04-17-2024, 04:31 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
A concept which has appealed to me for a while is a scale setting switch or advantage. The core concept is that in a Scale X game, you can just build PCs as normal SM +0 characters, and then the game's scale will take care of making them interact properly with the environment. The general likely components of scale are:
A fairly consistent scaling for giants (which makes things like falling and collisions work correctly) is
Point value... aii. Off hand:
A useful combined scale is
Note that the above is cinematic giant scale, which ignores the square/cube law. A pure square/cube formulation is instead
Last edited by Anthony; 04-17-2024 at 06:58 PM. |
04-17-2024, 06:19 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
This is a potentially elegant approach.
In the past T-Bone has put a lot of thought into alternate GURPS Scales with his GULLIVER rules for GURPS 3E. It also dig into the mechanics of mass vs. SM mostly by riffing off of the old GURPS 3E Bunnies & Burrows rules. One of my house rules is that hits that do 0 HP or less still inflict 1 HP of damage on creatures at least one Size smaller than the attack scale itself. That means that regardless of the damage roll, a human always inflicts enough HP with a weapon attack to kill a tiny creature like a mouse or insect. It gets rid of silliness like a ST 8 human not being able to reliably kill a fly with a single punch. |
04-17-2024, 06:24 PM | #3 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
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04-17-2024, 06:57 PM | #4 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
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Btw, added some edits on how less cinematic scaling works. |
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04-18-2024, 08:18 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
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Remember that GURPS assumes that people reduced to HP x -5 die instantly, rather than dying slowly and messily like they do in real life (e.g., agonal breathing and instinctive neurological reactions after an untreatable, soon-to-be-fatal head injury). Unless a cockroach can still go about it's normal business rather than just scuttling off to die one human-sized stomp equals one cockroach-sized funeral. |
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04-18-2024, 08:36 PM | #6 |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
It occurs to me that GURPS Spaceships might be a starting/comparison point for scaling large objects simply, since each +1 to SM works out to approximately a 3x increase in volume. How dDR scaling for armor works and the way that HP are calculated might be useful, if only as a comparison of your system to RAW.
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04-18-2024, 09:22 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
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Last edited by Anthony; 04-18-2024 at 09:31 PM. |
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04-19-2024, 10:51 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
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04-19-2024, 11:02 AM | #9 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
Human skin definitely has non-zero protective value, though its true DR might be fractional.
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04-19-2024, 11:16 AM | #10 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: GURPS Scale and SM (spinoff from +1/-1 to hit)
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I often assume 0.5 DR for human skin. This probably overstates the effect but it gives a jumping-off point at least. The "minimum 1 point" rule for cutting and impaling is a resolution issue; it largely goes away if you replace GURPS' linear HP with something logarithmic. Which I think would work well here - something that is SM +2 and average Strength for its size could basically be run as having ST 10 but have incoming damage at -2 steps and cause damage at +2 steps.
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