Steve Jackson Games Forums - TV series with ideas for GURPS

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Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

I think 480 points is the maximum. That includes +100% for Summonable.

Compare that to buying a Wildcard skill at skill 21 (for someone with base stat 10), which is 156 points.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anders (Post 1961252)

I think 480 points is the maximum. That includes +100% for Summonable.

Compare that to buying a Wildcard skill at skill 21 (for someone with base stat 10), which is 156 points.

I counted 300pts, as there's a +1 on the base skill cost for supernatural sources of info, but had forgotten about the +100% for Summonable. Adding that, I guess, makes 600pts, although I'm not sure you can combine Summonable and Always Available- they basically do the same thing.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by evileeyore (Post 1961242)

Well obviously she's soooo super-duper smart she secretly invented AI and turned all her lab equipment into capable lab assistants. She does name them all after all...

:|

Yes. But is she supposed to be a realistic human? I mean ... Even if a lot of TV series are quite realistic, and are even supposed to happen in our real world, they often have a lot of features that are not. They are most often at the fringe between realism and heroism ... And GURPS is precisely perfect to handle that fringe ...

Fringe, here again: one of the best series ever for GURPS ideas!

;-)

Oh, I didn't tell why it could make a good GURPS source of ideas! First, for its characters. Each of them have so many and well thought advantages and disadvantages that they could have been built with GURPS rules (I'm even wondering if some of the scenarists don't know our favorite game). Second, it happens in our world and a parallel one with different technology levels. Finally, it is quite realistic, but with a lot of heroic features ... Exactly as most other "realistic" TV series ... A must, for GURPS rules.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flyndaran (Post 1961197)

I'm not even talking about her impossible super genius and decades of experience and qualifications. It's that there's not enough time to do the work of 100 people no matter how smart she is.

It's rare that any TV or movie depiction of lab work is remotely realistic.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1960881)

A plantation growing what, or slaves working what? What's valuable enough to be worth hauling 8 light-years back to Sirius?

That's a great question, and it depends on how difficult/costly it is for them to lift stuff out of Earth's gravity-well, and then get it to Sirius. They had anti-grav, so if that's cheap and the FTL drive is, too, they could just consider Earth the way we do China -- a source for cheap labor they can treat as slaves.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1960881)

V suffers from a problem in translation to a game that a lot of TV does, PCs may ask questions that characters can be carefully forbidden from asking by the writer/director.

The only thing that really makes sense, as an invasion plot, is that they want to move to Earth, or colonize it. That can be made to make sense, if we assume that habitable worlds are rare, and it's harder to maintain artificial ecosystems and habitats than we think it is.

It may be the reason the Visitors came because they had no other choice. If these are the refugees from a lost war, then the ability to use Earth as a plantation suddenly becomes a lot more desirable.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1960881)

(These assumptions could in fact be real-world true, for all we know.)

The other big logical problem is that if they've got Visitor-level tech, facing a late 20C/early 21C Earth...resistance is futile. So you need a reason why the enemy is operating without using 99% of their potential.

If they need the human labor, and have absolutely no desire to destroy the ecosystem because they need that even more, that would constrain their actions.

However, the fact that such capability exists means the path to victory involves a whole lot more than guns and knives. You almost have to wipe out their spacecraft before doing much more than sporadic acts of asymmetrical resistance on Earth.

You'd have to do the George Washington thing, really. Build up a force capable of beating them on terms they recognize as valid. Acquisition of their technology for study would be key, and the early part of the campaign focuses on social engineering to get hold of such items.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran (Post 1960885)

V aliens were impossibly earth life compatible up to and including reproducing with us, something no other actually related species can do.

Yeah, this was freakin' stupid. I stopped watching the show as soon as this happened.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flyndaran (Post 1960885)

If they wanted to colonize they should have just bombarded from space and/or experiment on some animals and unleash killer viruses.

Yep. You have to give them a reason to consider human labor and a functional ecosystem as valuable.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gollum (Post 1961036)

Fringe would make an excellent GURPS Campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_%28TV_series%29

One of the guys in the Denver GURPS Group is running a campaign based on this very idea. It's a little high-powered for me, and I kinda resisted watching Fringe for a long time (I think conspiracy theory is too stupid to be enjoyable, but that show uses it brilliantly), but it looks like a lot of fun, based on the early campaign thread on our site.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr_Sandman (Post 1961280)

It's rare that any TV or movie depiction of lab work is remotely realistic.

Except that her character is cartoonish when compared to other lab techs of other shows.
When each C.S.I. character does the work of a dozen real life people, Abby does the work of a hundred all in a couple hours of in setting time.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

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Originally Posted by evileeyore (Post 1960970)

It does if Earthlings are like unto caviar to the Visitors. No expense spared to ship the delicacies across the galaxy...

They didn't have faster than light travel so they were here to stay. They were eating people just because people were in plentiful supply and it was their way of asserting their dominance.

Re: TV series with ideas for GURPS

Quote:

Originally Posted by tshiggins (Post 1961407)

...
Yep. You have to give them a reason to consider human labor and a functional ecosystem as valuable.

Slaves are not economically viable except in very specific circumstances and/or TLs below 5.
"A functional ecosystem" is very vague. As a conquering alien, I would at most care about oceanic algae for O2 production and CO2 sequesteration. But ultra tech could easily help that along if bombardment caused mass die offs.