V&V Conversions

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Infornific

The 9.8 here mostly focuses on how much you can lift. That said, the Strength stat in V&V affects HtH damage and damage capacity as well as lift. So it's simplest to treat it as a boost to ST. In fairness, V&V Strength isn't the main base for Hit Points so you could make a case for less of a boost to HP.

S of 60 gives you a hit point multiplier of 4.4, which boosts hit points from 4 to 18 (in V&V) or from 10 to 44 (in GURPS).

HP +34 is roughly comparable to Striking ST +30. You might approximate this as ST +30 for 300 points, and Lifting ST +65 for another 195 points.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If an average Kryptonian, on Earth, has Heightened Strength B x3, that's +9d10 to S, which averages +49.5. Rounding that up to +50 gives total S 60. Their lifting ability then is 6^3+1 x (weight/2). An average human's lifting ability is 2 x (weight/2), so they're 108.5 times as strong as a human, in terms of lifting abiiity. That's equivalent to GURPS ST 104, or Lifting ST +94.

In V&V, damage inflicted scales approximately as the logarithm of carrying capacity. Assuming a male Kryptonian with body weight 175 pounds (I don't recall the original Kal-L having a "denser molecular structure"), I get 18,987.5 pounds, which gives 3d10 damage, or 6.6x a normal human's ability to injure with a blow; taking ST 10 as giving thrust damage of 1d-2, I get 6.6d - 13.2 = 23.1-13.2 = 9.9, which is roughly 3d, or Striking ST +20.

However, in GURPS, damage inflicted scales approximately as the square root of carrying capacity. The square root of 108.5 is about 10.4. Taking 10.4d - 20.8 gives 36.4 - 20.8 = 15.8, which is roughly 4d+1, which equates to Striking ST +30.

Or we could just equate it to ST+90, for Basic Life 2000 lbs. and thrust damage 11d.

I kind of think that the second of those options is probably best. Basic Lift 2170 lbs. will let Superman pick up a fairly heavy truck two-handed; damage 15.8 will require an average human to roll to stay conscious, but isn't likely to kill them.

This gets a little tricky. I assumed that 1 point of damage in V&V was roughly the same as 1d damage in GURPS. The logic is based on pistols and rifles in V&V doing 1d6 and 1d10 respectively. That in turn lead to the assumption that base damage for powers would peak around 11d or so (converting the d20 of Power Blast) and this also suggested an I level game.

That said, there's some oddities - HtH damage for a normal human is about 1d4. Which is about 2.5 points in V&V which would convert to 2d+2 or so in GURPS, far higher than the 1d-2 base. Now if a character is planning to do a lot of punching they're likely to drop 8+ points in Boxing or Karate. That still doesn't bring in anywhere near 2d+2.

That in turn causes inconsistencies with our Kryptonian. In V&V he's doing 3d10, a little more than 50% than a d20 power blast. In GURPS he drops to a base of 4d+1. Even assuming the character has Boxing or Karate, that's only good for a +8 bonus. Including the -1 for punching damage, that's 4d+8 or the equivalent of 6d+1. That's well under my suggested 11d for Power Blast.

On the other hand, I was already thinking of using survivable guns and halving gun damage. That would drop the rifle from 5d+2 to 2d+3 or so and the pistol would drop to 1d+2. If we apply that halving to all V&V abilities, that would get base HtH for a normal around 1d+1 - not too far off GURPS. Our Kryptonian's 3d10 would be 8d+1 which is over the 6d+1 for GURPS. But the Power Blast would convert to 5d+2 so the Kryptonian could outpunch a blaster. So perhaps the following genre rules for a V&V conversion:

1. As in Pulver's "Survivable Guns" in Pyramid 3/44, rifle damage is halved and guns are armor piercing by default. Unlike Pulver, I would apply that to all guns, including pistols. Body armor specifically made for guns has DR halved but is considered hardened by default. So still as effective against guns but less so against powers.

2. Damage from V&V converts at a rate of 1d of GURPS damage for every 2 points average damage from V&V. This makes power damage modest but still more potent than guns.

3. Damage Resistance from V&V powers will typically have the Hardened enhancement, making modest amounts of DR effective at stopping most guns.

Getting back to the Kryptonian, here's a suggested alternate Heightened Strength:

+ 6 ST (Super -10%) [54], Lifting ST 12 (Super -10%) [33], HP +4 (Super -10%) [8] and Damage Resistance 2 (Super -10%, Tough Skin -40%) [5]. Total cost is 100 points.

