GURPS pitch to d20 players

[mr beer]

Personally speaking, a big draw is that GURPS combat is almost infinitely superior to D&D combat.

[corwyn]

Originally Posted by jacobmuller

Templates make character creation easier - any min-max will have been done for you. Dungeon Fantasy rocks.

I'm a roll-player so, in GURPS:
- Your Stats matter - they have direct effect on game outcome, skill, damage, survival.
- a 1 point Stat increase averages out as a 10% bonus.
- cripplingly unlucky rolls are 1 in 200.
- the better your skill the better your chance is of being ridiculously lucky (Crit Success can be figured as Effective Skill -10).

Compared to D20 games I've tried - 2 points of stat = 5%. Crit Fail 1 in 20.

"crit fail" in default D&D combat just means auto-miss; there are no fumbles
outside of attack rolls, it doesn't even mean that, no auto-failure, no crit fail.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by mr beer

Personally speaking, a big draw is that GURPS combat is almost infinitely superior to D&D combat.

This is the big distinguisher for me. There's also the fact that I can take Administration, Politics, Propaganda, Strategy, etc.,--the greater breadth of potential foci.

My first D&D game, I played a Cleric who was--rather opportunistically--trying to establish a theocracy. I succeeded, but there were several points where I looked at the character sheet and went "Hmm... what do I roll against to rule the little town I'm in charge of? How about to spread my theocratic fundamentalism?"

There were also moments I missed some of GURPS more utility-level spells. We had a mad mayor on whom I could have used Relieve Madness...

The final combat was rather dynamic, but we had several which were "find mooks to help us, run them at BBEG, sling ranged attacks from afar until BBEG dies." Another began with the rogue attacking the foe in chinks in the armor... but there was no game mechanic to back that up... we just slugged it out with them.

It was a fabulous game, but I came out of it with a pretty clear notion that D&D focused on combat, but didn't make even that all that interesting, whereas my character was focused on knowing what was up and manipulating things at a larger scale than D&D is accustomed to.

[borithan]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

The final combat was rather dynamic, but we had several which were "find mooks to help us, run them at BBEG, sling ranged attacks from afar until BBEG dies." Another began with the rogue attacking the foe in chinks in the armor... but there was no game mechanic to back that up... we just slugged it out with them.

That is kind of what the Rogue's sneak attack is meant to represent already, attacking vulnerabilities of various different types, including armour gaps, and to an extent any hit in D&D includes hit to chinks in armour (better covering armour has a better AC in part because gaps or thinner spots are harder to hit). But yeah, the D&D system is quite limiting at times, and given the sort of "mother, may I?" approach the rules take it isn't easy coming up with mechanics to reflect a lot of interesting situations without borking the system elsewhere.

I do remember that in AD&D a bulette had AC 5 on it's eyes, compared to a much better AC everywhere else. How you adjudicated that I don't know, as if it was simply a matter of "I attack the eyes!" why wouldn't you always attack the eyes?

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by borithan

I do remember that in AD&D a bulette had AC 5 on it's eyes, compared to a much better AC everywhere else. How you adjudicated that I don't know, as if it was simply a matter of "I attack the eyes!" why wouldn't you always attack the eyes?

Because in AD&D every general attack assumes you're going to take any opening presented to you, and the effects are abstracted into hit points of damage. When you reach zero hit points, you die. Exactly what happens to do when you're hit is not given in the rules and isn't meant to be dwelt upon. But if you've got a creature that has a weakness in a certain location, that's special permission to target that location.

To put it another way: a goblin's eyes aren't especially more vulnerable than the rest of it. The difficulty in hitting the eyes offsets the greater damage that would be done if they were hit, and since everything is abstracted into a binary dead-or-not-dead result, it doesn't matter.

The strength of GURPS is not that it solves the things about D&D that don't make sense. D&D DOES make sense if you take the time to understand its sense. But GURPS lets you remove the abstractions and get into the details of things like hitting specific locations and causing specific effects.

The mechanics of GURPS are very much a reaction to the abstraction of D&D. Whether it's because you don't like the abstraction or it "never made sense" to you, GURPS removes most of it and lets you have all the details.

[borithan]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Because in AD&D every general attack assumes you're going to take any opening presented to you, and the effects are abstracted into hit points of damage. When you reach zero hit points, you die. Exactly what happens to do when you're hit is not given in the rules and isn't meant to be dwelt upon.

Sure. I understand that and I don't see a problem with it inherently. But according to that model the AC and hit points of a bulette should include the chance you might hit it's unarmoured eyes, and then this rule comes along and says "you can target specific locations on this specific creature" (there were a couple of others like it... I think dragons maybe had a lower AC on their belly?), which sort of run counter to the design.

What it makes me think happened was in whatever game they originated from (given old D&D monsters often came from the personal games of the designers) a player asked "This creature has some tough armour all over it. Can I try and attack it's eyes specifically, which presumably are not armoured?" and so as to reward the player thinking about their options in the game and giving a justification, the GM said "yes" and gave a different AC to the eyes. This then got included in the write up when they published the monster officially, but they didn't really think too closely about 1) how that is handled in game (do the players get to know about this weakness? How do the players get to take advantage of the bonus? Do they have to be in a specific position attack with a certain type of weapon etc, or just say they are attacking the eyes?) and 2) how it ran entirely counter to how their combat mechanics allegedly "model" the "reality" of the game. This wouldn't surprise me because... well, at that point they mostly just made **** up as they went along.

