Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I've followed (and contributed to)that thread and still can not fathom where you got the idea that PCs should be between 10-13 HP and never more than 20 even when made with 500+ cp.. That's not what the rules say and it certainly isn't what I've said.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

It might have been me taking MBurr0003's statement on page 3 too to heart. He made three assertions with this sort of thing.

1) "no 10-15 is normal."

2) "I would not recommend allowing more than +3 over normal."

3) "don't have more powerful than 5d weapons. " (again with the "we have a monster manual full of cool baddies to fight that you should totally never ever ever ever put in game. They are just for looking at, not for playing against. There are plenty of small arms like battle rifles and tl9 assault rifles that do 6d+ damage)

You add in other commenters supporting statements like

"lots of things die when they get shot, that's sort of the point."

And I walked away with the distinct impression that even if it wasn't EXPRESSLY against the rules, it was against their spirit. There are additional statements expressing the doubts of the effectiveness of increased HP but... well having 30hp so you need to lose 20 before the game rules say "alright you can't roll successful defenses anymore!" is preeeeetttttyyyy effective...

Added: Originally I was against higher HP because I was worried about having melee options be like fleabites but all the arguing over the past (weeks?) really helped me understand the rules a bit better. gurps when it says 2d6 swing doesn't MEAN 2d6 damage... that's more like 4d6 damage for that weapon... In a setting with vampiric or cybernetic strength well that's an option still to at least be semi threatening to a player character with 30hp even in context of guns as a comparison.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Nope, there's no general rule against making superhuman characters. There are only specific campaigns where the local GM has limited character abilities.

As the GM you've already decided that your PCs aren't going to be "normal" humans so what assault weapons do the limbs of unarmored average humans is pretty irrelevant (except for when your PCs shoot such persons and your PCs will want those weapons to be effective then).

If you go to the Martial Arts book it's fairly simple to make a Sumo Wrestler with 40 HP. However, even when you do you can not just soak up attacks into your HP like a D&D character. Gurps characters need to avoid being hit (and wear armor too).

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

It's not that extreme. If my normal Dodge is 13 (because I'm a super cool vampire with Speed 9 and Combat Reflexes), +3 for using a large shield and +2 for Acrobatic Dodge, and I get hit for lots of damage and my Dodge gets halved to 6, +3 for shield and +2 for Acrobatic Dodge, I still succeed on my Dodge (11) about 62% of the time. I'm dodging like hamstrung greased lightning but it's still greased lightning. If I Dodge and Drop for another +3 in exchange for ending my turn prone, I've got effective Dodge 14 and a 90% chance of success.

If you get seriously wounded you have to adapt and start being more cautious, but you still get to succeed on some defense rolls.

100% agreed. 10-13 HP seems too low for vampires.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

There's a 24 HP vampire PC right on page 321 of Basic. It's not that there's anything wrong with high HP vampires.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

One other thing to keep in mind (adding to this particular post) is the fact that when you roll for crippling damage, you roll vs HT of the character. If said character succeeds at their HT saving roll vs Crippling injury, their injury is not lasting - and use of the crippled item in question returns once you are fully healed. If you fail your HT saving roll, it is a lasting injury that will take months to recover from. ONLY if you crit fail the HT saving roll for Crippling injury does this issue become permanent.

Now, the real issue here is what happens during the game play? THAT is entirely dependent upon what tactical situation you've hit your players with. If all of the characters are rendered combat ineffective (for what ever reason), you have to decdie what the NPC's response will be to the circumstances. If it was a battle to the death, winner take all - well, that is unfortunately, a Total Party Kill. If one of the characters is captured, then you simply decide what the NPCs will do with their captured individual. Maybe the remaining player characters will have a chance to mount a rescue. Maybe a secondary group shows up to rescue the player characters, but then tell the group "you owe us" and then send them on a mission of some kind that is going to be TOUGH as hell, and that the players had better bring their A-Game to the table.

If you always spare your players - that will become a part of your Style as GM. If they never have to worry about the consequences of their actions, they will play that way until either the campaign ends, or you pull out all of your hair and run screaming into the streets or something in between. ;)

Me? I let them have the fruits of their victories, along with the tears of their defeats. You need to have the specte of defeat and have it mean something if you really want them to enjoy the fruits of their victories.

SOMETIMES, your players will pull off something that is so blindingly Spectacularly perfect, that as GM, you smack yourself quietly thinking "I should have anticipated that, but didn't". Do NOT steal their victory from their grasp! Let them savor it, and remember it for 3 to 4 decades later!

To this day, my wife recalls how she asked a trucker "you running empty?" while she and her team mates were trying to dodge the bad guy assassins on their tail. The Trucker (picture Jerry Reed) said "Shure honey, as empty as a poor kid's lunch box". She asked him "how much to rent his rig and take cargo to California" He gave her an answer that was a given amount per mile and she said "Done". The trailer was wider than the car they were in - and she knew that the truck stops (it was Car Wars) wouldn't give the time of day to strangers asking about a brother trucker's routing - and the adventure came to a halt. PERFECT ending as it were in my eyes.

In any event - I'm willing to discuss these aspects of gaming via Fantasy Grounds - Monday through Fridays, 8 AM through Noon Eastern Standard Time. I am more than willing to share some of my "techniques" for GM'ing off the cuff, because NO campaign survives contact with player characters. You can either run a sandbox campaign and let the players explore your game universe, or you can tie them to a "road" style adventure where they start at point A, and have to go through B, C, D, E and F before they can arrive at G.

True story: Scientists wanted to measure the intelligence of a Gorilla by giving it only THREE ways out of a room. They were certain they could control all of the variables. The Gorilla showed them the fourth method out of the room when the Gorilla ripped the one door off its hinges and went through it. Your players will do the same to you as GM. As my wife tells me often...

"It is our JOB to make mincemeat of your plans".

So - that's all I can say. I will suggest that if you want advice as a newbie GM, that you open up a thread either in GURPS area or in Role Playing area - and simply posit your scenario saying "what can go wrong?"

Make it a point to remember who responded to this thread and ask people privately or via email "hey, this is my scenario, help me refine it".

I have to admit, I came close to trying to dig up my copy of GURPS VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE and trying to translate it into GURPS 4e just to feed my itch to see what it would look like. Sadly, if I did that, I'd have to inflict it on a guy who wants to play GURPS CYBERPUNK instead.

if I had my druthers, I'd rather reconvene the 1920's campaign set in New Orleans. One of the two players dropped out, and Iv'e been thinking about restarting that campaign up on Monday Nights again.

Now if ever there was a need for a GM to tread carefully and NOT kill of his player characters gratuitously, it would be in a two player campaign set in the 1920's! On that note, I'll sign off. I've got end of Month processing tonight and that is a definite "all hands on deck" environment. Night all.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I'll note this only holds when at between that part's crippling threshold and twice the crippling threshold - an attack that deals 2x or more the crippling threshold automatically permanently cripples the body part, with no roll to avoid this. This doesn't sit quite well with me, but that's the RAW (honestly, part of me feels limbs should be treated somewhat like characters with some amount of HP - at 0 HP and below, they risk falling "unconscious" - temporary crippling - when used, at -1xHP they risk being "destroyed" - permanent crippling, although failure by 1 or 2 might mean lasting crippling instead - and at -5HP they are automatically "destroyed" - but that would probably work out as being too complicated at the table). That said, canonically a lot of Permanent Crippling can canonically be fixed with TL 7+ surgery (B424; I believe this is expanded on in Bio Tech), and the GM can certainly rule this is the case for crippling due to firearm hits. Heck, there can be cases where a severed digit or limb can be saved and reattached; it typically never winds up working as well as before, but that can often be disregarded for a game.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

No, it isn't. Did you start out looking at the 3e Basic Set that would go with the V:tA book? 3e started out pretty focussed on 100-point characters, but expanded its range a fair bit. 4e has always been aimed at a wide range of point totals.
Having 30 or 40 HP doesn't let a character give up wearing armour, or mean they don't need to bother with making defence rolls. It does mean you can survive bigger attacks while doing those things, and last longer if there are lots of opponents.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Since this is Hal's thread, I can give an answer that would have been off topic on Colonel Klink's similar recent thread.

My primary strategy for avoiding killing player characters is to follow a practice of not fudging dice rolls, and not modifying the rules to make combat less lethal, and being up front about this with my players. If I'm running a campaign with this approach, I'll say something like the following in the prospectus:

* Emphasis on weird horror and the academic life; violence will be unusual and not pretty; those who know too much will go mad.

