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Old 10-09-2020, 03:51 PM   #81
2097
 
Join Date: Sep 2012
Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

Just so you know, Phoenix_Dragon , our styles sound similar as far as I can tell, and the discussion right now is about some pretty small differences. There are GMs out there who play it way differently.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
So, in reference to the note: this is just as much GM fiat when done before the game as it is done during the game. It's just as much GM fiat if done weeks before revealing it to the players as it's done a second before revealing it.
It's sort of like selecting an secret for the game "20 questions" if you're familiar with that game.
It's my fiat, as in my choice, what secret I choose, but committing to an answer (maybe even writing it down) before I hear the first question is a very different game than a game where I let myself change the answer at any point until the questions have narrowed it down to just one possibility.

The board game "Zendo" is an even better analogy. If you are curious and have the time, please check out how it works.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
To be honest, the whole thing feels like it's based in adversarial gaming principles, especially when you name one of the principles after an adversarial game. You say the game isn't GM vs players, but then go on to describe coming up with details in reaction to player actions as cheating, as if regular play is adversarial. I mean, it feels like it's kinda insulting everyone who plays RPGs in a more traditional but cooperative way, by equating that to cheating in a competitive game.
So blorb enables adversarial play, or challenge-based play as some like to call it, but doesn't mandate it. The way I explain it to new players is, and I hold up some module or w/e, that "It's you vs this book, and I'll be the referee".

Quote:
Originally Posted by prepping is different from running principle
A good prepper might think of things like theme, fairness, balance, things being evocative etc but once you start running, all those thoughts need to go out the window.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
Given some of the seemingly hyperbolic examples you give (Like the 20 beholders example), I have to wonder if you've encountered a lot of adversarial GMs and this is your reaction to it? Because that doesn't resemble normal campaigns.
I roughly divide RPG into four playstyles.
  • sandboxy play
  • challenge-based play, "fair combat encounters" etc
  • improvising a story together (e.g. Fiasco, Microscope, even some GM-based games)
  • running through a pre-written story, like adventure path style play

(The latter is almost always combined with elements of the other three styles: some sandboxy mini-areas to explore, some combat encounters set up to be fun fights, and some involving the characters and their backstories and relatives etc.)

A game that's purely about story, whether improvised or prewritten, doesn't need to take this "20 beholder problem" into account. So let set such games aside for the moment, and just talk about games that do have e.g. combat rules (or puzzle/exploration based challenges or mystery solving or similar).

I'm glad that the problem sounds foreign to you but what I see all the time on Reddit for example is stuff from, this is just from earlier from today:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Some rando on Reddit, no offense to them, they're not alone
I'm running [module name] as a one shot. The players took the plate mail from the corpse in the wine cellar and now their fighter has 20 AC. The rest are fighting at a distance. To compensate for this, I was thinking of giving the Skeletons Pack Tactics. This would make them more threatening to the 20 AC level 2 fighter in particular, but it would also make the squishier targets less safe. Does that change seem like a good idea?
What I see all the time, especially from people who came up in the 3e/4e/Pathfinder community (which I've never been a part of, I've just seen online), is DMs suggesting to, or asking how to, make stuff "harder" or "easier" to "match" the player characters. I've seen that in the GURPS community too, the bash-o-matic calculations in HtbaGG for example.

That mindset, I tend to think of it as the GM who wants to "curate the experience".
As opposed to my mindset which is more "play to find out what happens".

Another thing I've seen proposed many times online is buffing HP, or fudging on die rolls, mid-combat! Some guy on the Paizo forums who was like "I just put a big X on the monster's hit point box and then that monster dies when I feel like it!"

And the reason they do this is not malicious. It's their position that they are making the game better by doing things like this. It's their version of cooperative play. Creating an exciting combat and a cool story.

I just happen to have the hang up that, and I don't expect everyone to follow me down this rabbit hole, that the logical extension of that playing style is that it makes a lot of elements of the game meaningless or illusory.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
Now, I'll pre-plan stuff like that if I have the time and knowledge of where they're going, because it's easier to have stuff planned than to come up with everything on the fly. But if they go into some random house or other location I haven't prepared, then I can come up with what's under the bed just as well at the time as I could before the game. [...] I'm far more confident in my ability to come up with reasonable and fitting answers to these questions then and there, with all the context of the situation, than I am of my ability to create random tables that will produce satisfactory results for any context.
I was a pure improviser for decades and coming up what's under the bed is not difficult at all for me. I have the blorb principles and the prep not to support me, but to reign me in or my improvising imagination would run wild.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
I can trust myself to use the same fair judgment in both cases to produce a result that fits into the world.
That's great, but I can't compartmentalize like that. I need to prevent myself from being like "OK, there are three bottles of healing potion there!" or "Hmm, there's that clue that they passed by earlier, it's here instead!"