But if you've got a creature that has a weakness in a certain location, that's special permission to target that location.

Yes... but then why wouldn't you always target the weakness, and if so why isn't it's AC just the worse AC of it's more vulnerable location? And why can't I target weak points on other monsters that don't have a specific ruling? Most things have eyes, and most things are going to be vulnerable to being poked in them. If I can target a chink in a bulette's armour, why not the gaps in a plate armoured knight? This is what I meant by making specific rulings that then bork the system elsewhere. D&D is very abstracted, and that is fine, but if you try to make a ruling to make it less abstract it opens all sorts of cans of worms.

This has made me think about the group I play D&D with, and the fact that while I know a lot of them really like it, there have often been times when they ave wanted to come up with cool ideas... and then run into the fact the system doesn't really allow them to do so. This is probably the best hook I would have to encourage them to try GURPS.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by borithan

That is kind of what the Rogue's sneak attack is meant to represent already, attacking vulnerabilities of various different types, including armour gaps, and to an extent any hit in D&D includes hit to chinks in armour (better covering armour has a better AC in part because gaps or thinner spots are harder to hit). But yeah, the D&D system is quite limiting at times, and given the sort of "mother, may I?" approach the rules take it isn't easy coming up with mechanics to reflect a lot of interesting situations without borking the system elsewhere.

Yeah, and as it was a rogue, and was given advantage for surprising them, this applied. It just didn't apply any more than if she'd ignored the sapient dagger in hand and described it as going for the throat instead.

A similar situation is looking at the rules for disarmament and deciding against it in basically every case because either the situation doesn't call for it or the opponent is certainly better off than me in relevant skills--and I haven't played a Battlemaster.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Because in AD&D every general attack assumes you're going to take any opening presented to you, and the effects are abstracted into hit points of damage. When you reach zero hit points, you die.

...

The mechanics of GURPS are very much a reaction to the abstraction of D&D. Whether it's because you don't like the abstraction or it "never made sense" to you, GURPS removes most of it and lets you have all the details.

Yes, this was largely a matter of the level of description we were using and the level of abstraction of the system in use were not lining up. I get that, but it felt off.


Of course, with any system, the real difference is made by the GM. That game I played in D&D was absolutely awesome, I just don't think much of that can be chalked up to D&D.

My pitch for GURPS was mostly "hey, I'm interested in running something with this" and them going "ok, sure!"

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

The templates themselves are very good, but the space-saving format that SJ Games uses to present them definitely puts readability low on the list of priorities. When I'm giving them to my players, I reformat them to be clearer, even though this takes up more space - usually one or two pages per template instead of the single block that they get in a sourcebook.

It's one of the reasons I spent so many pages doing pre-gens in Hall of Judgment using bullet-points. Readability is really big for at-the-table play.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by borithan

Sure. I understand that and I don't see a problem with it inherently. But according to that model the AC and hit points of a bulette should include the chance you might hit it's unarmoured eyes, and then this rule comes along and says "you can target specific locations on this specific creature" (there were a couple of others like it... I think dragons maybe had a lower AC on their belly?), which sort of run counter to the design.

Because AC is a rather poorly named hit modifier, which often has little to do with armor. Halflings get +1 to armor class for being small targets, while a colossal dragon gets -4 for being big. When armor makes you harder to hit rather than reducing damage (which is, IMO, a weird design choice to begin with), targeting a small unarmored spot is usually of no particular value. The specific exclusions are cases where the reduced target area and vulnerability of such a spot do not cancel one another out.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by RyanW

When armor makes you harder to hit rather than reducing damage (which is, IMO, a weird design choice to begin with), targeting a small unarmored spot is usually of no particular value. The specific exclusions are cases where the reduced target area and vulnerability of such a spot do not cancel one another out.

The logic is basically armor is inherently protective. There's a pretty good argument - backed up by grave finds - that by and large folks mostly didn't get killed THROUGH armor, they got wounded and incapacitated by hits going AROUND armor, and then finished off later. Or just right then with a well-aimed bypass. So the conceit here is that if you're wearing armor, it protects what it protects, and doesn't what it doesn't, and so your "hits" [1] go around the protection [2]

[1] A hit, at least according to the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, was always a combination of defenses, endurance, luck, favor of the gods, and lots of things. The final blow that ran you to zero or negative HP was the one that actually drew blood. The cognitive-mechanical dissonance in this - because people want "hit" to mean "hit," not "near miss" or "you made him nervous" - has been a source of friction in the system for as long as I've played it.

[2] I played games with Rob Conley for a while where he had "knight-killer" crossbows that added to your hit roll or subtracted from the foe's AC (using a Swords and Wizardry 'high AC is harder to hit' paradigm). This was a nod that punching through armor was modeled with 'easier to hit' not 'more damage.'