(Unofficial) FAQ of the GURPS Fora

[vicky_molokh]

Is there a Compendium of Talents from the whole of GURPS 4e?
Yes! GURPS Power-Ups 3: Talents.
You can also look here.

[vicky_molokh]

Not sure it's worthy, but here goes:

Originally Posted by Bruno

Can't find any particular reason per the rules why a halfling can't Judo throw an Elephant. Makes my brain hurt. Please send help.

Originally Posted by Kromm

I'd say that since "more than twice your ST" is the limit on useful grappling, the same ought to go for Judo Throw. So a ST 6 halfling can throw up to a ST 12 man, a ST 23 ogre up to a ST 46 elephant, etc. It errs on the side of cinematic, but then most games do.

PS: As always, this is Approved For Sharing™.

[vicky_molokh]

Breath Control - the RAW is vague how does it work? Is it owerpowered?

Originally Posted by Kromm

Breath Control is pretty much custom-made to help people with cinematic martial-arts skills get back their FP. If you think those skills are "supernatural" – and I do – then the skill should also work for FP blown on magic, the Healing advantage, etc.

Yes, Breath Control indeed recovers almost any lost FP (lost as a cost for powering some ability, that is).

Originally Posted by Kromm

With Breath Control, you must sit still and do nothing but breathe, rolling vs. skill over and over. You will fail some of the time, and critically fail – and thus be at the GM's mercy, and perhaps pass out or inhale a fly that chokes you – on occasion.

Notice that this makes BC markedly less useful than Recover Energy for mages.

[vicky_molokh]

How do I build a wide damaging field/aura? Not just skintight, but several hexes in size?

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

Emanations have two different modes. Emanation + Area Effect is a conscious attack, taking an Attack maneuver to activate and going off in an immediate, one-off burst. You can affect people over and over as long as you spend a turn each time doing it, just like an ordinary Area Effect attack. Emanation is basically "zero range" for an AE attack, plus immunity to its harmful effects for yourself, but doesn't change anything else including the need for an Attack maneuver.

The variant in Powers (Emanation + Area Effect + Always On) makes it a permanent field that you don't have to consciously use - it affects people automatically when they enter it, but only once (or possibly more, if they enter then leave then enter again, but in any case they aren't affected again while remaining in the area effect).

Aura + Area Effect (plus Melee Attack at -30%, if the base attack is normally ranged), per a PM exchange with Kromm*, gives you a Switchable field that continues to affect everyone in the area, once per turn, without any attention or maneuver needed on your part. You get the immunity that Emanation gives as part of the Aura enhancement.

As of Pyramid #3/19, this is canon, with the following combination officially allowed:

Originally Posted by Auras of Power

Statistics: Area Effect, 2 yards, +50%; Aura, +80%; [ . . .]; Melee Attack, Reach C, -30%; [ . . .]

[vicky_molokh]

Note to everybody: Quick Contests don't usually have meaningful criticals:

Originally Posted by Kromm

As the rules state, the winner of a Quick Contest is the contestant with the greatest margin of success or smallest margin of failure. The rules don't mention critical results because they're not relevant to the calculation of a margin.

Consider a Quick Contest where Character A has skill 14, rolls a 4, succeeds by 10, and scores a critical success, while Character B has skill 30, rolls a 10, succeeds by 20, but scores only a regular success. Character A loses to Character B, and in fact Character B gets a 10-point margin of victory. It might seem to "cheapen" Character A's critical success to say that Character B wins, but all Player A did was roll dice well. It would cheapen Character B's massive investment in her abilities even more to let Character A win with a critical succes. After all, Player B actually paid points -- she bought another 16 levels, which might be 64 points in a skill, 80 points in Will or Per, 160 points in ST or HT, 320 points in DX or IQ, or some combination thereof. To put it in perspective, Player A could "buy" a critical success for at most 5 points (see the box on p. B347)!

Some rules do specifically note what critical success and failure do in a Quick Contest if you win or if you lose. However, actual victory and defeat depend on the margins. This is for the sake of fairness. Points, not lucky die rolls, are the gold standard in GURPS. If we're going to start letting lucky dice trump points, then we might as well have people roll up attributes instead of pay points for them . . .

