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Old 10-29-2010, 02:35 PM   #1
panton41
 
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Default Game where everyone's SM is high or low

Kind of as a thought experiment, but also practical to a few game ideas I'm batting around; what if everyone in the game has the same high or low size modifier. Mostly I'm interesting in scaling down since GURPS scales up fairly well, but like what if everyone in the game was, say, a 6" tall fairy or human intelligence but otherwise normal animals (Bunnies and Burrows, The Secret of NIMH) or centered around a "little people" concept like the 80s cartoon "The Littles"?
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:41 PM   #2
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Dude, we aren't small. The world is big!
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:50 PM   #3
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Default Re: Game where everyone's SM is high or low

T-Bone's Gulliver rules from his fan site are nice.
I think Gurps has a kludge of a tiny species of people in one of the alternate earth books. (The smaller you are, the lower your terminal velocity making falls much less dangerous.)
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Old 10-29-2010, 03:00 PM   #4
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Default Re: Game where everyone's SM is high or low

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Dude, we aren't small. The world is big!
That's more or less my assumption on approaching it. PCs are SM+0 for all game purposes like attributes, damage, etc., everything else is comparatively larger. So if the PCs are, say, SM-6, then a human and anything human scaled is suddenly SM+6 and scaled accordingly.

My thought is that if you don't do that the system breaks down pretty quickly.
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Old 10-29-2010, 03:43 PM   #5
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Default Re: Game where everyone's SM is high or low

What you don't want to play with realistic plus magically sapient insects? Getting blown thousands of body lengths by a 1 mph wind... crushing attacks just knocking you around with no damage, ...?
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Old 10-29-2010, 03:54 PM   #6
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Default Re: Game where everyone's SM is high or low

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Originally Posted by ciaran_skye View Post
... or centered around a "little people" concept like the 80s cartoon "The Littles"?
Heck with the cartoon, I grew up on the books. :)
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Old 10-29-2010, 03:54 PM   #7
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What you don't want to play with realistic plus magically sapient insects? Getting blown thousands of body lengths by a 1 mph wind... crushing attacks just knocking you around with no damage, ...?
That's basically my point. I think GURPS does best between SM-1 and SM+1 and it scales up decently because "big things" are very common. Going down much beyond that scale of a little person or Halfling and you start getting weird results.

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Heck with the cartoon, I grew up on the books. :)
I recall the books existing, but my library didn't have them. I read the NIMH books so many times in middle school the librarian told me I couldn't get it anymore. When I was young I found the concept of "small folk" fascinating.
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Old 10-29-2010, 04:16 PM   #8
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Default Re: Game where everyone's SM is high or low

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I recall the books existing, but my library didn't have them. I read the NIMH books so many times in middle school the librarian told me I couldn't get it anymore. When I was young I found the concept of "small folk" fascinating.
If you want to do something based of the general concept of the Littles, I recommend finding the books, they're fairly good, considering the target age, and will provide better inspiration than the series did.

Now, game wise, my main thought has been to do mostly what you've said. Whatever the base SM of all the characters is, that's the new +0 mechanical SM. Also, if using mapped combat, divide normal height in half and use that as the standard hex size. Just translating BM as hexes should get you correct 'in genre' movement speeds if the characters are supposed to be tiny humans.

Further questions such as what to do with ST—especially if tiny/human interaction is supposed to come up very often, I haven't gotten around to pondering.
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Old 10-29-2010, 05:31 PM   #9
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What you don't want to play with realistic plus magically sapient insects? Getting blown thousands of body lengths by a 1 mph wind... crushing attacks just knocking you around with no damage, ...?
So how do you model that? Use SM-0 as the default for insects and say the giant hand does knockback only?

A 1 MPH wind is a radical change of campaign setting. We're done with jungle fighting in the lawn. Now we're going to adventure in the kitchen.
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Old 10-29-2010, 06:49 PM   #10
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Default Re: Game where everyone's SM is high or low

IIRC, in GURPS 3e Bunnies and Burroughs, all the little rabbit characters had normal human stats. If I were to run a "little people" game, I'd probably do it that way. There's just so freaking much to consider. I'd never try to run a realistic one at all.
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