GURPS character creation baseline/guidelines for combat focused cinematic campaigns?

[gomipile]

If I wanted to run a campaign with a heavy combat focus with PCs about as durable as in D&D 3.5, what would be a good baseline of attributes and advantages to give all player characters?

[RazorChain]

If you are thinking about Fantasy I suggest you look at the Dungeon Fantasy line for Gurps. It's pretty much a D&D clone for Gurps.

For Modern I suggest Monster Hunters, about high powered mortals hunting down the things that aren't supposed to exist.

Else there is Blackops where you are literally a supersoldier working for the Argus Company, keeping the world "safe", currently still 3rd ed. but easy to convert.

[JellyPooga]

What level D&D do you want to emulate? 150pts with a Disadvantage limit of 50pts is a good "adventuring/heroic" level in GURPS; probably equatable to roughly level 3-5 in D&D; competent, but neither god-like or a chump. It doesn't quite compare linearly, but I'd say about every 20-30pts (over 100) is approximately equal to one D&D level.

[gomipile]

What level D&D do you want to emulate? 150pts with a Disadvantage limit of 50pts is a good "adventuring/heroic" level in GURPS; probably equatable to roughly level 3-5 in D&D; competent, but neither god-like or a chump. It doesn't quite compare linearly, but I'd say about every 20-30pts (over 100) is approximately equal to one D&D level.

I'm specifically concerned with the general fragility of standard GURPS characters without damage reduction and extra HP. I want to know what combination of baseline advantages and extra stats the characters should have to make them about as durable as, say, level 5 D&D 3.5 characters vs. a CR 5 challenge.

[JellyPooga]

I'm specifically concerned with the general fragility of standard GURPS characters without damage reduction and extra HP. I want to know what combination of baseline advantages and extra stats the characters should have to make them about as durable as, say, level 5 D&D 3.5 characters vs. a CR 5 challenge.

Do bear in mind that GURPS characters, in general, are pretty tough compared to D&D. Even a baseline HT:10, ST:10 rube with no Advantages in GURPS isn't really risking death until he hits -5 HP at least and even then is probably only going to fall unconscious on failing his HT roll, rather than outright die. Compared to a level 1 D&D character who (edition dependant) automatically keels over at 0hp, either dead or (in 3.5) unconscious and liable to die without outside interference. Given GURPS' generally lower damage-per-hit as compared to HP and lower frequency of attacks actually connecting (assuming halfway competent combatants and presumably no automatic firearms; guns change everything in GURPS), I'd say you don't have to worry too much about characters being fragile

Of the two systems, GURPS is definitely more forgiving on the HP front, at least as far as low-level play (d&d level 1-5ish, GURPS 100-200pts) goes.

[RazorChain]

The combat focus in Gurps is vastly different in D&D. The focus is in breaking though your opponents defenses, to do so you have some tools at your disposal like rapid strike, feint and deceptive attack.

You don't have to be tough if you never get hit. So a character with good skill and therefore parry, block or dodge may be a lot more durable than a D&D character. Also in Gurps skill makes you harder to hit while armor makes you resist damage. Character creation give you option to toughen up, you can buy extra HP, High Pain Threshold or even damage resistance with the GM's discretion.

3rd editon had the advantage of toughness DR1 or 2. In 4th edition this would be something along the line of DR1 (natural skin) which costs 3 points and added 5 points for unusal background as it's not available to normal humans for the total of 8 points per level, I use it in my games but cap it at DR2. Remember this stacks with armor.

To get higher parry you only have to increase your weapon skil or your shield skill for block, buy advantages like combat reflexes or enhanced defense (Parry, Dodge or Block), take acrobatics for that sweet acrobatic dodge or increase your speed to increase dodge. Remember that there are also defensive options in fights like Extra effort: feverish defense and retreating defense.

Gurps isn't like D&D where you chip down the HP until one falls down, often the fights will be decided with a single stunning blow.

Let's look at an example a DX 10 character spends 12 points on a shield skill to raise it to 14, he picks up a medium shield with 2 DB (defense bonus). Now his Block is 14/2 = 7+3+2= 12. This is a 72% block chance for only 12 points. If he spends 8 more points on shield he'll have 84% block chance, if he uses feverish defense he's up to 95% block chance and that's before looking at retreating options. If you use optional rules from Martial arts then he can also get more than 1 block at a -5 penalty to each successive block.

