Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

~Happy Holidays~

Are there particular parts of non-DF products which you have found useful for your "hybrid" game?

Happy holidays to you as well!

Besides Characters and Campaigns, where I sometimes go to reference other rules and options, I find GURPS Fantasy to be particularly useful as a source of inspiration. In addition, I regularly consult the Low Tech series for gear details, the Social Engineering series to help structure social challenges, the Power-Ups series for nifty extras (mostly imbuements, perks, quirks, and impulse buys), Underground Adventures because dungeons, and Locations and Hot Spots (among others) for ideas to plunder. Monster Hunters is also surprisingly useful because it's basically high-powered, modern DF, so the monsters can be reused and the pacing advice is helpful.

Are there particular differences between Dungeon Fantasy (the pdf line) and the Dungeon Fantasy boxed set of which one should be aware while mixing the two?

I love the boxed set primarily for my players and as a one-stop location for the bulk of the rules I'm using. If I don't have any of my other GURPS resources available, I can easily run a game with just the box. The booklets look sharp and are easy to lend out to new players (many of my players don't know much about the rest of the GURPS universe). I do plunder the rest of the DF series regularly. There are monsters there that didn't make it into DFRPG. I use some of the other templates and races for NPCs, and keep them in my back pocket in case a player really wants to go in that direction. Wilderness Adventures is packed with useful material and Caverntown is one of my favorite GURPS supplements ever. I find that the DF series just gives me more fun stuff to use; any rules differences are so minor as to be irrelevant.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

Are there particular parts of non-DF products which you have found useful for your "hybrid" game?

I'll echo Dalin's Underground Adventures mention. From DF I mostly just use the non-PC Template books and Power Ups, so DFs 5, 8, 11, 15, 16, and 18.

If you only bring over one or two books from DF though I'd pick up up 11 Power Ups and 16 Wilderness Adventures.

I've added back in some rules from Martial Arts (the new Maneuvers, Fighting in Close Combat, and the Extra Effort options; just to make things easier for the PCs).

From Basic I mostly just added back in the Extra Effort in Combat options, so melee Characters have a use for their buckets of FP. Nothing feels better than pulling out some crazy extra damage or attacks or boosted defense to save the party - which I argue is exactly what the melee Template is there for.

Are there particular differences between Dungeon Fantasy (the pdf line) and the Dungeon Fantasy boxed set of which one should be aware while mixing the two?

Mostly in what get's left out or all the optional rules from Basic, Martial Arts, etc that GURPS Players and GMs are so used to that were cut to trim the system into the tight perform engine it is.

Most of which I mentioned above. I'll note, the armor weights all conform to Low Tech, so adding Low Tech into the mix is super easy.

There are a few tweaks to the Templates, but those are light and barely noticeable.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

From Basic I mostly just added back in the Extra Effort in Combat options, so melee Characters have a use for their buckets of FP. Nothing feels better than pulling out some crazy extra damage or attacks or boosted defense to save the party - which I argue is exactly what the melee Template is there for.

I keep hearing about the Extra Effort rules and have been meaning to try them. They sound great for the type of game I run. I don't remember if they didn't exist in 3e (the last time I played a lot of GURPS) or if my groups just didn't use them back then. Is there anything I should see besides the applicable pages in Basic and Martial Arts?

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Dalin

I keep hearing about the Extra Effort rules and have been meaning to try them. They sound great for the type of game I run. I don't remember if they didn't exist in 3e (the last time I played a lot of GURPS) or if my groups just didn't use them back then. Is there anything I should see besides the applicable pages in Basic and Martial Arts?

Not for Extra Effort.

But as I mentioned I also use the Close Combat rules from Martial Arts so the PCs don't all have to carry and switch to CC weapons when wild animals attack.

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I'll echo Dalin's Underground Adventures mention. From DF I mostly just use the non-PC Template books and Power Ups, so DFs 5, 8, 11, 15, 16, and 18.

If you only bring over one or two books from DF though I'd pick up up 11 Power Ups and 16 Wilderness Adventures.

I've added back in some rules from Martial Arts (the new Maneuvers, Fighting in Close Combat, and the Extra Effort options; just to make things easier for the PCs).

From Basic I mostly just added back in the Extra Effort in Combat options, so melee Characters have a use for their buckets of FP. Nothing feels better than pulling out some crazy extra damage or attacks or boosted defense to save the party - which I argue is exactly what the melee Template is there for.


Mostly in what get's left out or all the optional rules from Basic, Martial Arts, etc that GURPS Players and GMs are so used to that were cut to trim the system into the tight perform engine it is.

Most of which I mentioned above. I'll note, the armor weights all conform to Low Tech, so adding Low Tech into the mix is super easy.

There are a few tweaks to the Templates, but those are light and barely noticeable.

I own most of the DF pdfs. Even though I haven't played in a while, I wanted to support the game, and I do like a lot of the concepts introduced. Occasionally, I've used powers and abilities from DF as inspiration for how to build things for a super hero game I was running.

