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Beardless posted:I'd avoid Tactical shooting stuff. For people who are new to GURPS you'd want to streamline it as much as possible. Like I said, the Templates from GURPS WW2 have been updated to 4e. The conversions are openly available, so I don't think it'd be The actual rules and such in Tactical Shooting should probably be avoided, but the templates have some skills, Advantages, Disadvantages, etc. from the vanilla content that can be mixed with regular character creation to speed up the process.
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Jan 31, 2015 07:04
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to post them. 
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chitoryu12 posted:The actual rules and such in Tactical Shooting should probably be avoided, but the templates have some skills, Advantages, Disadvantages, etc. from the vanilla content that can be mixed with regular character creation to speed up the process. So do the WW2 templates. And they don't require him to buy another book.
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Jan 31, 2015 07:08
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GURPS Action is as good as you're gonna get for one-shots, but I'm gonna be honest with you: if your players don't know how this all works ahead of time, you might want to look into something less involved. The game is extremely front-loaded, there's a lot of looking up what stuff does, and on the GM side there is a lot of work in just deciding what's allowed and what's not. Fights can be pretty lethal and knowing your defensive options is extremely important. I ran a couple of GURPS campaigns for about a year for newish players and had to make cheat sheets for everyone's specific characters just so they didn't have to dig through the books searching for what they could do. If you're still interested, there's three genre-based booklet series, each designed for quickly setting up a specific type of game. Action is pretty much made for Die Hard-type stuff, if that's the kind of thing you want. Dungeon Fantasy is D&D in a different ruleset, which is its own bag of poo poo to learn in terms of designing monsters, learning how spells and powers work, etc. Monster Hunters is a high-powered Buffy-style thing, lots of cool options and the Enemies book is a pretty good monster manual, but even with the templates it can take a while to make 400-point characters for a one-shot and the magic system, though pretty neat, can be hard for new players to grasp for a session or two. GURPS is a pretty alright system for what it does (though not necessarily what it says it does), but unless everyone is already familiar I wouldn't use it for a one-shot.
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Jan 31, 2015 08:40
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The problem with using GURPS as a one-shot isn't for the players; it can play very fast and light since all rules are optional and you can disregard most of the crunchy stuff for a cinematic action campaign. If you're giving the players premade characters and using only the basic combat and skill resolution rules there's very little for them to actually know. The problem is that it's a ton of work on the GM to prepare such a thing for the players. I think it's a great system but it might not be worth the effort just for one session.
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Jan 31, 2015 13:02
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GURPS is fine for newbies, so long as they get pregenned characters or templates to work with. Character generation is the most time consuming part of the game - not just in terms of creating a character, but making sure that the characters aren't gimped (it's very easy to do that accidentally). As to running a one shot, there's a fair bit of prep (you might want a historical battle map of Omaha beach to help with that), but all you really need for the enemies in terms of stats are a couple of combat skills, damage for knife or bayonet, and hit points.
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Jan 31, 2015 14:45
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Thanks for all the advice and help! The converted WW2 templates look especially like what the doctor ordered. I don't mind doing the additional prep: roll20 makes it easy to duplicate character sheets and I can recycle any material I write up if/when I go into a full campaign.
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Jan 31, 2015 18:01
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So my Romanian WW2 game is halfway true. Things learned: 1. It seems inadvisable to move and fire. 2. The game is indeed pretty hard to learn for the GM, but having a supportive group has made looking up rules and making house fixes bearable. 3. Don't be flamethrown.
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Jan 31, 2015 19:28
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Tias posted:So my Romanian WW2 game is halfway true. Things learned: 4. Grenades. All the grenades.
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Jan 31, 2015 20:06
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Yeah, I had a couple mortars drop, and those seem even crazier here than IRL. Lethal shrapnel for up to 20 metres at skill 15? Oy vey. On the other hand, I used the WW2 firearms database up above, and one dude got shot 3 times with the Nagant revolver (2d pi-) without going down.
