GURPS Action!
 

SJGs has GURPS Action! on the e23 Wishlist. This is definitely my personal favorite GURPS PDF product. Personally, I'd love to eventually see a hardcover GURPS Action! book. I'm beginning to think this may be one of the hardest books to write.

Can GURPS really do cinematic action well and still remain GURPS?


The items I want to see featured in GURPS Action! are:

• Reduced die rolls
• Much faster game play
• Good use of wild card skills
• Larger than life cinematic action - check the reality at the door!

There is a Pyramid article that has what I think are many good ideas for implemeting "cinematic points". Anyone with a Pyramid account can check out the following article Cinematic Points! by Chad Underkoffler. I think some of the features in this article adapted to GURPS 4e standards would be definite additions I'd like to see.

Some suggestions I'd make are the following

• Work out an Acrobatic Dodge that uses one die roll and is based on Enhanced Dodge purchased with a prereq. of a certain level of Acrobatics being required.
• Pre-calculate damage using the average for a weapon and use that except for criticals and when a major battle takes place (Boss battle, climatic fight, etc. - not for mooks/grunts/cannon fodder).
• Emphasize larger than life action
• More detail on the cinematic nature of Wild Card (Bang) skills along with some additional examples.
• Lots of examples on cinematic game play in a variety of genres (or tie them together using the Infinite Worlds setting and ISWAT featuring the Iconic characters in the basic book.

So what things would people most like to see in this PDF?

[Edit - added the following due to recent publication of GURPS DF e23 books]
BTW, anything in Dungeon Fantasy (DF) that should be incorporated into GURPS Action? Should DF be required reading for any GURPS Action author?

Re: GURPS Action!
 

The first three of the four you listed would be sweet as the core of the book..

The rest would probably be some kind of GM kit for quick templating of scenarios, especially some kind of challenge rating system for an action-themed setting. Doing challenge ratings was kind of thrown out before since there's just too much variety in GURPS to do it like say D&D does. But it'd be plausible now.

I'm usually disappointed at the lack of opponents/enemies listed in supplements, so listing some would be a plus.
Examples galore would not be desired. If the gamer wants IW, they can buy the IW setting book, etc..

This would also have potential for resurrecting the 3e versions of Cliffhangers and other pulp settings book, which would be a logical inclusion, excepting that they shouldn't take over the book.


Extra sugar icing on top would be some rules for devolving the system to a set of miniatures skirimish rules, but I wouldn't expect it.

Re: GURPS Action!
 

GoodGame, thanks for your reply.

Ok, so far so good.

Can you expand on this. I'm not sure I understand what a scenario template would look like? Does this idea already exist in GURPS or is it something new?
If existing, can you point me too it in one of the GURPS 4e books.

How would challenge ratings be implemented. I'm not really familiar with them in D&D as I haven't played that system since 2nd edition.

Opponents and enemies would just be examples. This is as opposed to templates, which I think should also be included. However, while there would be several templates for appropriate villians and enemies, there should also be a few specific enemies and opponents developed using the templated. Then they could be used for other examples.

The reason for using IW iconic characters is they are familiar to anyone playing GURPS and they have a good range of variety. They are also already mostly cinematic.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and a good example tends to be highly illustrative. Seeing a rule implemented is very important and one thing I think GURPS doesn't do enough of in the books. Stating a rule just isn't enough, it is very important that for GURPS Action! they cinematic rules are shown in action.

I agree that Cliffhangers certainly fits in Action! and should get its own section, if not an entire chapter. Certainly a couple of good examples using the cliffhanger style/genre would be useful. Something Indiana Jones-esque would be good.

I'm not sure if that would be desirable. Is there a reason that miniatures would be particularly useful for GURPS cinematic gaming as opposed to any other form of GURPS gaming?


Again thanks for your post.

Re: GURPS Action!
 

Agreed. Fast action and Miniatures are opposites in my experience. You do either one or the other. Using miniatures turns the game into a strategic game with can be very fun, but its focus is on details which is exactly what you want to avoid in a fast paced cinematic action! gaming style.

I would therefore also prefer focus on the 3-4 first points mentioned.

And if possible you might want to make a turn more or less than 1 sec as a big part of cinematic is relative time. Sometimes it takes 5 secs to get across the room, sometimes it take several minutes to open the door and step through it, all depending on what goes on.
In connection with this the range and movement rules should also be made much simpler.


[Edit]Oh! I just remembered. One thing there would be a most is some rules for 'mass combat' Ie. How to easy set 4 players up against 100 enemies without it taking the entire session. Or possible 4 players and their 100 allies vs. another 100 opponents. See Lord of the Rings for an example of the style of battle I'm thinking about.


