01-07-2007, 12:58 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Canada
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[GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
Greeting GURPS Fans, I do not know enough about GURPS Powers 4e, but I have the entire GURPS Supers line and GURPS Psionics.
My Top Ten Questions are: 01. What Setting have you used GURPS Powers for? (I.S.T., Wild Cards, DC Univers, Marvel Universe, etc...) 02. What Genre it is best suited for? (Fantasy, Modern, Superhero, Space, Cyberpunk, Castle Falkenstein, etc...) 03. What are your Top 5 Favourite things about it? 04. What are your Tops 5 Least Favourite things about it? 05. How difficult is it to Convert from Supers 3e to Powers 4e? 06. What have you used it for in game so far? 07. When did you buy it? (1 Week ago, 1 month ago, etc...) 08. What can you not build with it? 09. How good is the layout? 10. Would you recogment it? Cheers QM
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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." |
01-07-2007, 01:44 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Portland, OR, USA
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
I can't answer all 10 of those because they don't all apply to me. I think it is beyond useful if needed... I couldn't set up my current Fantasy project without it. Period. Too many things are in there you can't do without. In my case, I needed it to flesh out Psionics with more than what was in the basic book and to provide an "Invocation" system for priests (I didn't want spells).
If you need any kinds of powers, this book is indispensible. Many campaigns besides Supers would need powers. Pretty much anything supernatural is likely to apply, such as Horror and Fantasy (for the more exotic monsters if nothing else). |
01-07-2007, 02:52 AM | #3 | |||||||
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
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01-07-2007, 02:57 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Oct 2006
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
1: So far I haven't "used" it as such. I've yet to start a game since I got it. However I have been designing some characters using it, mostly for a hypothetical World War II supers game.
2. Obviously it's superfluous for mundane games. But it's almost as valuable for space science fiction games as it is for superhero and psionic games. It's not totally useless for swords and sorcery but it depends on how interested you are in advantage-based magic. 3. Obviously my favourite thing about is that it fills in the holes in the system as a supers system. I need illusions and weather control before I'm ready to run supers. I also like the power sources complete with beneficial and limiting options to make their respective natures distinct. It keeps GURPS powers from falling into generic Champions hell. The alternate Fright check table for things that aren't so much frightening as just mindblowingly impressive or weird is a good idea. 4. My least favourite thing is that to create one character you have to keep switching between books. Finding what you want can be a problem. Too much "see page B. 140" and "is that limitation in Characters or Powers" 5. Ehn. Not impossible, but you can't just import characters right over. 6. Redundant question. 7. A bit more than a month ago. 8. Someone who just plain understands all spoken and written language. 9. A bit iffy. I think maybe it suffered from the rush to get the new edition out. 10. Sure. If you want to use GURPS for Supers it's definitely a must-have. |
01-07-2007, 04:24 AM | #5 | |||||||||||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: The ASS of the world, mainly Valencia, Spain (Europe)
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01-07-2007, 09:50 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
I forgot to mention it in my origial response, but I feel there's another place that Powers sort of fell down for building abilties. Specifically, it gives no particularly good way of creating a character who can enhance an otherwise-normal weapon (the paladin who can pick up any sword and make it holy, for example, or the psi who can use telekinetic force to give their weapons an armor divisor). There are several proposed ways of doing this sort of thing, but I find none of them really satisfying, I'm afraid.
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01-07-2007, 10:05 AM | #7 | |
Join Date: Oct 2006
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
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01-07-2007, 10:38 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
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Further, even the case of enhancing a single weapon type is not particularly well-balanced, IMO. If Player A can pick up a normal sword and do 1d+1 damage with it, and Player B can pick up a normal sword and do 1d+1 (2) damage, why should Player B be forced to pay for the dice of damage they do? Player A is getting it for free, after all. There should be some practical way of paying for just the armor divisor, not the damage dice. |
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01-07-2007, 10:59 AM | #9 | |
Join Date: Oct 2006
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
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01-07-2007, 11:26 AM | #10 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: [GURPS] Powers - What have you used it for?
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As I said, I run a couple of campaigns where this sort of power is an issue. When I proposed the "Innate Attack with Accessibility" solution to the players, the pretty much universal reaction was "Eh, too expensive for what you get." And this is with a pool of ~10 players. Not a statistical sample, I'll admit, but good enough to suggest to me that the utililty of the solution is poor. Quote:
In any case, though, 4e still has advantages that apply bonuses to all weapons, or at least a large subset. Weapon Master, for example, which effectively gives you a decent damage bonus if your skill is high enough. If that's balanced, then surely there's some way to balance the ability to apply an armor divisor to all weapons. Quote:
And I completely disagree about the Perk. This is a fairly potent ability. In the Shadowrun setting, for example, spirits (and a good number of other magical critters) are highly resistant to normal weapons. And spirits are a major opponent. Letting a character take the ability to affect spirits normall with all their weapons for one point would be seriously unbalanced - probably everyone would take the perk, and that's a good indication that it's unbalanced. In any case, this is rather a serious digression from the original poster's questions. We should probably take this to another thread if we're going to keep discussing it. |
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