GURPS

[WhiteShark]

Thread to talk about GURPS.

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Homebrew stuff:

• Legendsmith's Condensed Skills
• His group's Houserules Handbook

GURPS blogs I like:

• Generic Universal Eggplant
• (this space for rent)

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Has anyone used the Tactical Mass Combat rules from Pyramid #3/44 (perhaps @Rand)? I like the idea of it, but some things strike me as odd just from reading the rules:

• No separate attack/defense ratings, just a unified Troop Strength, meaning that a TL8 Riflemen element is twice as hardy against artillery as a TL7 Riflemen element. That doesn't seem right...
• RAW, "pinned" doesn't do anything unless the same element gets pinned again in the same turn, in which case it is destroyed, but the description of the Pin Recovery Phase implies it's supposed to do something more: "Friendly Pinned elements recover (and are free to attack on the next turn) unless adjacent to enemy elements."
• There's no state between "full fighting strength" and "destroyed" (except pinned, which doesn't actually inhibit fighting).
• The stacking limit is arbitrarily small:
  • You can only stack four elements in one hex.
  • One infantry element represents "10-15 men" (annoyingly ambiguous).
  • One hex is 100 yards across.
  • Hence, a maximum of 60 men can occupy a hex 100 yards across; compare ACKS, which strives for historical accuracy, in which 120 men in formation can fit in a hex 20 yards across.
• Aircraft elements have a 50% chance of having to leave the battle permanently after every use. I guess it's supposed to model running out of supplies/fuel, but it seems ridiculously random and punitive.
• There are no rules for when a force goes into a fight undersupplied or fatigued.

I looked into how the Troop Strengths for Mass Combat were derived for different elements in the first place and found out they weren't derived, just arbitrarily assigned, which means they don't bear any mathematical relation to their components as statted in normal GURPS rules.

All that said, I feel the base system is salvageable but in need of significant tweaking. There's a formula for deriving Troop Strength intended for modeling Hero (PC) elements in battle in Pyramid #3/84 (Heroes on the Mass Scale), but if you try using it to recreate an existing element from Mass Combat, the results don't line up at all. I think the first step to fixing everything would be taking that formula (or a new one) and properly deriving Troop Strengths as well as separate Attack and Defense values.

[Rand]

Has anyone used the Tactical Mass Combat rules from Pyramid #3/44 (perhaps @Rand)?

No, but your criticisms seem quite accurate.
Pulver is good, but he has a predilection for submitting shallow systems with flaws, but that he adds to and fixes over time for himself, sometimes re-published later.
This means that unless he's writing a book, it's usually a half-assed system.

And even then, that GURPS Spaceships system book that he wrote has glaring issues.
Unless you're using force field rules, ships are either almost instantly destroyed (if they're close to each other in size) or have invulnerable armor (if disparate in size and the larger of the two).
The kinetic weapon rules (guns, missiles) are really bad. At long ranges, kinetic missiles basically obliterate enemy ships. He uses kinetic energy and not momentum as his damage basis.

[Rand]

RAW, "pinned" doesn't do anything unless the same element gets pinned again in the same turn, in which case it is destroyed, but the description of the Pin Recovery Phase implies it's supposed to do something more: "Friendly Pinned elements recover (and are free to attack on the next turn) unless adjacent to enemy elements."

It's supposed to say at the beginning of the FIGHTING THE BATTLE section, just before AIR PHASE that pinned elements do not get to take any action until the "pinned" condition is removed, except for aircraft which may move, but only to move closer to the home map edge.

[Jordy]

Thanks for the links. This can go into the folder of all the things I want to read but will never get round to.

[WhiteShark]

RAW, "pinned" doesn't do anything unless the same element gets pinned again in the same turn, in which case it is destroyed, but the description of the Pin Recovery Phase implies it's supposed to do something more: "Friendly Pinned elements recover (and are free to attack on the next turn) unless adjacent to enemy elements."

It's supposed to say at the beginning of the FIGHTING THE BATTLE section, just before AIR PHASE that pinned elements do not get to take any action until the "pinned" condition is removed, except for aircraft which may move, but only to move closer the home map edge.

Huh. That would make sense, but where did you find this? Is this from an errata or did you contact Pulver himself? I couldn't find any answers when I searched online and on the (incredibly gay) GURPS Discord.

[Rand]

RAW, "pinned" doesn't do anything unless the same element gets pinned again in the same turn, in which case it is destroyed, but the description of the Pin Recovery Phase implies it's supposed to do something more: "Friendly Pinned elements recover (and are free to attack on the next turn) unless adjacent to enemy elements."

It's supposed to say at the beginning of the FIGHTING THE BATTLE section, just before AIR PHASE that pinned elements do not get to take any action until the "pinned" condition is removed, except for aircraft which may move, but only to move closer the home map edge.

Huh. That would make sense, but where did you find this? Is this from an errata or did you contact Pulver himself? I couldn't find any answers when I searched online and on the (incredibly gay) GURPS Discord.

There are no answers in anything I've seen. I just know GURPS and Pulver's stuff and how they always work. It's entirely possible that a later Pyramid has a note about it, but good luck finding it.