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Jan 31, 2015 20:14
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Tias posted:Yeah, I had a couple mortars drop, and those seem even crazier here than IRL. Lethal shrapnel for up to 20 metres at skill 15? Oy vey. With the distance penalties from shrapnel, the ability to take a dodge to dive away, and decent armour, shrapnel isn't too bad. I generally see 2d shrapnel, though, so maybe your stuff is deadlier.
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Jan 31, 2015 22:16
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Tias posted:Yeah, I had a couple mortars drop, and those seem even crazier here than IRL. Lethal shrapnel for up to 20 metres at skill 15? Oy vey. It actually may be prudent to treat military standard 1895 Nagant ammo as +P in the rules. The Nagant's poor reputation for power today is mostly because the only ammunition available is light target loads. Examination of the low stocks of remaining milsurp from when the gun was contemporary indicates that it was loaded more powerfully and actually had fairly decent killing potential, and the revolver itself was designed to handle such strength.
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Jan 31, 2015 22:50
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Tesla was right posted:With the distance penalties from shrapnel, the ability to take a dodge to dive away, and decent armour, shrapnel isn't too bad. I generally see 2d shrapnel, though, so maybe your stuff is deadlier. 4D for a Russian 81 mil. Also, my Romanian conscripts don't really armour up. chitoryu12 posted:It actually may be prudent to treat military standard 1895 Nagant ammo as +P in the rules. The Nagant's poor reputation for power today is mostly because the only ammunition available is light target loads. Examination of the low stocks of remaining milsurp from when the gun was contemporary indicates that it was loaded more powerfully and actually had fairly decent killing potential, and the revolver itself was designed to handle such strength. Doh -_- Good to know, thanks.
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Feb 1, 2015 12:33
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Quit making me wish I could convince someone in my group to run a WW2 game. I'm the only history buff among us, and the only one interested in tabletop games that do anything aside from swords and sorcery 
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Feb 1, 2015 12:42
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The German liaison officer literally tanked 3 Nagant shots, threw a stiehlhandgranate too soon, and it bonked into the roof, back towards him, and he flipped it the hell away before it blew 
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Feb 1, 2015 12:43
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Am I correct that under the more basic implementations of GURPS' combat rules, you don't need a map and can run it in "theater of the mind"? Or if not all up in the air then at least in just vague tokens on the map without strict observance to ranges? I ask because I'm pretty bad at making/manipulating explicit terrain maps.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:Am I correct that under the more basic implementations of GURPS' combat rules, you don't need a map and can run it in "theater of the mind"? Absolutely. That's usually how I play it. Just give rough estimations of where things are in terms of yards and everything just works out.
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Feb 6, 2015 18:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:Am I correct that under the more basic implementations of GURPS' combat rules, you don't need a map and can run it in "theater of the mind"? Depending upon just how basic you're getting, strict location/facing tracking isn't as important as paying attention to just how little occurs in a single round of combat. Activities that normally would take a single turn or roll of the dice can often take 2-3 in GURPS because of how granular it is. I'm talking things like reloading a weapon, getting up from prone, or even just swinging a big fuckoff two-handed sword. This granuarity interconnects with a bunch of skills (like Quick Draw) that help negate these downsides; if you start eliminating things like loading/readying actions, just be sure you do it consistently across ranged/melee, and that you don't have any players that have these related skills so they don't feel shortchanged. Detailed maps aren't necessary, just keep in mind that the relative effective ranges of things like pistols/shotguns/longarms are part of the overall balancing of these weapons, so being able to offer a sense of whether or not you are in the optimum range for your weapon is important. When you hit firearms, cover is SUPER important because of how lethal TL6+ firearms can be. So again, you don't need a detailed map but you do need to be able to communicate what cover is available, how effective it is, where the enemy has taken cover, possible routes to circumvent cover, etc. Ranged combat is fiddly, and it can be difficult to abstract it in a way that still makes it meaningful. My sympathies.
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Feb 6, 2015 18:05
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There's easier and faster gunfight rules, but they're in the GURPS Action series so that's more money, and they're still kinda fiddly and take forever.
