Keeping you players alive for dummies

[fsbof]

Howdy,

my group and I are going to plunge into GURPS as complete greenhorns soon.

We're playing a western style scenario with some supernatural horror tropes on the low key.

Therefore my players may pick some supernatural abilities if they choose to, but again, those are suppossed on be on the low key, too. They might play lightning fast gunslingers, mysticists with a connection to the spirit realm and so forth, however they won't grow magic armor, won't become supernaturally tough and won't have access to magic healing.

They'll encounter the usual, worldly threaths in such a world, but also supernatural ones like a rampaging wendigo from native folklore or an unregistered midnight express from hell. The latter ones will be rare, but still.

So: how do I keep them alive? :D

From what I get so far, GURPS tends to be quite deadly and all in all, we like it that way. Still, that also begs the question about player survivalability.

Tipps I've already read up on are:

-Don't have your hostile NPCs do targeted attacks, at least not to the face, skull or vitals.

-Keep most NPCs at moderate skill levels.

-Encourage your players to tackle problems smartly, not gunz blazzzing.

-Be generous with starting XP.

-Go with "Survivable Guns" (not a fan of that one tbh)

-Give players some reroll ressource, like Shadowrun's Edge

[whswhs]

Encourage them to buy up their HT.

When you get down to fully negative hit points (that is, if you have, say, 11 HP, and take 22 points of damage, you are reduced to -11 HP), you have to roll to survive. If you have HT 10, you have a 50% chance of survival; on the average you'll die at -22 HP. But if you have HT 12, you have a 75% chance of survival; on the average you'll die at -44 HP, which takes a lot more injury to get to. With HT 13 or higher, on the average you won't die until you get to -5 times your HP, at which point you're considered to have been physically destroyed.

Spending 20 points on boosted HT is a worthwhile investment, for this and other reasons.

[JulianLW]

All these are good ideas (though I don't really like Survivable Guns, either), but the most expedient would be to start the campaign with one (or maybe two) tokens for each player that they can exchange for a single use of the "Flesh Wounds [5]" advantage. This is a houseruled advantage (from Malainka, I think) that's basically an aspected Destiny point that is usable once per session to turn a single injury into a 1 HP injury (though maintaining any damage effects, such as crippling). For more, see "Flesh Wounds" in Power-Ups 5: Impulse Buys.

You don't have to make this trait available to your players, but giving them one or two uses of it could be a good way to both teach your players about how deadly combat can be in GURPS and to help their starting characters survive a couple of combats. Let them exchange the tokens whenever they want - they'll probably wait until there's a lethal injury and use the tokens for a second chance to get away....

[Fred Brackin]

Avoid Survivable Guns. It would protect he monsters at least as much as the PCs (probably more since at least some of the opposition wouldn't be using guns).

Make at least 1 level of Luck mandatory. A lot of serious consequences begin with a bad die roll.

Yes, invest in HT and HP strategically. 1 to 2 more HP will shift the target's "Major wounds" threshold by a pt which can mean not being crippled by a limb wound and/or not even needing to roll v. Knockdown and Stunning.

[Varyon]

Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy is a cinematic switch you can activate that makes it so the opening volley of most enemies will always miss the PC's which can help keep them alive. You can use other cinematic switches, like Flesh Wounds, Melee Etiquette, etc to help here.

You may want to encourage traits like Hard to Kill, and even discourage traits like Hard to Subdue (which makes it more likely for the character to stay up and fighting until they hit various death thresholds, including the instant death threshold of -5xHP) if OpFor would be inclined to capture rather than kill (or even just run away after the fight's over).

You may wish to avoid bleeding rolls, and if you do use them then you won't want to use the rules from High Tech and Bio Tech that make severe wounds harder to patch up (in some cases calling for Surgery at a penalty) - if it just requires basic First Aid, then outside of the party all being knocked out and left for dead, bandaging them up to prevent further bleeding will keep them alive.

There's also an optional rule from High Tech that is often referred to as Blowthrough (I don't recall what it's actually called in the book, however). This caps the amount of Injury a Torso hit from a bullet can do, to 1xHP (so 10 for a character with HP 10, 13 for a character with HP 13, etc), although you use the full Injury rolled to determine bleeding (if not using bleeding, the cap is instead 2xHP; note this is a case where using the bleeding rules may well help your characters survive, if medical assistance is readily available). Many GM's who use this modify it so the cap applies to penetrating damage rather than Injury, so that a pi- attack can only deal half the character's HP in Injury, while pi++ can deal up to twice the character's HP in Injury (in both cases, penetrating damage is capped at the character's HP, then the WM - 0.5 for pi-, 1 for pi, 1.5 for pi+, and 2 for pi++ - is applied to that).

