[Sell me] Non-combat GURPS titles?

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Fatigue damage, if it takes FP below 0, starts inflicting hit point damage. Do you intend to limit it to not inflicting hit point damage even in that situation?

Good catch. Yes, once FP hit 0, the individual simply remains unconscious with no further consequences.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

Good catch. Yes, once FP hit 0, the individual simply remains unconscious with no further consequences.

Note that, RAW, being reduced to 0 FP doesn't automatically make you pass out - rather, you must make a Will roll each round to do anything other than Do Nothing, and failure means you collapse (but don't necessarily fall unconscious) and can't act again until you're above 0 FP. It's -1xFP that makes you pass out. For your purposes, just getting rid of the associated loss of 1 HP each time you lose 1 FP below 0 will work just fine.

Honestly, though, if you're looking to run a campaign without combat, you may want to disallow FP-damaging attacks. They're expensive, sure, but useful enough - particularly in a campaign where you basically can't attack otherwise* - to often be worth it. You could easily end up in a very similar situation to before, where PC's still opt to resolve things via combat, it's just that combat is no longer lethal. Of course, if your players are going for workarounds for the "no combat" issue, that means your players probably aren't interested in a no combat campaign**...

*Indeed, in a campaign where the only way to fight is using FP-damaging powers, such powers are even more worthwhile - those who don't have them are literally incapable of fighting back...

**An aside, this is reminiscent of what I thought was a hilarious aspect of Star Fox Adventures. General Pepper sends a mercenary (Fox McCloud) to perform an investigation of what's going on with Dinosaur Planet. It's not supposed to be a combat mission, and Pepper wants to avoid spooking the locals, and thus forbids Fox from taking any weapons. Fox, being a mercenary rather than a diplomat, immediately starts looking for something to fight with upon arrival, and when he finds an artifact of great power (Krystal's magic staff), he promptly repurposes it into a stick for beating the crap out of people.
Give a man a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail. Take that man's hammer away later? He'll just find something else to beat those nails down.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Okay, didn't think about it like that. What I was trying to model was those times when a character is either incapacitated via something like a sedative or falls down briefly after getting zapped with electricity or lightly singed by fire. What happens is that my concept of violence and/or combat has a fuzzy border, where it's okay to do certain types of things to people because they're usually not shown to have lasting consequences.

This wouldn't be a problem is some systems, but GURPS models stuff, so I need to first figure out what things of violence do in non-violent media and then figure out what that means in GURPS context. Hence weapons adding function to Intimidation. But I'm still kind of new to GURPS, so.....

......it only just now occurred to me to look up "stun" on my PDF.

Maybe Affliction is a better fit for what I'm trying to do than FP damage.

[whswhs]

I do want to add that I think you may be adopting a strategy that doesn't work well in pursuing your goals, in a way that some other commenters have alluded to. I remember a campaign I ran set in Middle-Earth for some of my San Diego players, who tended to a fairly R-rated play style. I didn't come up with rules tweaks to make it impossible for them to play sexually active characters. Instead, I told them at the pre-session that in fidelity to Tolkien's narrative style, we would fade to black between the first kiss and the birth of the first child—and they went along with that, though there were certainly some subplots about romantic passion.

My feeling is that rules are not an effective way for either players or GMs to get [other] players to stop or avoid doing anything. If you rely on rules, you simply motivate players to find ways to work around those rules; it turns into a technical challenge. What I find more effective is to secure the agreement of the players to a campaign where sex, or deadly force, or backstabbing, or whatever doesn't take place, because they choose not to have their characters do that sort of thing. And the time to do that is when I first offer the campaign as an option, when I both specify anything that will be excluded, and define what play WILL focus on. Then if players are attracted to that focus, and agree to play in that campaign, we're mostly good; and if they aren't and don't, well, my plans to run something like that weren't viable to start with.

Or, in short, the way to get the style of play you want is not to enforce it through the rules, but to have a meeting of minds before play begins.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I think it's still useful as a guide for what sorts of weapons/attacks are acceptable.

EDIT: Also I think weapons as Intimidation tools is a cool idea.