Pyramid #3/34: Alternate GURPS

[PK]

What is GURPS' greatest strength? Its internal consistency? Its realism? Its ability to be burned as an alternative fuel source? While I could agree with any of those, I'd suggest that its ease of customization may be what sets GURPS apart from many systems. And fortunately, we were able to find a half-dozen authors who felt the same way.

Pyramid #3/34: Alternate GURPS is the product of those authors' fevered dreams. Each starts with the system that we all know and love, but takes it somewhere exciting and new. Why, just look at what you get:

• Alternate Spaceships: David shows that the rules from GURPS Spaceships can be adapted to almost any type of vehicle, from flexibody snakes to submarines to cars . . . heck, even buildings. Along the way, he muses on alternative calculations for DR, beam damage, and life support -- giving the GM complete control over just about every assumption in Spaceships!
• A New Take on Grappling: Ken literally throws out everything that the Basic Set teaches us about grappling in favor of these new, more detailed rules. Unifying Judo, Sumo Wrestling, and Wrestling into a new set of techniques which rely on Setups, Transitions, and Control, this article adds another level of realism to wrasslin'.
• When We Were Very Small: Mark lays out all the rules and guidelines a GM will need to run a game with tiny, weak characters. With full rules for fractional ST, along with a ton of advice on running "critter" games, there's now technically no reason you can't have that Reign of Steel/Bunnies and Burrows crossover you've been dying to run.
• Eidetic Memory: Extreme Damage: David shares some insight into the creation of Fourth Edition, along with a healthy dose of "if we did it this way instead." Do you want your super bricks to do more damage? Do your vehicles die too easily when shot? Do you dislike how HP scale with weight, or how explosions vary with a square root? Then take a look inside this month's Eidetic Memory column and see how easy it all is to change!
• Ten Tweaks to Customize Combat: T Bone gives us an a la carte menu of options to adjust your GURPS game. From simple tweaks for active defenses to new rules that turn near-misses into hesitations and near-hits into grazes, the wide variety here means that you're likely to find something to try out in your own games.
• A Deck of Dice: Steven suggests ways to replace GURPS' 3d6 with an equivalent, flashcard-based alternative. The changes are subtle, but surprisingly profound, especially if you let the players keep track of what's been drawn.
• Armor Revisited: Douglas doesn't takes sides here. Do you wish damage had more variable penetration against armor? No problem. More consistent penetration? Sure. More variable injury? Got you covered. Less? Yup. If you've ever uttered a sentence along the lines of, "I wish the interaction between damage, armor, and injury was more _________ in GURPS," this is the article you've been dreaming of.
• Random Thought Table: So, you have all of these alternative rules. Now, how do you keep track of them -- and how do you make sure the PCs are willing to keep track of even the ones that make their lives harder? Worse, what if you try a rule and hate it -- but its effects were so profound that now you have to explain why everything keeps changing in-game? Fear not -- Steven's been thinking about this, too, and he has some great ideas for you.

Whether you're the type to house-rule away half of the system, or to just tweak the damage on a gun here and an axe there, everyone who likes playing with the rules will appreciate this issue of Pyramid. And if there's anything in it you don't like . . . change it. That's the whole point, after all.

[demonsbane]

Hey, this seems interesting . . .

[doulos05]

I'm SO buying this next month. (CURSE YOU SALARY! Why must you fall monthy and not biweekly!)

[Pragmatic]

Thankfully, I have very few expensive hobbies.

I buy TV series on DVD, but I'm waiting for the pre-orders to hit 40% off. (I have literally hundreds of DVDs--perhaps as much as 1000--in my collection, plenty I haven't watched yet...)

I have NetFlix, but that's only going to be $16 a month.

I have WoW, but that's only $15 ($16?) a month.

I have cable & internet, that's pretty expensive...

And I buy a few books every once in awhile.

So my main hobby is role-playing games. And, aside from Dresden Files and the Mongoose Traveller core book (plus Hammers Slammers), it's all been GURPS for the last couple of years.

So keep up the good work, guys! :-)

[Tyneras]

I really like Eidetic Memory: Extreme Damage. I'm definitely going to use it next time it comes up. It kind of makes me wish that all attacks had a wound size modifier (like piercing), there is a bit of difference if a giant is taking crushing damage after getting hit by fist sized stones or horse sized catapult stones.

I'm still mulling over Armor Revisited and Ten Tweaks to Customize Combat. Lots of possibilities there.

Great issue!

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

I really like Eidetic Memory: Extreme Damage. I'm definitely going to use it next time it comes up. It kind of makes me wish that all attacks had a wound size modifier (like piercing), there is a bit of difference if a giant is taking crushing damage after getting hit by fist sized stones or horse sized catapult stones.

I had a table somewhere, probably on the Forums here, extending the table for pi damage both up and down, at 0.1 increments. Fairly straight-forward to do. I like it as well, where the damage type tells you what rules to use (bleeding, can it hit the vitals, etc) and the multiplier is straight-up application of "how bad do it hurt?"

Wasn't a table, it was a formula with some explanations of what I did. Might have been a different table somewhere else, tho, since I remember generating one.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Might have been a different table somewhere else, tho, since I remember generating one.

I remember a table with two columns from the Tactical Shooting playtest for granuality of firearm damge.

Not sure if that is what you are thinking of though.

[Steven Marsh]

I'm not sure if it's the table that everyone is thinking about, but GURPS Loadouts: Monster Hunters (p. 9) has a sidebar that offers optional wounding modifiers (and typical calibers) at 0.1 increments from 1.5x through 2.0x.

[Christopher R. Rice]

As a fan of Torg (and the SAGA Marvel RPG) I loved the dice to deck mechanic! It was a real close one with the Spaceships article. I like it enough that I'm working on a permanent set that's laminated and using this for the cards. I'm wanting to use the Armor = Dice mechanic but I'm not sure if it will slow down game play more...

Still, overall great issue!

:)

[Rasputin]

Well, I need to tweak my personal conversion of Bestiary 3e (so I can have all the point values) to accommodate the new ST and SM data. Funny, I would have guesses T Bone would have written that article. I guess he was more interested in getting preemptive Dodge in print by SJG somehow.

I want to know how those grappling rules work in play.