It's also a golden rule question of giving the players what I enjoy when I'm a player. I love interacting with a world that's has an off-screen, canon game state, as opposed to being pulled out of the GM's hat on the fly. Not everyone feels strongly about that, and I respect that.

(So, just as a reminder, my three steps here are "does the prep says there is something under this particular bed? No? Does the prep has procedures that applies for generating what's under this bed? No? Then, and only then, make up something that doesn't hinder/help the characters too much [interesting & evocative is fine, dangerous or useful is not fine] and commit to patching this category of holes for next session.")

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
The only fundamental difference between "The players might go here in the future, so I should come up with what's there," versus "The players are going here right now, so I should come up with what's there," is how much time I have to come up with the answer. [...] If I can trust myself to make the same fair judgment at the table as I can in prep
Selecting paper before I have seen which of the three shapes the other player chooses is different to selecting paper after seeing that they chose rock.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
So if I've got a table for "random things found under the bed," I'm as likely to have any particular result if I'm looking under a peasant's bed, a rich merchant's bed, a knight's bed [...] Now, could I do all of this with pre-planned tables that take all of this into account?
Exactly, a game that has a significant amount of under-bed–checking can have more nuanced tables. I've seen the "roll a d6+1 if it's a king's bed, +2 if it's a queen's bed, etc".

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
Sure. But I'd rather spend that time coming up with useful details for the world, instead.
This is why three tiers of truth principle and wallpaper salience principle.

For under-bed–stuff I would easily just improvise some "wallpaper" (like "there is a nice pair of stockings, neatly folded, under there, and a teddy bear that has one of its eyes replaced by a button"), or, sometimes, out of consideration for the players at the expense of evocative mood, just answer "no" to the "is there something under the bed question". If we're pixel hunting I don't want to spam too many red herrings, after all.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
...But that's a perfect example of you prepping outcomes.

Action: players look under the bed.
Outcome: players find a box.
Action: players open the box.
Outcome: they find the champagne bottle.

What else would you call that?
OK, I am becoming increasingly aware of the nuances of semantics around the phrases "outcome" and "plot". I'm not trying to win a "what is the best dictionary definition for these words" debate.

I hope by now that you understand what I meant when I said that I didn't prepare outcomes and I didn't prepare plot.

I don't prep "The players will look under the bed and then they'll find the champagne bottle."
I don't prep "The players will first go to Floobenbürg and then later they will go to Bërenville."
I don't prep "The box is under the third bed they look under, no matter what."
I do prep "In this particular room there's a bed and under the bed there's a locked box that holds a bottle of a potion of climbing."

I just wanna be clear how I prep and run games. Please read it charitably.♥
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Old 10-09-2020, 04:01 PM   #82
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

The champagne bottle is becoming a bad example, since, unless they are broke and the bottle is valuable, it can fall under "wallpaper". Just evocative but not very salient detail. In the blorb playstyle, it's legal to improvise "wallpaper" detail.

Selecting between placing a potion of healing or a potion of poison-that-looks-like-healing is a better example.

Or placing a chest that contains a powerful magic sword for them or a dangerous mimic.

Or 3d6 wolves in the cave vs 20d6 wolves in the cave.
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Old 10-09-2020, 04:55 PM   #83
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

I prefer not selecting everything ahead, because I have spent hours pre-designing a dungeon/keep/ruin with clues, useful items, little bits of colour (odd wine, weird books, distinctive tapestries) and had my players miss or ignore 75% of it, and so completely wasted my time.
If they miss a clue that is important to a given plotline (one that they have shown interest in developing, or one that I have included as relevant to the goings-on), then I will move it so they have another chance to find it. If they explore an unknown section of the jungle, the interesting ruins will be wherever they happen to go, unless they are following a map that indicates where things should be. And if they make too much noise, I roll for chance encounters.
Why? Because the game world needs to react to them and enhance their experiences (they are the stars of the show), and I simply don't have time to design things that don't get used.

