Simple Ways to do High Point Games

[Minuteman37]

So I've been itching to run another GURPS game for awhile now. In particular I've wanted to do a quadruple digit point supers game, but I've never had an abundance of good players who were familiar enough with the system to handle character creation without me.

Any suggestions or advice for running such a game of such scale?

[Nereidalbel]

My group does this on a regular basis. Instead of relying on point totals as the only metric, put limits on dice of damage and DR values. Gets around the issues with Innate Attack being a little too cost-effective for city-busting purposes.

[ericthered]

Don't just give a pile of points and so go for it. Ask for concepts, ask for niches, and make sure you have good players.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

My group does this on a regular basis. Instead of relying on point totals as the only metric, put limits on dice of damage and DR values. Gets around the issues with Innate Attack being a little too cost-effective for city-busting purposes.

Honestly I'm more concerned with inter team dynamics and how to challenge players. Do you honestly let someone play as Hawkeye while the other players are Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk?

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

Honestly I'm more concerned with inter team dynamics and how to challenge players. Do you honestly let someone play as Hawkeye while the other players are Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk?

I'm usually the Hawkeye player, and the city-buster player ends up with the inferiority complex. Gadget-based Imbue and barely-cinematic skill levels have lead to exploding arrows through the eye.

Imbue + Super Throw lead to a fun PvP combat...the Iron Man clone took a Nanothorn dagger to the power supply (vitals hit on the suit). The character who can pass for human ends up with enough points not spent on DR and powers to have ludicrous skill, enough Dodge to laugh at full-automatic rifles, and pretty much every cinematic advantage the GM allows.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

So I've been itching to run another GURPS game for awhile now. In particular I've wanted to do a quadruple digit point supers game, but I've never had an abundance of good players who were familiar enough with the system to handle character creation without me.

Any suggestions or advice for running such a game of such scale?

Do the character creation as a joint project. That's how I do my games, and I did it in particular with Sovereignty, a GURPS Supers campaign with a 1600-point base.

My approach is this:

The players and I sit down together as a group. I give an overview of the campaign. They come up with character concepts that they are comfortable with having in the same campaign, that have a common mission statement and don't intrude too much into each other's niches. We do initial rough sketches of character builds.

I take all the character builds away, write up character sheets, and calculate point values. I send them to the individual players, with a discussion of points over or short; rules problems; questions about how to build abilities; questions about abilities that would make sense give the powers and background story; and suggested ways to approach all of the above.

The players review the character sheets, comment on my suggestions, and ask me for anything I've left out.

We go back and forth a couple more times till everything is to the player's satisfaction.

This isn't "simple" but I've found it reliable.

[Phantasm]

The real issue I've found with high-point characters is as much "who are they without their 'powers'?" as it is "what are their powers?".

My rule of thumb is 150 point characters without powers, as this makes them competent and provides a bit of niche protection, and then factoring in the power set. I also set a campaign pre-powers cap on attributes (usually 15), with attributes above 15 counting toward the "power set". In the case of "Hawkeye or Black Widow vs Thor or Iron Man", the "power set" should include all the heroic traits, including the points spent on, in Hawkeye's case: Bow-30, Heroic Archer, DX 16+, Imbue, any imbuement skills, etc. The 150 point character would probably cover skills from his days as a carnival performer, combat training from Captain America, and leadership skills he developed from his time leading the Wackos (West Coast Avengers), not to mention his brashness, sense of duty, and other personality traits. In Thor's case, the 150 points would be his Status, standard Asgardian warrior training, and personality, with the remaining 1350 points (assuming he's a 1500 point character) being his Asgardian racial template, Mjolner, and super-Asgardian strength/durability.

This help at all?

[starslayer]

I second the suggestion of maximum innate attack levels.

I suggest scaling those to the highest technological weapons available- if the best innate attack can't exceed the best machine gun available then while the super-shooter is scary they don't actually represent a threat outside of the scale of things that could actually be encountered.

