in further misadventures of Saladin the Paladin, i missed on every attack roll last night and got hit by the dmpc when he got a critical fail
I'm playing a warlock character in a new session we've started (homebrew as always), and the god im contracted to is a god of chaos. Occasionally our DM lets me roll his d100 for some stupid or near impossible request, and of course the one time I roll a 100 ( the only way to pass) it's for my character to know a stupid song from an obscure cartoon. My character canonically knows the tune and dance moves to the Ord Shuffle from dragon tales and I hate it.
Other fun thing about my character, she was raised on "bedtime stories" from her nanny that consisted of her nanny's collection of Amish romance (think Beverly Lewis) but even more censored
Okay, this isn't technically the 'general RPG' thread but it's close enough, and God help me, I'm thinking about GURPS again. I'll never be able to actually play it because it's designed in such a way you basically need a VTT but using a VTT is forbidden by the terms of service and they do C&D anyone who tries but I'm still thinking about it because GURPS is the RPG you stand in absolute awe of and never actually play. Specifically, I'm tettering at the precipice of a whirlpool of house rules and general un-fuckening. If you don't know, GURPS is a 'universal' role-playing system built with a focus on flexibility and 'realism'. What this translates to is an enormous amount of math, a grab bag of abilities with no particular relation, and combat that starts out deadly and blasts into the stratosphere around Tech Level 4, where 5d6 starts being a perfectly normal amount of damage. The average character has 10 HP, by the way, and it does not go up. (yes this realistic, rules-heavy system uses HP, that's one of the things I'm thinking about.) It only gets worse. It's not exactly intended to be a 'heroic' system, but it's not exactly universal, either. It can just about manage gritty rocket tag. Anything like, say, Battletech or Star Wars is impossible. I think I might be able to shape it into a game, instead of a contest of how many d6x100000 we can stick on an antimatter warhead. Will I ever actually play this houserule set? Probably not. It's hard enough to find a game and the GURPS community is weirdly sticklers for RAW. Compels me though. So I'm gonna put this under spoilers because it's basically a slate of houserules for a famously complex game. Spoiler: Hit Points & Weapons First, Hit Points. They've got to go. They make characters super squishy, turning armor into an all-or nothing. Somewhat realistic... but unfun. It also means that, despite the game's pretense to realism, you can get axed in the head for 190% of your HP, pass the roll to remain conscious and be fine, and then stub your toe for 10%, triggering a death roll that kills you instantly. Instead of your HP depleting from attacks, they're now a threshold. Any attack that deals over half your HP is a potentially debilitating hit. Hits that don't kill or knock you out are recorded as wounds. (In addition to causing stun and other impediments) Whenever you take damage, you add the number of wounds you already have to the raw damage number - so harm slowly accumulates, but doesn't *directly* deplete. GURPS allows (requires, by RAW) targeting limbs, so your limbs all have a portion of your HP and if they take that much damage may suffer crippling injury. For instance an injury to your arm of more than half your HP risks breaking that arm. The head (split into face and skull for armor purposes) has no particular special effect, except that it doubles the effect of damage, so half your HP in damage risks a health roll. A debilitating hit forces a Health (HT) roll. (BTW in GURPS your HP comes from Strength (ST) rather than Health, and we're mostly going to keep that.) Additional damage beyond your HP threshold imposes a penalty on the roll. (-2 for every half again, perhaps, or, more harshly, 1 for every additional HP/tenth of your threshold.) If you fail this roll, you fall unconscious for a period ranging from seconds (combat is second by second) to hours. If you fail badly enough, you not only fall unconscious but also risk death, suffering a 'dying' condition (which GURPS doesn't have?!). If you fail really badly, you just die, but this can't happen under ordinary circumstances (i.e., you'd need to fail by 10 or more, which for an average character with no mods means rolling a 20 on 3d6 (GURPS is 3d6 roll-under)). What this means is that weak attacks are initially non-threatening, but can wear a character down over time, while an 'instant' attack