* Play style will be mildly cinematic, but with realistic injuries.

* Combat will be realistic and death will be possible, as will legal consequences for going too far with your abilities.

I have several points to make about this as an approach:

It avoids player character death partly by giving players an incentive to have their characters do something other than draw knives or guns or cast deadly spells, and thus to avoid giving their adversaries a reason to use such methods.

At the same time, if player characters do face a situation where they have to resort to deadly force, it makes the choice dramatic, not only for the characters, but for the players, because they have skin in the game—they might lost their characters and the work of designing them. For the character, the choice is "I know I'm risking my life, but this is something that needs doing"; for the player, it's "I gained points by giving the character traits that make this fight necessary, so now I have to pay for them" or "having my character go into this fight is good roleplaying." (There are few more intense moments in the film of The Lord of the Rings than Faramir and his men riding out to a doomed struggle against the forces of Mordor, while the people of Gondor throw flowers at their horses' feet.) Since I usually value drama more than action, I think this is a plus.

Players still have some reason to give their characters combat skills, if only so that they can pose a believable threat to foes who, realistically, also have a reason not to throw their lives away in an unneeded battle.

The risk of death doesn't need to be all that great to have this salutary effect. Certain death in GURPS means reducing a foe to -5 x HP, which is 60 points of damage for an ordinary human, and may be more if you take damage resistance and increased hit points into account; buying up HT, or taking Fit or Hard to Kill, makes it significantly less likely that death will occur short of that much damage—but there is still a risk. On the average, player characters will get into multiple fights with severe consequences before anyone actually dies—but the chance that it might happen will still be on the players' minds.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

If you want melee and guns to be more similar, boost the melee. Make them very fine due to high tech materials, or make the vibro weapons, or give them other tech advantages to provide AD and so on. Then, give the players armour so that the more balanced melee and guns are suitably resisted to average the kind of damage that you want to get through. Then allow the players have a few extra HP and a decent HT. Don't take head shots against the PCs (or give warning shots that make them pull their heads in when you want them to feel like they need to back off - "that shot nearly took your ear off - they're aiming for your heads!" and so on.

In short, you're concerned that melee weapons don't do enough damage by comparison, so boost them. Then you can use armour to balance it all out and thus avoid killing your PCs.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

TBH it was way too low for any character in a high combat firearm laden setting! My campaign will have the possibility of three paths of cybernetics, raw human magic, or vampirism for player characters to achieve heroic results. Even the cybernetic path has it's own magic it can tap into.

As such I was principally concerned with just getting the basics working, having good fun gunfights with normal human characters without it being instantly lethal first. With the basics done I figured I'd move on to the supernatural and superhuman power scale. When I started looking at even vampires with supernatural abilities with the base HP range not being able to cope? I started to panic!

What I love about gurps is the combat is attack and defense. There's counters and movement and all sorts of things you can do. I just knew that these weapons would EVENTUALLY connect and they need to connect sometimes in order for players to feel the threat so I was worried about not having things padded enough so they could take a hit, be reminded how *dangerous* this all is but not have all those instant "you lose" crippling effects fall into place. They are all quite "realistic" but they are not very... well they aren't good gameplay for adventurers. It's the opposite of normal gameplay.

When a player is losing you don't normally put the boot in and intentionally finish the job as gurps is systemically designed to do. (sorry if the player has a HIGH dodge roll of 12 and the game halves it you get a 6... which is basically "get a critical roll or you're dead.")

One of the things that I am thinking about is if I as a GM can get players to think about combat like Kenshi. With decent HT at 15-16 (heck even a 14) it's pretty much impossible to straight up die on a failed HT roll that isn't a crit failure. You're "mortally wounded." You're out but not *technically dead.* In Kenshi... well it happens, bad guy cuts you up, steals your sandwich and leaves you for dead. High toughness (HT in gurps) is how you survive that fate and don't bleed to death before you can wake up and bandage your wounds. It's the will to survive. I wonder if a house rule increasing the margin of self recovery from that is a good idea?

But it's hard to change player perspective that this is part of the game and not painful gameplay. How to set it up so they know they can get k/o but they will always have the chance for vengeance?

Y'know you might have hit upon a slight problem of my perspective. I started playing gurps as a kid with 3rd edition. Every game I ever played started with 100-150 point characters then.

Now I got a 4th edition book and the VTM book I'm using for GUIDELINES for my setting. I like the concepts of the powers in it (I don't like some lore things like generations from Cain ect.) I've already been adjusting it like changing celerity's speed per level, partially this is because I want a human burning through fatigue with a reflex booster implant to be on par with a vampire of the same level of boost.

However one of the things that is taking me getting used to is a 250 point base character (recommended in the quite dated cyberpunk book I found in a bargain bin... I'm not sure what edition it was made for... I use it only to get a "feel" but it's rules are other wise pretty useless it seems.) From the excessively grounded in reality 100-150 point perspective it was too easy for me to latch onto "humans should have 10-13 HP." Which means the scale of combat I want just... is too much risk for the player characters.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I've never said that, and it's wrong anyway, unless they also can never dodge (or parry if the monsters make melee attacks). I'd be quite happy for 500 point character in a game that sounds fairly cinematic to have 20 hit points if being tough is their 'thing'.

I wouldn't know about that. I've run games with 100-125 point characters facing foes in the 'hellhound' range, and bad guys with submachineguns while the PCs mostly had pistols and shotguns and no armour. The only death was when they called the bluff of a guy with an old 7.62x54R rifle and one of the PCs took a hit in the chest when he was all out of Luck.

My 'Traveller' games started with 200 point characters, and they've faced a lot of scary opponents over the years, and as the PCs generally have decent armour, those opponents tend to have powerful weapons. Despite that deaths have been rare, and even serious injuries have been memorable for their rarity. All the (PC) deaths I can recall were from taking gambles, knowing that a character death was possible and losing that gamble (much more often the gamble would be won, and the PCs would win).

I've offered advice as best I can, but really I think you're over-selling the problem. Have you run an adventure for a few sessions, as a test run, to see how much of a problem it actually is in play? Or fought out some scenarios, with the character having various advantages and builds to see what works and what doesn't?

Now, I absolutely will agree that if there's no decent body armour available and full-bore rifles are common, 'normal' (sub 200-point, not built with exotic advantages) people will get hurt or killed fairly often if they get hit. But the solution is to make the characters you don't want to that happen to not-normal, unless you want everyone in the game universe to find guns to be only moderately annoying, in which case you should nerf the guns to match the universe. If you want cinematic characters, they need cinematic advantages (Luck, Enhanced Dodge, etc.) and the points to pay for them, and/or the option to adjust outcomes by expending points ("Influencing Success Rolls", Campaigns, p.347).

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

And I did so under two assumptions:

1 - That was for normal folks. 2 - You were trying to emulate Vampire: The Masquerade. Once I realize you had no desire to adapt VtM into GURPS I started aiming you at using Unliving, higher HP and DR. Or as I said, just do what you want and nerf firearms, but beware the knock on effect of making swords and axes king.

Where you get "you should never the cool bestiary" from I have no idea, and yes, if you're pitching a fit over a 7d rifle, people will advise to not allow NPCs to carry all those battle and assault rifles. That's just sensible.

That's not even accurate either. If a weapon does "2d sw damage", it's doing 2d sw damage. Now it might do more or less wounds*, but the dice do not change.

* Due to cutting or impaling wounding modifiers and hit location modifiers, as well as less from DR.




I was happy with the 30 HP, DR 10 monstrosity I made in a 250 point Dungeon Fantasy game. I did "play carefully" in order to avoid "breaking the game", not be too much of a threat or too efficient at dealing with foes, thus ensuring the GM never wanted to throw something to "truly challenge the damage sponge", because I know how easily that can become a TPK when the damage sponge drops due to bad rolls and the rest of the party is suddenly facing a monster they cannot handle.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

The only "cyberpunk" book ever made for Gurps was early 90s and so early 3e.. It mentions the Secret Service incident on the cover.

"Modern 4e cyber is in Ultratech and Bio-tech. UT also has more armor and rules for disguised armor that is very useful for cyberpunk.

Incidentally, this "soft" clothing armor helps balance melee against guns. It's base 12/4 which is DR 12 against Piercing and Cutting but only DR 4 against everything else.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Which has the amusing effect that it's more effective vs armour-piercing arrows than standard broadheads.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Yup the book is positively ancient. It's... for getting the feel of the setting only at this point it's so dated. The cybernetics prices both in points and $ don't mate up very well. My campaign I'm going with the ultra tech rules $1k per character point and using their general guide for rules on how many points something costs. Working on a regeneration implant which will be stupid expensive but it's a way humans can "catch up" so to speak with vampires.

