10-09-2020, 03:51 PM | #81 | |||||||||||
Join Date: Sep 2012
|
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:
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:
Quote:
Quote:
(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:
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:
Quote:
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:
Quote:
Quote:
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:
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.♥ |
|||||||||||
10-09-2020, 04:01 PM | #82 |
Join Date: Sep 2012
|
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. |
10-09-2020, 04:55 PM | #83 |
Join Date: Jan 2011
|
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 |
10-09-2020, 09:55 PM | #84 | |||||
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
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. |
|||||
10-10-2020, 02:33 AM | #85 | ||||
Join Date: Sep 2012
|
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:
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:
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.
(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:
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:
[Cont'd] |
||||
10-10-2020, 02:33 AM | #86 | |||
Join Date: Sep 2012
|
Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two
(Re conversion formula)
Quote:
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.
"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:
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:
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. 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. |
|||
10-10-2020, 11:50 PM | #87 | |||||
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
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). Quote:
|
|||||
10-11-2020, 01:14 AM | #88 | |
Join Date: Sep 2012
|
Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two
Quote:
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. |
|
10-11-2020, 05:27 AM | #89 | ||
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two
Quote:
Quote:
|
||
10-11-2020, 08:24 AM | #90 | ||||
Join Date: Sep 2012
|
Re: GURPS monsters/NPCs in D&D, take two
Quote:
Quote:
Whereas by adding stuff in game, I would know exactly the party composition, their exhaustion levels, their HP, their spell slots etc. Quote:
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♥ Quote:
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. |
||||
Tags |
conversions, dnd |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|