Steve Jackson Games Forums - Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

Steve Jackson Games Forums (https://forums.sjgames.com/index.php)

- GURPS (https://forums.sjgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=13)

- - Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting (https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=49031)

Re: Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corlock Striker (Post 1151765)

Own it and have read it, Robin's Laws that is. And I imagine it is rather difficult, but any sort of general guidelines would be useful. I imagine some of the CR wonkiness in D&D probably had to do with them expecting you to have the standard party make up, and if you didn't have that, then everything was thrown out of wack, either because you could do too much damage in a turn, or heal too little or other such things.

My "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox" will work with GURPS (or any Fantasy RPG for that matter) could be helpful. Especially in the later sections where I go into creating locales.

http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/20...y-sandbox.html

Re: Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

Quote:

Originally Posted by tg_ambro (Post 1151759)

Once again, Robin's laws is awesome for the first part, the second part is much more difficult to determine, primarily because points totals don't translate into combat prowess. And it's not like D&D's CR system was very accurate. I remeber in one game I ran a CR 1/4 spider almost TPK'd my party of level 1 heroes, by itself. I've heard other stories of CR wonkiness as well.

The way I dealt with it in My GURPS Fantasy campaign was mainly by designing the adventure naturally as if it really existed. And reading up on anything that was close in the real world. For example for monsters reading up on big game hunting is instructive.

Also I used a rough guideline of 20 pts per level or HD with a liberal dose of common sense about which abilities are combat effective and which are not.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

I've generally found that in most combat situations, there are 3-4+ minds applying a coordinated strategy against mine. Which generally means they generally are in pretty good shape.

I tend to apply something I learned in Savage Worlds to Melee combat in GURPS. Make a creature hard to hit, but low health, or vice versa. Make a creature skilled at hitting but weak damage or vice versa. It's worked rather well, especially when combined with the mook rules.

Magic is a little harder to predict the impact of, especially given the number of spells available, etc. However, I find that if magic is available to the players, it will usually result in their favor.

All that said, combats that I thought were going to be a challenge were quickly taken care of and things I thought were going to be easy just about resulted in a TPK.

Thus, I will adjust stats on the fly. If I have a creature that has high skill, low damage, is hard to hit, and low hit points, I may adjust their skill or DR down if the players are having too difficult of a time hitting it. If questioned, I can attribute it to some magical buff or something. If it's a modern/realistic setting, then maybe they were initially amped up on adrenalin...

Just some thoughts in case they help, they probably won't be acceptable to everybody, but might to some. But I guess I'm aiding the digression from the original topic...apologies.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

Quote:

Originally Posted by obatron (Post 1151821)

Thus, I will adjust stats on the fly.

Yes, exactly. I am acutely aware of the fact that this approach bugs some gamers – people who like to run as close to GM-less as possible, in many cases aiming for a PvP or computer-game-like experience. Unfortunately, a system as expansive and generic as GURPS doesn't confine itself to the hermetic range of parameters required to make an objective, no-fudging game work. We've sat down and tried . . . fail, fail, fail. Thus, we design assuming that there will be a GM, the GM will fudge, and the players will live with it. Which, incidentally, illustrates the central difference between "generic and universal" (which is about breadth of genre and unity of rules) and "supports all styles of play" (which is ultimately about the social contract, and not genre or rules at all). I think that a lot of people misread the first as implying the second.