The tailored armor is something I'm really thinking about and sorting how to offer it in a quick digestible way for my players during session zero as their starting armor. I'd prefer it would be 8/4 as starting armor (so enemies with regular rounds in pistols could at least hurt them) but we can use AP rounds or something lol.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I'm not sure about any of the following.

Well. There's another joking expression you'll hear around here besides "That Other Game" - "the Cult of Stat Normalisation". That means that some people think it's awkward to let mundane human PCs have very high or low attributes, or only very rarely, because it gets a bit silly - so no DX 16 (unless the character is specifically supposed to be a world-class athlete) or IQ 23, and no HP 25 because a human only has so much tissue so where's it coming from?

However, not every GM and not every game subscribes to that way of thinking. You'll notice that several of the example characters in the Iconic Characters section in Basic Set have an attribute at 16 or more, even the humans. And the Dungeon Fantasy series seems to take attributes like that for granted for heroic dungeon delvers - which is one way that their characters are routinely 250 points or more. Some people on here have mentioned that in some games they've ditched even the "all humans of roughly the same size have roughly the same amount of HP" rule of thumb.

Not that it applies to your game anyway, as some people have mentioned - your PCs aren't mundane humans, so it makes perfect sense for some of them to have superhumanly high HP, even if you care whether things make sense or not.

You talk as if you're thinking in terms of the D&D model where one of the main ways characters get stronger and become able to fight bigger monsters as they level up is by gaining more HP. Well, as far as I can tell, the only thing you have to do to make GURPS work like that, if you want to, is to allow players to spend accumulated points on buying more HP (it's only 2 points per point), and there's actually nothing against that in the rules besides a vague admonition not to let players spend accumulated points on things that don't make logical sense unless you don't mind it not making logical sense. It doesn't seem to be the usual playstyle for GURPS - it's more common to keep the HP mostly fixed but increase skills and advantages so you get hit less and/or survive apparently-deadly hits better - but I can't see that it would break anything, since GURPS is designed to allow for monsters and superheroes with lots of HP without the rules malfunctioning.

Yeah, I'm not sure whether Colonel_Klink has done any test combats yet - there seems to be a lot of arguing back and forth "it would play out like this" "no it wouldn't play out like this" about his scenario, so doing a few test runs, if they haven't yet, might clear up some of that rather than argue about what might hypothetically happen.

Ooh, that looks interesting.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

You can offer them 'old-dated' TL8 'early concealable vests' (from High-Tech), and have the bad guys only shoot for centre of mass (the Torso), and introduce aimed shots for elsewhere and random hit locations later on. Also, tailored armour from UT can be made thinner, so rather than DR12/4* armoured jackets and trousers, give them 'light' armoured long underwear with DR8/3* (and try to avoid head, hand, and foot hits, though adding armoured shoes, gloves, and an armoured beanie will cover everything but the face and neck).

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

He did do a test combat, in which a couple of skill 10 mooks accidentally headshot a test PC, in part due to two rules errors: treating skull as -5 instead of -7, and allowing 3 to crit succeed even with an effective skill below 3. On learning about the first error, the good Colonel said that assuaged some of his discomfort; he did not comment on the second error, which should have made the headshot impossible even if it were armed at the face. (Because there was a -3 range penalty.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Pyramid articles for past/modern/future armor also exist, such that you can develop your own Cyberpunk era armor. Here is one such suit of armor I crafted using those pyramid rules:


ARASAKA Limited SPYDER COAT:
Designed from a more utilitarian styled light “Duster” style coat, the Arasaka Spyder coat was designed with an eye towards a more fashionable “overcoat” than anything else. Made of the finest synthetic Arachnoweave, this coat will cover up to half of the throat if the collar is pulled up, otherwise none of the throat if pulled down. In addition, it covers the entirety of the users arms and torso, right down to the user’s knees. Available in many colors and as of this time, 14 different patterns, the Spyder Coat released Fall of 2047, will be a good addition to any executive’s clothing wardrobe. This clothing is for discriminating buyers whose wealth demands both style and functionality. Anyone who recognizes this as an Arasaka Limited, will usually be suitably impressed – as the coat itself is almost as expensive as a small car.

Cost: $39,000
Weight: 8.2 lbs

Game specifics: This armor can be targeted using the chinks in armor rules. Its DR is 24/6 – 24 against bullets, and 6 against other forms of attacks. Time to don is 3 seconds for full DR, or 2 seconds but with a gap in armor with a DR 0 (the front being unbuttoned/unzipped) that is visible from the front.

Note: the standard Overcoat used by Arasaka employees or Guards costs as little as $9,800 for essentially the same stats. The difference between the Spyder Coat and the workman's duster is a matter of status. Wearing a Standard Arasaka Duster as a common workman will not gain the +3 bonus for wealth that the Spyder Coat does.


Arachnoweave Balaclava - covers the face, skull, and neck, leaving only the eyes exposed. Comes in multiple colors such as black, grey, white, along with urban camouflage and battlefield camouflage patterns of various nations.

Cost: $1,300
Weight: 2.2 lbs

DR 24/

Unlike the Duster style armor, the balaclava does not suffer from chinks in armor rule.


You won't find these in the GURPS ULTRATECH because they are built using the Pyramid rules I've alluded to in the past. It is simple work to craft an excel spreadsheet that permits one to handle ALL of the calculations on the fly where you simply select an armor material, fit type, character weight (in case you want to have fitted armor for someone who is 210 lbs instead of the stock standard 150 lbs.) along with the area you want covered. I've set mine up so that I can either have coverage for an entire area such as Torso, or I can simply armor just parts of the torso.

The spreadsheet is not hard to create. Google how to create drop down lists in Excel, along with liberal use of Vlookup, and you can easily create a database of armor materials, weight per DR, cost per pound, etc - until the entire spreadsheet can do all the grunt work for you.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Well, someone has forgotten GURPS 3e Cyberworld exists.



That's fixable by making armor-piercing arrows impaling as they should be, instead of pi.



Point of order (nitpick really), it's not a "setting book", it's a genre book. GURPS 3e Cyberpunk is about how to run cyberpunk games with GURPS 3e, but it's not a setting. GURPS 3e Cyberworld is the setting.

And... well... it's very boring comparatively speaking. I mean even CP 2020/2077 is jazzier, and I've always thought CP 2020 was completely boring. My setting recommendation would be to bring GURPS 3e Technomancer into the roaring 2020s... and as luck would have it there's a few people on the forums working on doing something similar.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Kill em all, it's just a game after all.

And no, I'm not a 'killer gm', just someone who thinks that balance is extremely overrated, and sometimes not fighting is the way to go, and as long as THAT is conveyed properly...that only leaves very few venues of PC death.

Hubris, blinding greed, malignant foolishness instead of just ineptitude/miscalculations, or just plain old back luck.

And it's best to weed out the first three aspects, this leaves bad luck and honest miscalculations, and that means tactics, and that means more fun.

It will also establish you as a GM who rewards 'goodness' (not in the moral sense) and a GM who at least appears to be honest. Which garners respect and makes victories feel ever better.

I know GURPS is very front loaded via the character creation, but...it's still just makebelieve. Give the makebelieve people some actual risk. It's good.

"Won't this raise players into min maxing munchkins?"

Not necessarily. People still tend to go the path of least resistance, the chance of PC death just shakes up and lessens some of the 'hurr durr' trances that can crop up (even in meself).

It happens in computer games, too. It's not easy for most people to be 'tryhard' and 'sweaty' 24/7.
But a little bit of it? That's something most people enjoy. Sink their teeth into something and take it seriously. Your world will also come more alive.

P.S.: Also, it will test you if you're actually making things fun ...because, speaking from videogame standpoints again.

"Man, I lost, all my work ...and I lost"
My brudda ...þu playest a gayeme...and not toileð in the fieldsetheth. Why art þu wroth about loss of laboreee? Hað I consigned þee to a labore campe inadvertenly?!
My shame is immeasurable and I apologize deeply for my deceit and pretense that this was a game, a folly for your delectation...orsumfink.

It should be fun, not work. If you can pull that off, then a feather into your cap.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

"Virtue free of moralic acids," as Nietzsche put it. Or in Greek, arete.