I find specifying a maximum DR is not required as the brick will inevitably use either a 'trick build' to take a lot of damage, or will be using DR (tough skin, cannot wear armour), so will still take some damage from flexible. DR is ultimately quite pricy compared to modern weapons, and being proof against much more than pistol rounds gets prohivitive fast unless it has strong modifiers.

From there its a matter of sitting down with your players and defining niches. We did this a LOT before the game began, even assuring that some PCs had linked origins and backstories and establishing HOW people were going to work together twoards goals.

Our group ultimately consisted of:

Sergi- Normal human, the guy who knew a guy (cosmic modular contacts, modular allies, wealth)
Illiana (The ice queen) - Super; Weather control powers, (control: weather, lightning innate attack, flight, ice walls)
Lodginus - Super; brick and gunman (Unkillable 2, immunity to pain, immunity to KO, high DX, 'offscreen-only' regeneration)
Dr Baur - Gadgeteer; (Via gadgets: Flight, innate attack, DR; High IQ, charisma, wealth, and general 'face man' skills).
? - Super; Morph (morph /w unlimited +improvised forms and a BIG point reserve; generally was whatever the party needed, transport, weapons, infiltration).
The Mask - Super; Information gathering and battlefield control (lots of different detect and neutralize + power theft abilities).

How we managed to get along without a healer or mind reader is kind of beyond me, but no one built one, and it did not come up often enough to require one- I am going to attribute that to good use of the brick PC and the face, information, and ally PCs working together.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

So I've been itching to run another GURPS game for awhile now. In particular I've wanted to do a quadruple digit point supers game, but I've never had an abundance of good players who were familiar enough with the system to handle character creation without me.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Do the character creation as a joint project. That's how I do my games, and I did it in particular with Sovereignty, a GURPS Supers campaign with a 1600-point base.

I've snipped the rest of Bill's answer, but it's really good advice. Basically, don't send them off to do character creation without you, even if they're GURPS experts.

The first session (or two) where people are trying to hash out just who they are, precisely, don't even have to involve mechanics. Get players to write out prose descriptions of their characters and what they do, like a comic book character bio. This can be bullet points or jot notes if they're more comfortable like that - the important thing is that the process of putting it down in concrete letters gives an important reference point for when you tackle rules.

If they're not GURPS grognards, then I also agree with getting people to write up the "non-super" person's character sheet on a set budget first before tackling super powers.

Batman and Ironman type characters can put Wealth and such as part of the "super powers" points they get into afterwards, and the Batman types can then slam more points into core attributes and Trained By a Master and such as part of their "powers".

Basically, if you approach character creation in smaller chunks, it's less overwhelming.

I would have a checklist at the first session, where everyone hashes out their concepts. These are other places to get players to "chunk" up their character points into smaller, more handle-able pieces. Characters need:

• A way to find the adventure
• A way to get to the adventure
• A way to impact the adventure
• A way to survive the adventure

Ideally every character should have all four of these things accounted for in some way. This may be "I partner with Bob's character, he carries me to the fight" - that's cool! That's team tactics and standard operating procedures already beginning to gel. But I really don't recommend allowing only one or two characters to cover an entire category - only one person handles transport, or only one person has the contacts and surveilance satelites to find the adventure, and so forth.

Impacting the adventure includes detective skills, social skills for talking to witnesses or getting past goons, and so forth - not the super-combat.

Surviving the adventure is surviving combat, but also environmental hazards (is the evil lair in an active volcano with real heat? Outer space? filled with poison gas traps?). Disabling adversaries with attacks is an important survival tactic, but it's not the only one.

