Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V

[Refplace]

[QUOTE=Kesendeja;2217487]I love the idea of the Fifth Attribute, but one of my players asked a question about it that we've already had to house rule.

He wants to split his Quintessence, having little active power, but a high resistance.

/QUOTE]

This was covered in the article by buying some or all of your QI with essentially the No Fine Manipulators limitation under the New and Existing modifiers section, p. 7.

[GWJ]

Opus Longa, Pugna Brevis
I almost never use Action rules, thus I won't elaborate about it.

Describing Vehicles
Wow. Just wow. Very thanks for this! I will test this guide in few days, but I just would say this is REAL customer care, and I think we are all appreciating this :) You just said to us "I know you are impatiently awaiting to read full book, and we can't speed it up, but please, it's simplified solution until we publish main vehicle book" :) I will be enormous help for my campaigns!

The Fifth Attribute
It's very interesting idea, I will try this out in next campaign maybe :)

Conditional Injury
It can't be too much additional realistic injury rules for me :) I would love if it can be mixed with Realistic Injurty from one of previous Pyramids (sadly I can't remember which, I just printed these pages and use in play), and especially Martial Arts additional rules :) Can it?

Fluid Skills
Nice idea too, I'm using something like that since ~year, but for skill development (no points, just skill roll after game session)

[cupbearer]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Conditional Injury
I'm left wondering if I can combine this with Armor as Dice (Pyramid 3/34) to make injury determination blazing fast.

I looked at the article after reading your post, Im not sure i get it though... why do you feel that this would speed up combat?

[cupbearer]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Thanks. It was meant as a thought experiment I'd been noodling on for a while, because as I note in the article, GURPS just doesn't *need* an ablative HP tally.

I've waited years for this article and wondered if someone would do it. Very cool--thank you! I'm very interested in how this would work and even tried out a little fight yesterday, this got me thinking about two things:

a) I noticed that the system doesn't exactly match up to the current Hp system -- the big difference seems to be that you dont' have a wound severity level which causes someone to have to roll each turn to act (or fall unconscious on a fail) equivalen to being in negative HP... If you're crippled you roll just once to stop unconsciousness and if you make it then you make it, there doesn't seem to be further rolls (at least that is how I read it). Why did you choose to do it this way? Is this because of the pain rules (and if so what happens if you don't use pain)?

b) I wonder if the pain rules and the fact that the rules are "chunkier" (as you call it) makes the system more deadly than standard, it seemed like it was a little tougher. What are your thoughts, do you think it is more deadly than the standard rules?

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by cupbearer

I looked at the article after reading your post, Im not sure i get it though... why do you feel that this would speed up combat?

instead of saying (frex) that an M16 rolls 5d damage, you'd say that it does an average of 17.5, which is a Wound Potential of 5. If you get hit by it, you know that on the average it'll be Severity 1. If you get hit more than once, you can increase the severity by +2 for two hits, +3 for three, etc, since hits *multiply* damage and therefore are log-friendly.

The downside here is armor, though. Subtraction and logs are not terribly friendly, but with armor as dice, you'd subtract armor from dice (or DR from average damage of 17.5) and look up the remainder on the Wound Potential table.

There are ways of cheating it, and I do mean to explore those in a designer's notes blog post when I can, but those are still a table lookup, so it's not less complex so much as differently complex.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by cupbearer

I've waited years for this article and wondered if someone would do it. Very cool--thank you! I'm very interested in how this would work and even tried out a little fight yesterday, this got me thinking about two things:

a) I noticed that the system doesn't exactly match up to the current Hp system -- the big difference seems to be that you dont' have a wound severity level which causes someone to have to roll each turn to act (or fall unconscious on a fail) equivalen to being in negative HP... If you're crippled you roll just once to stop unconsciousness and if you make it then you make it, there doesn't seem to be further rolls (at least that is how I read it). Why did you choose to do it this way? Is this because of the pain rules (and if so what happens if you don't use pain)?