My preference is to run campaigns where it feels as if the setting is a real world. And real worlds have real dangers. I don't want to run a game on a stage set where everything is contrived to make the player characters the only real people, and ensure that they come to no harm.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

This Flexible armor so Blunt Trauma applies. See p.379. Every full 10 pts of damage stopped by Flexible armor still does 1 pt.

The difference between 8 and 12 also might not matter as (at least today) HP ammo for pistols is common. That increases tissue damage but also increases DR. Pistols are usually for unarmored targets.

Doing 9 pts against DR8 is generally not effective. 1 pt of damage would only be -1 to the targets attacks the next round (and nothing if he has High Pain Threshold) . Then if the target has 20 HP you're looking at 14 hits to put them at "reeling".

Armor Piercing ammo also tens to be a mixed bag. If you use it in sub-10 mm weapons it degrades "P" to "P-" and that halves tissue damage after armor penetration. So if you used 9mm AP at 2D+2 and did 9pts That's 9-6 v DR12 armor and round down to 1 pt. Lowering DR to 8 makes it 9-4 and then you round down that remaining 5 to 2.

Players would probably adapt to this by carrying bigger guns and/or aiming for the Face. You can buy a Targeted Attack Technique and lower the -5 for the face to a -2.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Stupid question: Did we bring up making sure you know actual RAW?

The talk involving Third Edition GURPS reminded me of how silly mistakes can easily get you killed. I even have three examples from the same Third Edition campaign: TL3-4, medieval-flavored, Earth-like setting but without magic. We were running a mercenary unit, so all were supposed to be combat competent, if not experts.

Most on topic example: My character was on the wrong end of a 2-person crossbow (small ballista?). I failed my dodge, took a bolt to the chest, and went from max HP to -2xHP in one shot. Failed my death check. Ouch! Except we were using the hit-location rules from Compendium II, page 52-53, including the damage caps for things like blow through. Ergo I should have only taken damage up to my max HP, and thus shouldn't have had to make a Death Check at all. GM retcon that I was only mistaken for dead. ;)

Now, if we were a new group, it might make sense to forget the Shock penalty from injury. We'd been playing 2-5 years at this point, so we had no excuse. Well, unless you count slapping High Pain Threshold on almost every character we'd ever made. None of our mercenaries had it! My character was an archer, so I still think it was justified. The three other party members, all frontline fighters? Not so much. The GM didn't realize what this meant, either, until after those first few rounds of combat...

...speaking of the GM, he made some goofs as well. For starters, that first combat? It was up against what he intended as a "boss monster". A ogre who wore no armor, and would always use All Out Attack to attack twice in a single turn. Imposing, but we had three melee fighters and me firing arrows at it from just under Half-Damage range. What could go wrong? Yeah, nearly a TPK. The GM gave the ogre Toughness +2 to raise the ogre's natural DR to 4. No question about whether that was balanced gameplay wise, or if it made sense for the ogre's hide to be that thick* Yes, we could do enough damage to get past that... if our two stronger melee fighters weren't struggling with shock penalties. In the end, we only survived because, while the ogre was chasing down my archer, the ogre failed a consciousness check (we had taken it down to 0 HP). >_<

*He was using the Ogre Racial Template from GURPS Fantasy Folk (for Third Edition), just with their Magic Resistance swapped out for a level of Strong Will.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I like the spreadsheet idea... I've been compiling things with google docs and google sheets. I should be able to do the same stuff there. Would be interesting to have an interactive page in my digital source book thinking on it... lol.

But please bear with me on this one. WHat the heck is pyramid rules? I mean... it seems the logo for Steve Jackson games is a pyramid? Wouldn't that mean all of gurps is pyramid rules???


I think I mentioned that it took me like half an hour to an hour of research to discover only the first shot in an attack is an automatic hit? At least I hope I did! lol.

TBH... the biggest complaint that can be levied against the game is the layout of the book but that's most TTRPGS. I wasn't even able to find that in the combat lite, the combat or the tactical combat sections in the book! I found it from a years old post on here!

One of the reasons why I haven't continued playing that little game with that character since (Bad Bart hired to investigate disappearances of poor, fully human persons in potters field, Mirage.) Is because I realized that I need to redo the character and that means I needed to get my sourcebook's magic, cybernetics and vampire rules done if not the lore. A lot of this is lifted from other books like GUPRS Ulra Tech but some of it needs adjusted rules (VTM is made for an older version of GURPS) But the other biggest problem is cyberware and vampire powers often are like "confers the charisma advantage +1" or "gives "Nictitating membrane." (another advantage.)

And every time I'm like "oh spank you spanky helperton! Thank you for telling me to open up an entirely different book to figure out what this does!!!!"

The philosophy of my source book is that you should need the basic set: Characters and my book and no other material. That everything should be clear and easy to understand and that you should be able to pick it up at a glance with none of this page turning back and forth to figure out basic rules nonesense. So it's taken some time to figure out what I want to port over to my setting, parse out how these powers / cybernetics work, determine if there needs to be an adjustment and then write the description in plain English in the source book so that my players can read it and decide if they want it at a glance instead of having to flip through three separate books just to tell what something even does.

In fact it's being lain out the opposite of most source books. Lore in the back. A BRIEF intro to each chapter subject in the front. Then everything is broken down so you can grasp the rules of the setting as quickly as possible including a table of contents for each chapter because I know from experience after the first time you open a source book 99% of the time you are opening it for a rules question, to look up an advantage ect.

TBH I'm quite proud of the project and this weekend I should be able to rebuild bad bart, give him a companion and do some roleplaying playing all the parts myself :). It'l help a lot with my ease of flowing through the rules and each session will help me write finer details in my lore and setting. Grand vision stuff is comparatively easy to write (who founded the city ect.) But the real juicy bits of a setting or story only come out when you let it live. You're not even sure what kind of story you're working with until you let all the characters and setting live and define themselves tbh!

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Articles printed in Pyramid magazine. There have been 4 versions over somethign like the last 25 years. The first was paper and ink. The second was subscription only online. Three was monthly in the SJGames webstore and Four is special event only and usually Kickstarted.

If you go to the SJGames webstore you cans till get any issues from the third and fourth versions.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Firstly, you're assuming I consider it a bug. I don't. It's amusing, not broken (and helps makes bows worth using vs some targets in a near-future setting, and that's in-genre for cyberpunk, and also something many players consider to be cool).

Secondly, AP arrows, as described in the rules, should not be impaling. Aside from any other considerations, that makes standard arrows worthless, and GURPS is at heart a game.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

It's got my curiosity so I'm gonna check em out!

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Pi, see box on Basic Set p277. This works in some ways, it makes sense for the narrower, edgeless point to be less wounding. It works less well in some other ways, since it is still a slow pointy object with respect to armor. If a shank can penetrate kevlar, a bodkin should be able to! (If the cutting edge is the deciding factor in penetration, a number of melee impaling weapons shouldn't be imp.)

(There are alternatives for this for the picky, but they're in house rule territory.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I am not 100% clear but I think you are saying that there are a lot of rules and it's hard to learn them all.

I agree, but since I was talking to someone who was asking if you had run test combats, I want to be sure we're all on the same page here: my point is that you did run test combats, and that part of your concern seems to have come from the fact that bad luck in the test combat plus rules errors resulted in your skill 10 mooks blowing the head off a test PC (Bad Bart) from 7 yards away. That wouldn't happen in actual play unless the mooks were 1-2 yards away, because there are no automatic hits in GURPS. If you skill 10 and have a -10 to hit, rolling a 3 is not a critical hit--it's a miss. (Technically you're not even supposed to roll at all in that case.)

This makes the corrected test combat result less alarming--instead of a headshotted Bad Bart, he's fine. Agreed?

Good luck Bad Bart!

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Yeah I deleted after a moment realizing how *stupid* was being because they literally said pi and imp right there!

And I totally agree it even fits with what I was saying. Imp is that tip of a sword, the tip has sharp edges not just the sharp point that makes it penetrate differently and slice right through fiber armors. I think that's a good example of gurps modeling things very realistically if you want that sort of thing.


Well... the combat rules are spread across three sections. One section, combat lite is segregated from the rest due to the basic set being two books (why?) There are like... ten damage types each with their own individual effects on armor and there are 4 different (at least...) body types that each wounding type has an effect on. There's rules for how much of a negative someone has to attack back if you hit them. there's rules about how well they can defend if you hit them hard enough. There's rules for blow through, there's rules for using a cloak as a shield. There's rules for this, there's rules for that. That's not even getting into the fatigue and injury in characters that's only given a page and a half then quite expanded in campaigns...