dealing high damage has a chance of taking them out. Very high damage attacks are increasingly more likely to cripple or kill a character, but a character who can reduce the relative margin of damage - through margin or HP threshold - has a chance of keeping up and turning lethal attacks into annoying ones. Additionally, as damage no longer needs to chunk down a potentially large HP pool, *damage totals can be smaller*. A hundred damage, 30d6, is enough to guarantee the death of any human, with a -20 penalty to their HT roll. Damage dice become *exponential*. There are weapons in the book that deal 3x100 d6. Granted, these are area weapons, which are another issue, but we're implementing an across-the-board nerf of basically everything post TL 4 - anything that can be described as a gun, or bomb, or missile, is probably taking a heavy nerf. Melee weapons are mostly fine, possibly needing some slight adjustment, perhaps even a few buffs. Most of them have damage multipliers, which increase the effective damage they deal after armor, so their seemingly low damage is much higher than it seems. But the later changes to armor may suggest an additional need. Guns, however. In any event, guns get a flattening of damage, but more modern varieties also gain armor piercing. Pistols deal 3d6(2), Rifles deal 4d6(2), the latter number being the armor divisor. Depending on the specific caliber there may be a bonus or penalty to the dice. Also, you'll take baseline Piercing Damage and you'll like it. Larger guns deal more damage but it increases in a dull roar, rather than 2d6 pistols, 5d6 assault rifles, 7d6 battle rifles, 11d6 machine guns. This equates to a decrease in overall damage, a reduction of damage modifier (from 1.5x to 1x) and an increase in armor penetration. The overall effect is to make guns more even as category and eliminate the huge damage outliers. Though the extant system is excusable from a realism standpoint (the 'machine gun' is like that because it's firing .50 BMG), it's also broken. While I may include 'tone variants' which will include more lethal combat, defaulting to 'it is feasible to build a player character that can survive being shot' seems more reasonable. Spoiler: Armor Armor! Armor is weird in GURPS. It's your only hope of survival at higher TLs, or frankly at any TL, it comes in both equipment and Advantage Form (but the equipment form is vastly superior), and it makes everything into an eggshell. High TL PCs - or vehicles, or anything - tend to have armor in the tens to hundreds to thousands. And 10 HP (vehicles have more, based on complicated math that means they tend to have hundreds of HP, to go with their thousands of armor). Which means that the kind of dice necessary to penetrate armor are also all-but guaranteed to obliterate the character within. Again, not a completely nonsensical result when simulating modern tank combat, but also not fun. Armor in GURPS is actually a fun system for the kind of person who likes to fiddle, but is spoiled by the combat system being Like That. Armor may suffer a general nerf in numerical terms, but will also be adjusted in general. There are two types of armor - backing, or flexible armor, and facing or hard armor. Backing armor works much like you'd expect - you subtract incoming damage from the damage taken. Hard armor is somewhat more complicated. First, Hard armor has half effect against crushing damage, so a 7 damage crushing attack vs armor 6 plate only subtracts 3 damage. (If the wearer were sensible, they probably have an flexible armor 2 gambeson beneath to absorb another 2). Second, Hard Armor allows the possibility of *glancing hits*. An attack which exceeds the armor value, but does not double it (i.e., anywhere from 7 to 11 damage for the aforesaid plate) is a glancing hit, which is converted to crushing damage and loses any carrier effects. It has struck with sufficient force to potentially caused injury but not actually pierced the armor. An attack which *does* deal twice the hard armor rating or more counts as a penetrating hit. A penetrating hit deals its normal damage type (i.e., stabbing someone with a sword deals impaling damage for a 2x multiplier to final damage), and carries any 'riders' on the attack, such as poison, taser paralysis, etc. Flexible armor does not contribute for this purpose, but does reduce damage even for penetrating hits, and crushing attacks are counted normally for penetration purposes (e.g. even a crushing attack needs 12 damage to penetrate our plate, which would lead to a 9 damage penetrating attack). Spoiler: Area Attacks I mentioned area attacks before, and they're