[Rand]

► Show Spoiler

PDF (hosted here in HQVault): https://f.rpghq.org/g1KxrT3vtPPe.pdf?n= ... rless).pdf

Related Products
• GURPS City Stats provides GURPS information on how cities intersect with these mass-combat rules.
• Pyramid #3/44: Alternate GURPS II has variant options that expand the Mass Combat rules to a tabletop tactical system.
• Pyramid #3/65: Alternate GURPS III contains optional rules that expand possibilities for working together, which can turn the tide of battle!
• Pyramid #3/67: Tools of the Trade – Villains has five ready-to-use Mass Combat armies, perfect for causing trouble for meddlesome heroes.
• Pyramid #3/70: Fourth Edition Festival offers Mass Combat ideas and troops for GURPS Banestorm: Abydos . . . plus stats for the forces of Abydos' enemies!
• Pyramid #3/77: Combat provides Mass Combat troops for two armies: one from the Egyptian New Kingdom and the other from early Imperial Rome!
• Pyramid #3/80: Fantasy Threats has details on the army of Baron Vordag, a tyrant who's a great foe for fantasy heroes.
• Pyramid #3/84: Perspectives gives more detailed rules for determining the Mass Combat troop strength of individual heroes.
• Pyramid #3/93: Cops and Lawyers delivers new Mass Combat units for police and large criminal groups.

[Jordy]

Is the Basic Set a good place to start?

[WhiteShark]

The kinetic weapon rules (guns, missiles) are really bad. At long ranges, kinetic missiles basically obliterate enemy ships. He uses kinetic energy and not momentum as his damage basis.

Related to this, it was pointed out to me that gun damage and armor DR are crazy at modern and futuristic tech levels because gun damage was derived from penetration into RHA, which doesn't really tell you anything about the damage it would do to a human body. Once they had their crazy gun damage numbers, there was the fact that modern body armor can stop bullets, so the DR values had to be made crazy, too. It results in absurdly deadly guns and armor impenetrable to even futuristic melee weapons.

[Rand]

Is the Basic Set a good place to start?

Yes. Fourth Edition is pretty fully featured. You need BOTH books, though.
They're not even numbered separately. Campaigns' numbering continues where Characters' leaves off.

Note that you can find EVERY book (or almost every book) in perfect PDF format for free online with very little searching.
Steve Jackson Games really went hard into PDFs around 20 years ago and they're everywhere.

[WhiteShark]

Is the Basic Set a good place to start?

Yeah. Feel free to skip over the long lists of skils, advantages, and disadvantages if you want to get to the meat of the rules. There's a GURPS Lite, which is supposed to be a stripped down version for introducinng people to the game, but it's not very well thought out (ex: includes shotguns but not the rules for how they work).

[Jordy]

Is the Basic Set a good place to start?

Yes. Fourth Edition is pretty fully featured. You need BOTH books, though.
They're not even numbered separately. Campaigns' numbering continues where Characters' leaves off.

Note that you can find EVERY book (or almost every book) in perfect PDF format for free online with very little searching.
Steve Jackson Games really went hard into PDFs around 20 years ago and they're everywhere.

The PDF in OP seems to have a link to all the material.

[Rand]

It results in absurdly deadly guns and armor impenetrable to even futuristic melee weapons.

EXCEPT if you roll a critical hit that gets a "bypass armor" result, meaning a proto-human with a flint knife can theoretically one-shot kill a battlesuited trooper.
GURPS requires a game master that is willing to change things on the fly for realism.

[Rand]

Is the Basic Set a good place to start?

Yes. Fourth Edition is pretty fully featured. You need BOTH books, though.
They're not even numbered separately. Campaigns' numbering continues where Characters' leaves off.

Note that you can find EVERY book (or almost every book) in perfect PDF format for free online with very little searching.
Steve Jackson Games really went hard into PDFs around 20 years ago and they're everywhere.

The PDF in OP seems to have a link to all the material.

LOL

► Show Spoiler

[WhiteShark]

Here's another for the pile of oversights and half-baked mechanics: Dungeon Fantasy doesn't actually have a classic D&D-style 10-minute "dungeon turn" mechanic for easily adjudicating how far a party can move+map+search+sneak per time unit. I guess you're expected to either handwave it or measure the duration of each task in fine detail (nevermind that many tasks don't have a listed time requirement). Apparently someone pointed this lack out to Kromm because he published "Tactical Looting" in Pyramid #4/1 with some relevant rules... that he didn't reality check at all. Example:

Searching: When actively searching for concealed or secret
doors, traps, etc., or using Tracking, delvers advance at Move
1 – i.e., each yard equals one second.

To put that in perspective, that means your party can move 600 yards per ten minutes while also actively searching and mapping. For comparison, a firefighter can (optimistically) search a 1,000 square feet in 5 minutes†―if you imagine that as a 10' wide corridor, that works out to linear movement of ~67 yards per ten minutes. The firefighter isn't checking for traps, mapping, or trying to be quiet, either.

It gets worse:

Walking: If passively searching, delvers can meander along
at Move 2 without undue fatigue. Every two yards equal one
second. This makes it harder to spot things: All rolls against
Observation, Tracking, Traps, and similar skills are at ‐2.

Meander. At 2 yards per second. That's a third again faster than real life average walking speed. Move 2 is at least speedwalking, maybe jogging. Apparently you can still search for traps while speedwalking through the dungeon.

I used to think the movement rate for dungeon exploration given in classic editions of D&D was absurdly low, but after investigating it, I think they are actually reasonably close.

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†

The officer knows that one firefighter can cover about 1,000 square feet in five to seven minutes. Because of the apartments’ size and layout (long and narrow), the officer decides to use the entire crew and split the apartment so that each 1,200-square-foot apartment could be searched in approximately seven minutes.

[Rand]

I used to think the movement rate for dungeon exploration given in classic editions of D&D was absurdly low, but after investigating it, I think they are actually reasonably close.

It is absurdly slow, but this is the opposite mistake.