The Trouble with GURPS 4.0 and Supers Games - Page 5

Orlin · 06-23-2009, 11:16 AM

The Trouble with GURPS 4th Edition Supers Games

I’m a big fan of the GURPS system, and so are a few of my friends. Many of my friends are extremely hesitant to give GURPS a shot because they prefer simple, cut-and-dry systems that don’t require a great deal of number crunching, and those are all well and fine, but at the end of the day, I look at GURPS and see something inherently superior to a great deal of other games. There’s something about the structure of it all, the way it’s so fundamentally simple and simultaneously so intricately detailed that just…calls to me. If you’re looking for a rule – any rule – chances are, GURPS has you covered.

That being said, I am by no means a GURPS Guru. I understand the system, I enjoy the system, I appreciate the system, and I would even go as far as to say that I am familiar with the system. The trouble is, I have not mastered the system. I make a great many mistakes over the course of a given game session (just as every GM does), and I find myself going back and correcting them as I can. While I’m not laying any claims that you all have access to some well of ancient knowledge, I’ve seen some of you guys throw system banter back and forth at each other, and many of you really seem to know your stuff. I need your help.

I’m running a game set in the X-Men Evolution universe, and so far, I’ve had an excellent time with it. My players are really enjoying themselves, and the game is, surprisingly enough, more social than physical. A great deal of the game focuses on life at the Xavier Institute as well as life as a high school student, with the underlying current being life as a mutant.

The characters have taken the role of the New Mutants, and as such, they spend much more time looking for prom dates and struggling to find their place in the world than they do in the field. They’ve established a rivalry with the Hellions (an even blend of Academy X style and old-school Hellions), who are working under Emma Frost, and the game seems to have taken to an easy pace and flow. About 75% of it is social, where I’m putting on a show for them, playing everyone under the sun, and developing plot seeds while the remaining 25% is a combat session, followed by a more relaxed social scene to wind everything down. So far, this has proven to be the winning formula.

These are some of the problems I encounter during combat sessions:

Super Strength vs. Hardened Damage Resistance

In the marvel universe, there are plenty of characters who can bench press a whole hell of a lot. The OHMU (Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe) has a penchant for listing characters strengths by how much they can “lift (press)”, as opposed to how much they can lift over their heads. As a result, this now makes it necessary to create a formula that determines how much characters can bench press. To give you all an example, Spider Man can “lift (press)” 10 tons. Using the following formula, Spider Man would have a 100 ST.

ST x ST / 5 = Basic Lift
Max Lift (Overhead) = Basic Lift x 08
Max Lift (Press) = Basic Lift x 10

I like this formula. It works well for me, and I intend to keep it. I believe that people in general can press much more than they could lift over their head. The trouble with it is that, when you compare the average cost of DR and the basic thrust / swing damage of most high ST characters, you start to see problems – especially if you throw hardness into the mix.

One of my players had an awesome character concept. She’s playing an aristocratic little southern girl who comes from old European money and considers herself a Lady in just about every sense of the word. It just so happens that her genetic mutation was Super Strength. The idea is that, while she’s practically invulnerable and can hit someone about as hard as a sports car at top speed, she doesn’t want to break a nail or look at icky stuff.

So, let’s think about this for a minute. She wants to play a brick **** house, someone who’s just ridiculously strong and nigh invulnerable, so what does she do? She purchases DR, of course! I allow all of my players to apply a custom Power Modifier: Mutant Power (for –20%); stack that on top of Tough Skin (-40%) and you can cut your costs by a substantial amount (-60%), reducing the cost of Damage Resistance from 5 to 2, but why even bother taking regular DR when you can take three levels of Hardened DR at the original cost?

After purchasing 15 points of Hardened 3 DR (effectively 75 DR!) with the Tough Skin limitation, our heroine decides that she wants to buy some Super Strength. Unfortunately, Super Strength isn’t cheap. I cut her some deals, allow her to buy her Super ST at an extraordinarily low cost, but in the end all that she ends up with is a ST score of 65. This puts her Thrust at 7d and her Swing at 9d, which isn’t quite as much as she’d like, but still very impressive. She can throw cars, after all!