5 levels (rather than three) would get you to +30 Striking ST, +90 Lifting ST and +50 HP. With Boxing or Karate, you'd have a robust punch by the standard of V&V conversions.

Alternate version, that will stay at 100 points a level (the above has some rounding): + 5 ST (Super -10%) [45], Lifting ST 10 (Super -10%) [27], HP +10 (Super -10%) [18] and Damage Resistance 4 (Super -10%, Tough Skin -40%) [10]. Total cost is 100 points.

Not sure I want to make this radical a change but it might fit the genre better.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Infornific

This gets a little tricky. I assumed that 1 point of damage in V&V was roughly the same as 1d damage in GURPS. The logic is based on pistols and rifles in V&V doing 1d6 and 1d10 respectively. That in turn lead to the assumption that base damage for powers would peak around 11d or so (converting the d20 of Power Blast) and this also suggested an I level game.

It seems to me that what you're trying to do is come up with a configuration of GURPS traits such that a boost to strength has the same effects on character abilities in GURPS that it would have in V&V. And I think that at best that's needlessly complicated and at worst unachievable. It's true that ST in GURPS affects lifting and carrying ability, hand to hand damage, and hit points, and that S in V&V affects these things as well; but the effects scale very differently, due to fundamental differences of game mechanics. And it's almost always impossible to exactly replicate the mechanics of a different game.

When you come right down to it, even GURPS ST and V&V S don't mean the same thing. GURPS ST means that you can lift a certain absolute weight, and inflict a certain absolute damage, and withstand a certain absolute amount of damage. But V&V S means that you can lift a certain proportion of your body weight, and inflict and withstand damage proportionate to your body weight. A V&V hulk with Size Change giving x1.5 height and x7 weight automatically gets more carrying capacity, more hand to hand damage, and more hit points; a GURPS character with that increase in weight would have to buy ST separately to fit.

I think what I would recommend is defining the GURPS version of Heightened Strength B to give the same proportionate increase in Basic Lift that the V&V version gives to carrying capacity. There are a couple of reasons for this:

* The most direct visual manifestation of strength in the comics is lifting and shoving huge weights. If your strong character in V&V can lift a car, but your strong character in GURPS either can lift a tank or struggles to lift a motorcycle, they're not going to seem like "the same character."

* Both hit points and damage are largely artifacts of the game system. We can't really look at an injury in the real world and say "this is equal to X hit points."

* So far as hit points have a physical meaning, that meaning in GURPS is roughly "this attack penetrated to a certain depth," but in V&V it's "this attack destroyed a certain percentage of body tissue." Those are not equivalent concepts.

* In V&V, hit points are modified by both Agility and Intelligence; that is, if you're quick enough to get out of the way, or smart enough to plan not to be in the way to start with, you can stand more damage. This fits the old D&D assumption that hit points include dodging and even luck as well as physical durability. GURPS doesn't do that; it fits the RuneQuest/Champions assumption that hit points are purely a question of physical durability.

So I would look at Heightened Strength B, which gives an average +16.5 to S, as boosting carrying capacity from 1x body weight to 9.8x body weight. The proportionate boost in GURPS would be from BL 20 lbs. to BL 196 lbs., which is approximately what you get from ST 31, or ST +21.

You proposed to have GURPS power builds cost 100 points. You could take ST +11 (Super, -10%) for 99 points. But that seems to be roughly half what you get from Heightened Strength B; you'd have to take it twice. An alternative would be to define Heightened Strength B as ST +22 (Super, -10%) for 198 points, which comes really close to the ST +21 I worked out above. You could put the odd 2 points into perks such as Huge Weapons (SM), Power Grappling, or Acceleration Tolerance.

Or you could keep it at 100 points, and define Heightened Strength A as Strength +10 (with no modifier) for an even 100 points. (Or if you want to get fancy, you could take the Trained modifier from my Pyramid piece "Götterdämmerung": Each such ability must be maintained by an hour of supervised training a week, or twice as much time on self-study (-5%); failure to adhere to this results in gradual loss of abilities (+5%), but they can be regained with a week of fulltime training (+0%). +0%.

