Tell me why you don't like GURPS.

[fusilier]

If your 8 HP character with no armour is in front of your party and is expected to withstand that an opponent is swinging a halberd at you, you are doing something wrong (or perhaps your GM is). Then, yes you should expect to die.

. . .

However I think it exaggerated how much more dangerous GURPS is. It is true that you need to think a bit more about protection. What can be something you need to consider is that in in a world where magic healing isn't available or scarce, serious wounds takes time it heal and thus you cannot go from deadly combat to deadly combat every day. So if that is what you want, you need to make sure magic healing is readily available.

I'm absolutely astounded. :-) I learned to play GURPS in the late 90s, and I always played with the blow-through rules. Do people really not play with these rules (but still do double damage for impaling, etc.)? In third edition, both are listed on the hit charts on the GM screen . . .

No wonder people think GURPS is really deadly!! :-)

[fusilier]

Limb hits explicitly cannot do more than 1/2 HP damage, and extremities cannot do more than 1/3. I can find no such rule for torso hits.


Found an explanation - that was removed entirely for 4E. There's an optional version in High Tech, but it explicitly isn't a default.

Wow. That's interesting! I guess another reason for me to stick with 3rd edition.* Wonder why they removed it? If you think about blow-through from a high power rifle, clearly a lot of the energy from the projectile is going to pass through a torso. Although I did notice that they seem to have generally lowered the damage from many weapons in 4th edition.

* EDIT -- I guess if it's an option in high tech, I can always implement it in a 4th edition game.

[Gnoman]

The optional 4E version is an attempt to make bullet wounds more deadly. You roll 1D for torso hits. On a 1, the torso hit turns into a vitals hit.

On 2-6, one of two things happen:

If you don’t use Bleeding, injury can’t exceed twice the target’s HP. Any excess is lost
If you do use Bleeding, injury can’t exceed the target’s HP. Any excess is lost but still counts when determining the HT penalty for bleeding rolls.



This is the only time in which torso damage is limited. It was one of the concepts removed from the game because it was too easy to make characters really hard to kill. Passive Defense was also removed.

[fusilier]

The optional 4E version is an attempt to make bullet wounds more deadly. You roll 1D for torso hits. On a 1, the torso hit turns into a vitals hit.

On 2-6, one of two things happen:

If you don’t use Bleeding, injury can’t exceed twice the target’s HP. Any excess is lost
If you do use Bleeding, injury can’t exceed the target’s HP. Any excess is lost but still counts when determining the HT penalty for bleeding rolls.

Well, in a way it makes them less deadly, on a 2-6 the damage is limited to HP and bleeding occurs. Bleeding isn't too bad, as long as the fight doesn't become stupidly protracted, and someone can bind your wounds.

This is the only time in which torso damage is limited. It was one of the concepts removed from the game because it was too easy to make characters really hard to kill. Passive Defense was also removed.

Yeah, I knew PD was removed, but they also gave a bonus to basic dodge, which was lacking in 3rd. (When most characters had a dodge score of 5, it was very rare when an unmodified dodge attempt succeeded).

[Mameluco]

In all the GURPS games I've played/ran, I don't know if I ever saw a character killed -- and I ran a good number which involved mauser rifles that do 8d6 damage! Generally speaking I find it quite hard to kill a character in GURPS (with the caveat that I didn't play many high powered sci-fi games). Instead, in these kinds of fights, it was easy to knock a character out of combat with a single blow. And recovery times can be slow (1 hit point a day), and very slow if a limb was crippled.

That's exactly my experience! I must reckon my RPG experience pre-GURPS was mainly RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. So, I was used to systems where combat is dangerous, and my expectations and play style aligned with GURPS'.

That's why I was so puzzled by other posters stating the lethality of the game.

[Willie the Duck]

That's exactly my experience! I must reckon my RPG experience pre-GURPS was mainly RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. So, I was used to systems where combat is dangerous, and my expectations and play style aligned with GURPS'.

That's why I was so puzzled by other posters stating the lethality of the game.