The trouble is, if I want to pit this character against another mutant with a similar build, the two characters would be completely unable to damage each other.

I encountered this problem with super strong characters so often that, in the end, I was forced to make a hard and fast decision. It was only meant to be temporary, but it seems to have caught on pretty well with the others. The rule is this:

When two characters with Super Strength and Damage Resistance fight, count each level of Hardened as if it were an Armor Divisor, with one exception: the divided DR cannot drop below the characters purchased DR.

In this way, if I were to put the previously mentioned character against a clone of herself, her Hardened DR would cancel out her clones Hardened DR, allowing her to strike at her clone as if it had 15 purchased DR instead of its usual 75 DR.

If the same character were fighting another character with 20 DR at Hardened x2 (Effective DR = 20 x 3 = 60), however, she would not be able to apply her third level of Hardened as if it were an Armor Divisor. So, instead of reducing the enemies DR to 10, she can only reduce it to 20 (because 20 DR is what her enemy initially purchased.) This is to reward people for not completely succumbing to the lure of Hardened as an enhancement altogether.

If it sounds overpowered, it’s probably because it is. If someone has a better idea about how to deal with these issues, please, let me know about it! I’d be more than happy to read anything you throw out there.

Here are my questions about Super Strength and DR

1. How do you, as a GM, deal with the allure of Hardened DR? Do you
really worry about it at all?
2. What are your solutions for some of the problems encountered when
you match Hardened DR against a super strong character and
discover that the super strong character can deal no damage?
3. What are ways that you can legally discount the ST attribute for
super strong players? (Note that in Third Edition, Super Strength
got really cheap, really quick.)
4. For those of you who run Supers Games, what's typical for a starting
character point value in one of your games?
5. What do you think of using Hardened DR as a makeshift Armor Divisor,
and if you strongly dislike the idea, what would you do differently?

