 |
Join Date: Dec 2016
Location: Southern Sweden, possibly on an Alternate Earth
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I got it the other day and just finished reading it. Love it! I see adventure everywhere when I read it. The thing with tourists joining experienced and battle-scarred delvers and ending up in trouble deep in the dungeon, full of Elder Things and goo... made me all giggly. A nice twist would be that later it turns out that one of the tourists is a royal family member, spelling big trouble for the delvers if everyone does not returns well and alive.
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#73 | ||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Thank you!
I must confess that this item is four pages longer than its first draft because I added 3,000+ words of adventure ideas that occurred to me later . . . Not the big, obvious adventure seeds on p. 12 and pp. 33-35, but the little hints shoehorned in all over the place. Quote:
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For fun plot twists, make one of the tourists (not necessarily the same one, if there are several) a monster in disguise who wants to be escorted back home – or even an avatar of a god testing the heroes' resolve to protect the weak! It could be interesting to have one tourist per delver, each with a twist:
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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#74 | |
Join Date: Oct 2007
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It is still great, and while I know the reasons for a certain looseness of dimension here (as in the Where’s The Map text box), I keep coming back to the height. The section on The Shaft tells us that climbing the steps “involves a 25-minute walk or 50/Move minutes at a run” which seems well and good, except that it is hard to reconcile with the heights we hear. A reasonably brisk delver (the ninja in my current group) would be up in seven minutes or so, and she is no speed demon. My gaming group is in southern Ontario and we have all ascended the CN Tower at one point or another. I daresay it is our basic shared referent for A Tall Thing. Each year there is a charity run up the stairs: the world record is slightly under eight minutes, and a more typical pace is 30-40 minutes. These are pretty much in line with The Shaft stairs figures: trouble is, the observation deck on the CN Tower is an even 374 yards up, or almost exactly one-quarter the figures we are working with in this thread with Kromm’s mention of “I'd put the zenith of the cavern ceiling – above Town Square – at between 1,400 and 1,500 yards.” It’s going to be a hard sell for verisimilitude for my players when the basic figures seem to be off by a factor of four. Am I missing something*? *Besides joie de vivre, obviously. Last edited by Evil Roy Slade; 07-17-2020 at 11:38 PM. Reason: “In” and “on” are two different words. |
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#75 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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This is heroic fantasy, not real life. Heroes just about always have enough HT and FP that, were we caring about them getting tired, they could run 1,400 to 1,500 yards.
That makes the base time 1,400/Move to 1,500/Move seconds, which is 23/Move to 25/Move minutes. But: stairs. You move up by moving forward, and even the rules in full-on GURPS ignore Pythagoras; per p. B387, it's "Stairs (up or down): +1 movement point per hex." That doubles the time to 46/Move to 50/Move minutes . . . assuming no breaks. That's where 50/Move comes from. Is that plausible? Well, a Move 5 runner (average person, or fast adventurer in armor) could do it at a Move 6 sprint (33 HT rolls) or Move 3 paced run (16 HT rolls). Even wheezy heroes have HT 11 (costs 12 FP or 6 FP), and most have HT 12+ (costs 8 or fewer FP or 4 or fewer FP), so rather than require lots of rolls, I assumed something between those paces and decided not to worry about HT rolls or FP costs. As for a walk, GURPS assumes a slow walk is Move 1 and a brisk walk but not a run is Move 2, so the 25-minute figure is just 50/2 = 25 in the above formula. Note that GURPS doesn't assess special FP costs for stair-climbing at any pace. The "extra cost" comes in through the extra distance (doubled!) and thus extra time (also doubled!). Hiking costs a few FP per hour, so fatigue just won't be an issue here.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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#76 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
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This is, I suppose, the heart of it: though GURPS is plenty robust, I am not sure anyone at any stage from 1986 onward has given much thought to how well the mechanics capture the situation when a character is running up essentially a mile of vertical staircase. With all due respect to your calculations, I think I will go for something more plausible, heroic fantasy or no.
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dungeon fantasy |
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