This is going to make combat somewhat more lethal than in V&V. You might want to look at rules tweaks to get around this. One that I recommended in GURPS Supers was to say that every character in a four-color setting has a free Hard to Kill +4 (and perhaps that inanimate objects have Easy to Kill +4!).

[maximara]

Using the Cinematic Rules can simulate Comic Code like supers:

*Cinematic Explosions: explosions do no direct damage though they do disarray clothing, blacken faces, and (most importantly) cause knockback.
*Flesh Wounds: ignore all but 1 HP (or FP) of damage . . . at the cost of one unspent character point
*Infinite Ammunition - oh I am supposed to reload the gun?

[whswhs]

I would agree that using cinematic rules—or the four-color rules in GURPS Supers—is a better way to get four-color results out of GURPS than trying to make GURPS mechanics produce the same results as V&V mechanics, which are inherently four-color.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by whswhs

It seems to me that what you're trying to do is come up with a configuration of GURPS traits such that a boost to strength has the same effects on character abilities in GURPS that it would have in V&V. And I think that at best that's needlessly complicated and at worst unachievable. It's true that ST in GURPS affects lifting and carrying ability, hand to hand damage, and hit points, and that S in V&V affects these things as well; but the effects scale very differently, due to fundamental differences of game mechanics. And it's almost always impossible to exactly replicate the mechanics of a different game.

Point taken. I still think the survivable guns option would be a good idea for a V&V style campaign but I admit that attempting a literal translation is probably foolish.

Originally Posted by whswhs

When you come right down to it, even GURPS ST and V&V S don't mean the same thing. GURPS ST means that you can lift a certain absolute weight, and inflict a certain absolute damage, and withstand a certain absolute amount of damage. But V&V S means that you can lift a certain proportion of your body weight, and inflict and withstand damage proportionate to your body weight. A V&V hulk with Size Change giving x1.5 height and x7 weight automatically gets more carrying capacity, more hand to hand damage, and more hit points; a GURPS character with that increase in weight would have to buy ST separately to fit.

I think what I would recommend is defining the GURPS version of Heightened Strength B to give the same proportionate increase in Basic Lift that the V&V version gives to carrying capacity. There are a couple of reasons for this:

* The most direct visual manifestation of strength in the comics is lifting and shoving huge weights. If your strong character in V&V can lift a car, but your strong character in GURPS either can lift a tank or struggles to lift a motorcycle, they're not going to seem like "the same character."

* Both hit points and damage are largely artifacts of the game system. We can't really look at an injury in the real world and say "this is equal to X hit points."

* So far as hit points have a physical meaning, that meaning in GURPS is roughly "this attack penetrated to a certain depth," but in V&V it's "this attack destroyed a certain percentage of body tissue." Those are not equivalent concepts.

* In V&V, hit points are modified by both Agility and Intelligence; that is, if you're quick enough to get out of the way, or smart enough to plan not to be in the way to start with, you can stand more damage. This fits the old D&D assumption that hit points include dodging and even luck as well as physical durability. GURPS doesn't do that; it fits the RuneQuest/Champions assumption that hit points are purely a question of physical durability.

So I would look at Heightened Strength B, which gives an average +16.5 to S, as boosting carrying capacity from 1x body weight to 9.8x body weight. The proportionate boost in GURPS would be from BL 20 lbs. to BL 196 lbs., which is approximately what you get from ST 31, or ST +21.

You proposed to have GURPS power builds cost 100 points. You could take ST +11 (Super, -10%) for 99 points. But that seems to be roughly half what you get from Heightened Strength B; you'd have to take it twice. An alternative would be to define Heightened Strength B as ST +22 (Super, -10%) for 198 points, which comes really close to the ST +21 I worked out above. You could put the odd 2 points into perks such as Huge Weapons (SM), Power Grappling, or Acceleration Tolerance.

Or you could keep it at 100 points, and define Heightened Strength A as Strength +10 (with no modifier) for an even 100 points. (Or if you want to get fancy, you could take the Trained modifier from my Pyramid piece "Götterdämmerung": Each such ability must be maintained by an hour of supervised training a week, or twice as much time on self-study (-5%); failure to adhere to this results in gradual loss of abilities (+5%), but they can be regained with a week of fulltime training (+0%). +0%.

This is going to make combat somewhat more lethal than in V&V. You might want to look at rules tweaks to get around this. One that I recommended in GURPS Supers was to say that every character in a four-color setting has a free Hard to Kill +4 (and perhaps that inanimate objects have Easy to Kill +4!).