[weby]

Important things about high point games as I have found them:
Niche protection - This is important and much harder at higher point totals as it is much easier to put few points towards something if you have a lot to points to use.
Attack Skill/damage balance/Defense balance - This is definitely a big problem, in how to balance things so everyone can contribute without making everyone close to carbon copies.
The range of results on 3d6 is really not enough if you allow really different levels of attack skill a difference of 10(=5 deceptive) in skill level still works if the higher skilled does less damage/effect on hit, 20(=10 deceptive) will not really work, as either the lower skilled is always defended against and or the high skilled is never defenses against.
The same basic problem exists with active defenses, but there it is not as critical if you balance it so that the lower defense ones can take the beating(high DR, high HP, Regeneration, IT(DR) and/or similar).
Damage and DR is also hard to balance so that the low damage ones cannot be totally ignored while at the same time the high ones should not be able to to insane damage.

Overall you need to balance combat(important part of supers games usually) so that the characters all have an useful role and that noone totally dominates. One possible way to start the process is to try to make the character styles and roles as different as possible as starting point and then start the balancing from rough drafts of the characters.

As example of some of the values and comments in my current 2500 point fantasy campaign
"The tank": DR 24, Can keep going at full power even below 1/3 hp, IT(DR)3, 35 hp and homogenous so in effect you need to hack him down for the 630 hp effectively through the armor. But dodge only 12 and parry 21. Attack skill is 31 and does 7d+8(2) damage. ->Gets hit a lot but does not care as armor helps a lot and hits do not matter, does not hit all that well, but does serious damage if he hits. Currently slightly over performing compared to others doe to the attack skill being raised recently to be slightly too high given the damage output

"The fencer/sneak" DR 7, Can often disappear from plain sight with a combination of warp and high stealth(effective skill up to 48). Has skill of 37 and does 4d+9(2) damage. Has dodge 16 and parry 26. Is seldom hit at all due to the ability to chose locations both by sneaking and warping around the battlefield. Does a lot of damage overall due to the often lowered/no enemy defenses.

"The Fencer/crowd control" DR 10, can stun and confuse foes, but mostly minion types. Has a skill of 38 and does 3d+11(2) damage. Has dodge 14 and parry 25. Can gain +10 to parry/dodge a few times a day and has other special defenses, so overall gets hit fairly seldom. Currently slightly under performing slightly as is definitely low on attack power if the crowd control does not work and the CC effect level is slightly behind currently and the attack skill is not high enough to compensate for the low damage. But can in effect stand up to enemy attacks very well by simply not being hit while going toe to toe with enemies. Overall the tacking of defenses is kind of silly(with at best 42 parry, 31 dodge and if hit anyway through that will have 75% to not be hit anyway... though enemies can work to lower those values a lot)


"The mage blaster" DR 13, does 7d+2(2) ranged attacks at rof 3 or 10d(2) at rof 1, with skill 35, but is heavily limited in how many such he can do in a day, so often does mostly lower attacks like the 3d(3) that is practically unlimited. has dodge 12 and a parry of 23, but has many special defenses, so combined with the distance he keeps he is also actually seldom hit, but cannot take that much damage is actually hit. Overall he is well balanced in that he can do most damage if he needs to, but is really limited in how often he can go "all out".

Overall thus:
In attack power:
the about less 3 deceptive attack for the tank is not enough to balance for the damage effect.
The need to husband resources for the mage blaster balances the high max damage output quite nicely.
The fencer/sneak is balanced by the mobility and surprise attacks.
The Fencer/crowd control is currently lagging behind totally and needs a buff.

On defense:
The tank and the Fencer/crowd control can stand and trade blows with the enemies, the former by not caring about damage the latter by not being hit.
The two others must use positioning to not be attacked by too many enemies or they will be in big trouble quickly.

Other resistances:
The tank is on and off with +8 resistance vs evil supernatural powers, but fairly low will and other mental defenses, but good HT based saves. So will save based attacks by non evil enemies hurt, but evil enemies using HT based attacks are just wasting their time.

The two fencers are fairly balanced with their saves.

The Mage blaster is kind of silly in most saves, with insanely high will, resistant +8 vs metabolic hazards and very high spell resistance making most resistance based attacks futile.

And all of the above is just a small part of the overall need to balance.