[gomipile]

The combat focus in Gurps is vastly different in D&D. The focus is in breaking though your opponents defenses, to do so you have some tools at your disposal like rapid strike, feint and deceptive attack.

You don't have to be tough if you never get hit. So a character with good skill and therefore parry, block or dodge may be a lot more durable than a D&D character. Also in Gurps skill makes you harder to hit while armor makes you resist damage. Character creation give you option to toughen up, you can buy extra HP, High Pain Threshold or even damage resistance with the GM's discretion.

3rd editon had the advantage of toughness DR1 or 2. In 4th edition this would be something along the line of DR1 (natural skin) which costs 3 points and added 5 points for unusal background as it's not available to normal humans for the total of 8 points per level, I use it in my games but cap it at DR2. Remember this stacks with armor.

To get higher parry you only have to increase your weapon skil or your shield skill for block, buy advantages like combat reflexes or enhanced defense (Parry, Dodge or Block), take acrobatics for that sweet acrobatic dodge or increase your speed to increase dodge. Remember that there are also defensive options in fights like Extra effort: feverish defense and retreating defense.

Gurps isn't like D&D where you chip down the HP until one falls down, often the fights will be decided with a single stunning blow.

Let's look at an example a DX 10 character spends 12 points on a shield skill to raise it to 14, he picks up a medium shield with 2 DB (defense bonus). Now his Block is 14/2 = 7+3+2= 12. This is a 72% block chance for only 12 points. If he spends 8 more points on shield he'll have 84% block chance, if he uses feverish defense he's up to 95% block chance and that's before looking at retreating options. If you use optional rules from Martial arts then he can also get more than 1 block at a -5 penalty to each successive block.

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about, yes. I'm wondering how much GM-granted extra HP and DR would make flat-footed characters equally durable to 3.5.

That is, I'm most concerned with relative ability to soak damage without taking skills into account.

[hifidelity2]

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about, yes. I'm wondering how much GM-granted extra HP and DR would make flat-footed characters equally durable to 3.5.

That is, I'm most concerned with relative ability to soak damage without taking skills into account.

Look at the cinematic rules but you can have

Damage – only x% (say 25%) that gets through armour is “real” the rest is bruising – this can allow a quick recovery (1 point healing heals all bruises for example)

[gomipile]

Look at the cinematic rules but you can have

Damage – only x% (say 25%) that gets through armour is “real” the rest is bruising – this can allow a quick recovery (1 point healing heals all bruises for example)

I know the rules that can be used to do what I want. What I'm looking for is specific combinations and amounts of those rules that are known to have the effect I'm looking for.

[RazorChain]

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about, yes. I'm wondering how much GM-granted extra HP and DR would make flat-footed characters equally durable to 3.5.

That is, I'm most concerned with relative ability to soak damage without taking skills into account.

If you are directly looking for the ability to soak damage the Damage Restistance and Hit Points are what you are looking for. Damage Resistance is super cheap at only 3 points per DR but is not supposed to be used in a "normals" campaign.

A normal ST 10 guy with a sword does 1d+1 cut if he's swinging so you realize that heavy armor and DR can make the characters almost impervious to damage from normal humans. So I would stick to DR2 Max. Extra HP are easy just 2 points per HP and the suggested limit is 1/3rd of your ST which means 3 for a normal human, 4 for ST 12 and 5 for ST 15.

But if you are going down that road I strongly suggest Dungeon Fantasy for Gurps because that's exactly what it tries to do, emulate D&D.

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/dungeonfantasy/

To quote the Sean Punch, the author of Dungeon Fantasy: "Dungeon Fantasy isn’t for everyone. It isn’t a great buy for people who think fun is about detailed rules for armor weights, economics, physical fatigue, etc. It’s an actively rotten buy for anybody who values realism or believability, since it encourages the players to create power-hungry psychos who have no social background, who take disads as a shameless point-grab, and who stack up bonuses to get godlike power at cut rates in terms of both dollars and points. I specifically wrote it for people who think fun is about having detailed rules if and only if cool, niche-specific abilities and/or raiding dungeons is involved. In short, GURPS is about the believable, detailed stuff by default, and Dungeon Fantasy is intended as a specific antidote for that bias."

[gomipile]

But if you are going down that road I strongly suggest Dungeon Fantasy for Gurps because that's exactly what it tries to do, emulate D&D.

