How to avoid killing your player characters as GM

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

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.

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?

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

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.