GURPS Combat. Ramped up or pared back?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Warden

Do you go with all bells and whistles blowing, or are you down to the skeleton remains? Perhaps somewhere in between?

Fairly lightweight. Combat is not the point of the campaign I'm running, but one of the players gets bored if he doesn't get to bash things occasionally.

[Pagan]

All the bells and whistles plus some house ruled injury rules (extended shock rules, extensive healing rules, delayed death rules, etc). My players like the nitty gritty and so do I. It adds to the perceived realism, so when they do something bad ass, it does indeed appear to be bad ass.

[mlangsdorf]

I generally go for as detailed as my players and I can handle, but that's obviously different for different groups. My face to face group just adds the extra Attack maneuvers and the like from Martial arts, maybe some techniques or the like. My online group where I've got rules stalwarts like Bruno and Crakkerjakk backing me up goes into a lot more detail and uses more options, techniques, and house rules.

No matter what, I skip the very fiddly stuff like "A Matter of Inches" because that seems to be past everyone's ability to remember and handle.

[Bruno]

It's a lot easier to go rules crazy with three or four rules nerds sitting around with searchable PDFs to look things up.

[apoc527]

It's only my first GURPS campaign since 3rd Edition (and the early 00s), but so far I'm using most of the bells and whistles: Body Hits, most combat options, Bleeding, etc. I have a very experienced group that's been playing together for nearly 20 years, and even though this is our first GURPS game, it's going pretty smoothly. Frankly, it is going better than 4E D&D, but I think it's because GURPS simply goes faster because you don't have to whittle sacks of HP down to 0.

[Captain Joy]

My current group is just using Basic Combat, but I have talked them into using extra effort in combat (B357). A fun and easy optional rule that makes FP interesting for fighter types.

[Engurrand]

I use all the rules: hit location techniques, martial styles, all the MA perks, committed attacks, bleeding and field surgery rules, etc etc etc. But I almost never need to USE all the rules. Fights in my story-driven game tend to be short and risky. They're in a modern world and have some low-level magic healing so field surgery has never come up. That same magic healing renders bleeding only important when it's REALLY important. When it does come up, the detail makes everything very real and exciting.

[Delvidian]

Even though we call ourselves cinematic, we do end up using many of the extended rules at one time or another. We have a martial artist in the group and we expect him to bring those rules to the table when his character needs them. That is generally our approach: Even though the GM may not invoke a esoteric rule themselves, a player is free to propose one. And we applaud the player's GURPS prowess (or get annoyed because they're slowing the game down). One notable exception are the optional rules for injury, which we don't use. We have magical healing, so characters don't stay wounded long enough to make them worth the effort.

[Ji ji]

I use the largest part of optional rules. Nothing of cinematic.

We added a lot of HR for max realism. Furthermore, I tend to adapt rules to situation (i.e., bleeding more or less severe related to specific weapon - a harpoon wound bleeds differently from a pick wound or a sabre wound) on the fly.

[shirosan]

Timely post. I was just thinking about this question--it's an interesting feature of the system that you could take any three groups of GURPS players and the way they run their games from a rules standpoint could look completely different.

I'm giving the Basic Combat plus Cinematic Rules a whirl in my latest campaign and I'm having a blast with it. In the past I've had a really hard time ignoring all the bells and whistles, because they looked like a lot of fun and, hey, they're in the rules, right? ;)

But the fact is that I don't get to run GURPS often enough to familiarize myself with the crunchier options. Plus my players are for the most part not all that into crunch or rules lawyering, so most of the burden for remembering that sort of stuff falls on me. Going Cinematic (particularly in using the Cannon Fodder rule) has really made running the system fun for me.

I think if/as we play more GURPS and system familiarity increases, I might try weaving in some of the more esoteric stuff, but that's a ways down the road if we even get to that point.