I'll say again that it probably has to do with D&D**, and that framing probably the level range where D&D is least lethal. Also I don't think people have specifically been saying that it is lethal exclusively. Also that it is brutal or dangerous or other terms*. And I think that is accurate, or at least a reasonable impression -- some super build with 20 HT and other advantages to conscious all the way to -5xHT or something notwithstanding, you tend to max out at ~40 damage points of being up, there are shock rules, bleeding rules, limb crippling, slow healing (and potentially no or less healing magic), combat penalties for fighting when injured, and all of a sudden combat looks more like something you avoid whenever possible rather than go seeking. For that reason, even if you never loose a character, the perception that combat is more brutal is, IMO, not without merit.
And I think a lot of the comparisons are late-2e/3e D&D to GURPS 3E, as that seems a sweet spot for when people played both.
**do not have the time to go through and make sure these were in this thread, but anecdotally I see the rest of the terms brought up many times.

Also, your GURPS character has an entire build full of dependents and defined careers and hopes and dreams and things you have the plot designed around, meaning that a X week hospital stay will have different consequences than a D&D game where one can say (not that you likely will have to, given healing magic) 'oh well, my paladin is out for six weeks, I have a druid I need to level up, let's keep going.'

Regardless, I think it is possible that a significant chunk of it is simply from different games being played. Sci fi with heavy weaponry and light armor until you get to the powersuits (whereupon the opponents have fusion weapons or gamma lasers). Cliffhanger or urban fantasy where people have guns but little or no armor. And so forth.

[MoiMagnus]

Regardless, I think it is possible that a significant chunk of it is simply from different games being played. Sci fi with heavy weaponry and light armor until you get to the powersuits (whereupon the opponents have fusion weapons or gamma lasers). Cliffhanger or urban fantasy where people have guns but little or no armor. And so forth.

Yes. The only feedback I had from GURPS is a friend who played a short campaign in which the optimal strategy degenerated into:
(1) pull out the pin of a grenade
(2) drop it on the floor/table [do NOT throw it otherwise it might require a check]
(3) run away and close the door behind if possible, alternatively jump through the window
(4) and then come back to finish off the few wounded peoples that were not insta-killed by the grenade [I assume this means no one is the setting was wearing protection able to withstand to a grenade]

Reading through this thread, I have to deduce that the GM was not great at his job. But on the other hand this was the first (and last up to my knowledge) experience of everyone at this table with GURPS, GM included, so inexperience was expected.

[Mike_G]

Yes. The only feedback I had from GURPS is a friend who played a short campaign in which the optimal strategy degenerated into:
(1) pull out the pin of a grenade
(2) drop it on the floor/table [do NOT throw it otherwise it might require a check]
(3) run away and close the door behind if possible, alternatively jump through the window
(4) and then come back to finish off the few wounded peoples that were not insta-killed by the grenade [I assume this means no one is the setting was wearing protection able to withstand to a grenade]

Reading through this thread, I have to deduce that the GM was not great at his job. But on the other hand this was the first (and last up to my knowledge) experience of everyone at this table with GURPS, GM included, so inexperience was expected.

So long as you have a good escape route, that's not necessarily unrealistic.

I think you have hit on one of the issues with GURPS. You need a good DM. Many systems can work with a mediocre DM, but GURPS really can't.

But the thread isn't "Why is GURPS bad" it's "Why don't you like it."

So things like slow combat, too many fiddly modifiers and multipliers, high lethality combined with exhaustive character creation and %$%^&ing disadvantages are all why I didn't like it. Maybe people felt those were features, not bugs, but they just didn't work for me.

[fusilier]

That's exactly my experience! I must reckon my RPG experience pre-GURPS was mainly RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. So, I was used to systems where combat is dangerous, and my expectations and play style aligned with GURPS'.

That's why I was so puzzled by other posters stating the lethality of the game.

Yeah. I also played a lot of 3rd ed. GURPS (still do). With the removal of blow-through for torso hits in 4th it would make it noticeably easier to kill a character. Although still difficult to "insta-kill" it is much easier to take a character from full hit points to "roll versus death" in a single hit. Probably would depend upon the particular weapons used in the setting. Sounds like the optional rule in High-Tech would be a good addition, if you don't want to kill your PC's all the time.

Also, as others have noted, you need a good GM, and I found it took experience to figure out what set of rules work well for what kind of campaign/setting.