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Old 04-16-2023, 11:07 AM   #1
Tyneras
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
Default Rambling Thoughts on Conditional Injury (Pyramid #3/120)

Just my various thoughts and impressions from Conditional Injury and its interactions with other parts of GURPS.

1. If the RT/Severity chart was shifted down by 4, making humans RT 0, it would remove a math step for human scale characters. While this would disjoint it from the Speed/Range table, I don’t see it as an issue.

2. I think presenting the HP to RT progression as a simple 6 step: 1.2, 1.8, 2.4, 3.6, 6, 8.4, 12 log progression and keeping the Speed/Range table plus 20% as an under the hood/designer notes is the better tack for introducing it to new players.

3. RT and Mass. While I appreciate a good precision chart, I think the 2, 6, 20 progression (or 1, 3, 10 for the metric users out there) is a close enough gameable approximation. I’d make RT 4 (humans) a 60 to 200lb range, which nicely lines up with the GURPS Spaceships masses and means big humans (all my barbarian buddies) would get a nice +1 RT.

4. Using Conditional Injury with Logarithmic Strength (Knowing Your Own Strength, Pyramid #3/84), you get a very nice and neat +1 RT = +5 LogST progression when scaling bigger creatures.

5. Survivable Guns (Pyramid #3/44). I loved the idea, but hated recalculating stats for each new gun. I think a better solution is as follows: Attacks as a small cross section but deep wound channel (piercing, impaling, beam) are capped at Severity 0 OR Severity-3, whichever is greater. Then apply modifiers for things like large piercing, vitals hits, vulnerability, etc.

The idea is that at that point the attack has just passed through you, and if you are using it it’s time to start looking at over penetration effects. But at the same time sufficiently powerful attacks with still do extra damage, avoiding silliness like being able to tank multiple shots from a tank cannon.

6. The cost of RT. RT syncs up perfectly with IT:DR; with IT:DR 2 being functionally identical to RT +2, IT:DR 3 equal to RT +3, and so on. Thus making each level of RT be worth 25 points. RT would be more expensive than equivalent HP at lower levels, and a ridiculous bargain at higher levels.

7. I think I would coin the advantage “Severity Reduction”, priced the same as RT. Mostly exists to clean up Unliving and Homogeneous, turning them into SR 2 (Pi, Imp) and SR 4 (Pi, Imp) but also leaving the advantage open to other uses. Severity Reduction would be applied last in injury calculations.

8. The Last Gasp (Pyramid #3/44). TLG by default has you lose AP equal to HP (modified by an HT roll) when injured. This gets a touch silly at high HP values. With Conditional Injury, I switch to a flat cost starting with Severity -6 up to Severity 5: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. This tracks approximately with HP/AP loss for human scale characters until things start getting really bad and you start needing to be super human to remain functional anyway.

9. Healing time. It’s trivial, but I don’t like that 1.5 days or the switch to weeks in there. A healing time progression of (in days): 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 70, 100 is almost the same as written and is just more ascetically pleasing to me.

10. Magic Robustness: Treating spell costs as injury and magery as your robustness level could be a fun variation of spell casting. I haven’t done this yet but it definitely looks neat.
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