07-30-2017, 08:44 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Oct 2011
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Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
Shrinking characters down to miniscule size and societies of tiny people are common tropes in fiction, but GURPS doesn't handle them all that well. The system simply lacks resolution at that scale. I've seen an official system for half-levels of Strength, but that didn't particularly help with the granularity of statistics based on strength (ie, HP and damage). I've been brainstorming a way to make a more precise system for a while, and think I've hammered out the details well enough to share it.
It involves finding the statistics which change the most from changing size and are expressed in game terms rather than real-world ones (damage, health, SM) and finding a way to shift them down by a given factor. Since GURPS already has rules for decade-, century-, and millennium-scale damage, I decided that the best place to start would be multiplying the health and damage of these tiny creatures by 10. I call this dime-scale, because the only other idea I had was decimal-scale and that sounds vague. Part 1: Data
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My dreams of an elegant mathematical solution effectively shattered, I decided to pick a decent, simple approximation and go with it, deciding that a factor of 5 would do perfectly. In other words, dST 10 would be ST 2 and ST 10 would be dST 50. It lacks the precision I was hoping for, but it works fine. A more precise approximation would be to halve the square of ST to get dST, meaning that ST 10 would be dST 50 and ST 2 would be dST 2, but the assumptions this generates obviously fall apart quickly at low dST values. Part 2: SM, or Putting Dime-Scale Into Context
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TL;DR: Dime-scale humans would be SM -5 or SM -4—that is, somewhere between almost a foot and a foot and a half. Part 3: Playing with Dime-Scale Creatures
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Part 4: Cent and Miniscule Scales
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Appendix: Metric Conversions for Specified Sizes
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How does it look? Did I mess up the math badly, or miss an obvious way to simplify things? Are there any other mechanics I'd have to tweak? |
07-30-2017, 08:56 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
My suggestion for dealing with such minuscule scales is to go the Bunnies and Burrows route: the ST scores of the PCs of that scale are set to 10, and everything else is suitably adjusted.
This of course makes Nac Mac Feegles super-strong when everything else is also that size... but that's part of their charm, IMNSHO. :)
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07-30-2017, 10:49 AM | #3 | |
Join Date: Oct 2011
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Re: Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
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07-30-2017, 12:11 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
Part of the reason games don't have such guidelines very often is that they're basically arbitrary. Realistic scaling of humans by over about a factor of two tends to amount to stuff like "your brain is too small to be sapient", or "you die of suffocation from inadequate circulation". And with lots of key environmental parameters scaling differently from each other, properly done Microworld is the sort of radically alien environment few authors can pull off stories in. Such works all tend to have slightly different rules for the fantasy they use instead.
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07-30-2017, 03:18 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Oct 2011
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Re: Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
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07-30-2017, 07:08 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
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For most settings the micro-world works just like the normal sized one with everything except the PCs scaled up. For that I'd just treat the micro-scale characters as the standard and use the regular GURPS rules, figure out how tough you want giant (i.e. normal sized) things to be relative to that and multiply their ST, HP, DR and damage done by whatever factor you selected (linear in height works as well as anything) and their weights by its square (no, not cube, to preserve the ST to weight relationship). Compute range modifiers and SM from scaled distances rather than "real" ones. Done. Yes, yes, I can here the complaints already that this isn't Generic and Universal, and lacks a complex scheme for calculating character point costs relative to full sized PCs. Those are the bane of many discussions of this sort, and if you aren't going to have both scale characters as PCs, they don't matter one bit.
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-- MA Lloyd |
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07-31-2017, 12:17 AM | #8 |
Join Date: Dec 2004
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Re: Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters
The basic problem you're running into is this:
1. You're expecting damage to scale consistently. 2. However, damage for ST in GURPS does NOT scale consistently with ST, mostly to allow more variation at normal human range. 3. Therefore, if you want a consistent 5 to 1 scale for damage, you can't have dST scale on a straight 5 to 1 basis. Is that a correct interpretation? If that is the case, remember you would want Lifting ST and HP to scale separately from Striking ST. Personally, I would just ignore the wonky damage progression and simply go with straight 5 to 1 or 10 to ratio. That's how it works for D-Scale, C-Scale, etc. damage. If large creatures seem too vulnerable, Pizard has an interesting house rule here for impaling/piercing damage. Trying to make damage scale correctly is more trouble than it's worth. You'd be better off reworking damage progression. |
Tags |
decade, dime, homebrew, size |
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