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to actually sit down and play. (I even cut out the play-by-post I had been doing; "real life" has been a rather robust hurdle for a while.)

Fortunately (and somewhat strangely), the face-to-face group I had been a part of for a while seems to have taken much more of an interest in GURPS during my time away from the table. (They're currently doing a game which is a little bit Supers and a little bit After The End.)

There has been interest expressed in a fantasy game.

I have a few ideas in my head; my biggest internal debate has been whether the ideas are better suited to Fantasy or Dungeon Fantasy.

That's good to know. I like a lot of the gear options from Low-Tech.

In regards to extra effort: the most commonly used options I've seen in face-to-face games have been Feverish Defense and the one which adds damage (Might Blow?). I've seen Heroic Charge used too.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

In regards to extra effort: the most commonly used options I've seen in face-to-face games have been Feverish Defense and the one which adds damage (Might Blow?). I've seen Heroic Charge used too.

The two I most see are Flurry of Blows and Feverish Defense.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

2) At some point, the question arises as to why the king is bothering to hire the PCs; if his guard is so godlike to as be able to crush the PCs (who are themselves godlike in comparison to the rest of the world), surely they could handle the army of goblins harassing the countryside -possibly even with just sending one guard.

In a lot of ways this is the inverse of the "rocket tag" issue. It's probably not possible to avoid both of them.

It is a less serious problem in GURPS (and other games that aim at realistic combat - a "weapon" that doesn't disable somebody you hit with it enough they can't hit back a good fraction of the time is not a realistically successful weapon design) precisely because those "rocket tag" results are on the table. You can't dismiss even individual goblins as threats even to SuperGuard if any one hit can be dangerous. Even if the odds are fairly low, there's always a chance the lowly goblin will land the first hit, cripple something, and win the fight.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

The two I most see are Flurry of Blows and Feverish Defense.

Heroic Charge is the big one in games I've been involved with - the ability to cover your full Move AND hit something is important.

[Black Leviathan]

GURPS starts out at Rocket Tag. Landing the first blow is pretty critical. Striking an unwary foe or in some other way hindering their active defense usually tips the combat downhill.

You never have to upgrade the royal guard. A dozen ST13 guys with Halberds will mess anyone up with enough attempted attacks. You just can't get enough DR in Dungeon Fantasy to shrug those numbers off. Even if you're fully loaded, an arrow with a Rooted Feet enchantment on it and a few dozen 4d fireballs will take the shine off of you.

The Point Being D&D Hit Points escalates your character into a weird strata that stops making sense very quickly and a "rocket" is needed to best you. GURPS has some heroic elements but your mortality remains pretty consistent. GURPS grasps in a way that D&D never did that the most powerful characters in our real life history were killed by the weapons that do the least amount of damage in their game.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by malloyd

In a lot of ways this is the inverse of the "rocket tag" issue. It's probably not possible to avoid both of them.

It isn't really. It's more of a problem with scaling and how damage resolution works. Sure, if PCs are meant to be able to take on a hundred goblins at once, NPCs meant to go one on one vs PCs also have to be able to do that, but it doesn't take rocket tag to make it so a hundred goblins are a threat to PCs, it just requires an average goblin to do 1% of PC health before being taken down.

What rocket tag does is increase the chance that the weaker side in a fight will win. Assuming a corridor fight (one PC and one monster attacking per turn), consider these models:

1. Goblins hit for 1 damage. PCs have 100 HP and kill 1 goblin per turn. Average goblin damage per turn = 1%, so expected goblins per PC = 100. Standard deviation = 0%. As there is zero deviation, a PC will never be defeated by less than 100 goblins, and will never defeat more than 100.
2. Goblins hit for 1 damage. PCs have 10 HP, 90% dodge chance, and kill 1 goblin per turn. Average goblin damage per turn = 1%, so expected goblins per PC = 100. Standard deviation = 3%. 50 goblin attacks = 50 average with standard deviation 21.2, so there's about a 2% chance to defeat a PC with 50 goblins and it is theoretically possible (1/10,000,000,000) for 10 goblins to defeat a PC. On the other hand, there's also about a 2% chance that a PC defeats 200 goblins.
3. Goblins hit for 1 damage. PCs have 1 HP, 99% dodge chance, and kill 1 goblin per turn. Average goblin damage per turn = 1%, so expected goblins per PC = 100. Standard deviation = 9.95%, but we aren't expecting a normal distribution. A PC can be defeated by a single goblin (1% chance) and has a 69% chance to go down vs 100 goblins, but a 0.65% chance to beat 1,000 goblins.

Note that if all the goblins can attack at once, it only takes 14 goblins to beat a PC, as they will get in a total of 105 attacks before being wiped out.

Neither of the first two cases is rocket tag, the third clearly is, but the typical power of PCs vs goblins is actually unchanged. The thing is, the way DR and defenses work in GURPS means average lethality of foes can be much lower than that 1%.