Rules you ignore/alter.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Or routine job rolls are made at +4? A lot of skill level bloat comes from not giving routine tasks an appropriate bonus.

TDM of 3+ also invokes the "riding a bike" rules where you don't actually have to roll if your effective skill is 15 or higher, meaning all you need is skill 11 or 12 and +4 or +3 and you can just avoid failure (crit or otherwise) altogether.

Of course not every day is a routine day at work. Maybe you missed some sleep and got -1 to IQ, or maybe there's a TDM of merely +1 or +2 on a rough day which does require a roll.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Plane

I'm not really sure it's a known of how the majority of fantasy settings in the GURPS multiverse operate?

I'm talking about settings that actually exist, not settings sampled from a completely hypothetical underspecified procedurally generated multiverse.

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

There's a lot of game rules average people abuse that aren't necessary normally in roleplaying. Dabbler, common TDMs, taking extra time, etc. And as Kromm has said in the past, real life people are far likely to spend cp on impulse buys to minimize disasters while PCs want to continually improve despite disasters. Even just five cp is likely enough to have a boring life due to lack of giant problems.

I have to say I'm intensely averse to using metagame mechanics to explain the lives of normal people. Having and spending cp are normally altogether non-diegetic.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I often see Impulse Buys as the player doing something, not the character. Normal people don't know they happened to avoid a terrible accident or know the boss was intending on firing them instead of their employee.

The vast majority of characters in any realistic setting should not benefit from cinematic/supernatural abilities. If you want a realistic character to have access to exceptional luck (which is realistic, as there are people who are demonstrably more lucky than others), give them Luck or Serendipity. In the case of the wealthiest and most powerful people in a realistic setting, their success can either be traced to succeeding when they should have failed (Luck), being at the right place at the right time (Serendipity), or being born to the right family (massive levels of Luck and Serendipity). In fact, I would argue that it would be unrealistic to have a character with Multimillionaire who did not have multiple levels of Luck/Serendipity.

[Polkageist]

Not so much a rule being ignored, but when a crit is rolled I'll usually ask the player if they want to roll on the crit table or not. Interestingly enough, they'll pass about equally on the good/bad crits usually because things want to keep moving along and not stop for something silly. Also, they'll roll on the table about equally for bad crits as good, though I admit that I blunt the worst of the nasty critical failures.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Polkageist

Not so much a rule being ignored, but when a crit is rolled I'll usually ask the player if they want to roll on the crit table or not. s.

My esperience in my Worldof D'y'r't campaign and rolling critical successes is that it almost always isn't worth the trouble.

The heart of the bell curve for the chart in Campaigns is literally nothing. Anything that isn't 15 or higher of 7 or lower is only useful to somebody who is trying to nickel and dime an opponent to death. That leaves only a 20% chance of getting something good.

If somebody is keeping a 5e to do list I vote to put "totally revamp the Critical Hit Table!" on it.

On the other hand, the one time Aldehar the Incendiary rolled a crit fail on spellcasting he did pop himself for about 35pts of damage. Everyone else accelerated their efforts to get an Amulet of Fire Resistance after that.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

My esperience in my Worldof D'y'r't campaign and rolling critical successes is that it almost always isn't worth the trouble.

It's a small bonus on top of the main reason you care about crits (no active defense). It's not like the extra effects of the roll are bad, they're just often irrelevant.

[Plane]

[QUOTE=Ulzgoroth;2348901]
I'm talking about settings that actually exist,
not settings sampled from a completely hypothetical underspecified procedurally generated multiverse.

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

real life people are far likely to spend cp on impulse buys to minimize disasters

I'm not sure that's even supposed to be an option for NPCs. "Bonus CP" for "good roleplaying" that can be spent on ANYTHING probably just isn't realistic, it's inherently metagaming to make things more fun and chaotic.

B145 for example suggests GMs give players 1-2 bonus CP for roleplaying themselves well in another character's Nightmares as a parenthesis after "completely unaffected by anything that occurs there".

As players we're in a sense ghosts in the shell: undetectable unkillable spirits on the shoulders of our characters engaging in Mind Control, making them immune to Reaction Rolls but needing to pay for Allies, occasionally jamming some kind Supra-Cosmic Afflictions of advantages upon them in the form of "bonus points" when us shell-ghosts opt to spend them.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

My esperience in my Worldof D'y'r't campaign and rolling critical successes is that it almost always isn't worth the trouble.

The heart of the bell curve for the chart in Campaigns is literally nothing. Anything that isn't 15 or higher of 7 or lower is only useful to somebody who is trying to nickel and dime an opponent to death. That leaves only a 20% chance of getting something good.

If somebody is keeping a 5e to do list I vote to put "totally revamp the Critical Hit Table!" on it.

On the other hand, the one time Aldehar the Incendiary rolled a crit fail on spellcasting he did pop himself for about 35pts of damage. Everyone else accelerated their efforts to get an Amulet of Fire Resistance after that.

I think the best crit success/fail I've seen was when someone fumbled with a mace, and and got the "throw weapon" result. It came up as 1-yard forwards, and thus onto the guy they were aiming at anyway. The DX check to avoid it failed, the mace hit the guy on the skull, and as the thrower was a massively strong WM the result was about the same as if he'd got a normal hit (aside from having to retrieve his mace).

I've seen a few 'funny bone' hits and forced disarms, but they're not usually very exciting as most attacks in these games are powerful enough to make those results irrelevant.

[TGLS]

I don't know. Job rolls are fairly harsh if you assume natural 18 is Lost Job. There's about a 1/3 chance of holding a job for 20 years and about a 1/9 chance of holding a job for 40.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by TGLS

I don't know. Job rolls are fairly harsh if you assume natural 18 is Lost Job. There's about a 1/3 chance of holding a job for 20 years and about a 1/9 chance of holding a job for 40.

To be fair, it's not that common to hold a single job for 20 years, though a lot of the causes for that aren't directly related to job skill.

Speaking of rules to ignore/alter, I generally ignore downtime rules (jobs, on job training, self-training, taking classes, etc). I might just give everyone some xp for an extended downtime, but it won't follow the rules for downtime if I do.