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Old 03-01-2016, 01:46 PM   #1
Mithlas
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Default The Hunter and Unkillable

Given that most local gaming groups are more active in that system, I don't have much opportunity to play GURPS. However, I find the cost-balance system of GURPS helps me stabilize and focus characters in the books I write. One of whom is a part-human hybrid who can be injured by mundane weapons, but heals very fast unless the weapon is silver (in which case it hurts a lot more and has a comparable healing time to average humans, with the caveat that he will heal from any non-fatal wound eventually as he can't bleed out). He's a self-styled hunter of these creatures, but I'm trying to figure out exactly how to build it so I make sure the ability is consistent as I write.

He isn't exactly supernaturally strong, but since the failure point of muscles is usually when they start tearing under strain he can continue to push his body past normal human limits and get back up to do it again, something he generally only uses against nonhuman enemies.

These are the (Dis)Advantages that I spotted in the main book that seem relevant, though I'm not sure how to best apply them.
  • Unkillable 1 (p95) never has to roll to avoid death is definitely fitting
  • Regeneration: Very Fast (p80) at least, but only for healing wounds from non-silver sources. Those heal slower, perhaps at standard rate
  • Regrowth (p80) could potentially apply, but none of the plot milestones ever deal with him having limbs chopped off. Most of his major injuries are impaling.
  • Resistant (impaling damage. common?) (p81) some manner of dividing mundane damage could help maintain a degree of parity with his compatriots, as he's joined by other humans who fight and are injured alongside him
  • Resistant (piercing damage. common?) (p81)
  • Damage Resistance (p47) while he's less likely to be stopped by mundane damage, I'm hesistant to use a straight subtractor because he can still be bruised and injured with the rest of his compatriots. Something more like "halves incoming damage" would seem more fitting because it would stop less lower-level damage but provide more protection against massive damage
  • Vulnerability (p161) multiplies the damage from that source, which is appropriate regarding the pain/shock taken from silver but doesn't reflect the fact that a 1kg straight-edged short sword would still only cut to a certain depth in the same swing.
  • Weakness (p161) bypasses defensive abilities, but causes damage at a distance like a radioactive isotope and doesn't reflect that it has to touch him.
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Old 03-01-2016, 02:09 PM   #2
Varyon
 
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
Unkillable 1 (p95) never has to roll to avoid death is definitely fitting
It also means you can keep going until your body is physically incapable of functioning (-10xHP), which seems rather appropriate here.

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
Regeneration: Very Fast (p80) at least, but only for healing wounds from non-silver sources. Those heal slower, perhaps at standard rate
GURPS Horror has the Bane Limitation, which can be applied to Advantages like Regeneration to make them not apply to damage caused by certain materials (in your case, silver). Worth a look.

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Regrowth (p80) could potentially apply, but none of the plot milestones ever deal with him having limbs chopped off. Most of his major injuries are impaling.
Decide if he can actually regrow bits, or if the bits can simply never be chopped off in the first place. The latter is a form of Injury Tolerance found in GURPS Powers.

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
Resistant (impaling damage. common?) (p81) some manner of dividing mundane damage could help maintain a degree of parity with his compatriots, as he's joined by other humans who fight and are injured alongside him
Resistant (piercing damage. common?) (p81)
The Advantage you're looking for here is Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction (which you might see on the forum mentioned as IT:DR). It's basically Vulnerability, but in reverse - see GURPS Powers.
To have it apply to two different types of damage, I'd personally figure out how much it would cost to be resistant to a larger class that includes those two, then mark it somewhere logical that's in between. Physical Damage would be Very Common and would include Crushing, Cutting, Impaling, and Piercing (Burning is more Energy, Corrosion and Fatigue are fuzzier but I'd probably lump them with Energy). I don't feel like looking up the actual values, but for sake of argument let's say IT:DR (Very Common) costs [40], IT:DR (Common) costs [30]. That's [+10] for +3 damage types, so each damage type is [+3.33] or so; IT:DR (imp and pi) would thus cost [34].

Alternatively, just give him Injury Tolerance: Unliving, which has built-in resistance to piercing and impaling attacks. In GURPS, what something does is more important than what it's called - while the character may indeed be alive, the fact that he lacks many of the vulnerabilities of the living makes this trait appropriate.

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
Damage Resistance (p47) while he's less likely to be stopped by mundane damage, I'm hesistant to use a straight subtractor because he can still be bruised and injured with the rest of his compatriots. Something more like "halves incoming damage" would seem more fitting because it would stop less lower-level damage but provide more protection against massive damage
Again, IT:DR. In this case, you might be looking at unmodified IT:DR or IT:DR (Physical Only), with further levels of the trait against impaling and piercing damage.