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/dungeonfantasy/

To quote the Sean Punch, the author of Dungeon Fantasy: "Dungeon Fantasy isn’t for everyone. It isn’t a great buy for people who think fun is about detailed rules for armor weights, economics, physical fatigue, etc. It’s an actively rotten buy for anybody who values realism or believability, since it encourages the players to create power-hungry psychos who have no social background, who take disads as a shameless point-grab, and who stack up bonuses to get godlike power at cut rates in terms of both dollars and points. I specifically wrote it for people who think fun is about having detailed rules if and only if cool, niche-specific abilities and/or raiding dungeons is involved. In short, GURPS is about the believable, detailed stuff by default, and Dungeon Fantasy is intended as a specific antidote for that bias."

That doesn't sound anything like what I want in tone, though.

I was hoping someone had already tested a "every PC must take this for this campaign" template that increased durability a bit, and had some results to report here about it.

[RazorChain]

That doesn't sound anything like what I want in tone, though.

I was hoping someone had already tested a "every PC must take this for this campaign" template that increased durability a bit, and had some results to report here about it.


I've played Gurps for a long time but I'm not quite sure what you are after. I've played everything from low point to very high point campaigns (supers). I've played for example a variation of Black Ops which is high points special ops characters hunting down aliens and supernatural things and covering it up so the rest of the population doesn't know about these things. If you have players that know the system and you give them bunch of points and tell them to make characters that can take a punishment then the issue mostly resolves itself. I assume you are running fantasy as you mention D&D and the title assumes cinematic campaign.

So I'm just going to break this down.

Increasing Hit Points

This means that the characters will be harder to cripple, stun, incapacitate and kill.

High HT

This means the characters will be harder to kill, stun and incapacitate. Will recover HP more easily and avoid long term crippling injuries

Damage Resistance

Will make the characters tougher in general as their DR is subtracted from each hit.



So for example making a Template which gives them all +2 HP and DR2 is going to make them all much harder to kill than a normal human.

5th level character in D&D has very diverse HP range but a normal human in Gurps has potentially 60 HP if he doesn't fail his consciousness or death save. A 150 point optimized combat character or mage in Gurps with 75 in disads/quirks (total 225) is going to wreck a 1st/2nd level character in D&D maybe 3rd as well. I can easily make a starting character in Gurp for those points that can take down an Ogre just with superior skill.

[Ts_]

That doesn't sound anything like what I want in tone, though.

I was hoping someone had already tested a "every PC must take this for this campaign" template that increased durability a bit, and had some results to report here about it.
I think there was some good advice in this thread so far, even if it wasn't the answer you think you need.

Think about it: No amount of HP or DR will protect the PCs from a small pack of goblins that, frustrated with the little damage they can do to the PCs, shove and push the heroes suicidally over the edge of a cliff. (Okay, tons of HP might help ... but there's lava at the bottom.) Good dodge would have helped, the Luck advantage, but not HP and DR.

Even in regular combat, a lucky Disarm could mean the end of a fight unless the PCs are prepared and versatile in their skills.

In other cases, say poison, you need HT to resist or become helpless. Mental save-or-suck attacks often target Will. HP might help against many things, but not if you're helpless.

Those examples show that in Gurps HP often isn't the deciding factor ...

But what I just wrote is also completely wrong. There is no "in Gurps blah is or isn't the deciding factor" because Gurps games can be so different in rules and the setting.

I assume you're the GM, so maybe you decide that healing potions are cheap and easily available little bottles of failproof instant recocery. Voila, your heroes won't die, independent of their stats.

Or healing potions are rare artefacts, only handed out to really special PCs on special missions. Still, your heroes won't die, but now you control the supply. ;)

Or healing potions don't exist and you play with a harsh and brutal ruleset. The PCs with lots of HP survive a fight, but they all catch an infection afterwards from improper wound care ... and die.

So, which one is it?

If you only want your heroes to survive a mindless clubbing with their foes, more HP is better, but it also means a lot of other things have a weaker effect (falling damage, for example).

It's so much easier to adjust the damage output from the enemies than the HP, I would say. Just give them slightly weaker attacks. Also, even without changing monster stats, you can adjust the deadliness of combat. If monsters don't attack fallen(/unconscious/fleeing) party members, the fallen are unlikely to die and can be treated afterwards. (Again, what are the healing options in this world?) If monsters flee at a convenient moment, say when half of them are slain (which is quite realistic imho) you also reduce the risk of severe injury compared to fighting to the bitter end.

If you go this route, you will also never have to regret giving your heroes too much HP on their sheets that you can't ever take away again ...

