[Speculation] GURPS 4.5e

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

What's the difference, if the elements are cheaper? Four Easy elemental skills instead of one Hard bundle?

you really havn't though this through have you? Lets see DX+2 the key level needed in an easy skill... [4] times 4 is [16]

DX+2 in a hard [12]


Most weapon skills are easy or average let be kind and say Average DX+2 [8]... starting to see the problem?

as it stands unarmed skills have no defualts and the split there is even less groundes for given them a defualt, so no buy from defualt, so the problem is just going to get worse the more compidate your fighter is meant to be...

as for sipes the one skill for fighters... Gues what all that addationed skill are need fore un armed fighjter too... thnis is on top of the split...

This make teniques and sty;lpe and even WORSE buy for unarmed fither who are spend a lot more points in the core you realy think they going to get any benfit from learning even the two teniquews people now claim is max worth buying?

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

What's the difference, if the elements are cheaper? Four Easy elemental skills instead of one Hard bundle?

Because all skills cost the same?

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Langy

Because all skills cost the same?

Last time I looked, GURPS had three cost levels -- which effectively work out to a skill shift, thanks to the way the table works. And all martial arts styles certainly don't cost the same. I don't understand your point.

If you like bundling some kicking and punching and a special defense here, but just punching and a defense there, then the whole previous sword vs. spear. vs bastard sword skill is misplaced. You should be arguing for melee skills like Swashbuckler or Sword-n-Board or Hoplite, rather than having to piece those together from smaller parts.

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Last time I looked, GURPS had three cost levels -- which effectively work out to a skill shift, thanks to the way the table works. And all martial arts styles certainly don't cost the same. I don't understand your point.

If you like bundling some kicking and punching and a special defense here, but just punching and a defense there, then the whole previous sword vs. spear. vs bastard sword skill is misplaced. You should be arguing for melee skills like Swashbuckler or Sword-n-Board or Hoplite, rather than having to piece those together from smaller parts.

All skills in GURPS cost the same - 1 point for the first two levels, 2 for the next, and 4 per level after that. All skill difficulty does is act as a modifier; it doesn't alter the price of a skill at all. Martial arts styles have nothing at all to do with this.

I'm actually fine with there being 'Grappling Skill' and 'Striking Skill'; I don't think there should be Brawling, Karate, and Boxing, though. All three of those should be a single skill, with the only difference between perks or something similar. Same with Judo, Wrestling, and Sumo Wrestling.

Yes, there'll be two skills to learn, but they do very different things. Same with a melee weapon skill and shield skill or anything similar.

This is not at all the same as the one-handed sword/two-handed sword problem, which boils down to the rules for purchasing things up from a skill default being just plain bad (since there is almost never any point in doing so).

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

If the GM wants characters at a certain level of competency, the GM should give them sufficient points to achieve that level of competency.

Sure. But the incentive created by the current skill pricing is such that the players won't make characters competent in multiple skills. They will instead opt to make their specialized character even more specialized, with a higher skill level in his primary skill. Or he might put those points into something else altogether. Just throwing more points at it doesn't achieve the goal.

You have to look at the opportunity cost. If I'm making a melee combatant, and we do like you want and give me, say, 125 points, I'm not suddenly going to branch out and buy up a bunch more skills. Because they still cost too much relative to everything else I could purchase instead. Now I can buy Extra Attack, or higher ST, or more Wealth, or higher Status. Or any number of other things that are better than buying up a whole bunch of unrelated weapon skills.

You would eventually give out enough points that players purchase lots of different weapon skills, but that's once they have things like DX at 15 or 16 or 17. And even then the only reason they're purchasing those skills will be because they can get them for a cost of only one or two points. I think that's because that's about how much those are worth.

Look at these as different things conceptually, because that's what they are. Axe/Mace alone is a completely different thing from Axe/Mace and Broadsword.

I don't see any reason to price Axe/Mace and Broadsword at the same number of points as Broadsword alone + Axe/Mace alone.

Look at how it works out if we use alternative ability with them, and if we don't.

