Quote:
Originally Posted by Infornific
This gets a little tricky. I assumed that 1 point of damage in V&V was roughly the same as 1d damage in GURPS. The logic is based on pistols and rifles in V&V doing 1d6 and 1d10 respectively. That in turn lead to the assumption that base damage for powers would peak around 11d or so (converting the d20 of Power Blast) and this also suggested an I level game.
|
It seems to me that what you're trying to do is come up with a configuration of GURPS traits such that a boost to strength has the same effects on character abilities in GURPS that it would have in V&V. And I think that at best that's needlessly complicated and at worst unachievable. It's true that ST in GURPS affects lifting and carrying ability, hand to hand damage, and hit points, and that S in V&V affects these things as well; but the effects scale very differently, due to fundamental differences of game mechanics. And it's almost always impossible to exactly replicate the mechanics of a different game.
When you come right down to it, even GURPS ST and V&V S don't mean the same thing. GURPS ST means that you can lift a certain absolute weight, and inflict a certain absolute damage, and withstand a certain absolute amount of damage. But V&V S means that you can lift a certain proportion of your body weight, and inflict and withstand damage proportionate to your body weight. A V&V hulk with Size Change giving x1.5 height and x7 weight automatically gets more carrying capacity, more hand to hand damage, and more hit points; a GURPS character with that increase in weight would have to buy ST separately to fit.
I think what I would recommend is defining the GURPS version of Heightened Strength B to give the same
proportionate increase in Basic Lift that the V&V version gives to carrying capacity. There are a couple of reasons for this:
* The most direct visual manifestation of strength in the comics is lifting and shoving huge weights. If your strong character in V&V can lift a car, but your strong character in GURPS either can lift a tank or struggles to lift a motorcycle, they're not going to seem like "the same character."
* Both hit points and damage are largely artifacts of the game system. We can't really look at an injury in the real world and say "this is equal to X hit points."
* So far as hit points have a physical meaning, that meaning in GURPS is roughly "this attack penetrated to a certain depth," but in V&V it's "this attack destroyed a certain percentage of body tissue." Those are not equivalent concepts.
* In V&V, hit points are modified by both Agility and Intelligence; that is, if you're quick enough to get out of the way, or smart enough to plan not to be in the way to start with, you can stand more damage. This fits the old D&D assumption that hit points include dodging and even luck as well as physical durability. GURPS doesn't do that; it fits the RuneQuest/Champions assumption that hit points are purely a question of physical durability.
So I would look at Heightened Strength B, which gives an average +16.5 to S, as boosting carrying capacity from 1x body weight to 9.8x body weight. The proportionate boost in GURPS would be from BL 20 lbs. to BL 196 lbs., which is approximately what you get from ST 31, or ST +21.
You proposed to have GURPS power builds cost 100 points. You could take ST +11 (Super, -10%) for 99 points. But that seems to be roughly half what you get from Heightened Strength B; you'd have to take it twice. An alternative would be to define Heightened Strength B as ST +22 (Super, -10%) for 198 points, which comes really close to the ST +21 I worked out above. You could put the odd 2 points into perks such as Huge Weapons (SM), Power Grappling, or Acceleration Tolerance.
Or you could keep it at 100 points, and define Heightened Strength A as Strength +10 (with no modifier) for an even 100 points. (Or if you want to get fancy, you could take the Trained modifier from my Pyramid piece "Götterdämmerung": Each such ability must be maintained by an hour of supervised training a week, or twice as much time on self-study (-5%); failure to adhere to this results in gradual loss of abilities (+5%), but they can be regained with a week of fulltime training (+0%). +0%.
This is going to make combat somewhat more lethal than in V&V. You might want to look at rules tweaks to get around this. One that I recommended in GURPS Supers was to say that every character in a four-color setting has a free Hard to Kill +4 (and perhaps that inanimate objects have Easy to Kill +4!).