4e Revised

[Jpot]

Originally Posted by Varyon

In the extant corpus of GURPS works - albeit DFRPG rather than GURPS proper - it's tough to beat Delvers to Grow for quick-to-the-table character generation, and that's something that would lend itself well to random character generation (roll to see which general category of Delver, roll to see which specific role, maybe a roll to determine what your preferred weapon skill is, and finally some random rolls to see which Upgrade Modules you're tacking on). I'm hoping the upcoming Mission X uses a similar framework, although that's probably not going to be quite as backward-compatible with mainline GURPS as DFRPG is.

I have Delvers and it’s terrific. Great concept for the game. That approach would be quite efficient. If the new game uses that and the FDG, Douglas would suddenly be thrust into a development position.

No offense to Sean, but perhaps a new writer, a new voice in the text, would also freshen the game up.

[weby]

My biggest suggestion would be to make revised version less human centric:

The default being a healthy young adult is good, but the things like:
-how different size categories interact should be beefed up. We have things like D-scale and so on, but we would need corresponding also downwards and lifted front and center.
-Actions in combat chapter is also way too human normal centric.

Second:
Give actual physical information for all things again, not just the advantages it has, but also weight, length, speed, range and similar as appropriate.

Third:
Make a more linear salary/cost of living/social class thingy. Maybe use speed/range table for the levels, so +1 social class would be 1.5 time base, +2 would be *2 and so on, instead of the weird *2/*5/*20/*100/*1000 progression.

Fourth:
Incoporate few rules from other places into the basic set like the chase rules and range band combat.

Fifth:
Fix the big object having too low durability problem. Maybe give large objects the thing suggested for supers with injurity tolerance to divide the damage they take.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by weby

how different size categories interact should be beefed up. We have things like D-scale and so on, but we would need corresponding also downwards and lifted front and center.

Fifth:
Fix the big object having too low durability problem. Maybe give large objects the thing suggested for supers with injurity tolerance to divide the damage they take.

I'm not familiar with what you think the problem is, but in my view this issue is that the scaling of muscle powered damage isn't even. Running two ST 100 monsters smacking each other as two dST 10 monsters smacking each other plays differently than running them as two ST 100 monsters. Sees them lose about 16% of their HP with every hit, the other sees them lose about 38.5% every hit. Give them swing damage sticks and it gets a little closer (35% for dST case, 45.5% for the ST case). Fix ST damage to be even at multiple levels and scaling thing works works better.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by TGLS

I'm not familiar with what you think the problem is, but in my view this issue is that the scaling of muscle powered damage isn't even. Running two ST 100 monsters smacking each other as two dST 10 monsters smacking each other plays differently than running them as two ST 100 monsters. Sees them lose about 16% of their HP with every hit, the other sees them lose about 38.5% every hit. Give them swing damage sticks and it gets a little closer (35% for dST case, 45.5% for the ST case). Fix ST damage to be even at multiple levels and scaling thing works works better.

Yeah, linear scaling would help there - while I think it may be realistic for muscle-based damage to increase faster than resistance to injury as size increases, I also think having them increase equally tends to work better for both gaming and story purposes.

I forget if I've noted it before, but if it's possible to do in a readily-gameable fashion, I'd like if damage rolls were always just a 3d roll. Basically, there would be a nominal average damage for each attack, and the 3d roll would modify this. That way all attacks have the same probability distribution, rather than near-average results becoming more and more common as damage increases. But actually doing that in a readily-gameable fashion is easier said than done! (I suspect Mission X is going to do something like this - Doug mentioned a "damage variance roll" when giving a sneak peak - but that uses a variant of Conditional Injury, and I'm not certain making that the default would be the way to go for a theoretical 4e Revised)

[dataweaver]

Remember: 4eR, not 5e. Any changes shouldn't break too much of the existing 4e library.

I'd personally love to see ST-based damage standardized in a way that makes it directly proportional to your ST (or perhaps some power of your ST), making it easier to scale up or down; but would that interfere with existing published material?

[weby]

Originally Posted by TGLS

I'm not familiar with what you think the problem is, but in my view this issue is that the scaling of muscle powered damage isn't even. Running two ST 100 monsters smacking each other as two dST 10 monsters smacking each other plays differently than running them as two ST 100 monsters. Sees them lose about 16% of their HP with every hit, the other sees them lose about 38.5% every hit. Give them swing damage sticks and it gets a little closer (35% for dST case, 45.5% for the ST case). Fix ST damage to be even at multiple levels and scaling thing works works better.