Let's say we only want the skills at DX+6. That's a very skilled fighter, but not at all uncommon for player characters. For Broadsword at DX+6, that costs us 24 points. You have to be in an incredibly high point game for it to be worth our swordfighter's while to drop another 24 points into Axe/Mace. I've never seen it happen. I've seen people put a couple points into a second skill if they have a high enough DX. The game prices you out of just purchasing both those skills. Because it's not worth it to purchase a whole other skill. But if we call the second one an alternative ability and charge 5 points rather than 25, then it starts to look like something someone might reasonably purchase.

And this isn't too far off from what others are proposing with more generous defaults which you purchase up as techniques.



I just have to wonder: would you ever find a trait's price too high? What if Fit cost 25 points? Would you think that's too high? What if it was 50? And then what if one of your players wanted to take it? The answer wouldn't be to give them more points, would it? You see what I mean? It would still cost too much for them to take, because other less-costly options would still be better.

The obsession that some display about having low-point total games is deeply silly and rather damaging in terms of how we (who run and play GURPS) are perceived.

I don't know what that means. I actually run low-point total games. Why do you think I should not care about the incentive structure the point costs create in those games? I've seen players agonize over the way the opportunity costs of the game don't match up with their expectations. They go in expecting to be able to create a knight who can fight reasonably well with a variety of weapons, but the game discourages that.

There are those of us who feel this is wrong, and would prefer something different. How is that silly or even damaging? The game should be perceived as it is. If something is damaging--like the incredible weights of the armors--then those things should be fixed. We shouldn't have to take a vow of silence for the sake of the game. The game is a means to an end. If I can't achieve my ends with it, then I'm going to change it. And if it's failing me not because of my specific needs (which I have house rules for), but because of a more general failing, then I'm going to speak up about it. Because maybe other players aren't aware of those incentives in the pricing. Maybe they haven't discussed the opportunity costs with their players as I have. There's already a pretty hefty buy in to play a roleplaying game, and a lot of these issues aren't readily apparent, though they're there all the same.

[sgt.sargent]

How about 4.5e as repackaging? GURPS four and a halfth edition could take rules from a few books and arrange them in a new Basic Set.

Basic Set: Beings - Rules on creating a character or other similarly point based thing. It could include all the character creation rules from the Basic Set, along with additional point based options from other sources: extra skills, advantages, disadvantages, and modifiers.

Basic Set: Campaigning - Rules on running games, including combat rules, traps, social encounters, etc.

Basic Set: Gear - Rules on creating things that aren't based on points, including the vaporous replacement for third edition Vehicles, low-tech armor creation, Deadly Spring bow rules, etc. To me, this is the missing Basic Set book, alongside Characters and Campaigns.

Include a page in each, in large print, explaining ways to get other resources online, including basic combat and GMing rules, the simplified IW run-down that currently comes in Basic Set: Characters, as well as similar condensed information on DF, Banestorm, and a couple of ultra-tech settings, topped off with relatively small equipment tables to go with each setting as well as a generic table. This way, people don't have to have Gear or even Campaigning to play. Of course, each of these files would come with links to purchase the full products, in a quasi-freemium model.



<Edit>
Oh and if I had my way, it would be created initially without the multi-column, pages of paper layout, then converted to computer file formats and a layout for paper pages. The .pdf files feel archaic to me, a relic of a dead-tree era, interfering with the usefulness of GURPS files on both small screens, such as phones, and very large screens. With information that morphs with the window size, users on both ends would be happier.
</Edit>

[dataweaver]

Well, I've mentioned elsewhere what I'd like to see in terms of a "repackaging" of 4e: namely, a series of "Lite" books, each between the size of GURPS Lite and Social Engineering — in fact, GURPS Lite would become the "core book" (perhaps expanded to 48 pages or so to include a few other key elements of GURPS such as Techniques), and the rest of the contents of the two-volume Basic Set would be reorganized into supplements similar to Social Engineering.

The premise is that for most campaigns, there are large segments of the Basic Set that either aren't needed (e.g., Magic or Psionics in settings that don't deal with the supernatural) or don't need the in-depth treatment that Basic Set provides (e.g., combat rules more advanced than "Lite Combat" in a game dealing primarily with political intrigue, or advanced social engineering rules in a high-action game); so a GM just getting into GURPS could pick up the core book plus one or two supplements that are most in line with the kind of game he intends to run, and could then expand from there as his tastes dictate.