Then if you want firearms you should get high tech which adds MORE rules...(of which I have barely dipped a pinky toe in. They got rules for fanning a single action revolver's hammer that I'll need for one of my player's characters when their campaign starts...)

It's ENDLESS and it's all in this jumbled mess sort of thrown out with no coherent organizational structure. . I have learned more arguing here than I have with the books.

I still don't think there's a ruling in the basic set that declares that a full ROF attack from a firearm gets all shots landed on a critical hit or only the first is guaranteed. I found that rule *here* and I have a suspicion that the rule is actually in high tech not the basic set!

This is the burden of me, the GM and so I need to master this and be the conduit that makes it all intuitive for my future players. That... that's my burden but the rest of it. The powers and cybernetics and spells that say "see this other page", at least I can fix that. My players won't have to reference basic set 245 or whatever in order to see what the power listed in my book says. The power, cyberwear, spell, hack, special ability ect will have a complete description of it's effects right then and there. Then there will be an index at the start of the chapter so you know what page said ability is on within the chapter itself. When you open the source book (at first digitally, if it's good enough? Who knows maybe I'll print one copy and bind it!) asking "what are the advantage of cyber arms" there will be absolutely no confusion about where exactly on what page that information is. No skipping around, no flipping between books. It's right there. Clean and easy to get.

Also on survivability it was a lucky pass in a sense. I could shift the point of target to one that's not 4x damage and the others don't hit. I have a few more tools now. Roll 1d6. 1-2 body. The other 4 possible outcomes represent arms and legs. No head targeting for now. The face has a good chance to obliterate an eye doesn't it?

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

It would, except the thing is that (A) spikes are not something basic anti-bullet textiles are good against and (B) many spike-like items are statted as imp, not pi. Anti-stab armor is a specialty developed because basic bullet-protection kevlar was failing against a common threat.

Edged stabs and edgeless stabs may have different properties with respect to armor, but they don't fit the imp/pi distinction because pi DR is consistently based on bullets, not ice picks.

(My best examples of imp for non-edged weapons are the rondel dagger and stiletto in Low Tech, which you probably don't have and don't want to pick up.)
Okay, real serious note here. While I personally am 100% gung-ho for collecting most of the rules, you are not obligated to katamari up the entire 4th Edition bibliography. You might seriously benefit from not doing that and focusing tightly on Basic for the most part.

(Though High Tech is a fairly light and useful source in terms of extra rules. If you were going to add one book it isn't a bad choice. Its bulk is gear tables.)
No, that's just straightforward reading. Maybe clarified in FAQ, IDK. Additional hits for ROF are for margin of success. Critical success doesn't change margin of success calculation.
It does not. It has literally no chance except when it is corrosive damage (splashing acid on people's faces is one of the weird-but-historical nasty things). The rules benefit from reading more carefully.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Well, the thing with the ROF rule is that the point of critical hits are that the attack connects! It connects and ignores all means of active defense. So it's not intuitive to think "well part of my attack hits but not all of it." All three shots fired out of a semi auto ROF 3 weapon are ONE attack, not three. So it's not immediately obvious that the whole attack would not connect when the rules say critical hits are a guaranteed hit for the attack.

And yup, you're right about the face hit. Maybe I was reading the critical hit table for faces? I dunno. It seems odd that shooting the face provides no benefit other than bypassing many armor types considering how obsessive gurps is with putting the boot in on characters who are losing. A portion of the t-box is actually in that facial area... Not gonna complain though.

Also you're exactly right about the modern armor. That's a whole can of worms that also got me to consider deleting that original comment. I don't know why gambeson were a fair bit better at pointy threats than modern fiber armor. Were gambeson thicker than the normal 40 layers of kevlar? I have no idea!

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

A successful attack roll also connects. But it means only part of your RoF attack hits. There's nothing in the critical hit definition that changes that, so it doesn't change that.

GURPS rules as written are not perfect but are usually better than the rules that people invent by misreading GURPS rules.
I mean, the thing is GURPS really is not that. Yes it does hinder significantly wounded characters' ability to fight a bit. That doesn't constitute an agenda of "putting the boot in on characters who are losing".
I suspect it is, but I don't know how I'd find dimensions for such kevlar. Non-metallic pre-modern primary armor tends to be heavy and thick AIUI.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

To be frank, I play Dungeon Fantasy RPG (Powered By GURPS!) now. Haven't played GURPS since 2010 or so, although I still steal rules from GURPS: Martial Arts, GURPS: Low Tech, etc. The DFRPG rulebooks are not perfect but they're above-average in clarity for RPG rulebooks (good indexes, good footnotes, an appropriate number of examples, etc.). I think they are easier to learn than raw GURPS is, and I applaud you for doing prep work to make it easier on your players when it's their turn to learn too.

The question you're asking is "what happens when I hit with a ROF 3 weapon?" and the answer you're looking for is on page B374 of Campaigns:

Rapid fire may score multiple hits from a single attack. A successful attack means you scored at least one hit – and possibly a number of extra hits, up to a maximum equal to the number of shots you fired. To find the number of hits you scored, compare your margin of success on the attack roll to your weapon’s Recoil.

An attack scores one extra hit for every full multiple of Recoil by which you make your attack roll. The total number of hits cannot exceed shots fired. For instance, if your attack had Rcl 2, success by 0-1 would mean one hit; success by 2-3, one extra hit; success by 4-5, two extra hits; success by 6-7, three extra hits; and so on.

(Emphasis mine.)

It is absolutely normal both in GURPS and in real life to hit with only one bullet out of three.

High Rate of Fire (ROF) doesn't exist in Dungeon Fantasy RPG so I'm lucky I remembered this rule from over a decade ago. :-) If hypothetically you didn't know that this rule existed and you just decided to ignore ROF and say that each gun fires only once per round, that would be better than ruling that all the bullets hit. (In fact, one of the problems with GURPS IIRC is that in certain situations you CAN get overpowered shotgun-style weapons where all the bullets hit, in which case it's better to change the rules.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I can't think of where that would happen. Needing at least 1 RoF per hit means that you need to hit by incredibly margins to score 100% hits with even a single round of buckshot and if you're anywhere close to that with something with significantly higher RoF than that your problem isn't the RoF rules, it's what you've done to your basic attack roll.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I misremembered, it's only half the bullets, not all. The rule is on B409, Shotguns and multiple projectiles.

For example, I can buy a 1d corrosion attack [10] with Rapid Fire enhancement (multiple projectiles, 1 x 300, +300%) and Increased Range (x50, +50%). It costs 45 points (10 points x 450%) and practically anyone I hit (out to 50 yards) takes 150d of corrosion damage (roughly 500) and loses about 100 points of DR, so in practice they're turned into sludge by the second shot at the very latest even if the GM rules that DR loss happens only after all HP loss is resolved. (I can't remember if there's a canonical order.)

Anyway, the point is that you shouldn't use the B409 rules for massive shotgun attacks. Make up your own rules or don't allow massive shotguns.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

The Pyramid articles being referenced are to be found in issues #3/52, #3/85, and #3/96, and are named "Low Tech Armor Design," "Cutting Edge Armor Design," and "Ultra Tech Armor Design," respectively. The first largely covers TL 0-4 (with a few bits from higher TL's), as implied by the name, and is also something of a "first draft" of the system - the system is improved for the latter two articles. The second is the one that is most relevant to a cyberpunk campaign, covering TL 5-9. The third may also be of use, as it covers TL 9-12 (while I believe cyberpunk is usually TL 9 in technology, you could have some higher-TL materials available at a sizeable premium as experimental/prototype designs, and there are some TL 9 options in the last article that aren't in the second - namely, reflec armor, which is useful against lasers).