the cause of many of the most disgusting damage stats in GURPS, because the way blast attacks work is that they deal their full damage to any target in their hex, and then that damage is divided by three times the distance in yards. (Yes, GURPS uses hexes and yards. The former is elegant but doesn't fit into the kind of environments humans actually live it, the latter is inexplicable). What this means is that to deal significant damage at distance, weapons have to deal *tremendous* damage up close. To deal 33 damage, enough to put all but the toughest humans at risk of death at a distance of 10 yards, a weapon must deal *one thousand damage*. On some level I think this actually verges on the unrealistic, though 'strict realism' in the form of the inverse square law is potentially even worse. Figuring out how to make area attacks feel good is something I've always had trouble with, so I'm not confident in a solution. But GURPs does come with a range ladder, a roughly logarithmic scale distance and speed, so what I'm going to do is divide by the scale modifier A blast deals full damage to all targets within 1 meter (unless we're playing Mouseguard or something and it's a very small blast. Technically we could multiply in this situation, but it's probably cleaner to simply go down a OOM and deal max damage to all targets within, say, a centimeter. This is why we use metric), half damage to targets within 1-2 meters, 1/3rd damage to targets within 2-3 meters, 1/4 damage to targets within 3-5 meters, etc. This means a bomb we want to deal 30 damage at 10 meters needs to deal 150 base damage. That's still huge, but it's not '3d6x100 damage'. A bomb we want to deal 30 damage at *ten kilometers* deals 700 damage, which is, again, less than 3d6x100 on average. It's certainly less than, I shit you not, 25dx10000, an actual damage number actually printed in an actual book. It can be yours for 50 points (Legal Immunity and Filthy Rich wealth), the same price as 25 HP. Spoiler: Character Creation Which brings us to the rest of everything, which is a mess. GURPS has accumulated various traits over the years into a massive list of advantages and disadvantages, which are best described as terribly unbalanced, perhaps best exemplified by Terminally Ill Shenanigans (being guaranteed to die *after the campaign* is just free points!). This would require rebalancing and reorganizing on a campaign-by-campaign basis, and probably restricting many of the options. I think, 'by default', some of them need requirements and something resembling context. Most importantly, however, the core combat abilities need to *scale with tech level*. 10 Armor, or a 2d6 innate ranged attack is game changing in a TL 1 campaign, worthless in a TL 8 campaign. But they cost the same, regardless. This is an immediate and obvious adjustment. Mostly, character creation just needs GM attention, due to being a freeform system. A little too freeform. Doing away with the rule that trait packages must always cost the same as their components parts and using them as more of a race/background package, subject to the whims of synergy and opportunity cost, is a necessary step. Also, you should probably divide up point categories instead of letting players spend them willy-nilly. Personally, I'd suggest splitting up attributes, skills (including learned advantages), and innate advantages. But that's more 'campaign creation' than 'houserules' in any event. Spoiler: IPP and Advancement We'll also add iterative probability protection. GURPS in theory has this, but it's tied into the XP system which... doesn't exist. Like, GURPS straight up doesn't have a character advancement system, or rather, has a massive shrug where it should be. There's references to earning XP but no clarification of how, several specifications that certain traits *cannot* be 'bought off', a completely seperate 'realistic' system for learning skills that takes a swerve into The Matrix midway through. I swear this system is actually really cool underneath the piles of bullshit. Anyways, advancement. I'm fond of the realistic 'skill learning system', where you advance by actually studying skills in downtime, but it needs... better rules. Like clarification of how you can gain attributes or advantages. I would *also* pair this with an XP system, which also functions as IP protection - you can spend XP on either rerolls and other IP things, or advancement. XP isn't used to buy traits outright but instead greatly amplifies the rate at which you can 'learn'. I.e. spend four points on that shiny new skill and you can learn it in a week instead of months. Oh no there's more.