[willfreedo]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

would you propose

Welp...

Long distance walking (so yes, hiking, I'm sorry)
Travel on foot for extended periods of time can be very taxing for the untrained body. If you walk for a day, roll against HT or Hiking skill at the end of it; failure means loss of 1 FP which can only be recovered by resting for a period of time (or whatever; something akin to starvation fatigue loss).

Now comes the fun part: this assumes you've been walking 8 hours in the day, at a speed of 4 km/h.

Want to march for more time every day? How about less? No problem. The roll is modified by -1 or +1 for every hour more or less you walked, respectively.

Want to go at a different pace? The roll is modified by -2 or +2 for each km/h faster or slower you walked, respectively.

On a table, the unmodified roll would mean having walked:

km/h | basic hours walked a day
1	14
2	12
3	10
4	8
5	6
6	4

The slowest ones are kind of silly, but I like tables. If you dislike tables, the formula for the modifier is +16 - hours - 2 x speed. Also, anything faster than the speeds shown borders on racewalking rather than hiking. Shun >:C

For added similarity to the bleeding rules, a critical failure on the daily roll results in a loss of 3 FP instead. For added granularity, a failure by 5 or more is -2 FP. Also, this roll might be a good place to apply the characters' encumbrance modifier (since I know some people prefer to ignore that mod when it comes to hiking)

So there. When the players are getting ready to start the hundred leagues journey to the Palace of Amber, they just need to answer "how fast do you want to walk?", then "how many hours a day do you want to walk?". Now you know what the daily roll will be for each character. Warn them about it if you wish, or keep it secret until the first painful morning arrives if you're a sneaky little evil GM. Shun.

Finally, the amounts for magnitudes are pretty arbitrary and pretty untested both in game and irl. Using metric system might disqualify this as a "philosophical change", too :P so by all means play around with it.

[BaHalus]

Originally Posted by sgt.sargent

How about 4.5e as repackaging? GURPS four and a halfth edition could take rules from a few books and arrange them in a new Basic Set.

Basic Set: Beings - Rules on creating a character or other similarly point based thing. It could include all the character creation rules from the Basic Set, along with additional point based options from other sources: extra skills, advantages, disadvantages, and modifiers.

Basic Set: Campaigning - Rules on running games, including combat rules, traps, social encounters, etc.

Basic Set: Gear - Rules on creating things that aren't based on points, including the vaporous replacement for third edition Vehicles, low-tech armor creation, Deadly Spring bow rules, etc. To me, this is the missing Basic Set book, alongside Characters and Campaigns.

Include a page in each, in large print, explaining ways to get other resources online, including basic combat and GMing rules, the simplified IW run-down that currently comes in Basic Set: Characters, as well as similar condensed information on DF, Banestorm, and a couple of ultra-tech settings, topped off with relatively small equipment tables to go with each setting as well as a generic table. This way, people don't have to have Gear or even Campaigning to play. Of course, each of these files would come with links to purchase the full products, in a quasi-freemium model.



<Edit>
Oh and if I had my way, it would be created initially without the multi-column, pages of paper layout, then converted to computer file formats and a layout for paper pages. The .pdf files feel archaic to me, a relic of a dead-tree era, interfering with the usefulness of GURPS files on both small screens, such as phones, and very large screens. With information that morphs with the window size, users on both ends would be happier.
</Edit>

I like columns, they are good for fast reading. actually, the larger boxes are the bad things when I read in my galaxy 5. I agree with the adjustable format. a format that incorporates new content would be cool too. things like having all the advantages, modifiers oor whatever in one place is cool.

[ehrbar]

Originally Posted by Refplace

The Magic supplements such as the Plant spells may address many of the issues people have.

Magic really does need a new edition. At a minimum, there's a lot of should-be errata to the spells just to make it work properly/sensibly in 4th (see my sig). When one considers the possibilities for actual revision (like consolidating or eliminating "nobody would bother" spells, making prereq trees simpler and more transparent, et cetera), the argument becomes even stronger.