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
Vulnerability (p161) multiplies the damage from that source, which is appropriate regarding the pain/shock taken from silver but doesn't reflect the fact that a 1kg straight-edged short sword would still only cut to a certain depth in the same swing.
Penetration is represented by basic damage, which Vulnerability doesn't modify. Your character isn't being cut any deeper by that silver sword, but the cut is hurting him more.

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
Weakness (p161) bypasses defensive abilities, but causes damage at a distance like a radioactive isotope and doesn't reflect that it has to touch him.
I think Weakness can be modified to require you to actually touch the object (actually, I thought it did that to start with, but I don't have my Basic Set books with me). Also, decide if it should actually harm him simply with a touch (It Buuuuurnsss!), or if it needs to hit him with enough force to cause injury.


Another trait you might want to consider (although I think it comes "free" with Unliving - you'll want to check) is Injury Tolerance: No Blood to represent the fact that he can't bleed out. He might actually have blood, making him susceptible to Blood Agents and similar. I believe that is a -40% Limitation on IT: No Blood (reducing its price to [3]).

Last edited by Varyon; 03-01-2016 at 02:13 PM.
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Old 03-03-2016, 03:46 AM   #3
NineDaysDead
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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How do you think this would work if you bought this in portions?

Like for example let's say you buy Regeneration up to 1 HP/minute normally, but then you pay the difference from minute>turn with the bane limit on that difference.

Say you have 100 HP, you take 10 damage from your bane, then 50 damage from some other stuff.
First heal the normal injury in 50 seconds, then the bane injury at a rate of 1 hp per minute: total time to recovery 10 minutes, 50 seconds.
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Old 03-03-2016, 05:37 AM   #4
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Right, it's simply enough when the per-turn heals normal damage before the first healing of the per-minute begins, but not sure what to do when they overlap.
They don't overlap. Heal all the fastest healing injury type first, then the next fastest healing injury type, and so on.

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So 1 minute goes by: I should steal at most heal 60 HP. But I could opt for that to be 59 normal damage and 1 silver damage, by trading one of my per-turns each minute for a per-minute.
No. GURPS Healing is sequential not simultaneous. You could heal 59hp at 1 HP per second, but then you need a whole other minute to heal 1 HP at 1 HP per minute, making the total time 1 minute 59 seconds.

You don't count the healing time from when you were injured, but from when you healed the previous HP.
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Old 03-03-2016, 06:54 AM   #5
Varyon
 
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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So 1 minute goes by: I should steal at most heal 60 HP. But I could opt for that to be 59 normal damage and 1 silver damage, by trading one of my per-turns each minute for a per-minute.
Not quite. Normal injury heals at a rate of 1 HP/second for you, while silver-inflicted injury heals at a rate of only 1 HP/minute. That means your normal injury should take 3600 seconds (1 hour) to heal fully, and your silver-inflicted injury should take 60 minutes (again, 1 hour) to heal fully. There shouldn't be any combination of healing rates (absent outside intervention, of course) where it takes you less time than the sum of those two times - a total of 2 hours - for you to heal up to full. Using your "59 normal, 1 silver per minute" rate, you're going to heal up to full in 1 hour, 1 minute. That's clearly wrong.

The simplest way to handle it is, as NineDaysDead suggests, to heal the quickest-healing injury first. If the visuals of this - wounds from silver weapons not even starting to close until all other wounds are gone - bothers you too much, you could split the healing up so that you recover 1800 HP normal injury and 30 HP silver-inflicted injury in an hour. You'll overall recover at the same rate (still takes 2 hours to get back up to full), but instead of 1 HP per second followed by 1 HP per minute, you're recovering 1 normal HP per 2 seconds and 1 silvered HP per 2 minutes simultaneously.

(EDIT: Of course, I should note here that your situation is purely theoretical. Regeneration actually scales with HP, just like natural healing, so Fast Regeneration would give you a rate of 366/minute, Very Fast Regeneration would give you a rate of 366/second. With some work, you might be able to figure out fair costs for 1/min and 1/sec for your HP, however.)