A small addition to the Suggested rules:
Do not allow mooks active defenses but let them give a penalty to the attackers Attack roll instead, based on the mooks defense. This makes combat a lot quicker as players do not have to wait from the GM's response but can roll away as long as they know the total penalty to their attack.


[edit again] som earlier threads on this subject:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=31790 (simplified combat)
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=12899 (problems with 1 sec turns)
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=27692 (you already know this one ;))

Re: GURPS Action!
 

Yes, that's my thinking too, but I'd be willing to hear some thoughts to the contrary.
Time scaling might be interesting though, I haven't the slightest idea on how to pull this off. If you only have a single character in play, it might be easier to arrange, but if you've got four or five PCs all doing different things that becomes really problematic.

Yeah, the whole battle scene with the elf and dwarf fighting their way through legions of opponents counting kills on the move. They are constantly moving forward and never seem to have to pause for things like dodging and parrying. No retreats in there at all. No stuck weapons, and always one hit one kill (or at least the foe is out of the battle).

Useful, though I'd say the GM just needs to know how much they make their roll by and then decide if the mooks defense is good enough to avoid the attack.

I'm sure I've already seen these, but thanks for pointing them out, I'll give them a look for items that might prove useful and appropriate for this discussion.

Re: GURPS Action!
 

I have no idea either thats why I want others to do it for me, hehe.
Basicly I think you can do one of two. Either just rename "1 sec per turn" to "0,1 to 5 sec per turn" and screw all consistency.
Or you have to change the entire system so that turns are in fact longer, this would probably be very, very time consuming and indeed be an entirely new rules system.


In a campaign I've run I used a similar rule, only for guns though. As I disallowed dodges against firearms.

What I did was: Take the chance of an attack hitting (depending on skill level), reduce this number by the percentage of the change of a dodge succeeding (depending on dodge level).
Then look at the final score and find out what Skill level this corresponds too,
give a penalty to the attacker so that it would lower his actual skill,
to the new relative skill level.

For instance:
Attacker with skill 14 has 90,74% chance to hit.
A defender with effective dodge 9 has 37,50% chance to avoid getting hit.
So out of 100 hits, 90.74 would hit. Of those 37.50% would be avoided. That’s 37,50% of 90,74 = 34,03 hits would be avoided.
That leaves 90,74-34,03 = 56,71% of the hits that would actually strike home.
If the defender did not defend at all, this is about the same number of hits that would hit if the attacker had, had an attack skill of 11.

So from skill 14 to skill 11 = -3.
So the penalty to the attacker would be -3. (or a penalty = dodge-6 (9-6=3))


As mentioned this number varies a lot but you can find an average pretty easy.
Assuming for instance that most Mooks have a defence around 7-9 and players effective attack score is usually around 12-14.
This will give penalties from -1 to -4. I put it at -3... or rather "Dodge-6".

This should just be renamed to "Defence -6".

So if the mook has a parry of 9 he gives a penalty of 9-6= 3 ~-3.


The system can also work the other way around to make a lot of mook-attacks faster. and the players still gets benefits for retreating, dropping, all out Defence, feverish defence and also multiple parries and all the other stuff that affects the defence score. As the penalty is derived directly from it.

I'm sure you have too (especially the last one as you posted it), and there are more threads about it I know. I remember some, I just don't remember what they are named and couldn't find them with a quick search.

Re: GURPS Action!
 

Time consuming would not be the way to go.

I once tried 3 second rounds using GURPS 3E, but there were some weird things that happened, I don't recall details, but I abandoned that path to go back to 1 second rounds.

Any reason you did this?

Re: GURPS Action!
 

You mean disallow dodges against guns?

1) I found it unrealistic. If a person points a gun at you, you can dodge, of course. But if he has been pointing at you for several seconds you can't dodge it, IMO, because then you would actually be dodging the bullet. I do not allow that.

It was in a setting with 200-300 pts super-normals with powerarmorus and all foes had guns. On several occassions I had players charging straight at gun-wielding thugs without getting hit as they made all their dodges... this seemed unrealistic to me.
However I didn't want defences to be pointless against gnus as my players would then die.

Actually What I did was that I made a new type of manoeuvre called "Evasive Action". Allowing half move and giving the aforementioned penalty to all attacks against you. But then you couldn't shoot back or attack in melee at the same time.



2) It slowed combat down. The setting we play in (SLA Industries) often sets the group of players against many times their numbers. So when 20 mooks starts shooting that's a lot of dodges that have to be rolled, making it into a fixed penalty to hit for the attacker meant much faster gameplay.

Re: GURPS Action!
 

Two of the biggest misconceptions I hear about GURPS is that it can't do dungeon crawls and that it can't do cinematic. Dr. Kromm dealt with that first one pretty handily and I think that a well-written GURPS Action would take care of the second.

Re: GURPS Action!
 

QFT, here here