Last edited by Purple Snit; 10-09-2020 at 04:56 PM. Reason: Typos
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Old 10-09-2020, 09:55 PM   #84
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

Quote:
Originally Posted by 2097 View Post
Just so you know, Phoenix_Dragon , our styles sound similar as far as I can tell, and the discussion right now is about some pretty small differences. There are GMs out there who play it way differently.
Of the seven principles your document lists, one is a common general principle for roleplaying games ("Time Zoom"), one expresses the general way you would use pre-generated content in any setting, but then adds on a rigidity and a conclusion that I don't agree with (The "Three Tiers" thing), and the other five are contradictory to how I run my games. I don't see those differences as small ones.

Quote:
It's sort of like selecting an secret for the game "20 questions" if you're familiar with that game.
And I note that you're again selecting an inherently adversarial situation for comparison. Most people don't play RPGs as adversarial, which probably makes your comparisons a lot less compelling than you might think, since it seems to treat the GM-player relationship as implicitly adversarial, hence the need for fairness. To a GM that doesn't assume an adversarial relation with their players, it probably just looks like a lot of rules to solve a problem that simply doesn't exist in their games.

Quote:
What I see all the time, especially from people who came up in the 3e/4e/Pathfinder community (which I've never been a part of, I've just seen online), is DMs suggesting to, or asking how to, make stuff "harder" or "easier" to "match" the player characters.
That isn't at all what I was talking about. Your earlier example was presenting hyperbolic examples of extremely nasty improvised content. Now you try to back that up with an example of someone trying to tweak the difficulty of an encounter to be a more even challenge for their players. There's a huge disconnect between those. It also doesn't address the reason I brought up your earlier example to begin with; the repeat use of such extreme examples makes me wonder if this is a reaction to having played under adversarial GMs before.

Quote:
Selecting paper before I have seen which of the three shapes the other player chooses is different to selecting paper after seeing that they chose rock.
Another inherently adversarial comparison. I mean, can you see why it might be an issue, when you're regularly discussing running a cooperative game by using adversarial comparisons?

Quote:
Exactly, a game that has a significant amount of under-bed–checking can have more nuanced tables. I've seen the "roll a d6+1 if it's a king's bed, +2 if it's a queen's bed, etc".
That's nowhere near the level of nuance or consistency to the setting that I would find acceptable in the games I run. It would take orders of magnitude more time to work out a method of random generation that I'd find passable even with improvised tweaks, than it would to come up with fitting content on the spot.

And right here, I'd like to tie it around to the original subject, because this seems to be the source of all the problems you're facing with the conversion; I think you're getting too focused on a mechanical conversion while overlooking the context of the different system's mechanics and the nuances of the characters themselves, all while imposing an artificial limit that this character or creature that you're bringing in from some other setting by GM fiat can't have stats set by GM fiat.

There's nothing wrong with converting a character or creature by looking at how they compare to other characters or creatures in their system, then using your knowledge of characters and creature in the system you're using to give them approximate stats. Beetle warrior? Well, she's a heavily armored warrior with enough skill to start getting involved with large-scale regional threats. So just say she's a 10th level fighter with plate, shield, and halberd, racial bonuses to have four arms, high Str and Con (I'd probably give 18 to each), and Heavy Armor Mastery; takes less time than the conversion formulas you listed, and gives a character that fits in the world the same way they did in the original setting. Want to port over a creature that's kinda vaguely like this other creature but with these notable differences? Well, stat them up "vaguely" like that other creature but with those notable differences. Porting over a hellfire-breathing wraith-dragon the size of an elephant, that mostly behaves like a normal dragon, but can put on a burst of movement where it turns to shadow and phases straight through any obstacles to effectively "teleport" to wherever it wants? Base it off an adult dragon (Probably red) that can use a shadowy teleport in place of its move. And if, for some reason, you need an accountant and are porting one over from another system? Well, if they're a moderately skilled accountant in their source setting, look at what you have for a moderately skilled accountant already, and give them the same bonus.

I emphasize this, because you're trying to translate categories that abstract other categories or simply don't correspond to each other.

