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Old 04-12-2021, 02:32 PM   #1
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default what do Lilitu eat, and what is a Daily Dose of Infants' Breath?

One variant of GURPS Horror's Specter (p27) is the Lilitu (p93). They have a disadvantage which removes the 'Doesn't Eat or Drink' advantage which Specters inherit from the Spirit template on B263.

This presumably means they need to materialize to eat (unless perhaps they can eat other insubstantial spirits? how plentiful would those be?) which Specters can do a bit more easily than other spirits: their -20% "difficult materialization" (H16) is merely 1 FP per minute instead of per second like the -40% "usually on" insubstantiality.

Lilitu have ST12/HT13 and presumably that much HP/FP. Thirteen minutes could be a rushed meal if you had to rely on consuming a substantial food source, but I guess you could just take breaks in between to recover FP?

Makes me wonder: when you've swallowed something, assuming that initially counts as "encumbrance", how long would it take to digest it enough that it's considered no longer to be encumbrance and instead part of you?

Same consideration for water too, I guess?

B62 requires "Can Carry Objects" and Spirits/Specters/Lilitu do not have that enhancement on their insubstantiality so time needed to incorporate food seems like a pretty important consideration. If you don't have enough time then whatever you're chewing on (or even swallowed/digesting) would presumably stay substantial when you stop paying FP and revert to insubstantial form.

- - -

Being creatures with the Noctural disadvantage (B146) they can't put this off getting their meals: they're completely immobile when the sun's risen until it sets, and I don't think turning insubstantial and hiding underground would prevent that, though maybe flying to the other side of the planet where it's night might work?
While "only at day" and "only at night" are -20% limitations (meant to be 44-56% of the time in Accessibility) and I figure probably meant to be 12-hour periods, I'm not sure if Nocturnal might be an even narrower range like 8 hours: do we have any guidelines for when sunset/sunrise occur?
- - -

Food/drink aside, the Lilitu have another thing they need to schedule during their night-active hours: a potentially deadly Dependency (Daily) which per B130 is going to make them lose 1 HP/hour if they don't fulfill a daily dose. That's a x3 multiplier so the base cost derived from -45 is -15, which if you knock off the -5 for Infants' Breath being illegal means it's -10: ranked Common (expensive, hard to find).

Do we ever get guidelines moneywise as to what the Dependency tiers require? You have Occasional (Very Expensive) or Common (Expensive) ... I was thinking maybe going by how B122 defines these terms for Addiction which is >0.5% average starting wealth for "very expensive" and >0.1% average starting wealth for "expensive".

This is pretty convenient since it uses a "cost per day" system too. So we have 1/1000 sw = "hard to find" and 1/200 sw = "somewhat hard to find" roughly.

I could see a dependency being "illegal" as perhaps a reason to perhaps apply some kind of cost-multiplier to buying the drugs though? Not sure.

If we assume that a Lilitu-equivalent with this Dependency lacking Leech could purchase "pre-bottled Infants' Breath" from some local mage for 1/200 sw per dose, then presumably "Leech" gives an alternate approach to spending money to get these "doses": in a sense manufacturing your own illegal drugs for free, using your own labor/abilities.

The question here then becomes : how do various levels of Leech translate into production capacity of Infants' Breath?

Leech in it's basic form steals 1 HP per attack, and every 3 attacks you make, you get back 1 HP. There's basically the requirement of some kind of tally system: sort of like you get a free energy reserve which stores up to 3 HP and then automatically heals you whenever you reach that. Without that, Leech 1 and Leech 2 wouldn't be able to recover HP without taking the Accelerated Healing enhancements which changes the heal-1-per-3-inflicted ratio to 'heal-what-you-inflict.

Lilitu happen to have that enhancement which makes for easier math for them. They have it at level 2 which means inflicting 2 HP per attack and recovering 2 HP per attack.

This would mean, if you're losing 1 HP per hour from missing a dependency, that 12 successful attacks should even things out.

It seems wrong to just say "while I'm getting full benefit of my Leech recovering HP lost to my missed doses, it's ALSO the dose" though.

Seems like maybe you'd need to choose one or the other: either the 2 HP you inflict heals 2 lost HP, or it counts towards your "dose requirement" to turn off the hourly HP loss.

So for example: you're at full HP and have no use for the stolen HP: it counts as a dose towards your daily quota to prevent the death spiral happening 24 hours later. Being at full HP first before dumping excess HP into dose-requirements seems like a good policy for simplicity.

