GURPS super thread: We suffer from having too many options

[Madara]

*Looks around the curtain into your screen, then walks on stage*
"Ahem. Ladies and Gentleman, gamers of all ages. I've been a member here for some time, and have found that this is a forum dominated by DnD. There is nothing wrong with that, but I'm here to tell you about GURPS."
-End Narative


OK, so here's the thing. Occasionally, there is maybe one thread about gurps that pops up every so often, but I see people mentioning it much more often in their posts. I figure that we can excite our fellow GURPS players by having its own thread. Yes, there is a wonderful forum specificity for the game on a different website. But, there are so many things to talk about in GURPS, so we should bring them here.


The goal of this thread:

1. To entertain. Feel free to tell stories. The game is so flexible that its very likely you can get quite a few new ideas from others.

2. To inform. This is not a game you spend trying to break(Because that's actually quite easy (http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=239055&postcount=216)). But, lots of people stat up their own innate attacks and other cool abilities and templates. Feel free to post the stats for your at least moderately balanced templates, attacks...ect(Post broken ones only by saying how/that they are broken, or else some poor game may happen upon an...interesting combat/encounter.

3. To grow as a community: Let's face it. Lot's of things on this forum have their own thread. DnD has three of its own forums. If this thread shows enough interest and use, that's cool, I'm glad that I made it. If not, it will pass into the pile of forgotten threads. Either way, I think GURPS should have its own thread.


Now, Have at it! :smallbiggrin:

[Cybren]

i love gurps i'm just sorry every time i try to run a pbp GURPS game here i flake out.

so for everyone i was supposed to GM, sorry

[Madara]

Yeah, its kinda hard to run a game in general. But PbP? Those are hard to keep playing, because there's no regular scheduling...ect

Still, I'd say my favorite part of GURPS is character creation.

[navar100]

I used to like GURPS, but I've found it uninspiring that my character will not change, ever. I do not like completing an adventure and only get a few measly points that can barely afford to improve a skill by 1. I can never get new advantages. My ability scores do not increase. My hit points do not increase. My character does the same thing over and over and over. If anything from GURPS I still like it's GURPS Supers because at least then your character starts off being able to do interesting "powerful" things instead of the rather mundane stuff the normal 100 point character can only do.

Tidbit: Though not buddies, I was a college acquaintance long ago with Stefan Jones who wrote GURPS Uplift and other Steve Jackson Games stuff.

[Ashtagon]

I used to play in a gurps campaign (until personal issues meant I couldn't meet up with the group).

Yes, gurps characters don't progress as fast as D&D characters, at least under normal rules (we played a high-powered game with 500-pount builds, and usually gained 3-10 cp each session).

However, a big difference between our gurps game and D&D is that in D&D, people typically expect to play the same character from level 1 to level 20.

In our game, we'd typically have two characters in play, and choose whichever one we wanted to play based on our mission brief (which sometimes was hilariously inaccurate). We played the character until they died, or we decided to send the character on a bus or outright go down in a blaze of glory or intentional stupidity.

When one of our characters died, an existing NPC would get promoted to PC status, or a new one would shortly appear.

In short, we played the the character, not the statblock.

[Madara]

I used to like GURPS, but I've found it uninspiring that my character will not change, ever. I do not like completing an adventure and only get a few measly points that can barely afford to improve a skill by 1. I can never get new advantages. My ability scores do not increase. My hit points do not increase. My character does the same thing over and over and over. If anything from GURPS I still like it's GURPS Supers because at least then your character starts off being able to do interesting "powerful" things instead of the rather mundane stuff the normal 100 point character can only do.

See, our group gets together so rarely that we give out like 25pts each session(Base 20+ bonuses for doing cool stuff). The lack of change is easy to fix.

So how many points did your games have you start with? Mine started with 350, and it was Badass :smallamused:

Edit: I also try to take advantages that are flexible, like magery and control/create. They are powerful, but they give you a wide variety of options.

[harkle1876]

My group is using the Dungeon Fantasy rules and we started out with 300 point characters.

The campaign is loosely based on a book. Our group was sent to infiltrate an enemy ruin in hopes of finding the secret to their powerful metal spiders. When our group reached the ruin, we found it surrounded by a small army. My character, the thief, decided to sneak in to aquire armor for our newest character, a minotour who was found without any armor. I managed to sneak into the Lutenet of the army's tent and take his armor. Next we had to get inot the ruins. We decided to sneak in during the night and have our druid, who could shape change into a shoulder dragon, and our leprechaun barbarian create a distraction. During the distraction, my character and the minotour were caught by some soldiers. They critically failed their perception checks adn thought that the minotour, who was wearing the lutenents armour, was the lutenent. The minotour convinced them to get him "his" sword. They went and got the sword for him and we carried on our way. Comeing out of hte ruin, we had to sneak past again. The problem was that our two fighters were both unconcious. Our druid managed to heal one of them, leaving the Minotaur behind (we had not thought of a way to get him through). We decided to dress the other unconcious fighter in the lutenents armour and try and bluff the healers in the army to heal him. This worked perfectly. They failed their perception checks yet again and tried to heal their wounded "lutenent". The fighter, now healed, mentioned to the healers that there might be enemies near the ruins (none of us remembered that the minotour was still on the hill). Everybody except for the Minotaur managed to get through the enemy encampment and set up a camp. We then decided to resuce him. Our druid summoned a swarm of bugs to find the minotour and lead him to our camp. The minotour was in chains in the enemy camp. He used his blessed for strength to break the chans and smash his way through the group of people surrounding him. The bugs find him and we all manage to escape the enemy encampment.

None of us could beleive the rolls that our GM had made. While not all of our rolls were good, their rolls were horrible, They critically failed several perception checks, and when the healer went to heal the fake lutenent, he critically succeeded. This army had the worst possible luck.