You should be rolling each turn at Severity 0 and Severity 1; those are between 0 and -HP/2 type reductions, so they should have the usual effects in GURPS. If that isn't clear in the article, my bad.

b) I wonder if the pain rules and the fact that the rules are "chunkier" (as you call it) makes the system more deadly than standard, it seemed like it was a little tougher. What are your thoughts, do you think it is more deadly than the standard rules?

Might be a bit tougher for big wounds; smaller ones are less-bad, and a series of scratches no longer threatens your life. I think it makes bad wounds worse, but scratches more ignorable.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I wrote a review last night.
https://refplace.blogspot.com/2018/1...alternate.html

Thanks! Oh, and:

Opus Longa, Pugna Brevis

Prolonged Work, Fight Shortcut according to Google Translate. I was thinking Long Work, something brief so my Latin got me in the ballpark but that is about it :)

It's a riff on the aphorism "Ars longa, vita brevis," which is literally translated as "Art is long, life is short" but usually interpreted more like: "Perfecting one's métier takes a long time, yet one has but a single lifetime in which to do so." In the case of my dog-Latin title, the literal translation is "Work is long, combat is short" while the interpretation is "Carrying out a skilled effort takes a long time, yet one has but the duration of a battle in which to do so." In both cases, the message is that when one must squeeze something slow into the timeframe of something fleeting, the mismatch creates challenges.

[calmquist]

Originally Posted by cupbearer

I've waited years for this article and wondered if someone would do it. Very cool--thank you! I'm very interested in how this would work and even tried out a little fight yesterday, this got me thinking about two things:

a) I noticed that the system doesn't exactly match up to the current Hp system -- the big difference seems to be that you dont' have a wound severity level which causes someone to have to roll each turn to act (or fall unconscious on a fail) equivalen to being in negative HP... If you're crippled you roll just once to stop unconsciousness and if you make it then you make it, there doesn't seem to be further rolls (at least that is how I read it). Why did you choose to do it this way? Is this because of the pain rules (and if so what happens if you don't use pain)?

I noticed this one too. I looked multiple times for it, but never did. Douglas has answered, so I would go with that.

Originally Posted by cupbearer

b) I wonder if the pain rules and the fact that the rules are "chunkier" (as you call it) makes the system more deadly than standard, it seemed like it was a little tougher. What are your thoughts, do you think it is more deadly than the standard rules?

The pain rules may be more deadly than the standard Conditional Injury rules if that is what you are asking. If you are asking if they are more deadly than the standard HP rules, the answer is a little more complicated.

Consider a typical 10 HP 16 HT (because 16 HT is obviously typical) character with no DR who is hit with a 10 damage crushing attack to the torso.

Using the standard HP rules, the character is reduced to 0 HP, suffers a -4 shock penalty and has all of the usual problems of being at 0 HP.

With the Conditional Injury with pain rules, the character takes a severity 0 wound and likely a -6 pain penalty with a small chance of agony and a somewhat larger chance of -2 penalty. The pain also lasts longer than the shock penalty.

Now consider the case where the character gets hit 5 more times. With the HP rules, the character is dead with no chance of survival. With the conditional injuries rules, the character is probably still at a severity 0 wound level.

[Tyneras]

Not an actual play session, but tinkering with Quintessence feels good. Just converting some IQ to QN works for a lot of wizard style characters. I'm often left wondering if I should invest points in buying Will back up or spend those points on QN related advantages.

For example, the DF wizard with IQ 12 (still smart) Will 15, FP 11 and QN 15 has 4 points left over, more spell-juice (since it's not split with physical demands) and just as much resistance to mental assault as before. The only drop is in IQ-based skills, spells are unchanged.

This feels like it will dovetail very well with The Last Gasp (Action Points), as it resolves the AP for spells issue by neatly side stepping it.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

The downside here is armor, though. Subtraction and logs are not terribly friendly

You can do addition and logs instead, which is slightly more friendly as it lets you save numbers down -- if your major wound threshold is 5 points (+2 on range/speed chart) and you have 10 points DR (+4), your armor adjusted threshold is at 15 points (+5).