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Old 05-17-2022, 01:38 PM   #11
Gollum
 
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

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Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
An automatic fall if you blow a Climbing roll is harsh but realistic.
Not really because, as I said above, it means that either you progress upward or you fall. Whereas, when you climb, there are many moments during which you don't succeed to go upward: search for new catches, need to search a new path, to stop and rest during a little while, and so on.

And sometimes, you just realize that you cannot go higher, give up, and go back down. You didn't succeed, but didn't fall however.
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Old 05-17-2022, 03:23 PM   #12
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

For my house rule, if the item you are climbing provide a bonus (e.g. +5 to climb a tree), then you have to fail by more than the bonus to fall (so you would have to fail the Climbing roll by 6 or more to fall climbing the +5 tree). A lesser failure represents being stuck and wasting time at your current level.

Only on dangerous climbs that result in no bonuses or penalties will all failures result in a fall.
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Old 05-17-2022, 03:52 PM   #13
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

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Not really because, as I said above, it means that either you progress upward or you fall. Whereas, when you climb, there are many moments during which you don't succeed to go upward: search for new catches, need to search a new path, to stop and rest during a little while, and so on.

And sometimes, you just realize that you cannot go higher, give up, and go back down. You didn't succeed, but didn't fall however.
Those moments sounds like Perception based Climbing rolls to spot your next grip to climb higher and IQ based climbing rolls to figure our a "path" upwards.
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Old 05-17-2022, 04:25 PM   #14
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

For what it's worth, back when I did rock-wall climbing, there were many occasions where, even after identifying what I thought was the best path and beginning the attempt to physically ascend, I found that I couldn't quite reach/couldn't quite get a grip/couldn't quite pull myself up and my climbing progress stalled, but I was in no immediate danger of completely losing the rest of my grips and coming off the wall.

EDIT: I suppose the details of the technique matters here a lot. If one is essentially jumping or throwing oneself to the next available grip ("dynamic climbing"), there may not be much middle ground between succeed or fall, but if one is making limited movements with one limb while remaining anchored on the other three, one has to mess up pretty badly to come off (but, apart from reduced speed, there may be places where grips are sufficiently far apart to make ascending in this latter manner impossible).
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Old 05-17-2022, 11:07 PM   #15
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

I think the main problem from a game mechanical perspective is not the failure (though that's bad for non-modern climbing gear too), but the fact that you're very slow and you need to roll every five minutes. That's about okay for a fifteen foot vertical stone wall, but for anything larger / harder to climb you're not doing only two rolls, but multiple rolls, even with a good or boosted skill level you're going to fall eventually and if you aren't secured, you are going to take damage. Free-climbing into a fifth-floor window of a modern building would take at the very least thirty minutes and seven rolls. Even someone with skill 18 there's a 28% chance you'll miss one roll thanks to the skill penalty. You better hope it's one of the first three or so.

It might be realistic, but it compares badly to other physical feats and it makes it unlikely that PCs will try cool stunts in favour of boring safety. What I do to avoid is:

1) If you fail by no more than 3 + climbing modifier (or fail by 1, whichever is less) you'll get a second chance to avoid at least some of the falling distance (grab a ledge, regain your grip etc.). This roll is always penalised to add some tension.
2) More important: I decide how dramatically difficult / important I want the climb and that sets the number of rolls. Climbing a tree to get a bonus to Navigation? 1 roll. Rope up a huge tower to reconnoiter the enemy? Two rolls. Enter into the dark lord's fortress? 5 rolls or more.
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Last edited by Blind Mapmaker; 05-18-2022 at 09:52 AM. Reason: rewrote 2 sentences for clarity
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Old 05-18-2022, 01:56 AM   #16
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

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But, when I was younger, I climbed a lot of trees. And the two possibilities (either you succeed, or you fall) is not true.
The possibilities are all valid if you want a slightly more complex house rules for Climbing.

You could rule that a failure by 1-4 represents a "fixable problem" - you find yourself unable to climb any further using a particular route and have to backtrack or you need to spend extra time recovering your will or figuring out a way to proceed.

Functionally, those add extra time to the climb. In a way, it's the same thing as Taking Extra Time but the extra time requirements are only imposed if there's a problem.

Unless the GM is running the harshest of harsh realistic campaigns, just about any "screw up and die" type skill roll should be rethought. The better game mechanic is:

"Normal failure results in a penalty to your next skill roll unless you do something to offset that penalty - taking extra time, using extra gear, etc. CF only results in worst case scenario if it's verified by a second natural roll of 17-18. Otherwise, you suffer some lasting bad effect which complicates all subsequent rolls to complete a task."