HP in GURPS and HP in D&D are not the same thing. In GURPS, they purely represent physical durability. In D&D, they represent this, but also represent grit, will to live, and luck. GURPS represents these factors in many different ways, but both games treat them as having very different effects. A GURPS character that gets beat halfway to death will be seriously impaired (Possibly crippled) and take weeks to recover naturally (Maybe months, if crippled). A D&D character that's beat halfway to death is completely unimpaired and is likely to be as good as new after an hour's rest (Basically everyone in D&D is John McClane).

And that's a simple one. How do we even calculate AC? Well, AC is a concept that doesn't really map to GURPS. It's an abstraction of how hard they are to hurt. The first impression might be to base it off GURPS DR, but that doesn't work cleanly; DR doesn't make it harder to be hit, it reduces the damage when you're hit, but in D&D you're damaged for the same amount regardless of whether you're wearing full plate or a thin t-shirt. Another difference is that D&D doesn't stack AC the way GURPS stacks DR; beetle-warrior gets DR from her carapace and her armor, but in D&D, she'd only get the greater of the two. So not DR. GURPS defenses? That would kind of seem to be the case with Dex adding to AC... until you get to heavy armor, where you get no benefit from Dex, and the only effect skill is likely to have on your AC is whether you have the +1 from the Defensive fighting style or not. A shield gives the same AC bonus to everyone, so shield skill has no impact on AC. So some skills might have an influence, but that influence is heavily dependent on armor, and the possible effect of skill is generally small compared to the possible effect of armor itself. Though in most cases, it's just Dex that contributes to AC, so it's less skill and more natural nimbleness...

AC is an abstract that doesn't really map well to anything in GURPS, because the systems work on fundamentally different principles. The fact is, they're based on things that don't really exist in the other system. Trying to convert it formulaically is just asking to produce something weird or nonsensical. Instead, look to what armor would give a character or creature in D&D, and add any traits that would be appropriate (Beetle-warrior would have the AC of plate and shield, +1 for defensive fighting, and the Heavy Armor Mastery feat. AC 21, boom, done).

These differences go on to include how attributes dominate the odds in D&D while skills dominate the odds in GURPS, the difference in expected success rates, the difference in odd curves, etc. You're basically trying to do something that will not generate good results. It probably won't even generate reliably passable results.
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Old 10-10-2020, 02:33 AM   #85
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

Purple Snit, it's clear that we enjoy different play styles. You are in good company, there are a lot of GMs and players who like the style you propose; I don't.

I don't feel like I'm exploring unless there are things to miss. A lot of people don't feel that way and that's OK.♥

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
Of the seven principles your document lists, one is a common general principle for roleplaying games ("Time Zoom"), one expresses the general way you would use pre-generated content in any setting, but then adds on a rigidity and a conclusion that I don't agree with (The "Three Tiers" thing), and the other five are contradictory to how I run my games. I don't see those differences as small ones.
I see. I will respect this distancing. I just thought that there are a lot of play styles out there that are waaaaay more different.

The specific blorb principles are a way to address some issues with sandbox games; you might've had other (incompatible) ways to address those issues, or you haven't recognized or experienced those issues as issues in the first place, but you still run a "let the players loose in the world" style setup, which is not a universal setup but a common touchpoint between our styles and I was trying to be reconciliatory.

(For context, the following quote was about me using "20 questions" in a comparison.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
And I note that you're again selecting an inherently adversarial situation for comparison.

Most people don't play RPGs as adversarial, which probably makes your comparisons a lot less compelling than you might think, since it seems to treat the GM-player relationship as implicitly adversarial, hence the need for fairness.
Please reconsider that the point I was trying to make was that when I select the secret answer for 20 questions, I can't be adversarial. I need to carefully choose something that will be fun. It's easy to come up with an overly easy answer, or an unguessable answer. "The smell of a mixture of lead and clay when experienced on dates in 1963 if the date is prime and it was also raining that day." That breaks the game. The game only works if I am cooperative when selecting an answer.

And then, I need to stick to that answer for the game to work. If I try to be "cooperative" once the players have started guessing ("Oh, they seem to think I have a specific person in mind, OK, I better switch my answer to that to make it a more fun guessing experience for them"), that also breaks the game.

This toggling between two fundamentally incompatible mindsets was the key point I was trying to convey.

Now, as I said, there are game styles out there (I mentioned several) that don't feature any challenges and as I said, you're correct that only applies to games that do have any challenges.

There are games out there, I've mentioned Fiasco and Microscope, that are wonderful and don't have any, for example, combat rules. (I'll use combat rules in the example but it also applies to mystery investigation, puzzle solving, and exploration.)

