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Old 04-12-2021, 10:16 PM   #41
Pursuivant
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Default Re: Improved Melee Defaults for Skilled Combatants

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Originally Posted by kirbwarrior View Post
Use optional specialties to keep skills at the same difficulties (give things like Knife and Force Whip a +1 to use).
Alternately, treat different weapons or families of closely-related weapons as Familiarities. That makes melee weapon skills a bit more analogous to skills such as Guns which allow you to use potentially thousands of different weapons with minimal penalties for switching between different models within the same class.

Familiarity penalties within a weapon group might be as follows:

Different stance or number of hands required, -1 (e.g., Broadword vs. Two-Handed Sword)
Significantly different Reach, -1 (e.g., Knife vs. Broadsword)
Significantly different Weight or Min ST, -1 (e.g., Broadsword vs. Shortsword)
Powered/High-Tech/Supernatural vs. Unpowered Low Tech, -1 (e.g., Broadsword vs. Force Sword)
Special Features, -1 (e.g., cross-hilted broadsword vs. basket-hilted broadsword)

For example, if you're familiar with a standard cross-hilted short sword, you have a -1 familiarity penalty if you pick up a basket-hilted cutlass, or a broadsword, but a -2 penalty if you use a two-handed sword (different reach, different number of hands), or a broadsword-length force sword (different reach, powered vs. unpowered).

Or, if you're familiar with a 10' medieval style glaive with Reach 2,3, you have a -2 penalty to use a 7' naginata with Reach 1,2 (-1 for Different Reach, -1 for different weight and Min ST).
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Old 04-12-2021, 11:11 PM   #42
Polydamas
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
Default Re: Improved Melee Defaults for Skilled Combatants

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Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
Realistically, any serious fighter is going to have a higher DX than normal, which gives them superior defaults for melee weapons across the board.

If you want someone whose default skills with all melee weapons are better than normal, but who doesn't have superhuman DX, another possibility might be a variant on the "Jack of All Trades" Talent, which just boosts default skill levels for melee weapons, 5 points per level, and a maximum default level of DX-1 seems fair.
But not enough. In GURPS, someone who trains with a sword has an overwhelming incentive to keep using it, even if an axe is better in the situation. In real life, the kinds of guys who would probably have DX 11-12 and several skills around 14 often had three or four different sidearms on their body and their saddle and switched as needed in the same way a modern infantryman switches between a long gun, an anti-tank weapon, and the radio. I wouldn't give myself more than DX 9 and 2-4 points in various Melee Weapon skills, and training a proper martial art certainly made me more effective with a wide variety of tools!
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Last edited by Polydamas; 04-13-2021 at 12:20 AM.
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Old 04-13-2021, 01:04 AM   #43
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Join Date: Sep 2006
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Default Re: Improved Melee Defaults for Skilled Combatants

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Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
But not enough. In GURPS, someone who trains with a sword has an overwhelming incentive to keep using it, even if an axe is better in the situation. In real life, the kinds of guys who would probably have DX 11-12 and several skills around 14 often had three or four different sidearms on their body and their saddle and switched as needed in the same way a modern infantryman switches between a long gun, an anti-tank weapon, and the radio. I wouldn't give myself more than DX 9 and 2-4 points in various Melee Weapon skills, and training a proper martial art certainly made me more effective with a wide variety of tools!
So instead of improving default, we should look at incentives to have people spend cp in several skills in,stead of one.

Which is something I already do when creating characters for a "realistic"* campaign : a trained fighter with all his combat cp in sword and nothing in axe/spear/knife/... better have a good explanation, or they go back to the drawing board.
*:DF and the like are another story, obviously.
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Old 04-13-2021, 08:15 AM   #44
Edges
 
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Default Re: Improved Melee Defaults for Skilled Combatants

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
If you are going to collapse them just to collapse them, and not because you want vastly cheaper or something, consider just using the existing Wildcard skill rules. Yeah the "official" ones for melee weapons are almost uselessly narrow for their costs, but there's no particular reason you couldn't allow Melee!, or Fight!, especially if you use the straight interpretation of the Basic Set rules that just amounts all the included skills with no special additional benefits. Yeah 24 points for everything at DX seems kind of on the high side for the initial buy in, but not all that bad, and 12 per additional level (i.e. the cost to improve just 3 skills) is actually pretty fair. If you really have a problem with the base cost (and honestly if you are comparing it to those same 3 skills at DX for 6 points, 24 points is pretty high), it's not too tough to include enough additional stuff like techniques at full DX, or perks (normally specialized by skill but here applying to everything included) to bring the value up. Armed Grapple, Cavalry Training, Close Combat, Fast Draw, Reverse Grip and Sweep at full skill, plus Form Mastery, Grip Mastery, Reach Mastery, Reverse Grip, Off Hand Weapon Training and Quick Sheathe, would come to more than 18 points (for one weapon!), bundle them into Melee! for all weapons and 24 starts to seem quite a fair buy in price.
My point was that the current skill system does not have uniformity is skill specificity. PCs don't need to pay a premium for Acrobatics! when they want to know trapeze, tightrope, human stacking, aerial silks, uneven bars, and all the dozens of vastly different abilities that are all covered by Acrobatics. Yet they are expected to pay such a premium to have all of the (I would say more closely-related) melee skills.

To bring melee skills more in line with the level of resolution of the rest of the skills, there really should just be one... maaaaybe two melee skills.

I get why it is the way it is. GURPS is more of a fighting game than a circus/sport game. But I think there could be more consistent ways of modeling it. The way Area Knowledge is arranged would be a great direction to take all the skills in, imo. As a bonus, it would effectively do away with the default system all together.
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Old 04-13-2021, 09:06 AM   #45
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Default Re: Improved Melee Defaults for Skilled Combatants

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Originally Posted by Celjabba View Post
So instead of improving default, we should look at incentives to have people spend cp in several skills in,stead of one.
in GURPS we have a mechanism for making it cheaper to buy one skill if we have another similar one. Its called defaults.

If someone knew how GURPS works in general, but not Melee Weapon skills, and was asked to guess the defaults, they would never guess that most of them do not default to each other.
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Old 04-13-2021, 11:41 AM   #46
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Default Re: Improved Melee Defaults for Skilled Combatants

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Originally Posted by JulianLW View Post
I want to find a solution for this problem (...)
I think you should simply resort to a wildcard skill, the ""house-rule"" being you can default to another skill at -5 (instead of DX) if your sill level is 16 or higher and if the weapon requires the same number of hands and shares similar characteristics to your “master weapon” (reach, rigid or flexible, etc.). I would combine this with a “rules exemption perk”, just to make it more legit.

If you are not trained in a certain weapon then you do not get its bonuses (e.g. you don’t know how to use a fencing sword you don’t get the enhanced parry). But you do get the penalties (e.g. unbalanced parry if it is an axe).
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