You quoted two parts, so reply in two parts:

Scaling:
A few general problems:

No smaller than standard scale:
Currently if a human and a classical large dragon interact in combat there are fairly good rules that work well enough by using D-scale (*10)and normal scale as needed for damage etc.

But give a mouse sized creature a weapon and have them fight a larger creature and the fact that there is no /10 scale to drop down to when needed. So you have to use normal scale with the mouse having maybe 1 hp giving no granularity.

Second on scaling:
Things like modifiers are given as absolute numbers:
example: "Defender’s Situation: Above attacker: +1 if 3’ difference, +2 if 4’, or +3 if 5’"

So if you have two giant 100 foot mechans fighting then that +3 is trivial to get, but two mouse men fighting cannot even reach each other at 5 foot height difference.

The books are littered with a lot of those types of rules where if you are not normal sized human versus normal size human the GM has to try to decide how to implement them, often on fly in middle of a session.

Obviously they should be scaled, but how? So would be better if there were rules on that.

As for damage to objects:
It is best illustraed by the example: Take the Skyscraper in B55. It has DR 10 and 3700 hp.

Give someone a Battle Rifle, 7.62mm and every shot will do about 3 injury after the DR and injury tolerance. Thus after about 1230 hits anywhere on the building that 50 story building will risk collapse and after about 7400 by the rifle hits it is destroyed for sure. That is without hitting anything important in the building.

In reality it would have a lot of holes, most windows shot out and such, but very unlikely be anywhere near a collapse unless targeted most of the shots specifically at the frame in one smallish area.

Same problems if you want to model age of sail ships pounding on each other, by the rules the ships cannot survive that many hits as you do not need to penetrate the armor many times until they run out of HP and so on.

Basically any massive object is very likely to survive a lot of small damage effects in real life, unless they hit something critical.

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by weby

As for damage to objects:
It is best illustraed by the example: Take the Skyscraper in B55. It has DR 10 and 3700 hp.

Give someone a Battle Rifle, 7.62mm and every shot will do about 3 injury after the DR and injury tolerance. Thus after about 1230 hits anywhere on the building that 50 story building will risk collapse and after about 7400 by the rifle hits it is destroyed for sure. That is without hitting anything important in the building.

Same problems if you want to model age of sail ships pounding on each other, by the rules the ships cannot survive that many hits as you do not need to penetrate the armor many times until they run out of HP and so on.

And it's a very hard problem to solve. You can kinda solve it with conditional injury. But in your example with Skyscraper... It would be immune to any guided missile in High Tech book. They can do at most superficial damage. And from my experience that is too entirely unrealistic.
Maybe we need some SM of te attack and give some sort of Damage Reduction (+50% one, without the minimum 1 damage) or Damage Resistance based on the difference between it and SM of objects. I don't know how much explosive matters here, I'm not an expert in physics. I suppose ability to penetrate and do damage to internals is good too.
And other question, should we think of where this damage is going? I would attack bottom of the skyscraper for example. So we need building hit locations...

Conditional injury is better for vehicles. It's kinda working)

Edit: as for buildings, conditional injury can work for walls, doors and stuff like that. But I'm not sure how realistic it is. I need some doors and a sledgehammer I suppose)

[Jpot]

Originally Posted by Flowergarden

And it's a very hard problem to solve. You can kinda solve it with conditional injury. But in your example with Skyscraper... It would be immune to any guided missile in High Tech book. They can do at most superficial damage. And from my experience that is too entirely unrealistic.
Maybe we need some SM of te attack and give some sort of Damage Reduction (+50% one, without the minimum 1 damage) or Damage Resistance based on the difference between it and SM of objects. I don't know how much explosive matters here, I'm not an expert in physics. I suppose ability to penetrate and do damage to internals is good too.
And other question, should we think of where this damage is going? I would attack bottom of the skyscraper for example. So we need building hit locations...

Conditional injury is better for vehicles. It's kinda working)

Edit: as for buildings, conditional injury can work for walls, doors and stuff like that. But I'm not sure how realistic it is. I need some doors and a sledgehammer I suppose)

Who wants to write GURPS: Buildings and Structures?

We have roamed far afield now. A revision of GURPS needs to address writing, cohesiveness, layout and organization, with changes that can affect gamers of the widest range possible. All while getting a new player excited, and to the table quickly.

Nobody grabs a book off the shelf and says "I wonder what kind of building damage rules this game has?"

[TGLS]

I kind of wonder whether there should be an injury tolerance between Diffuse and Homogeneous for large air filled things, like Zeppelins and Buildings. Like right now, 18 hits with Basic Set's ATGM brings the skyscraper to 0HP. That seems vaguely correct.