Crafting fantastic dungeon creatures in GURPS

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

I found this out the hard way with Demons last night. Constructs have a core of about six traits that they always have and about four that are quite common, but Demons are all over the place.

Demons are essentially both a sibling-category of both "people" and an extremely broad sub-category of "monsters". Even fiction and mythology is willing to give demons almost as wide a set of personalities, motivations, attitudes, etc. as they do humans, paired with "whatever the story teller thought was sufficiently creepy/frighting".

They're hard to categorize without making very game-world specific assumptions - and even then they tend to ahem tempt you to break whatever rules you've made for yourself for the sake of a good idea.

Originally Posted by Rasputin

The only commonality I think I found was Immune to Metabolic Hazards, which is pretty common for anything that isn't Plant, Animal or Mundane. So don't go into the dungeon looking to fight with metabolic hazards.

I go with ItMH and Immune to Mind Control, and of course Social Stigma (Monster) or a Secret, along with the feature "Affected by demon spells" (aka Pentagram, Banish, Summon Demon, etc) for the "always" traits. For the "Recommended" traits, I make sure it has "evil" disadvantages of some kind, and consider Cannot Harm Innocents (Truely Virtuous Only), and Revulsion/Vulnerability/Dread/Weakness/Allergic Susceptibility to something holy-sounding. In this case the Fiend didn't have one of the "bane" traits, but its really cool stuff falls off which is very much the same idea.

Originally Posted by PseudoFenton

although constructs are generally still a pain

A really big hammer and a really big barbarian generally solves that one. If it's not a jelly construct, then crushing probably works :)

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

In its own way, demon is as broad as mundane. Same with divine servitor or elder thing. All of the categories are very broad. Demons can be anything from weak evil beings from another dimension to extremely powerful lords of evil and everything in between. Nailing them down with a specific set of advantages and disadvantages is possible, but IMO that's better done by a GM with a precise worldview. DF doesn't have one, really. I figure what "Demon" means at its core is "You can try to throw Banish on this."

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

In its own way, demon is as broad as mundane. Same with divine servitor or elder thing. All of the categories are very broad.

Yes. This is a problem with starting from those categories and working more specific. There are many that are just evil supernatural men. There are many that are indescribible Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know.

I suppose you need man/beast categories for all of these, at a minimum.

[Jerander]

Hi,

I've been playing around with Rasputin's adaptation of the Creature Crafter (which I enjoy quite a bit, by the way). One question I had, based on these tables:

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Potency Table
2d10	Relative Potency	ST	Attr. 	An. IQ	Move	DR	Damage
-4	Minimum			6	8	1	-5	0	1d-2
5-6	Weak			9	10	2	-3	1	1d
7-9	Less			11	11	3	-1	2	2d-1
10-12	Baseline		12	12	4	0	3	2d
13-15	More			13	13	5	+1	4	2d+1
16-17	Strong			15	14	6	+3	6	3d
18+	Maximum			18	16	8	+6	8	4d

Creature Size
1d100	Size		SM	ST	DX	HT	Speed	Move	DR
1-5	Tiny		-6	-9	+3	0	+0.75	-5	-4
6-20	Small		-2	-5	+1	0	+0.25	-2	-2
21-70	Human-sized	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
71-85	Large		+2	+12	-1	0	-0.25	+4	+3
86-95	Very large	+4	+50	-2	-1	-0.50	+8	+8
96-100	Gigantic	+6	+120	-3	-2	-0.75	+12	+18

When dealing with Potency rolls of for ST, would it make sense to base the modification based on the Potency roll of off the ST adjusted by size?

For instance, currently, a Gigantic creature would have a ST of 120 + Potency Roll Result (range from 6-18), giving a resulting ST of 126-138. The next step below, Very Large, ends up with a final ST of 56-68. We have a huge gap between ST68 and ST126.

Would it make sense to set up different Potency Roll ST results for each size range to help fill that out?

Thank you,
Jerander.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Jerander

When dealing with Potency rolls of for ST, would it make sense to base the modification based on the Potency roll of off the ST adjusted by size?

I treated the ST ranges as -40% through +80% from the size base, instead of flat modifiers. Worked well for me.

EDIT: In retrospect, I treated the potency as percentage rolls; according to above notes anyways. Anyways, you get the idea.

[Jerander]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I treated the ST ranges as -40% through +80% from the size base, instead of flat modifiers. Worked well for me.

Meaning, start with the base size ST, the modify it from -40% to +80% based on the Potency roll?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Jerander

Meaning, start with the base size ST, the modify it from -40% to +80% based on the Potency roll?

Something like that. *flails hands around* I don't have my notes here and I apparently totally forgot I was messing around with this for a while.

Remember that quirk level Obsessive Compulsive and temporary Single Minded? Yeah, when I'm not monomaniacal, I'm Absent Minded with a quirk level Short Attention Span :D

[Jerander]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Something like that. *flails hands around* I don't have my notes here and I apparently totally forgot I was messing around with this for a while.

Remember that quirk level Obsessive Compulsive and temporary Single Minded? Yeah, when I'm not monomaniacal, I'm Absent Minded with a quirk level Short Attention Span :D

:)

If you find it, please share. Otherwise I'll start messing around with it myself, starting with the -75%, -50%, -10%, +0%, +10%, +50%, and +100% values listed...