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Old 10-18-2018, 01:23 PM   #1
Refplace
 
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Default GURPS Power Ups suggestions

Couldn't find a thread going back a few months.
With Pyramid ending in a few months we will soon see our last Alt GURPS issue (maybe even today, still refreshing). I would love to see some of that material and other items like stuff from PKs site and alt pricing for abilities like Regrowth as perhaps a Power Up issue.
Anyone else?
Suggested Items from this thread
  • Gadgeteering and Invention rules
  • Techniques, including noncombat ones
  • LogST
  • Benchmarks
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Old 10-18-2018, 02:33 PM   #2
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

A systematic guide to designing techniques, especially non-combatant techniques, could be useful.
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Old 10-18-2018, 02:49 PM   #3
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

Gadgeteering and Inventing. PLEASE!
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Old 10-18-2018, 03:45 PM   #4
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

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Gadgeteering and Inventing. PLEASE!
This one. 100%.

Making up new stuff, making modifications to existing things (permanent vs temporary), inventions that cross TL, examples at various TLs (especially TL3, 6, and 8), etc.

Include pricing components (monetarily and with character points), a how-to for scrounging (what you can get and what you have to buy), how facilities and wealth interact with making stuff, etc.
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Old 10-18-2018, 11:28 PM   #5
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Gadgeteering and Inventing. PLEASE!
No, offense, but I don't see this happening because these represent a conceptual flaw in the rules. Like Strategy and Tactics they require the PLAYER to come up with something. For Strategy/Tactics a successful roll means the CHARACTER has a plan, but the PLAYERS don't get one, for Inventing/Gadgeteering the player first has to come up with something to invent and then the GM has to OK it before any rolls are made, so outside of genres that can support any weird ideas the players come up with they shouldn't be allowed.

Also note that they shouldn't be used for the players improvising gear and traps.
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Old 10-19-2018, 02:55 AM   #6
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

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No, offense, but I don't see this happening because these represent a conceptual flaw in the rules. Like Strategy and Tactics they require the PLAYER to come up with something. For Strategy/Tactics a successful roll means the CHARACTER has a plan, but the PLAYERS don't get one, for Inventing/Gadgeteering the player first has to come up with something to invent and then the GM has to OK it before any rolls are made, so outside of genres that can support any weird ideas the players come up with they shouldn't be allowed.
My players do come up with a lot of weird stuff, and we operate mostly in TL7-11^. "Take what you know works and go gonzo with it" is one player's mantra when it comes to some stuff, so much that I as a GM can't keep up half the time.

For instance, just recently I had a group of flying saucers working off Tesla-tech (coil levitation and electromagnetic force fields, mostly); my one player who is playing an electrical engineer (and is an electrician with knowledge of Tesla's theories IRL) salvaged part of the saucer and has begun tinkering with it to make other stuff Tesla theorized but never had a working prototype for. (He doesn't have Gadgeteering, but even the base Invention rules are somewhat letting me down.) Another player does have Quick Gadgeteering, but hasn't yet really used it to MacGyver anything.

Some assistance for both the GM and the Gadgeteer player would be greatly appreciated in this instance.
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Ranoc, a Muskets-and-Magery Renaissance Fantasy Setting
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Old 10-19-2018, 06:03 AM   #7
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

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A systematic guide to designing techniques, especially non-combatant techniques, could be useful.
A technique volume seems like a natural fit, especially if it also includes some rule variations and a list of sensible (or cinematic) non-combat techniques. Could also do something about optional specialisations - e.g. some alternate rules for replacing them with techniques. Alternately, this could be part of a larger skills volume.
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Old 10-20-2018, 07:30 AM   #8
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A systematic guide to designing techniques, especially non-combatant techniques, could be useful.
I'd find the money for this today.