If a game has combat rules, it's for one of two reasons.
  1. It represents a challenge to the players.
  2. It represents a curiosity to "play to find out what will happen", i.e. a challenge to the characters if not their players.

(Or both, but not necessarily both—it is legit to be uninterested in one, and completely driven by the other.)

Trying to curate the experience by micromanaging monster stats (fudging HP) or even outcomes (fudging die rolls) contradicts both of those reasons and make it meaningless to even have combat rules in the game.

There is also a third reason why a game might have combat rules; legacy reasons. It can be inspired by an earlier game that did have one or both of those previously mentioned reasons. The GM wants to portray or narrate an exciting fight, but has an outcome in mind instead of actually playing to find out the outcome of the fight. A more narrative based rule set (or subsystem—GURPS could do it, even though the combat system in the Basic Set couldn't) would be better suited.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
That isn't at all what I was talking about. Your earlier example was presenting hyperbolic examples of extremely nasty improvised content. Now you try to back that up with an example of someone trying to tweak the difficulty of an encounter to be a more even challenge for their players. There's a huge disconnect between those.
The hyperbolic example makes it clear that if the game would've been adversarial, it would quickly become meaningless because the DM can easily win. ("Oh, you defeated the 20 beholders! OK, then rocks fall!")

Now, there is a set of principles where tweaking difficulties of encounters to make them a more even challenge for the players would be legitimate:

Seeing encounters as atomic.

Fate Core is explicitly set up this way (pp 232–238): the larger goings-on are improvised but you create each "scene" to answer a specific question, and then you play out each scene.

So a GM that uses that structure could legitimately want to add the pack tactics trait to the skeletons, or calculate the player characters' and their opposition's bash-o-matic values, and then commit to them before the encounter is played out (but, and this is unblorby, but legit in this "encounters are atomic" play style, to commit to them after an encounter is, uh, "initiated"—after the players have said "we go down to the cellar").

In blorb, once they say "We go down into the cellar" it's too late to mess with what's down there. The blorb play style is a little bit more "zoomed out" in what it considers "fair"—the entire house is one big, multi-session "encounter". But that's not to say that the blorb play style and its principles is the only fair or non-"cheating" way to play.

(For context, the following was about rock paper scissors.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
Another inherently adversarial comparison. I mean, can you see why it might be an issue, when you're regularly discussing running a cooperative game by using adversarial comparisons?
What I am getting at is to create clear boundaries, in the GMs mind if nothing else, between the cooperative aspects of the game and the inherently challenge-based aspects of the game. That's why 20 questions, riddle-guessing, or that old "Zendo" board game are better comparisons than RPS. The master in Zendo isn't trying to win, and can't win. Their goal is to present a puzzle that is challenging enough to be entertaining but possible.
[Cont'd]
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Old 10-10-2020, 02:33 AM   #86
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

(Re conversion formula)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
all while imposing an artificial limit that this character or creature that you're bringing in from some other setting by GM fiat can't have stats set by GM fiat.
The limit on fiat with the blorb principles are about when the fiat can be applied.

As I've said in this thread, it's absolutely legitimate to do more "bespoke" conversions of NPCs and monsters if I do them ahead of time. I just thought it would be laborsaving to have a fallback "tier two" way of getting the stats for when I hadn't been able to do so ahead of time.

At our table, once the PC has said "I shoot the beetle warrior", it is no longer appropriate to apply fiat to determine her defense stats; if the outcome of the shot is salient I need to apply the three tiers.
  1. Have I made a bespoke conversion of her in advance, for example by looking at similar creatures in D&D sources?
  2. If not, do I have a deterministic conversion "formula" (as proposed in this thread)?
  3. If not, I have to make something up, and commit to patching this category of holes for future play.

"They're probably not gonna go to Floovenbürg in a while, and if they do they're probably not gonna start any fights, I can just say that everyone in there uses the conversion formula."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
HP in GURPS and HP in D&D are not the same thing. In GURPS, they purely represent physical durability. In D&D, they represent this, but also represent grit, will to live, and luck.
I tried basing D&D HP on GURPS FP and DR. (I added in original HP also because that seemed to make sense for some of the creatures I was eyeballing from, from, for example, the 3e version of Creatures of the Night, but maybe that was a mistake.)