06-23-2009, 11:16 AM	#1
Orlin Join Date: Jun 2008	The Trouble with GURPS 4.0 and Supers Games The Trouble with GURPS 4th Edition Supers Games I’m a big fan of the GURPS system, and so are a few of my friends. Many of my friends are extremely hesitant to give GURPS a shot because they prefer simple, cut-and-dry systems that don’t require a great deal of number crunching, and those are all well and fine, but at the end of the day, I look at GURPS and see something inherently superior to a great deal of other games. There’s something about the structure of it all, the way it’s so fundamentally simple and simultaneously so intricately detailed that just…calls to me. If you’re looking for a rule – any rule – chances are, GURPS has you covered. That being said, I am by no means a GURPS Guru. I understand the system, I enjoy the system, I appreciate the system, and I would even go as far as to say that I am familiar with the system. The trouble is, I have not mastered the system. I make a great many mistakes over the course of a given game session (just as every GM does), and I find myself going back and correcting them as I can. While I’m not laying any claims that you all have access to some well of ancient knowledge, I’ve seen some of you guys throw system banter back and forth at each other, and many of you really seem to know your stuff. I need your help. I’m running a game set in the X-Men Evolution universe, and so far, I’ve had an excellent time with it. My players are really enjoying themselves, and the game is, surprisingly enough, more social than physical. A great deal of the game focuses on life at the Xavier Institute as well as life as a high school student, with the underlying current being life as a mutant. The characters have taken the role of the New Mutants, and as such, they spend much more time looking for prom dates and struggling to find their place in the world than they do in the field. They’ve established a rivalry with the Hellions (an even blend of Academy X style and old-school Hellions), who are working under Emma Frost, and the game seems to have taken to an easy pace and flow. About 75% of it is social, where I’m putting on a show for them, playing everyone under the sun, and developing plot seeds while the remaining 25% is a combat session, followed by a more relaxed social scene to wind everything down. So far, this has proven to be the winning formula. These are some of the problems I encounter during combat sessions: Super Strength vs. Hardened Damage Resistance In the marvel universe, there are plenty of characters who can bench press a whole hell of a lot. The OHMU (Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe) has a penchant for listing characters strengths by how much they can “lift (press)”, as opposed to how much they can lift over their heads. As a result, this now makes it necessary to create a formula that determines how much characters can bench press. To give you all an example, Spider Man can “lift (press)” 10 tons. Using the following formula, Spider Man would have a 100 ST. ST x ST / 5 = Basic Lift Max Lift (Overhead) = Basic Lift x 08 Max Lift (Press) = Basic Lift x 10 I like this formula. It works well for me, and I intend to keep it. I believe that people in general can press much more than they could lift over their head. The trouble with it is that, when you compare the average cost of DR and the basic thrust / swing damage of most high ST characters, you start to see problems – especially if you throw hardness into the mix. One of my players had an awesome character concept. She’s playing an aristocratic little southern girl who comes from old European money and considers herself a Lady in just about every sense of the word. It just so happens that her genetic mutation was Super Strength. The idea is that, while she’s practically invulnerable and can hit someone about as hard as a sports car at top speed, she doesn’t want to break a nail or look at icky stuff. So, let’s think about this for a minute. She wants to play a brick **** house, someone who’s just ridiculously strong and nigh invulnerable, so what does she do? She purchases DR, of course! I allow all of my players to apply a custom Power Modifier: Mutant Power (for –20%); stack that on top of Tough Skin (-40%) and you can cut your costs by a substantial amount (-60%), reducing the cost of Damage Resistance from 5 to 2, but why even bother taking regular DR when you can take three levels of Hardened DR at the original cost? After purchasing 15 points of Hardened 3 DR (effectively 75 DR!) with the Tough Skin limitation, our heroine decides that she wants to buy some Super Strength. Unfortunately, Super Strength isn’t cheap. I cut her some deals, allow her to buy her Super ST at an extraordinarily low cost, but in the end all that she ends up with is a ST score of 65. This puts her Thrust at 7d and her Swing at 9d, which isn’t quite as much as she’d like, but still very impressive. She can throw cars, after all! The trouble is, if I want to pit this character against another mutant with a similar build, the two characters would be completely unable to damage each other. I encountered this problem with super strong characters so often that, in the end, I was forced to make a hard and fast decision. It was only meant to be temporary, but it seems to have caught on pretty well with the others. The rule is this: When two characters with Super Strength and Damage Resistance fight, count each level of Hardened as if it were an Armor Divisor, with one exception: the divided DR cannot drop below the characters purchased DR. In this way, if I were to put the previously mentioned character against a clone of herself, her Hardened DR would cancel out her clones Hardened DR, allowing her to strike at her clone as if it had 15 purchased DR instead of its usual 75 DR. If the same character were fighting another character with 20 DR at Hardened x2 (Effective DR = 20 x 3 = 60), however, she would not be able to apply her third level of Hardened as if it were an Armor Divisor. So, instead of reducing the enemies DR to 10, she can only reduce it to 20 (because 20 DR is what her enemy initially purchased.) This is to reward people for not completely succumbing to the lure of Hardened as an enhancement altogether. If it sounds overpowered, it’s probably because it is. If someone has a better idea about how to deal with these issues, please, let me know about it! I’d be more than happy to read anything you throw out there. Here are my questions about Super Strength and DR 1. How do you, as a GM, deal with the allure of Hardened DR? Do you really worry about it at all? 2. What are your solutions for some of the problems encountered when you match Hardened DR against a super strong character and discover that the super strong character can deal no damage? 3. What are ways that you can legally discount the ST attribute for super strong players? (Note that in Third Edition, Super Strength got really cheap, really quick.) 4. For those of you who run Supers Games, what's typical for a starting character point value in one of your games? 5. What do you think of using Hardened DR as a makeshift Armor Divisor, and if you strongly dislike the idea, what would you do differently?