Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

Keen new perspective
On a knotty conundrum
Can sever the snag

— A Phrygian

As its name makes clear, GURPS is by design generic and universal, meaning it offers tools to handle any theme, genre, or setting you throw at it: a set complete enough to tackle each challenge, although you might not always need everything in the toolbox. But play style is a tougher proposition – it's the product of the preferences and personalities of a specific group of gamers. No one system can promise that it will work for everybody. Fortunately, GURPS is friendly to those who want to customize the tools themselves.

Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V offers those who like to tinker some new perspectives on the core rules that might suit a particular gaming group or campaign better than the "plain vanilla" versions. Its helpful heresy consists of:

Opus Longa, Pugna Brevis

By Sean Punch

Almost all roleplaying games struggle with the balance between blazing-fast action scenes and tense technical or intellectual challenges. Each player has a different idea of what's fun, and this is reflected in the wide range of character archetypes found in most genres – especially ones that assume a heterogeneous adventuring team, like GURPS Action and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. The obvious resolution is to adjust the timeframes of one or both kinds of activities so everybody meets in middle. Here are some thoughts on how to do this, straight from the guy who designed GURPS Fourth Edition, Action, and Dungeon Fantasy.

Eidetic Memory: Describing Vehicles

By David L. Pulver

We know: "Where is GURPS Vehicle Design?" In the meantime, how about a compromise? From the author of GURPS Vehicles for GURPS Third Edition come these guidelines for converting real-world information into usable vehicle stat blocks. This isn't a design system, but it does provide all the essential details for those whose campaigns need detailed vehicle stats, but whose play style leans away from design mini-games and toward quickly assigning believable numbers to things that zoom across the countryside, soar through the air, and ply the seas.

The Fifth Attribute

By Christopher R. Rice

The GURPS library is full of things that could be seen as additional attributes, or at least as new secondary characteristics, but nearly all of them matter only to narrow subsets of characters; e.g., Energy Reserve is its own thing, but a thing nobody but power-users and spellcasters cares about. What's cool about Quintessence is that everybody has it. Sure, it's most important those with supernatural gifts . . . but even if that isn't your bag, you had best make sure you don't use it as a dump stat. Not unless you want to be known as "the one who always ends up cursed, mind-controlled, and drained by vampires." Especially psychic vampires, who get a whole new ability in the bargain.

Conditional Injury

By Douglas Cole

Since we're tinkering with fundamental attributes anyway . . . what about Hit Points? They're a great bookkeeping tool, to be sure. Yet they don't represent anything in the real world, so they can feel a little out of place in realistic campaigns. At the same time, they encourage picky bean-counting that doesn't suit the roll-and-shout nature of a lot of cinematic gaming. This alternative looks at what matters most in both cases: What your wounds actually mean, whether in medical terms or dramatic ones. We won't promise it'll make taking a beating more fun, but it might just pep up the game!

Editor Steven Marsh provides the customary intro and extro. His Random Thought Table takes a couple of sharp kicks at two more pillars of GURPS: character advancement and skills. If you do it right, nothing falls on your head.

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Store Link: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG37-2720
Preview PDF: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-2720_preview.pdf

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

Sad to see Pyramid winding down. However....

THANK YOU, DAVID PULVER! The guidelines for Hnd/SR are just what I've been missing for many of my vehicle stats.

Chris's article w/ Quintessence looks like it might come in handy in the future, though I'm not likely to change my existing campaign to fit.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

Someone needs to go over the encoding of the images/artwork in this because for some reason advancing to a page with any images/artwork causes lag/slowdown.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

Some thoughts:

Opus Longa, Pugna Brevis is kind of two articles joined by a common theme. The first part seems very useful to me. The Life is a Battlefield bit I could have done without, but maybe others will like it.

Describing Vehicles is very welcome; although my own notes on converting real-world vehicles to GURPS already covered most of it, it's good to have confirmation that my approach was generally OK and to have some alternative options for figuring out tricky details.

The Fifth Attribute is an interesting idea. Basically POW from BRP in GURPS.

Conditional Injury is the highlight of the issue for me. I especially like that it gives the option of replacing shock with ongoing pain; I've long thought that injury in GURPS seems rather forgiving in that respect, especially when in comes to crippled limbs. My main problem with it is that there doesn't seem to be any real reason for Robustness Threshold and Wound Potential to actually exist. As far as I can tell, you could get similar results by simply comparing damage to HP and translating that directly into Severity. HP/10 would be Severity -6, HP/5 would be Severity -5, etc. My other quibbles are that the system for cumulative damage seems a little fiddly with the extra rolls, the Deadly Fatigue system seems like it could be replaced by just having characters die when they lose enough FP, and the roll to ignore pain seems like it should be based on Will rather than HT. Still a very interesting article and probably one I will actually use, possibly after tweaking it a bit to suit my taste.

Fluid Skills is very interesting (and another bit which seems slightly reminiscent of BRP mechanics) but probably not something I would ever use in a game.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

I wrote a review last night.
https://refplace.blogspot.com/2018/1...alternate.html

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

We definitely want issues to work correctly! We haven't changed any of our PDF-saving settings in quite some time, so I don't have any ideas offhand what's going wrong. But if you're still having problems, please email me at smarsh@sjgames.com and I'll try to figure out what's going on.

If you do drop me a line, it'll save time if you let me know what kind of system, device, and PDF viewer you're using. And if previous issues have been working before now, you might want to try re-opening those to see if they continue to work; if they're exhibiting odd behavior, it might be an issue with an updated PDF viewer.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

I bought it without thinking twice. I love the Alternate GURPS series. I would like to see more.

My thoghts so far:

The Fifth Attribute: although is not a new idea (Thaumatology has it), I enjoyed seeing an entire article dedicated to developing it. I'm looking forward to discussing with you guys here about it. There are some points that would have been good if they had discussed about, such as increasing the point cost (some suggestion would already be good) and the impact on the magic variables (such as maximum damage, healing, etc.).

Conditional Injury: I still have to take a deeper read, but I enjoyed finally seeing rules that cover scratches and minor injuries that do not pile up with the rest.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

I would replace Magery with a Magical Talent for increasing those variables but maybe the authors thoughts were increasing Quintessence would do that. One of my big criticisems of the article in my review was overlooking that kind of stuff in the article.

I submitted an article for this issue and it wasnt picked, since there wont be another chance I'll post a version of it on my blog and add in some ideas about this too.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

But the thing is it would cost more...

Let's pick the same PC with each rule.

RAW -> IQ 15 [100] + Magery 3 [35] + ER (Mana) 10 [30] = 165 pt and you have a mininum SL 15/16 for spells.

P120 -> IQ 15 [100] + QN 18 [80] + Magery 0 [5] + QP 2 [6] = 191 points for the same effect (and keeping the mental skills).

The same PC, with each rule.

Re: Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V
 

I kind of like the idea of a "power" attribute for those times when you don't want to base magic off smarts.