In our game, HP is only stamina, grit, will to live, and luck/fate. We have other rules to determine when there are actual injuries and wounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
And that's a simple one. How do we even calculate AC? Well, AC is a concept that doesn't really map to GURPS.
Correct.

The most important factor I was basing AC on was… This might sound weird, but, it was based on the GURPS' characters chance of failure. Let's say a GURPS character has shortsword-13 and her opponent has active defense 3 or for all practical purposes zero. The GURPS character will hit 84% of the time so in D&D terms, that means that the defender has an AC that's four higher than the attacker's attack skill. So AC 10 if the attacker hits with +6 etc.

Now, you can see how me not factoring in Telegraphic Attack or Deceptive Attack was a huge error! Possibly the source of all the weird numbers. (And TA and DA should've, in hindsight, been made "core" and been part of GURPS Lite.)

The numbers I chose made sense for the GURPS NPCs and monsters I was looking at. I saw skills like 16+ as "essentially 100%", only for total legends. TA and DA changes that.

What I would need to do is to make X×Y table: attacker skills × defender's active defense, and [this is what I was missing before], given optimal use of TA & DA, what is the chance to hit?

And then create a formula for attack skill that works well for a "typical" defense, and for defense that works for a "typical" attack.

Then double check those formulas with the "how many rounds of attacks does it take to bring them down" benchmark, and if it's a horrible mismatch, reiterate from the previous step to tweak the formulas.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
Instead, look to what armor would give a character or creature in D&D, and add any traits that would be appropriate (Beetle-warrior would have the AC of plate and shield, +1 for defensive fighting, and the Heavy Armor Mastery feat. AC 21, boom, done).
Yeah, that seems like a good approach if I can figure out a way do it deterministically (again, with an option to do more bespoke conversion when I have the opportunity to do so a head of time).

Last edited by 2097; 10-10-2020 at 06:36 AM.
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Old 10-10-2020, 11:50 PM   #87
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

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Originally Posted by 2097 View Post
As I've said in this thread, it's absolutely legitimate to do more "bespoke" conversions of NPCs and monsters if I do them ahead of time.
And I think it's just as legitimate to do it at the time of gaming, especially when doing so in a game where the outcome is quick and easy (In this case, as quick or quicker than using a complicated formula). You're still using the exact same judgment, with the exact same information, so rejecting one seems completely arbitrary.

Quote:
I tried basing D&D HP on GURPS FP and DR.
With or without your odd houserules, these two absolutely don't map to each other. FP doesn't cleanly or significantly map to survivability, to the point that even large differences in FP very rarely have any survival impact in a fight outside of unique circumstances (Asphyxiation or fatigue-damaging attacks). DR doesn't map cleanly because it has dramatically different impacts on different levels of damage, which doesn't at all map to anything in D&D hitpoints. Plus, having armor impact HP leads to inevitably double-dipping with AC.

Quote:
The most important factor I was basing AC on was… This might sound weird, but, it was based on the GURPS' characters chance of failure.
Why would that sound weird? I'm well aware you did that. I spent several posts pointing out why that was a bad way of modeling it.

Quote:
Now, you can see how me not factoring in Telegraphic Attack or Deceptive Attack was a huge error! Possibly the source of all the weird numbers.
No, the source of all the weird numbers is that you're trying to convert from one system that has several explicit mechanics based on certain principles to another system that has fewer abstract mechanics based on completely different principles, with each system having different expected odds of success, different success curves, and different assumptions about how the world works. The two systems don't map accurately to each other because they model completely different visions of how the world works. Even some incredibly basic things like strength or how fast people move work on very different baseline assumptions. You can not produce a conversion that will result in both a character that performs the same in both systems, and which still fits in the setting its being adapted to, much less in the same relative place in that setting, because the systems themselves do not perform the same way.

GURPS and D&D have fundamentally different models of combat. D&D expects hits to be common, but most blows are fairly minor, and it generally takes a lot of accumulated hits to down someone. GURPS expects hits to be much less common, but usually much more significant when they do happen (It's quite frequent that the first blow to land and cause injury is the deciding factor in a fight!). In D&D, you can have your HP whittled down all the way to one step shy of death, but you'll fight just as effectively as ever. In GURPS, you suffer impairments, sometimes crippling, from the loss of HP, and are generally incapacitated a good deal shy of when death is a risk (Though only generally; it's also possible to outright kill someone with a single hit). A duel between two highly skilled individuals in D&D is a fairly steady decrement of HP on both sides, with both combatants performing at 100% until one hits zero and drops, typically after only a few turns. A duel between two highly skilled individuals in GURPS typically has very few (Sometimes only one!) HP drops, with combatants often becoming less capable if they are injured, and depending on their skills, might last for quite a long time before any HP is lost (Or, alternatively, might end in the very first move of the fight).