[Cybren]

I used to like GURPS, but I've found it uninspiring that my character will not change, ever. I do not like completing an adventure and only get a few measly points that can barely afford to improve a skill by 1. I can never get new advantages. My ability scores do not increase. My hit points do not increase. My character does the same thing over and over and over. If anything from GURPS I still like it's GURPS Supers because at least then your character starts off being able to do interesting "powerful" things instead of the rather mundane stuff the normal 100 point character can only do.

Tidbit: Though not buddies, I was a college acquaintance long ago with Stefan Jones who wrote GURPS Uplift and other Steve Jackson Games stuff.

iunno, i remember reading the campaign journal for sean punch (gurps 4th ed line editor) and the dudes PCs went from like 300 to 1000+ over the course of the campaign. Rate of advancement seems like a gm thing. (how many points per session and do you use time to learn rules mostly)

[Set]

I loved GURPS Supers. Even starting out with 250 pts., the characters felt insanely powerful (at least, by GURPS standards). 500 CP was almost an embarassment of riches, and anything higher was insane.

Unlike Mutants & Masterminds, there wasn't even an attempt at establishing any sort of built-in balance, and you could easily create characters that were vastly unbalanced compared to each other, and the various sub-systems weren't designed to work the same way at different point totals, so that if you used GURPS Magic or GURPS Psionics to build a 'Dr. Strange' or a 'Jean Grey' superhero, you could end up with something balanced wildly differently than someone who takes powers only from the Supers book, and if Ultra-Tech devices get thrown into the mix, that's an entirely different kettle of fish.

The sheer variety of character types was exhilarating, and the rules made for some cool options. Being able to tap into GURPS Martial Arts to make a martial artist, or other setting / genre specific products, really fleshed out the concepts, and just as having a half-dozen differently balanced sub-systems could be a bother at times, it also allowed someone experienced with one of those subsystems to create a 'super-mage' or 'super-martial-artist' to create a character using a non-Super-sub-system that could indeed 'hang with the big guns.'

[Bronk]

For me the odd thing about GURPS Supers was that there wasn't a power for 'super strength', instead you had to just buy lots of the regular strength stat, which takes a very long time to scale to 'super' levels. Nor were there any super shape shifting ability. A friend tried to make a super strong shape shifter, ended up blowing most of the build points on one shape, then not being all that strong. Ahh, that was still a fun game though!

[Madara]

I didn't have too much difficulty building stuff using Supers. But you're right about the lack of balance. I think that's because the game is supposed to be less focused on combat?


Nor were there any super shape shifting ability

Just take Morph[200](From basic set)

That gives you 100pts to play around with. If you're gonna be a shapeshifter, then its gonna be your thing.

I would also take modular abilities so you could pick up skills that the creature you morphed into would have. The thing about being a Super shape shifter is you just do many forms and then modify shaping speed? You have to take advantage of the variety of forms.

So, yeah. It would be about a 300-400pt character if you just focused on morphing. The other trick is that you could build in reverse.
I.E. A minotaur that can turn into a human rather than vice-versa. It'll cost you less in the end.

[valadil]

My biggest gripe with GURPS is that it's a framework for constructing a game rather than a game in and of itself. There's no such thing as an average GURPS game. What you get depends entirely on the GM's ability to select a subsection of the rules that are appropriate to the current game. Don't get me wrong, the versatility is cool, but the quality of a game is so dependent on local game settings that I have a hard time telling if I actually like the system or if a good GM is making it playable. (Granted that's always the case that a good GM can make a poor system fun and a terrible GM can make your favorite system rubbish. GURPS makes this problem worse IMO.)


I used to like GURPS, but I've found it uninspiring that my character will not change, ever.

That's usually* my experience with point buy games. If my character specializes in anything at all, he's likely to have it nearly maxed out when the game starts. As you play it's easy to put a couple points here or there into random skills that you should have but don't need to have maxed out. By the end of the game, my specialist is right where he started with his specialty, but the other skills are almost caught up, so the specialty no longer feels special.

* The exception being Dark Heresy, but that's a hybrid between point buy and class/level based rather than a strict PB game.

[Morty]

I don't mind the lack of advancement in GURPS. One of my many gripes with D&D is the absrud power curve - start out as a shmuck, become superhuman in a few levels. In GURPS, there's none of that.
I've taken part only in two short-lived GURPS games, I'm afraid, but I did put together a character for fun recently - a warrior worth 150 points total. GURPS does realistic games well, which is why I like it.

[Madara]

Yeah, my game was very short run, but since then I just put together builds for the fun of it. :smallsmile:

[Necroticplague]

I like gurps because I find the minmaxing of its point buy system to be fun to mess around with, and seeing what corners i can "cut" to save points, like putting (unkillable2+supernatural toughness) with limitation flaw (easy to kill) and (only in combat). One thing that I always find to make starting up hard is knowing what variant rules are being used, like for my unarmed characters, are we using the rules that mean I can break my hand punching someone in the face?

[valadil]

I don't mind the lack of advancement in GURPS. One of my many gripes with D&D is the absrud power curve - start out as a shmuck, become superhuman in a few levels. In GURPS, there's none of that.
I've taken part only in two short-lived GURPS games, I'm afraid, but I did put together a character for fun recently - a warrior worth 150 points total. GURPS does realistic games well, which is why I like it.

I think I'd prefer a power level somewhere in the middle. 4e heroic tier is my happy place. Over the course of the game I do want to become more powerful, but I want the scope to remain the same.

All the GURPS games I've liked have also been short. I can play a 5 session game without leveling up. But if I'm going to stick with a character for a year, I'd like to see his mechanics change.