Originally Posted by Kromm

Concepts such as critical success, critical failure, and automatic failure normally matter only for straight, uncontested success rolls. Reread Margin of Victory (p. B348) and you'll see that Quick Contests are purely quantitative and do not care about qualitative degrees of success. Notably, "The winner's 'margin of victory' is . . . the difference between the loser's margin of failure and his margin of failure if both failed." You can fail and still win! All that matters is margin, found from each party's dice roll and full score.

Resistance rolls are special and unusual because you must succeed to win. But that rule applies only when a Contest is specifically called out as a resistance roll. Choke or Strangle (pp. B370-371) is a Quick Contest, not a resistance roll.

Feints are also special and unusual because you must succeed to win and margin of victory is worked out according to rules that don't add your foe's margin of failure to your margin of victory. See p. B365.

No, that counts as success by 0. It's still enough to win if your opponent fails by 1+. But for anything that depends purely on margin of success, your margin is 0, not 1. A few rules do assign a minimum margin of 1 to any uncontested success, but those are special cases. Strangling, resistance rolls, feints . . . none of those are among those special cases. Mostly, those special cases arise when margin of success is used to calculate duration or a similar parameter.

[vicky_molokh]

A bit that might be good to remember:

Who builds Allies? Player or GM?

Originally Posted by Kromm

. . . They're GM-created and -controlled characters. [ . . . ] Treating Allies as something like PCs sans players, or as PCs shared with the GM, is missing the point.

I would say that an Ally designed and controlled by the player, and that always has a Good or better reaction and goes along with the PCs' plans, is surely worth a lot more points. I'd call that the equivalent of Cosmic, +100% on Ally, probably on top of the +50% for Minion.

[vicky_molokh]

Q: When targeting the eyes on an opponent wearing headgear that does not explicitly cover the eyes, does the headgear offer any DR?

--- Warning: Low-Tech probably supercedes this by now ---

A: Yes, targeting the eye-slots on headgear that does not protect the eyes is the same as targeting a chink in armor with the special penalties for face, eyes, vitals, arm, etc.: the target gets half the DR of the headgear, for a -10 on the to-hit roll.

Q: What about headgear with explicit eye DR?

A: In that case, the eyes are not considered chinks.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

Hey, Molokh, I couldn't find anything like "Which limitations (Costs FP, etc.) include Switchable 'for free', and when do you have to use the enhancement?" in the FAQ. I know I've wanted to look that up fairly often; maybe I was using a bookmark to a Kromm post that got lost - anyway, I think it'd be very useful.

AFAIK all of them do, except those whose Switchable cost is increased (Static). Not much of a list, IMO. Do you still think it should be in the oFAQ?

[Mgellis]

Please consider adding this issue (how do you build switchable force fields?) and its resolution for the FAQ...

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=61975

You may want to check and get a more firm ruling, but it looks as if Switchable is not required for DR (or other passive abilities that are usually Always On) to make it "usually off" if it is built with a limitation that implies it is usually off, has to be turned on, and will only last for a certain amount of time, and will then shut off whether you want it to or not...this would include Requires Concentration, Costs Fatigue, Trigger, Accessibility, etc.

In short, the reason Switchable, +10% is an enhancement is that it gives you a great deal of control over when something is on or when it is off, at no extra cost. If something can take that ability away, then the power is Transient, and you don't need Switchable, +10% to build it.

Mark

[vicky_molokh]

Slams and Evades: If someone misses with a slam (or is Dodged), why does this effectively give a free Evade? Can I prevent that?

If someone tries to slam you, and you got out of the way, it's your fault that he ran past you - you could choose to take the hit. You can waive your Dodge if you don't want that to happen. In fact, here's another option you might want to use:

Optional Rule: A defender against a Slam may opt to grant the slammer an automatic hit to remove the chance of running past. After such an automatic hit, the defender may use any Active Defenses normally allowed.