How to avoid killing your player characters as GM

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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.

I am not 100% clear but I think you are saying that there are a lot of rules and it's hard to learn them all.

I agree, but since I was talking to someone who was asking if you had run test combats, I want to be sure we're all on the same page here: my point is that you did run test combats, and that part of your concern seems to have come from the fact that bad luck in the test combat plus rules errors resulted in your skill 10 mooks blowing the head off a test PC (Bad Bart) from 7 yards away. That wouldn't happen in actual play unless the mooks were 1-2 yards away, because there are no automatic hits in GURPS. If you skill 10 and have a -10 to hit, rolling a 3 is not a critical hit--it's a miss. (Technically you're not even supposed to roll at all in that case.)

This makes the corrected test combat result less alarming--instead of a headshotted Bad Bart, he's fine. Agreed?

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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!

Good luck Bad Bart!