Adderal seems to be working. Spoiler: Tone GURPS, having pretense to being a universal system, also has lots of suggestions on tone and adjustment, but unfortunately they're mostly bad, favoring broad sledgehammer solutions that throw any pretense of balance or sanity out of the window, pinning massive mounts of the system the binary presence of one of two advantages (Trained by A Master and Magic Sensitivity), and using the word 'cinematic' to mean both 'high power' and 'literally a movie parody'. 'Cinematic Advantages' include both 'can run on walls a little further than really practical' and 'can have your stunt double take a hit for you'. For instance, their solution to 'how do I deal with my superhero dying when shot with a gun' is to add a 1 point feature that, if taken, makes you literally immune to bullets, as like, a conceptual category, (They also explicitly forbid doing this elsewhere in the book.) which isn't being Superman, it's begging the GM to turn off the concept of guns, and you still have to pay for it for some reason. No really this game is good, actually, when it works its an intricate dance of moves and systems assembling neatly into *anything*, which is why this pisses me off. So Tone. Most of the things specified here are based on my... baseline? It's somewhere between gritty and heroic. Medium-Gritty, let's say. Characters have extraordinary abilities but the little things matter. You're still in *danger* going into combat but a bad roll does not necessitate a new character. I don't know. I think there are roughly four categories, let's call them Mythic, Heroic, Gritty, and IVAN (Iter Vehemens Ad Necrem, aka 'long road to death', after a roguelike that particularly struck me), that we'll sort our variant rules into. Mythic is the highest power level and most favoring of the PCs. PCs are more resilient, more capable, generally *more* and don't need to worry about mundane concerns. The Standard Operating Procedure feature is not a thing here. PCs are supermen, comparable to comic book heroes - and not even like, the C listers, however humble their origins may seem they are the most important beings in the world and will shape it to their will. A Mythic PC is comparable to Superman, James Bond (Brosnan Version), Kirito, or Galen Starkiller. They're fundamentaly an exception that mortal rules do not apply to. Heroic is a slightly higher power level, where things are a little... smoother, than they should really be, and the PCs are a little bit special. They still have to work for it and may get a little bloody, mundane concerns still matter to them. A heroic PC can be assumed to maintain their weapons but if for some reason they couldn't it would take a penalty. They may be powerful in-universe, or somewhat smaller scale, a Heroic PC is James Bond (Craig Version), John Constantine, Luke Skywalker, Amuro Ray, or ... 'Gritty' is a lower power level where safety mechanisms begin to fall away. Characters - including PCs, can die or suffer more easily, and the PCs must expect to work hard to punch above their weight class. Fights are quick and bloody with little room for showing off. Explicit planning and failsafes are important, and a Gritty PC is always at risk of catastrophe. Consider John Miller (Saving Private Ryan), James Holden, IVAN is the lowest power level and highest level of danger. At this level, all protection is stripped away, and the game is highly lethal for PCs and, optionally, NPCs alike. It is easy to fall into a death spiral, and the GM becomes almost an antagonistic force, probing and exploiting the PC's weaknesses. Combat is best avoided unless in a situation of extreme advantage and PCs should expect to struggle to survive. Comparable characters are difficult to find because comparable characters do not tend to last long. Backgrounded: An additional 'tone', this simply means that this aspect of the game is not as important. For instance, in a game focused on politics and diplomacy (see, the fun thing about GURPS is that it *actually has entire rulebooks for politics and diplomacy*, combat may not be important, as as such, if it occurs, is resolved with a single roll. Spoiler: Skills More on skills. Abilities in GURPS are a mess, because they don't have any structure worth noting. You can take basically any trait with no particular order, subject only to the GM's whims. That... kind of works, in some cases, but also very much doesn't work in most cases. Instead, I suggest a more orderly system based on your skill and attribute level. First off, since I'm posting this for some reason, a brief overview of how skills work. Every skill is functionally a modifier to your attribute rolls, with the associated attribute being known as the 'Governing Attribute' (GA) in this document some skills have secondary attributes, (such as IQ based Driving roll to discern how an unfamiliar vehicle works) but each one has a main attribute associated. Investing points in a skill raises your target