How to avoid killing your player characters as GM

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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

Well, someone has forgotten GURPS 3e Cyberworld exists.

Originally Posted by Rupert

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

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

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

Yup the book is positively ancient. It's... for getting the feel of the setting only at this point it's so dated.

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.

[Lovewyrm]

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.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Lovewyrm

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.

"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.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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.

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.

[Otaku]

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.

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by hal

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.

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???

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

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.)

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!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

WHat the heck is pyramid rules? h!

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.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

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

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.

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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.

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

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

That's an interesting thing I couldn't figure out. What damage type are AP arrows in GURPS?

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.)