As an example, you mentioned you'd like to have DR 8/4* armor as general low-profile body armor. Magnetic Liquid Armor (one of the two options "Cutting Edge Armor Design" gives for what UT calls Reflex) fits the bill, as it has its full DR against pi/cut and half DR against everything else. A full body suit of MLA that provides DR 8/4* has a coverage of 21.35 square feet for a typical person (there are rules for adjusting this based on the character's body weight if desired; note for a cyborg you should use what their weight would be if they were still flesh-and-blood, being denser doesn't make armor heavier - weight is just a proxy for bulk in this case). DR 8/4* MLA has a base weight of 0.256 lb per square foot and a base cost of $200 per lb. If it's just a bodysuit, that means 5.4656 lb and 1,093.12; I'd just round these to 5.5 lb and $1100, respectively. There's also the option to make it Optimized Fabric, which represents flexible armor that has varying thicknesses (basically, thick where you need extra protection, thin where you typically don't, much like how rigid armor does it). That reduces weight, but boosts cost and makes the armor susceptible to targeting Chinks (flexible armor normally lacks chinks, but optimized fabric does have them) - in this case, it reduces weight to 4.37248 lb and increases cost to $1748.992 (I'd treat these as 4.4 lb and $1750). Thickness would be around 0.089" - but I have no idea if that's like a dress shirt, T-shirt, hoodie, or winter coat, as everything I find online just talks about GSM (grams per square meter), but MLA is going to be markedly denser than clothing fabrics, so that doesn't work. The article does state that anything with less than half the maximum DR (which typically corresponds to 0.5") can be concealed as or under clothing, and we're well below that.

Of course, a full body suit isn't going to work for low-profile armor. So maybe it's instead a pair of pants and a hoodie, leaving out the Front Face (Back Face is the back of your head, which is covered, at least when the hoodie is pulled up), Front Neck, the Hands, and the Feet. That removes 6.65 square feet, making it around 3.75 lb and $750 for Fabric, around 3 lb and $1200 for Optimized Fabric. You can also add features like Biomedical Sensors or IR Cloaking (making you harder to spot with Infravision and similar), if desired.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Ah, yes, if you cross shotgun rules with custom built powers designed to abuse them by way of the dubious corrosive rules, you will arguably have a problem with the point value of the ability.

Though your rabbit hole here goes weird - the "all HP loss" thing implies you think this is multiple hits, which it is not. If you hit with it, it is only one hit, one damage resolution. You need the second shot that gets to multiply zero dr by 150 to actually accomplish anything.

...This attack is, of course, comparable to a cannon firing (unusually small shot) canister rounds. The error is the price more than the destructiveness.


If you want some real hilarity, use crushing instead of corrosive damage. It won't directly hurt (armored) people. It'll just fling them away at around Move 50 so they splash when they hit a solid object. Good chance of first-hit lethality and it costs half as much.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I have a suspicion that it isn't in any rule book (an unfortunate oversight) and is from a clarification by the line editor.

This is the effect of several things. Firstly, the main rules being only able to be a certain size. Secondly, not all the rules for stuff even being invented at the time the core rules were printed. Thirdly, putting very niche rules in the books with the stuff to which they apply (and if you think 4e is bad for that, try 3e, or most other game lines by other publishers). And fourthly, you're looking to set up and run a game with very high detail around gunfights and injuries, and want outcomes that require the use of many of these optional niche rules.

One thing I'd do, once you've decided on all the rules you think fit your game is to go over them and ask yourself which ones can be dumped for being too fiddly or adding too much rolling for the value they bring, and then discarding those.

Not by default. To damage an eye you generally need to target the eyes, though a critical head hit has about a one in eight chance of turning into an eye hit.

Hitting the face for any damage at all forces a knockdown check (B420), and if it's a major wound it's at -5, so it has a very good chance of putting your average dude on the ground, ready for a good kicking.

They were very tightly woven compared to most kevlar, for one thing.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Aimed attacks with laser rifles. RoF10, Acc12, Rcl1. If an unaimed single shot would've hit, a full-RoF aimed attack will land all 10. If you want cinematic Space Opera games either throw out the lasers, or make sure the PCs and other major characters are in laser-proof armour.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Apologies if this has been mentioned before. From experience the most dangerous encounters are regular adventures (without magic, high tech armour, or superpowers) going against opponents with automatic weapons. In my games this most commonly occurs in fairly realistic historic war zones like the American-Vietnamese war. Assuming that type of scenario I employ the following:

Engagements typically start at beyond half dice range in open terrain (half damage) or in very thick cover for short range engagements making it difficult to score a hit. This has the added advantage of seeming realistic as the enemy wants to minimise their own casualties.

Use random hit locations for NPC fire. There is a good chance of striking a limb which is non-lethal.

Make realistic assumptions about enemy behaviour. The Viet Cong for example often used hit and run tactics, this greatly reduces the chance of character deaths. Looking at the American-Vietnamese war from an Australian perspective about 60,000 soldiers were deployed during the war and there were around 500 fatalities, not all of those were combat related. Sure the PCs might be exposed to more danger than the average soldier who might not even see combat, but even casualties amongst SASR soldiers was fairly low (I can’t recall the exact number). As GM I try to investigate the historic reasons for the surprisingly low casualty rate and make sure they are reflected in game.

Encourage PCs to take advantages like Luck and Danger Sense.

Encourage PCs to use reconnaissance and planning, and allow it to work well. Reinforce the idea that GURPS is not like those other games.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

True, but they're not shotgun-style.

(Bonus: even if the PCs are wearing laser-proof protection, their equipment isn't and laser acc is so high it's practical for fairly ordinary shooters to do things like shoot somebody's gun.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

This is why we never use lasers as written. It's one of the strengths of GURPS that we easily overcame the issue by either using Blasters or just not using the "they all hit" rules. I don't doubt there are game where this works nicely, but not for us. Easy fix.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

What 'they all hit' rules? UT laser rifles hit a lot thanks to generating excessively high bonuses on the attack roll, having a bit of RoF, and not having recoil. There's no special case there, the numbers are just extreme.

A lot of technologically advanced settings should not use the UT laser rifle, for sure.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Huh? I don't see how it implies that, since I don't. It just means I can't remember if there's a canonical order for DR loss vs. HP loss. (Or at least couldn't at the time. Turns out there is, and HP is lost first, so DR 6+ saves you from dying to the first shot.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

There is a thread around here somewhere that semi-reviews each issue of the Third Generation of the magazine (all 4e rules), so I'd read that thread to get an idea of which issues might be more useful to you before you just willy-nilly buy them all.


I mean, I bought them all*, but that's just me. Others might be more discerning with their money.


* I've also since purchased all the digital issues for the first GURPS mag, Roleplayer, as well the first gen Pyramid (3e rules), of which I already owned all the hard copies... so... I'm not as discerning. I'm still missing a good bit of the 2nd gen Pyramid, since I didn't have internet at the time... but if I ever get a time machine, I'll get that corrected as well.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Yeah, it sure would be sweet for them to sell an archive of v2.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

This is what the groups I play in call the "death spiral", and it does mean that the way players should go about playing combats is different from D&D family games. Look at p. B380, "Effects of Injury".

1. If you have less than a third of your hit points left, your Move and Dodge get drastically reduced. If you're in a melee combat, you may want to carry on, but if you're in ranged combat, it's time to stop fighting.
2. When you're on zero or less hit points, you need to make a HT roll at the start of each turn to avoid passing out. It's definitely time to stop fighting.
3. When you're "fully negative", only then are you at risk of death. You won't die for certain until you're on -5*HP.
4. Few enemies will take the time to finish off a downed character when there are still some who are fighting.

So you need some teamwork. A party of characters needs to keep track of each other and be ready to react to someone going down. They need to accept that their fellows will stop fighting when badly injured. It's not cowardice, but good sense, and is the main reason Berserk is a 10-point disadvantage: it prevents you accepting that you're out of a fight.

It's easy to make GURPS characters fall over, but killing them takes quite a bit more damage.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

For a single damage roll, there's no order to be concerned with. If you deal 30 corr to someone with effective DR 20, 10 damage penetrates to become 10 HP Injury, and the fact you hit the DR with 30 corr means it loses 6 DR. If they were independent hits in the same attack roll - say from being beyond 10% of 1/2D range - then there may be the concern that earlier hits could reduce the DR against later hits, but for simplicity as GM I'd just resolve all the hits and modify the DR at the end.

As for your particular build, yeah, at extreme RoF the general rule of "multiply damage and DR by half the number of 'pellets' within 10% of 1/2D" is problematic. Or at least, it is if using that rule - High Tech states that, when going from a single projectile to a multi-projectile load, you divide damage by the square root of the number of projectiles - so the multiplier for 300 projectiles should be around x17.3. Which, don't get me wrong, is still rather powerful, but at least in this case winds up with what is arguably a fair price - a 17d+1 (1/17) corr attack with a Range of 50 would be something like 17d+1 Corrosion Attack (Increased Range x10, 1/2D Only +15%; Armor Multiplier x10 -70%; Decreased Range x1/2 -10%) [43.25]. The fact your attack is still useful at longer range is certainly worth more than a mere [1.75], but it's not as egregious as if it were a 150d (1/150) corr attack!