But you wanted rules, not a sermon. So, without playtesting or any real understanding of how tough the flat-footed DnD character would be, here are some numbers and ideas out of my wizard's hat (from tough to cheap):
* The Flesh Wounds cinematic rule (with CP debt allowed) should let your PCs survive almost everything, but it will cost them dearly.
* Similarly, you could make them pay FP instead to shrug off damage, though I'd demand at least 3 FP (and a cool description, if you're into that) to shrug off all damage from an attack. (3 FP to not undermine other 1 FP defensive options in combat.) It's very cinematic, but also limited to maybe 2 or 3 times a fight.
* In a medieval fantasy world with DR3 to DR6 easily available in armor and even strong humanlike foes unlikely to do more than 3d6 (before damage type factors, so roughly 5d6 after armor factor with imp damage), I'd say that 30 HP ought to be enough for everybody (at least to keep fighting after one really bad blow and many normal ones), but I would treat most of that HP as extra HP that don't count for the n×HP rules. The PCs have "basic HP" according to ST and some extra pool of "hero HP" of about 20 on top of that that gets exhausted first. But they still can die at -"base HP" (say 15) instead of -35 HP and arms get crippled at "base HP"/2 damage etc. (This seems to have been discussed, no surprise, on the gurps forums as Vitality Reserve: http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=424329&postcount=8 )

If your PCs get hurt for more than 30 HP in a fight, they deserve it ... But there will be many lesser foes that can't touch them, or at least not in armor.

I prefer this extra HP over DR because a bit of DR is only really effective against small attacks, but then extremely effective. You could call that a feature, but if you're up against a really strong enemy or an unexpected arrow to the vitals, DnD and similarly tons of HP in Gurps would still protect you that round, while DR wouldn't.

You would still have to decide how that much HP can be restored (since I'd leave the basic healing rules intact and not scale them up with the high HP), but out of combat the options are probably better and the hero HP might just come back by themselves within a day or week or whatever suits your campaign style.

You could let your players buy lots of "hero HP" at the usual 2 cp / HP up to say 30 extra HP (whereas normal HP cannot be bought up from ST, because then everybody would do that first). Then it's still up to them how much they want to invest in tankiness. (Set a lower limit of 10 extra HP to protect power hungry wizards if you plan to hit them a lot ...) At a new "level", give them the option to buy 5 more HP. You could also scale the amount of hero HP allowed based on the character concept ("class").

(That's very DnD-like, but not very Gurpsy, because Gurps players would want cinematic advantages and cool powers to simply not get hit at all, even if they're pretending to be flat-footed ...)

In all cases, really tough heroes also have HT 14+ or effective HT 14+ to stay conscious (Hard to Subdue) or alive (Hard to Kill). Two levels of one of those (cheap) advantages for free could fit a world with a forgiving wounding mechanic. Comic book violence gives Hard to Kill 4 or so to everyone in the world, so that even mundane people hardly ever die.

Again, disclaimer: all these numbers are speculation. But they would let your tanky PCs shrug off the occasional 3d6 fireball or giant sword hit.

Regards
Ts

[gomipile]

I admit the advice is good. I do wish this thread had a higher ratio of playtested results to theoretical advice.

The theoretical advice should be useful, but I'd like to know what has and hasn't worked well in practice.

[RazorChain]

I admit the advice is good. I do wish this thread had a higher ratio of playtested results to theoretical advice.

The theoretical advice should be useful, but I'd like to know what has and hasn't worked well in practice.

There are just too many variations.

When I've run heroic games I've simply put just made the adversaries in the normal human range. So the normal thug will have most stats at 10 and his skill will be around 9 to 11. Professional skill level is around 12 to 14.

Let's take a character I made with 225 points with disads

ST 16 [60]
DX 12 [40]
IQ 10 [0]
HT 12 [20]

Advantages
Fit [5]
Combat Reflexes [15]
High Pain Threshold [10]
DR 2 [16]
HP+2 [4]

Decked in medium maille for a total DR of 6

Two-handed sword 16 [16] Dmg 2d+5 cut/ 1d+3 imp
Targeted Attack: Two handed sword Swing/Neck 14 [4]
Feint: Two handed Sword 18 [2]

Parry 12 Dodge 10

This guy literally wrecked everything and was really hard to put down. A normal human with a sword does 1d+1 cut in damage so they could only scratch him. To stun him you needed to be able to do 13 points cutting or 10 points impaling in the vitals.


So unless your campaign world is full of extremely deadly monsters or very skilled opponent then you don't need to add any durability.