Do note that, without magical healing, the road to recovery may be a long one. "Western" implies TL 5 or TL 6. At TL 5, Treating Shock has a 50% chance of doing nothing beyond the 1 HP restored by bandaging; on average, it will restore a further 1 HP, for a total of 2. At TL 6, there's a 33% chance of it doing nothing beyond the 1 HP restored by bandaging; on average, it will restore 1.67 HP. So you're looking at between 2 and 3 HP restored by First Aid (if you get lucky, you can wind up with 4 or 5 HP restored, thanks to a critical success or rolling maximum HP restored). After that, characters will be restricted to bed rest if they want to restore more HP; without dedicated medical care, that's at best a bit under 1 HP per day. With medical care, your physician gets a roll every 2 days at TL 5 and every day at TL 6; success means you restore an additional 1 HP (critical success means 2 HP, but critical failure means -1 HP). So, overall, between natural healing and physician assistance, you're probably looking at an average of 1.5 HP per day at TL 5, 2.5 HP per day at TL 6.

One good option to speed things up is Very Rapid Healing; while Characters isn't explicit about this, it has since been clarified that this is meant to apply to all healing, not just your own recovery attempts. It means you restore twice as much HP as normal, cutting recovery time in half (unless you have high enough HP to already heal more rapidly - double at HP 20, triple at HP 30, etc - in which case it functions as though you simply had 10 more HP than you do, but I don't think that's something you're expecting to happen in your campaign). Note you can also have supernatural healing salves that grant Normal Regeneration (1 HP per hour for some amount of time) or similar without being as explicit as having people cast healing spells, and that will markedly cut down on downtime for healing. You could also let people roll for natural healing without bedrest, perhaps at -4 (as Rapid Healing grants a +4 to recovery rolls, that means having that or VRH lets you roll against straight HT each day to restore HP, even while on the move).

Crippling wounds can also result in a lot of downtime; both Rapid Healing and Very Rapid Healing will help a lot here, as both give a +4 when rolling to see how long a crippling wound will last; this will mean Lasting Crippling will be much rarer than Temporary, and the latter just requires you to get back up to full HP to regain use. They can also make Permanent Crippling less likely (if your HT is 12-15, as they boost it to 16+ and thus require an 18 for Critical Failure), and that can result in a character needing to retire from the campaign, which isn't all that different from death from the players' perspective.

[The Colonel]

Remind your PCs that they're not playing "that RPG" - combat is not the default resolution mechanic. PCs will live a lot longer if they don't get into combat all that often.
Also, for more survivable combat, have a look at tactical shooting and consider turning up the difficulty of actually hitting anything. Lots of sound and fury but very few actual hits is entirely genre appropriate for a Western.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Yes, invest in HT and HP strategically. 1 to 2 more HP will shift the target's "Major wounds" threshold by a pt which can mean not being crippled by a limb wound and/or not even needing to roll v. Knockdown and Stunning.

The added HP are certainly a good idea. You can also get them free as part of buying up ST. Higher ST pays off in lots of ways.

[Kesendeja]

One of the best things I've found to help survivability is the use of Impulse Points, from Power Ups 5 - Impulse Buys.

You can use character points to buy the effects, but Impulse Points are a renewable resource that generally cost 5cp per point.

These can be used to alter dice rolls and environment in a variety of ways.

[Donny Brook]

I found this house rule that I now use cinematic campaigns.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Note you can also have supernatural healing salves that grant Normal Regeneration (1 HP per hour for some amount of time) or similar without being as explicit as having people cast healing spells, and that will markedly cut down on downtime for healing.

Introducing an actually working snake oil-type concoction, that grants some form of sped up recovery like Normal Regeneration, would certainly not feel too out of place in a Western setting where the supernatural actually exists.

Same with an allied shaman asking spirits for aid with restoring the health of the protectors/allies of their tribe.

And neither of these have to result in full recoveries from near death. The "snake oil" might work for half a day, while the spirits might not want to exert themselves too hard for someone they aren't directly indebted to and just leave when everyone is at 0 HP.

Both options also have some additional natural limitations, the "snake oil" needs to be carried, the bottles might break and the working type might only be available from a scant few salesmen (who might run out of a critical ingredient). The shaman is unlikely to leave the tribe's lands unless the spirits direct him to do so, and the spirits might not want to keep patching up reckless individuals who constantly get hurt (at least without a great service in return).

Other than that, the various options presented in this thread work well, in particular Luck and HT & HP 12+.