number for that particular action. (Recall, 3d6 roll under). If you don't have the required skill, you suffer a penalty. Most skills actually start out *lower* than the GA when first bought, this is meant to represent some skills being harder than others. (For instance, if a character has 12 DX, their default Driving rolls are at -5, and thus need to roll a 7. If they invest a single point, then as Driving is a Average skill, it becomes GA-1, or 11.) Skills cost 4 points per rank, with the exception of the first two ranks, which cost 1 and 2 (cumulative). Thus an investment of 4 points in a skill represents 3 upgrades - GA +2 for Easy, GA-1 for Very Hard. 4 points in a skill is considered a 'full skill rank'. The number actually rolled, after compressing the initial set and accounting for the governing attribute, is the 'effective rank'. Skills are neat. They're basic workhorse of Your Character, and are all part of a complex web of interwoven relations. They've also got their own little modifiers and sub-skills, but we aren't going to get into those here, except that we're going to give out one free Technique Point for every full skill rank (4 pts). Skill Rank, not equivalent. If you have 17 dex and four points, you get one technique. Techniques are tragically neglected, and this helps encourage them, though it can also be spent on Skill Feats. Instead of simply letting you purchasing anything that seems neat or tying a whole plethora of skills to Trained By A Master, we're going to break into proficiency tiers. You may need a certain tier to qualify for certain techniques, dependent skills, skill feats, etc. Three proficiency tiers exist for skills, dabbling, trained, and expert, based on how many points are spent on the skill. Only points that are actually paid count, not bonus technique points, defaults, or skill bonuses. However 'effective rank' also matters, you need a baseline level of proficiency to qualify. This may be the more demanding requirement in the case of higher difficulty skills. Dabbling = 1 Point and effective rank 6. This is pretty undemanding, obviously. As long as the governing ability isn't low (9 for a very hard skill) a single point will qualify. Required for all techniques and all but the most basic of functions. This basically amounts to 'not a default', but if your GA is catastrophically low, you may not qualify for 'dabbling' in a skill despite having points in it. You are probably also Incapable, more on that later. Trained = 5 Points and effective rank 10. The cost for achieving this ER is a bit higher for Very Hard skills at GA 10, and will be costly if GA is low. Allows access to a broader basis of techniques and functions. Master = 15 Points and effective Rank 15. At this point, without an elevated governing ability, reaching this tier will be costly - given GA 10 even an easy skill requires 16 points. Only at GA 12 is the necessary cost lower than the minimum requirement. Allows access to almost all techniques and functions, though it does not guarantee they are effective. (i.e., this is the level that allows the Parry Missile Weapons technique to be learned, but it's still at a heavy penalty.) Given the way GURPS skills are priced and arranged, with a typical roll representing a task of moderate difficulty under stress, this seems largely appropriate. 3d6 roll under 15 is 95% odds, after all. There's even more that could go here if I am not stopped. Like Attributes and why Strength is weird. I think I may have found another use for Obsidian. Also the GURPS sample characters are the best sample characters but I don't think the writers realize it.
Why are the attributes like this, why does IQ govern everything? You can tell this was written by nerds.
My GURPS descuffing attempts are proceeding at... well, there's a lot there, but it's going. In other news... well, I'm already in a online RPG campaign, but part of me wants to get into *another*. The problem is voice chat. I... don't like my voice. And everyone wants to use voice chat. I tried using a voice changer, but... I'm just not confident in it? ... plausibly I could try making a video, like I was doing an LP or something, with the voice changer, and then playing it back. Seeing how it goes?
... what if. Okay I know this is gonna sound dumb. But what if: I just ran a module? That could be fun...
Personally I prefer text chat over voice, I'm with you on that. Also running a module doesn't sound dumb, I think it's worth giving a try! What system are you using?
I'd probably be using D&D 5E. It may not be my favorite system but A: It has lots of modules, and B: It has lots of players. I've DM'd a lot more than I've actually played, but I've never actually run a module. I think. Maybe a ran a small dungeon once? Not sure which one I'd run. I could also possibly run Rise of the Runelords in Pathfinder 1E. That's an option, though it's a *long* one. ... I sent out some messages to possible campaigns on roll20, didn't get a reply yet.