I think I'll try to keep Heightened Strength in 100 point blocks, mostly for convenience sake. I'm likely to play looser with point cost of other powers but try to keep them in 50 - 100 point blocks. Probably overly influenced by Delvers to Grow but there's something to be said for making it easy to put together a PC. GURPS has a high level of detail & Supers amplifies this.

For now I'd keep Heightened ST a straight boost of ST but +7 ST and +13 Lifting ST might be closer to the effect in V&V.

Also I think on review I've been scrambling Heightened Expertise & Special Weapons and should revise and distinguish between those.

I like the idea of "intensive training" type powers, though I'm tempted to tweak that limitation to -5% with more time needed to get back in condition. A week seems a bit short to recover form requiring intensive training. But that might make more sense as a separate, low cost list of "super normal" powers. Honestly, that might make a good GURPS supplement.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Infornific

I like the idea of "intensive training" type powers, though I'm tempted to tweak that limitation to -5% with more time needed to get back in condition. A week seems a bit short to recover form requiring intensive training. But that might make more sense as a separate, low cost list of "super normal" powers. Honestly, that might make a good GURPS supplement.

* Kromm's recommendation is to avoid -5% limitations if possible, since for most advantages, 95% of the cost just rounds up to the full cost; he favors either coming up with another -5% or making them 0%. Of course that doesn't fully apply to superpowers.

* I came up with Trained specifically to represent "super normal" characters and their abilities: Doc Savage, Batman, Hawkeye, and so on.

* It seems to me that "It takes 40 hours of exercise to get these abilities back" isn't all that unreasonable when it goes with "Your ability started to fail when you skipped an hour or two of maintaining it in a single week." One week of slacking off followed by one week of full time training seems fairly balanced.

The other thing I'd say is that if you are going to define Heightened Strength B at 100 points invested in ST (and perhaps a perk or two), then to match the benefits of the V&V ability, you're going to need to take Heightened Strength B (GURPS) twice. If so, you might want to aim to have other GURPS versions of V&V abilities grant about half the benefit as well.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by whswhs

* Kromm's recommendation is to avoid -5% limitations if possible, since for most advantages, 95% of the cost just rounds up to the full cost; he favors either coming up with another -5% or making them 0%. Of course that doesn't fully apply to superpowers.

* I came up with Trained specifically to represent "super normal" characters and their abilities: Doc Savage, Batman, Hawkeye, and so on.

* It seems to me that "It takes 40 hours of exercise to get these abilities back" isn't all that unreasonable when it goes with "Your ability started to fail when you skipped an hour or two of maintaining it in a single week." One week of slacking off followed by one week of full time training seems fairly balanced.

I can see the issues with a Power limitation of only -5%. I was thinking of Training being equivalent to real world professional athletes and Special Forces, who spend a lot of time just keeping in shape. So it seemed to me it should take longer to get back in condition. But if you only need an hour a week to maintain, yes it makes a little more sense to have quick recovery.

I see the point about Batman, Doc Savage, etc. I don't know if you follow either but both the Marvel superhero long threads tend to be reluctant to put a normal human's DX above 15. The problem is that it makes it difficult to buy skills at appropriately high levels. Having a Trained power origin seems a useful compromise. Super soldier serum might get you a DX of 15 but Captain America has trained up to 19 or 20. Black Widow perhaps has a base DX of 13 or 14 but trained up to 17 or 18. Etc.

Originally Posted by whswhs

The other thing I'd say is that if you are going to define Heightened Strength B at 100 points invested in ST (and perhaps a perk or two), then to match the benefits of the V&V ability, you're going to need to take Heightened Strength B (GURPS) twice. If so, you might want to aim to have other GURPS versions of V&V abilities grant about half the benefit as well.

Part of the problem is GURPS ST can be a bit overpriced compared to other abilities. So it's hard to match V&V abilities at the same point level. I might compromise and give the option of either +11 ST or +7 ST and +13 Lifting ST. The latter would give a lifting increase pretty close to V&V's. I'm trying to do 50 and 100 point versions of abilities where practical.

[Infornific]

I also added to the start of this thread a link to the wiki and a list of the powers at least partly converted.

[Infornific]

Added in Sonic Abilities and heavily modified Disintegration Ray. Also modified Heightened Strength and moved most of what was Special Weapons to the more appropriate Heightened Expertise.