I will note that those rules in HT don't quite gel with the way buckshot vs slugs functions, where slugs are simply 4x the damage of buckshot - which means if we back-calculate from 16-20 gauge slugs being 4d, 12 gauge being 5d, and 10 gauge being 7d, buckshot for these should be 1.46d (7-8 projectiles, for an average divisor of 2.74; this would be 1d+2) for 16-20 gauge (+2 over RAW), 1.67d (9 projectiles, for a divisor of 3; this would round be 2d-1) for 12 gauge (+1.5 over RAW) for 12 gauge, and 1.94d (13 projectiles, for a divisor of 3.6; this would be 2d) for 10 gauge (+1 over RAW). Alternatively, instead of x4 buckshot damage, just using the rules to calculate slug damage would result in 16-20 gauge slugs dealing 2.74d (3d-1), 12 gauge slugs dealing 3.86d (4d), and 10 gauge slugs dealing 6.17d (6d+1).

You can also save some more points - and double the effect - by making such an attack No Wounding, No Blunt Trauma, and Double Knockback.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

That and the "no Active defenses" thing. Someone who doesn't Dodge or Parry ends up at the "stop fighting" point much sooner on average.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Yeah, intuitively that seems like a better rule. Dividing a big attack into lots of little attacks shouldn't massively increase the total damage inflicted. The DFRPG falling damage rules have a similar issue, wherein because damage inflicted scales with HP * velocity and yet HP scales with the cube root of mass, dropping a big 32 lb. boulder on a monster from 50 yards up does far less damage than cutting that boulder into 16 tiny 2 lb. stones and dropping them all at the same time.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Pretty sure that goes for the GURPS proper collision damage rules in general.

That's edging on the space where you get the extended wounding modifier house rules. (Though those are usually more oriented towards the problems with small arms vs. cannons. Crushing damage seems to be particularly hard to frame.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Well, part of the issue of large rock vs same rock broken up into many smaller rocks is that GURPS largely treats one 10 HP wound and ten 1 HP wounds very similarly (the former will typically be a Major Wound, which can incapacitate, but in terms of getting the character closer to death, the two are basically identical). Things like lwcamps' Semi Cumulative Wounding System, "Conditional Injury" (Pyramid #3/120), or the simple expedient of dividing Injury by 3 for purposes of wound accumulation (so a single hit for 20 HP Injury on a 10 HP character would call for a death check as it puts the character at -1xHP, a consciousness check at -1 to the roll for the same, and a knockdown/stun check because it's a Major Wound... but provided the character survives, they only actually lose 6 or 7 HP, depending on how you round - personally, I'd suggest just retaining fractions here, so that thirty 1 HP wounds deplete 10 HP rather than depleting 0 or 30) address that issue. But that can add complication that many groups won't find necessary.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I don't think that came up yet, or it maybe it did and I missed it. There's sort of but not quite a discussion going on about various combat rules, or someone's specific campaign setting, and... well... I have nothing to contribute there so I haven't been too fussed to read those thoroughly. ;)

I noticed this bit, though, and it too seemed like good, general advice. I'll risk proving myself a fool by suggesting the real first step is "If you get near 1/3 Max HP range, you need to call it quits and get out of there." Meaning, before your Move is halved from injury. However, I also have to acknowledge this could be a meaningless distinction. Injury can accumulate so quickly, that you go from full HP to under 1/3 HP in a single hit.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Yeah, probably once you're at or below 50% HP you're going to want to disengage from the fight if possible - although some will want to push and try to win. Below 1/3 HP, you can't really expect to get away unless the foes are either letting you or you have some form of assistance (people to keep them busy, a getaway vehicle, etc), unless you're markedly faster than they are. Of course, realistic characters may opt to disengage from a fight as soon as they take any damage - or even before doing so - either by fleeing or, if that's not an option, hiding and/or playing dead. Tactical Shooting has some options for that (it basically calls for fright checks during combat from things like bullets whizzing past your ears, striking cover really close to you, hitting you, even if it doesn't penetrate your armor, and so forth; a character who fails, provided they don't outright flee in terror, will probably try to disengage once the stun wears off) if desired.

Granted, most players probably aren't interested in playing a character who opts to do the logical thing and stay out of danger whenever possible (or who literally cannot handle being shot at; imagine trying to play CoD if every time a bullet comes close to hitting you, there's a chance your character will flee in a random direction without you being able to control them, drop to the ground and refuse to move for several seconds, etc), so supporting such characters without mercilessly killing them off is a playstyle that needs support. I feel GURPS provides that support, but in many cases it calls for cinematic (or supernatural) traits and/or rules to be utilized.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

And yet, if the GM runs monsters by this logic, many a good hack and slash game becomes frustrating.

That's not necessarily a bad thing if you view frustrating = challenging and use enough monsters that it's still difficult to force them all to flee, and make pursuit and finishing routed foes off permanently so they cannot recover and eventually counterattack an important part of the game.

But it's certainly different than the common default behavior.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

The idea that characters can't fight effectively once below 1/3 seems a bit off to me.

It halves your move and dodge. That's bad, but how bad?

Low tech (or certain kinds of super-science) you can still block and parry unimpeded. Your reduced mobility probably means you need to take a less dynamic posture, but you can stay in the fight.

In gunfights, half dodge seems really bad...except realistic-style gunfighting doesn't entirely depend on dodge. If you're prone behind cover, you are leaning on making the enemy fail their attack roll more than on pulling off a dodge. So again, you may not have to drop out of the action at all, just act as a base of fire rather than maneuvering.


Of course, some fights are much more dynamic - in room-to-room assault or a battle with big splash attacks that can only be dramatically leapt away from, the injured character really is mostly a liability who probably does the most good by getting out of the way so their allies don't need to worry about them.
Only if your goal is to annihilate the enemies, rather than defeat them. That's not necessarily the best goal to set!

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Is this thread about rpgs generally, or is it just about dungeon crawls? Because in the great majority of my campaigns, I don't see what you seem to be calling "default behavior." Even when I ran an intentionally combat-focused campaign, it wasn't about that behavior; it was about duels with the smallsword, typically to first blood.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

It's more than dungeon crawls that can heavily feature existential combat (that is, combat where the purpose is to eliminate OpFor, and where OpFor is trying to do the same to you). Indeed, particularly considering this is the kind of combat that tends to crop up in action films and video games, many players go into a game expecting that to be the way combat is handled. Doing things differently - duels to first blood, foes fleeing (or surrendering) as soon as it appears they may be losing, it being more beneficial to capture - or even just drive off - foes than kill them, etc - is certainly a valid playstyle, and I expect is favored by groups who are markedly more interested in playing a role than playing a combat simulator, but many players don't expect that mode of play. Fortunately, the campaign prospecti (prospectuses?) you've mentioned supplying in the past probably help avoid players being surprised when that's the mode of play.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

My post (not the entire thread) was explicitly about hack and slash gaming, and any game that's about smallsword duels to first blood doesn't sound like it's hack and slash, let alone "common" hack and slash.

I am not implying that hack and slash is the "common default" mode of GURPS play or that you personally play hack and slash. I'm not even saying that I play hack and slash the majority of the time. Your smallsword duels would fit right into diplomacy protocols for my last D&D 5E game.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Prior to D&D3, D&D had morale rules for NPCs and monsters, etc., were absolutely expected to often retreat or flee if things were going against them unless they were something like mindless undead. This could/can lead to interesting situations where the players have reasoned "They're only goblins, they'll flee once we've killed a few of them", charged a band of 20-odd goblins, and then found that the goblins (due to good morale rolls or higher than expected morale) aren't the fleeing types, and now they're in a dicey situation, with the Goblins surrounding them and starting to eat away at their reserves (hot points, luck, whathaveyou).

I blame the modern view of hack 'n' slash dungeoneering on D&D3's removal of morale stats for monsters (because rolling for this stuff was too hard or something) and then having many of the D&D adventures have monsters explicitly not retreating or surrendering, to the point where it became the assumed norm that unless it was specifically noted that an encounter was with creatures that might retreat or negotiate, they wouldn't.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I wish Morale or something equivalent were listed among DFRPG monster stats, but the closest we have is Will + Fearlessness, which isn't quite the same thing, since willingness to die fighting is not necessarily the smart thing to do. (And besides, Morale is useful to measure other things too such as willingness to refuse a bribe, willingness to leave a fixed position and maneuver aggressively towards a foe, and unwillingness to desert in the face of poor conditions like no pay and lack of food.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Only if you're running the "D&D you only get exp if the NPCs are slain" style. Otherwise, it's neither common nor default.