A book of Other People's House Rules would get evaluated based on whether any of those rules fix a problem I have experienced in a better way than my own rules, and then I would consider if the book contains enough such fixes to justify skipping lunch. And I like food.
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Old 10-20-2018, 07:50 PM   #9
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

Techniques looks like a good idea to me too, especially if it collects and adds non-cinematic non-combat techniques, which are few on the ground. And guidelines for creating techniques, especially non-combat techniques.

I'd probably buy it.

I could also imagine having two separate Power-Ups, one for combat techniques (which are numerous and mostly already collected in Martial Arts) and another one for non-combat techniques. I imagine that combining both together could up the price beyond the current Power-Ups range.


These lists (last updated 2012) show there are also several advantages, disadvantages, specialties, and even skills that could be collected together; as well as several perks published since Power-Ups: Perks. I'm guessing there have been several new Quirks as well.

I can add that at least a few generically useful traits (a perk, disads, and quirks) from 3E apparently haven't been ported to 4E: Above Suspicion, Dour, Poor Tactile Sense, Businesslike, Undiscriminating. Some of them do have point values in GURPS: Update, but some aren't even mentioned there.
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Old 10-21-2018, 12:42 AM   #10
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Default Re: GURPS Power Ups suggestions

What I'd want to see would be a “Styles and Techniques” Power-Up that reframes Techniques as components of Styles rather than treating them as stand-alone traits. That is, listing and improving Techniques should be done primarily through Styles. This would be a bit like how Style Perks are handled — though given the existing lack of incentive to spend points in Techniques, I'd be more inclined to explore “carrot” approaches rather than “stick” approaches: for instance, for every, say, four points spent on a Style's Primary Skills, you're given one point to spend on the Style's Techniques. Or maybe points spent on a Style's Techniques count double or more, at least to the extent that the Technique buys off penalties. (Granted, both of these ideas violate the notion that “it costs what it costs”; but with the existing pricing structure for Techniques, there really isn't much reason to invest in more than one or two Techniques; so putting caps on how many points you can spend on Techniques the way you have caps on how many points you can spend on Perks really isn't going to do much: unless the caps are draconian, it's unlikely to affect peoples' expenditures on Techniques. And if the caps are draconian, the result will be to further disincentivize something that's already disincentivized.)

Put another way, Techniques should be presented as being to Styles as Abilities are to Powers: while it's possible to do “raw advantages” in a setting that features Powers, there's an implicit assumption that such traits tend to be the exception rather than the rule — and when you do get superhuman Advantages that aren't part of a Power structure, there's a good chance that they're part of a Racial Template instead. In a similar way, Techniques that are not part of a Style should be viewed as a rarity; and the main purpose of Techniques should be in helping differentiate Styles from each other.

(Magical Styles differ from other kinds of Styles in that the role that's usually played by Techniques is instead played by Spells; but the principle is the same: you have a selection of hyper-specialized tricks that your Style promotes, and which largely defines what a practitioner of that Style can do. I'd expect this power-up to address how to adapt its advice concerning Techniques to apply to the spells of a magical Style.)

For non-combat Techniques, it works the same way: the Techniques should almost never be taken “raw” and should instead be considered through the context of a set of Styles that represent different approaches to a particular kind of non-combat challenge. The “Civil Arts” Pyramid article illustrates one example of this, where the concept of Styles is applied to Social Engineering rather than Combat.

And if you can't come up with multiple Styles for a particular kind of challenge that differ from each other in some meaningful way, that should be taken as an indicator that you probably shouldn't bother with Techniques relating to that kind of challenge. Take computer skills: could you come up with several different styles of software engineering? Possibly; but I'm not sure that they'd differ from each other enough within the granularity that GURPS applies to the computer-related skills for there to be a meaningful difference: and if not, you probably shouldn't bother with any computer-related Techniques. On the other hand, if you can come up with gameably meaningful distinctions to different schools of computer science, them by all means devise some Techniques to accentuate those distinctions.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe this shouldn't be a Power-Up at all; maybe it should be a Template Toolkit, dedicated to the mini-templates called Styles.
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