Non-verified CF might mean injury, loss of equipment, a new problem which requires a roll against a different skill to fix, a social or combat complication, or something else.

In some cases, you can reset any penalties due to CF by abandoning an attempt. For example, CF when making a vehicle control roll during a chase might set you up for an accident unless you break off pursuit.

Multiple failures might produce cumulative penalties which ultimately do result in catastrophic failure. That nicely simulates "cascade failures" where one bad decision or a minor problem triggers a more serious problem, which in turn triggers a catastrophic problem.
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Old 05-18-2022, 04:06 AM   #17
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

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Originally Posted by zoncxs View Post
Those moments sounds like Perception based Climbing rolls to spot your next grip to climb higher and IQ based climbing rolls to figure our a "path" upwards.
Right. But the rules in Basic Set don't say when you have to make those Perception or IQ based rolls. So, with them, it is either you progress upward or you fall.
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Old 05-18-2022, 04:14 AM   #18
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
I think the main problem from a game mechanical perspective is not the failure (though that's bad for non-modern climbing gear too), but the fact that you're very slow and you need to roll every five minutes.
Not only, in my humble opinion. But you are right: it is a big problem too. Because if things happened in reality as they do with Basic Set GURPS rules, free climbers would never dare trying what they do.

No matter the training (i.e. th skill level) and even the bonuses, 1.9% chance of falling (17 or 18 are always a failure) is too much as soon as you make dozens of rolls in a raw.
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Old 05-18-2022, 04:25 AM   #19
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

Having said that, all the house rules you wrote above sound good to solve that problem. And I like very much Kallatari's one. It is very simple to apply and makes a lot of sense: the more the climb is easy (either because there are a lot of catches or because the climber is very prudent and take all his time to ensure his catches before going up), the less is the chance to fall.

But the official rules in Action sound to make the job too. One failure, DX roll. Another failure, another DX roll ... The player knows that it becomes very dangerous now and that he'd better give up or go slower to avoid falling.

Tension and drama arise, which is much more fun than a mere "make the roll or your dead" situation.

So thank you very much to every one. I've got all the answers I needed.

Last edited by Gollum; 05-18-2022 at 04:34 AM.
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Old 05-18-2022, 05:04 AM   #20
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Default Re: Reading GURPS rules more closely: climbing roll failure

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Originally Posted by Gollum View Post
Not only, in my humble opinion. But you are right: it is a big problem too. Because if things happened in reality as they do with Basic Set GURPS rules, free climbers would never dare trying what they do.

No matter the training (i.e. th skill level) and even the bonuses, 1.9% chance of falling (17 or 18 are always a failure) is too much as soon as you make dozens of rolls in a raw.
That's a point that comes up often in GURPS rules, and I think it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of probabilities in GURPS and in gaming generally.

Yes, it's true that in the real world, a climber with any experience would have a very low probability of falling. They might climb every day, and go for a decade or more without ever falling.

But in actually playing an RPG, if you played every week, and rolled Climbing twice in every session, that would be VERY FEW rolls compared to the number of "rolls" you would be making for climbing in the real world. If you said that the chance of falling was 1/5000 rolls, you might play for 2500 sessions, or 50 years, before a failure. And that's so low a chance that psychologically it would be negligible; you would have no feeling of suspense when your character tried to climb, and in terms of the experience of playing the game you might as well say that Climbing rolls weren't required.

The rolls you make in a game session to use a skill are a small sample of the "rolls" your character could be assumed to be making if they actually had continuous existence in the game world. But they are not an unbiased sample. You're playing an adventure game, one that's about your character doing things that are exciting to imagine, and thus risky. Your sample is of the number of times your character attempts to use the skill while having exciting adventures. And if you think of adventure movies and the like, the number of times things go wrong in such a movie is a lot higher than it is in the real world. The movie doesn't show every single time a character tries to use a skill; it shows times when they use the skill in dramatically tense scenes. The probabilities have to be different.

If you want to think about routine, everyday use of the skill, think of it as the basis for job rolls. On a job roll, you don't have anything bad happen on a normal failure; only on a critical failure. If you get your Climbing up to 16, you have one critical failure per 216 rolls, or per 216 months, which is 18 years. And that's probably a lot less unreasonable as a representation of the kind of situation you're talking about. But job rolls are for background, non-adventuring activities.
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