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And TA and DA should've, in hindsight, been made "core" and been part of GURPS Lite.)
Telegraphic Attack isn't even in the basic set, and as nice as it is to have in a detailed-melee game, I don't think its absence is significant. And, while I consider Deceptive Attack to be one of the more important options, it's also one of the more finicky and unobvious ones, which makes it a natural choice for exclusion from a ruleset that is explicitly lightweight and minimalistic. GURPS Lite does a decent job for such minimalist rules, but if you're trying to get more detailed, in-depth, and thorough combat rules, you're probably going to want something a little more robust than the free sample introduction to a game system. Especially if you're trying to convert characters and creatures that are made under the assumption that you're using the basic combat rules. You're trying to convert stuff from a system when you don't even have the majority of the basic system. I mean, you don't even have hit locations.
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Old 10-11-2020, 01:14 AM   #88
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

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And I think it's just as legitimate to do it at the time of gaming, especially when doing so in a game where the outcome is quick and easy (In this case, as quick or quicker than using a complicated formula). You're still using the exact same judgment, with the exact same information, so rejecting one seems completely arbitrary.
Here, I don't feel heard. I wrote a long post explaining why I am not using the same basis of judgment at all, and how I have more information once we've started playing.

Information
I now know much more about the condition and the capabilities of the characters. This makes me liable to flinch. Maybe if the characters arrive badly beat up I would hold off on giving Beetle Warrior the Heavy Armor Mastery feat (and I would deceive myself with any number of reasons, like "I've never given any NPC a feat before"). Or if I don't flinch, and I do really bring the ruckus, they would blame me when they die. Most importantly, I just don't think it's fun, on either side of the screen, to play like this. It's like creating the answer to a riddle after having heard the question.

Basis of Judgment
I wrote at length about this, using 20 questions as an analogy. You attached the word 'adversarial' to this, and to RPS, and then other connotations you might have with adversity are also being attached even though those connotations don't apply. For context for the following, please scroll up.

An inventor of a 20 questions secret, or the designer of a crossword puzzle or a sudoku, or of something like the Rubik's cube or Tetris, isn't the opponent of the players. They need to execute judgment such as fairness, challenge, restraint, interest etc. A designer of an NPC or a monster is a game designer in that sense.

Whereas a referee needs to base their judgment using almost opposite parameters. Consistency, neutrality, emotional detachment. Fairness and restraint goes out the window; I can't soften the blows to match a weakened party. Challenge also goes out the window; I can't up the stakes to match a party on a success streak. Interest also does. I can't be so afraid to let things be boring or overwhelming that I start fudging.

I've acknowledged that some GMs say they can compartmentalize, that they can prep-while-running without issue. I can't. I like to prep warm and run cold.

Also, I know from experience that as a player, I don't enjoy interacting with "on-the-fly" injected entities as much as I like discovering what was really under that bed. Interacting with "on-the-fly" stuff feels like shadowboxing. To me. YMMV and that's fine.
I ran my game as improvised for 20 years and then I played in a few sessions of B4 The Lost City and Barrowmaze and I was like "holy ess! Everything makes sense now! It feels like what I do actually matter!" Items, locations, and enemies felt much more "there".
I never had basic D&D as a kid. I grew up with "90s games". Games with huge and complicated player-facing rules and on the GM side "Feel free to fudge, make the game feel exciting like a movie" and "adventure" books that were 100% useless, like "first this happens, then this happens" etc.

Prepping a sandbox seemed ludicrous to me. "Prep a dungeon? What if they don't go into the dungeon? I can't prep every grain of sand on the planet!" So since that kind of location-based prep was unthinkable, I really struggled to understand how it was meant to be done. The improv style was easy to understand so that's what I played. Improvising NPCs, monsters, locations on the fly based on ideas from novels or from Creatures of the Night or CthulhuPunk. It didn't feel fair to ask the players to have a bunch of rules since I as GM didn't follow rules, so we played rules light, freeform.