But the question is: just how much excess should you need to qualify as a dose? What would the value of HP be when compared to money?

I was thinking maybe we could use Power-Ups 5 (Impulsve Buys) as a guideline, since you can buy money using character points, to get a rough guideline of equivalent values.

Trading Points for Money is 1 cp per 10% sw, which would buy 100 doses of an "expensive" substance (like ready-to-consume mage-bottled Infants' Breath).

You can also spend CP to reduce damage you take (pg 6 "Defense vs Effect") which involves controlling randomization to guarantee snake-eyes on 2d. This is incredibly useful when you're hit with a 2d Corrosion Attack 2 [20] because you're changing an average of 7 damage into merely 2 damage: a 2/7 multiplier is basically a 3.5 divisor.

It's not like a universal 3.5 divisor of course multiplier: you get less benefit if the roll would've come up low to begin with (2 stays 2), and more benefit if it would've rolled high (12 becoming 2 is a divisor of 6)

DVE is a much less useful option if you're hit with something like 1d+3 Corrosion Attack 1.9 [19] though: there's only 1 die to reduce so it will still do 4 damage.

Given the potential "adds problem" I wonder if instead one could take something like "1 cp buys a 3.5 divisor for up to 7 damage" as an alternate policy. Basically it will change 1-3 damage to 1 damage and 4-7 damage to 2 damage? The downside being: you're out of luck if it ends up doing 8-12 because then you'll be taking 3-5 damage instead of merely 2, but 'dice plus adds' doesn't cripple the ability to buy success even on less-random attacks.

Changing 7 damage to 2 damage is basically negating 5 damage for the price of 1 cp

So basically negating 5 damage = getting 100 doses of your expensive drug, or 1 damage = 20 doses.

I feel like the math is off though because this would mean a single Lilitu attack of 2 HP should give 40 days worth of Infants' Breath and I get the impression they need to feed more often than that...

Another approach instead of "Defense vs. Effect" might be "Second Winds" (pg 10) where 1 cp buys 100% fp. This creates a sliding value: FP has increasingly less CP: value the more FP you have.

Given the 5%/10% contrast between Costs Fatigue and Costs Hit Points (we also see this in the "FP only" version of Dependency elsewhere in horror) it might be reasonable to say 1 cp could recover 50% hit points, though there's no actual mechanic for that in impulse buys.

if 50% hp = 100 doses then 5% hp = 10 doses and 0.5% (1/200 hp) could give a dose, so it's still underwhelming... 2 HP is still a high % of the 13 HP that a Lilitu has (>15% which would be >30 doses per attack) so it still feels off.

I don't think Impulse Buys strategy works, instead maybe I'm thinking for simplicity that you could just treat Dependency like having an energy reserve of "drugs in my system feeding my dependency" and the reserve is only big enough so that it can only last up to your period (24 hours in this case) and it fades at the rate you'd lose HP once it runs out?

In that case, a Lilitu would have an ER for storing Baby's Breath of 24 FP which would drain at 1 FP/hour, and when they're at full HP any excess HP they steal converts into HP to fill the ER?

ER 24 divided by the rate of 2 hp per attack would work out to 12 attacks per day. Per B20 an infant would have ST 3 (so 3 HP) so suffering 2 HP would reduce them to 1/3 HP which is still healthy enough to avoid Move/Dodge penalties (B327: must drop below).

So a Lilitu could in theory feed on 6 babies per night to meet it's "dose" requirement while minimizing harm to them (let them recover HP to full before feeding again)... does that seem too extreme?

In practise, this won't actually happen of course: the Link+10% obligates Lilitu to also attack simultaneous with Affliction: Choking, which per B428 causes Suffocation (B436) losing 1 FP per second.

This is actually badness for HP economy: MoS minutes of Choking at 60 FP per minute is going to guarantee death pretty soon, which means your food source is non-renewable (no wonder they have an Odious Racial Habit).

I actually don't get how that's an advantage at all: the usual benefit of choking is to neutralize threats, but infants aren't threats that need neutralizing. The sole benefit only seems to be "cannot speak" preventing them from crying out and alerting people that the Lilitu is there...

But is crying out even that big a threat? Lilitu can instantaneously turn insubstantial to avoid threats, and even ghost-slaying weapons wielded by invisible-seers aren't particularly dangerous if you just hop through a wall (or just the ground) since the wall can function as cover against both sight and attacks.
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daily dose, dependency, leech, lilitu, suffocation

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