Last edited by Varyon; 03-03-2016 at 07:00 AM.
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Old 03-04-2016, 01:56 AM   #6
Mithlas
 
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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Regeneration actually scales with HP, just like natural healing, so Fast Regeneration would give you a rate of 366/minute, Very Fast Regeneration would give you a rate of 366/second. With some work, you might be able to figure out fair costs for 1/min and 1/sec for your HP, however.
I might be missing something, but in the main and Powers book I don't see anything indicating Regeneration scales with HP or it would've said something like "regenerates N percentage of HP". It does mention reducing by proportion the recovery time of abilities under Powers, but that's for restoration of abilities like DR (Ablative).

As to "what damage heals first", my books don't give an explicit indication so I would think that the "fast damage" heals first, then the slow damage heals after that. Unless you buy two Regeneration abilities (one for general and a limited one for the slower bane version), and an Alternate Ability would function one at a time and probably also go fast then slow healing unless you've come to an understanding with your GM during character creation.
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Old 03-04-2016, 05:09 AM   #7
NineDaysDead
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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I might be missing something, but in the main and Powers book I don't see anything indicating Regeneration scales with HP or it would've said something like "regenerates N percentage of HP". It does mention reducing by proportion the recovery time of abilities under Powers, but that's for restoration of abilities like DR (Ablative).
It's not listed under Regeneration because all healing works this way.
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Originally Posted by High HP and Healing; basic page 424
The healing rates given for natural recovery, first aid, magical healing spells, the Regeneration advantage, etc. assume someone with human-scale Hit Points; that is, with fewer than 20 HP. Those with more HP heal in proportion to their HP score. Multiply HP healed by 2 at 20-29 HP, by 3 at 30-39 HP, by 4 at 40-49 HP, and so on, with each full 10 HP adding 1 to the multiple.
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Old 03-03-2016, 02:13 PM   #8
Varyon
 
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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This must be one of those 3>4 changes I didn't notice, will have to review the updated ability. I guess the thing about normal damage first makes sense. This also means that if someone uses healing spells on you, they won't get wasted on healing normal damage that will quickly go away, by healing the normal first it lets the healing spells target the slower bane damage.
The way healing spells/abilities/technology will work is going to be up to the GM. Unless using houserules for targeting specific wounds while healing, I'd probably have any external healing have a proportional effect. If you've got 10 HP of injury and that should take an hour to heal, a 5 HP healing effect should cut healing time in half, not to (by targeting Bane damage) or by (by targeting the normal damage) only a couple minutes. Others might feel Bane is such a low-point modifier that letting characters overcome it by more effectively prioritizing healing abilities is perfectly fine.
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Old 03-01-2016, 02:26 PM   #9
NineDaysDead
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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  • Regeneration: Very Fast (p80) at least, but only for healing wounds from non-silver sources. Those heal slower, perhaps at standard rate
Regeneration: Very Fast (Bane, Rare: Silver -10%) [90]

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Originally Posted by Mithlas View Post
  • Resistant (impaling damage. common?) (p81) some manner of dividing mundane damage could help maintain a degree of parity with his compatriots, as he's joined by other humans who fight and are injured alongside him
  • Resistant (piercing damage. common?) (p81)
Normal: impaling and huge piercing a wounding modifier of X2; large piercing, X1.5; piercing, X1; and small piercing, X0.5.

Injury Tolerance (Unliving) [20]: This gives impaling and huge piercing a wounding modifier of X1; large piercing, X1/2; piercing, X1/3; and small piercing, X1/5.

This doesn't effect special locations like the vitals or the brain. If he's ok being stabbed in those add:

Injury Tolerance (No Brain) [5]
Injury Tolerance (No Vitals) [5]

If he really doesn't mind being stabbed take Injury Tolerance (Homogenous). Impaling and huge piercing have a wounding modifier of X1/2; large piercing, X1/3; piercing, X1/5; and small piercing, X1/10.

This effects all locations and includes Injury Tolerance (No Brain) and Injury Tolerance (No Vitals)

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  • Damage Resistance (p47) while he's less likely to be stopped by mundane damage, I'm hesistant to use a straight subtractor because he can still be bruised and injured with the rest of his compatriots. Something more like "halves incoming damage" would seem more fitting because it would stop less lower-level damage but provide more protection against massive damage
Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction Divides injury by 2, 3, 4, etc.
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Old 03-01-2016, 02:36 PM   #10
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Default Re: The Hunter and Unkillable

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He isn't exactly supernaturally strong, but since the failure point of muscles is usually when they start tearing under strain he can continue to push his body past normal human limits and get back up to do it again, something he generally only uses against nonhuman enemies.
The rest was pretty well covered so Ill just hit this one.
Extra Effort can model this and maybe give him an ER so he can do it more.
Rules Exemption perk if no one else can use Extra Effort as well.
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