But I kept wondering... how is it really done? How in the world could these games work?
I didn't have the missing puzzle piece that GMs that grew up with something like Keep on the Borderlands would have. How to, in practice, prep a sandbox. What you need to prep and what you don't. And, once you have a desert, cities, jungles... that actually work, that are explorable and playable on their own even without an "adventure" because there are items and places to discover in there and monsters that guard them, then adding on something like a Caravan to Ein Arris doesn't sound impossible. But I only saw the caravan and I was like "this is useless".

A lot of games that I bounced off of, bashed my head against, when growing up seem usable now that I know how to prep and run worlds.

So you might be saying: whaddayamean prep warm? Just coolly base her stats off of what she can do in GURPS, her place in the world, base your judgment not on a game design consideration of the player character's situation but on the beetle warrior herself! Easy-peasy!

That's great and that's what I am trying to codify. Codify, because even after DMing for six years, I still haven't gotten to the point where the cool detachment I need to have when running is easy to attain or sustain. Unblorbily injecting cool on-the-fly stuff is a constant temptation.
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Old 10-11-2020, 05:27 AM   #89
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

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Here, I don't feel heard. I wrote a long post explaining why I am not using the same basis of judgment at all, and how I have more information once we've started playing.
Wait, by prepping stuff "ahead of time," did you mean before the campaign starts rather than just between sessions? Because yeah, if you do it between sessions, you've got basically all the information that you'd have in-game, which makes the distinction seem pretty arbitrary. And if you don't add stuff between sessions, and can only rely on stuff you planned before the campaign ever started, then it seems inevitable that you're going to run out of stuff.

Quote:
That's great and that's what I am trying to codify. Codify, because even after DMing for six years, I still haven't gotten to the point where the cool detachment I need to have when running is easy to attain or sustain.
To be completely straightforward with you, I think you'll have a far easier time developing that ability, or re-evaluating your own rules, than you will in coming up with a good mechanical conversion that addresses the problems I've been pointing out to come up with reliable results, especially if you're trying to do so without knowing most of the basics of the system you're converting from.
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Old 10-11-2020, 08:24 AM   #90
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Default Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two

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Wait, by prepping stuff "ahead of time," did you mean before the campaign starts rather than just between sessions? Because yeah, if you do it between sessions, you've got basically all the information that you'd have in-game, which makes the distinction seem pretty arbitrary. And if you don't add stuff between sessions, and can only rely on stuff you planned before the campaign ever started, then it seems inevitable that you're going to run out of stuff.
For the fifth time:

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Now, I found after a few years that it was stressful to prep everything before campaign start so I have set up rules to add some content after the campaign starts but filtered through dice and randomness and maybe the added content never shows up or is never discovered.
To address specifically the "basically all the information"—I don't. I don't know which PCs will be present or even alive when they meet the Beetle Warrior or the Accountant or the King of Atlantis. Or what level they are, let alone how well rested they are. The new content I add go on a queue where it might be discovered in the distant future, or maybe never. Or maybe soon but that's not something I can know.

Whereas by adding stuff in game, I would know exactly the party composition, their exhaustion levels, their HP, their spell slots etc.

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To be completely straightforward with you, I think you'll have a far easier time developing that ability, or re-evaluating your own rules,


There are many people all of the world who have become quite fond of my rules. Like me, they enjoy interacting with committed entities with an off-screen, canon gamestate rather than on-the-fly–stuff. Remember, I did play on-the-fly for 20 years so I've already tried that. And, the six years I've been using my current style have been the best gaming I've even had♥

I went from pulling teeth to get a game group together once a year, to
people queued up to join playing multiple times per week.

The sessions are awesome. I really love it.

The set of blorb principles isn't some cockamamie, untested thing. They are awesome♥

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than you will in coming up with a good mechanical conversion that addresses the problems I've been pointing out to come up with reliable results, especially if you're trying to do so without knowing most of the basics of the system you're converting from.
I've done a few things with 4e but I am familiar with 3e, which doesn't have Deceptive Attack. I was surprised to see your insistance that 16 and 20 were very different skill levels, but, with DA they definitely are. So I might take another stab at it later with DA in mind.

You haven't painted GURPS in a particularly inviting light; seems like it's tricksy to get every little detail right or there's no use.

Last edited by 2097; 10-11-2020 at 08:32 AM.
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