I've played plenty of D&D games where we didn't kill everything, allowed for surrender, took prisoners, allowed a defeated foe to flee, etc, going all the way back to 1984. A few in between were 'murder hobo' fests, where you only got exp for killing the enemy, but most were not, so, we did not.

That behavior was expected in the Gauntlet arcade, not our rpgs.


Also, my games have never featured that, even in a pure dungeon crawl, because I don't run NPCs to be stupid. A few mooks drop, and the mooks will get spooked. Unless the NPCs have a decent leader amongst them, mooks will flee as soon as it looks like it's necessary (roughly 30-40% have fallen).



That's because it was left to the GM. However 3e also explicitly calls out that PCs get exp for any 'defeated' encounter, whether that be via physical or social combat (either killing/defeating foes or diplomacy/fast-talk/intimidation) or even by successfully avoiding it entirely!

But yes, Gauntlet and Diablo had a strong impact on D&D for the worse (and Mike Mearls "back to the dungeon" and "orc and pie" nonsense didn't help either).

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I just roll on the Reaction Chart with modifiers. That's exactly what it's for, determining random NPC reactions.

Otherwise, set a Loyalty stat.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Yeah, that excuse is always weak. "Left to the GM" with no guidance and not even discussion is omitted with a fig leaf.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Well, okay, I was using "dungeon crawls" as synecdoche for fighting to the death as a play style.

As for prospectuses, here's an example entry from my 2020 prospectus:

_____ Demobbed. Streetlevel supers. GURPS. Source material: Astro City, JSA: The Liberty File, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Planetary, Top Ten: The Forty-Niners, Wild Cards, The Defenders (Netflix series).
It’s 1945, and the boys (and girls) with special powers are coming home from the war. How will they fit into civilian life in a world at peace? Player characters will be streetlevel supers—not necessarily “superheroes,” but generally inclined to obey the law, protect the innocent, and help the helpless. The focus of play will be partly on the usual superheroic combat and partly on inventing a role for people with strange powers and abilities. There won’t be a generic category of “superpowers”; rather, many different types of special abilities will be available, from ancient mystical rituals to superscientific inventions. Combat will be realistic and death will be possible, as will legal consequences for going too far with your abilities.
You may enjoy this campaign if you like streetlevel superheroes or pulp adventurers; a post-World War II setting appeals to you.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I was going to include this in my last post, but I can't figure out how multiquote is meant to work; when I click the icon I don't get a box to type in.

When you said "common default" it sounded to me as if you were saying that hack and slash was the normal mode for rpgs in general. So I thought it was relevant for me to say that I hardly ever do anything with that kind of high lethality, and—by implication—that my players don't even expect it (and I have no shortage of such players). I wasn't trying to refute the idea that I personally ran hack and slash, because I didn't assume you were saying that; I was just illustrating the point that there are other modes. Since it seems that you are perfectly aware of that, I don't think we actually disagree, and I apologize if I suggested otherwise.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Okay, but can you understand our confusion?

I had to follow a quote chain to realize why you thought I was addressing you. I quoted a post by Boomerang (who was neither quoting nor directly responding to anyone) and a post by johndallman (who quoted Colonel_Klink). When I followed the quote chain back a step, I noticed Colonel_Klink had quote both you and johndallman in his previous post.

Not a superlong quote chain, but still not 100% obvious. Plus, I made sure to say this immediately after quoting johndallman:

So yeah, I wasn't speaking about it for hack 'n slash games. Thinking about it, I think it is pretty much a YMMV kind of thing. In some games - or even specific encounters! - the death spiral won't apply because:

1. You - or someone else on your side - can easily restrain/finish off the target next turn.
2. You're losing HP very, very slowly while your foes are not (similar to above).
3. Even dropped to half move and half dodge, you are still well beyond your foe.
4. Your fighting style is such that neither the loss of HP nor the drawbacks from dropping below 1/3 HP is an issue.

There are probably other exceptions. It is just that, given the main topic of this thread, johndallman's advice seemed good "in general".

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

Yeah, that doesn't sound like a campaign where I'd expect existential combat to feature, particularly with the bit about legal consequences for going too far. As I suspected, your prospectuses sound like they do a good job of setting expectations.

I normally just open a new tab for each reply, then cut-and-paste them all together into a single post, but I decided to test out the multi-quote function for this reply. Looks like the way it works is that you hit the multi-quote button for each post you want to quote, which selects it; once you have all of them, you click on Post Reply (as though you were posting without a quote) and your reply automatically has the selected posts quoted.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I'll try that next time. Thanks!

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

I'm glad you find them so. I've been writing them since the 1990s, and I've learned to make them more informative and formulaic as I've gone.

Here's a bit from the oldest prospectus I still have on file, dated 2005, so nearly twenty years back:

___Mentat: Immediately after World War II, but with a historical divergence: effective mind-control drugs were developed before and during the war, making possible most of the effects attributed to hypnosis, telepathy, and brainwashing in popular fiction. Induced autism drugs made digital computers unnecessary for codebreaking and no one has them. Can the United States use this technology to preserve world freedom, or will it be corrupted by the use of these methods? And how long can they be kept secret, or is the secret already out? Agents of the United States’s most secret organization confront these issues. Rules system: GURPS.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

To clarify: I did not think you were addressing me, and do not disagree that johndallman's advice is good in general especially for player characters.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

As long as we're talking about 3.x and retreating we should mention the way "Attacks of Opportunity" complicated retreating. AoO actually discouraged many kinds of imprecise swanning about in combat ("Roll for Initiative." "What do you do for your first action?" "I climb a tree.") but it was triggering an AoO by trying to break off combat that fixed in people's minds that it could be very difficult to do this successfully.

Gurps can make it pretty difficult too. Burning those 3 movement pts to spin around so you can run away full speed will generally give your opponent an attack you can't Parry or Block. Sometimes yu have to do something like encouraging disengagement by taking a Retreating Defense when you think the enemy is ready to flee.

Fleeing is always easier when you're not in melee but "hit' em hard and fast" is usually a good way to start off battles. I usually have non-engaged monsters roll IQ or similar stat to figure out that it's time to run but for the oens already committed to melee changing their minds can be difficult.

You could have monsters signal their willingness to flee by doing something like All out Defense with Retreat every Turn but that could just encourage aggression. After all, where did PCs learn to be "MurderHobos"? From running into endless series of "MurderNomads".

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

How's this supposed to work? For the first turn, starting in an enemy's reach would be unusual and decidedly not a situation where vague swanning about makes sense. For general withdrawal, there's a perfect solution named...Withdraw. Prevents the AoO and gives you full double movement.

Now, if you're white-rooming there is something that makes it hard to back off, but that's Charge, not AoO. (If you're not white-rooming, any kind of obstructive terrain can block the charge.)
Turning your back on an enemy in melee range to run away is a terrible idea unless you have reason to believe they're happy to let you run. Opening space by backing up with defensive maneuvers or Wait, that's a much more sensible approach. (Then you can take to your heels once you're not in reach.)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

This is where Gurps' relentlessly "fair" alternation of Turns becomes problematic. You can back up every Turn but your enemy can advance every Turn in pursuit. It's not likely that you're going to hit terrain where you can back up but he can't follow you. A friendly pike wall isn't exactly "terrain". :)

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

The rules for retreats in AD&D1/2 worked in a similar manner, and were just as punishing. I think the real difference was that after about 3rd level damage relative to hit points was considerably lower in earlier editions, so getting hit as you ran was less punishing.

And back-pedaling is just as useless for making distance.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

What's to stop you from declaring that you'll Wait until he attacks you, and then attack him back and step away from him while turning? Then on your next turn you're already an extra yard away (so probably two yards total), and you Move another 6 yards or so away, and 7 yards per turn thereafter until you run out of endurance.

Re: How to avoid killing your player characters as GM
 

There were like three small paragraphs in the DMG.


Yeah, yeah, I know. Which is why I mentioned Mike Mearls attitude about D&D, I suspect Murder Hobo was his preferred style, so it got baked into 3e. There are reasons my group hasn't played D&D since 3rd ed.



Once you've clicked the "multiquote" button on the post you want to multiquote you need to actually quote another post, or hit the Post Reply button at the bottom of the page. If it's not workign for you... it might be your browser doesn't support multiquote.