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Feb 6, 2015 18:43
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Lynx Winters, your avatar reminded me of a question I had for this thread: is there any decent way to approximate Borderlands guns in GURPS? Because GURPS would be a pretty loving great system for running a tabletop Borderlands game. You've got plenty of setting stuff to hijack, there's all sorts of cool poo poo you can do for story stuff, and of course, who doesn't loving love loot(Hello High Tech/Ultra Tech)?
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Feb 6, 2015 19:01
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MohawkSatan posted:Lynx Winters, your avatar reminded me of a question I had for this thread: is there any decent way to approximate Borderlands guns in GURPS? Because GURPS would be a pretty loving great system for running a tabletop Borderlands game. You've got plenty of setting stuff to hijack, there's all sorts of cool poo poo you can do for story stuff, and of course, who doesn't loving love loot(Hello High Tech/Ultra Tech)? Easily done, just have some weapons do burn or toxic or explosion damage, you can build Afflictions to model DoTs and you can more than easily make something that looks like a pistol but actually fires fuckoff shotgun rounds.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:15
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I tried for a couple days to do stuff like give weapons different damage types, adjust individual guns stats based on manufacturer, etc. Then I stopped because it was pretty much just lovely paperwork and went back to actually playing Borderlands. It's all possible, just do those things I said. Also my plan was to run it in Action because if you're counting hexes for loving Borderlands you have missed the point entirely. Another big problem is that the games have a lot of melee stuff going on, both for players and enemies, and melee doesn't tend to scale well when there's guns around. Also, make sure everyone has some form ablative DR forcefield and remember that you'll have to adjust the recharge delay because five seconds in GURPS is a loving eternity and someone will get splattered the instant their shield goes down. Ultimately, I pretty much disagree that this is a good system for a tabletop Borderlands because Borderlands is all long gunfights that don't seem long because you're always doing stuff. If I was at all interested in recreating that in tabletop anymore, I'd go with a much faster and simpler system and strive more to emulate the feel more than the mechanics.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:17
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Lynx Winters posted:I tried for a couple days to do stuff like give weapons different damage types, adjust individual guns stats based on manufacturer, etc. Then I stopped because it was pretty much just lovely paperwork and went back to actually playing Borderlands. It's all possible, just do those things I said. Also my plan was to run it in Action because if you're counting hexes for loving Borderlands you have missed the point entirely. Yeah, the trap is that GURPS has all the crunch you need to manage the cool technical aspects of Borderlands, but actually doing it in-game makes it not feel so much like Borderlands.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:36
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For the mostly realistic wild west PbP game I'm doing, I don't bother much with combat maps. During the recent gunfight in a train car, I just provided a map of the car (with all the seats numbered for reference) and kept all the number crunching for exact yardage in my notes. The players got to just say what they were doing and I listed the effects after doing most/all of the math for them. It makes things go much easier, since they don't need to really consider most of the detailed stats and it discourages perfectionist analysis before each action.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:Am I correct that under the more basic implementations of GURPS' combat rules, you don't need a map and can run it in "theater of the mind"? As with everything in GURPS, the map-based combat is an optional rule that has its own chapter that you can ignore if you want something faster and lighter. If you just use the standard character creation, action resolution, and combat rules you have less than 40 or 50 pages of rules to keep track of and no maps at all are necessary. Now, the several hundred pages of Advantage/Disadvantage/Skill lists in Characters and the several hundred pages of advanced rules in Campaigns throws people off and is a bit scary and probably responsible for GURPS' reputation as being crazy complex, but everything there is strictly optional, too. (Though from reading the official forums I've come to understand that there are a significant number of GURPS GMs and players who gobble up having rules for everything, not my kind of gameplay though) Edit: I keep saying all that in this thread but my favourite part of GURPS is that it can be one of the lightest systems or one of the heaviest systems or anywhere in between and I want people to know this BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 23:36
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The important thing to remember is that literally almost everything in GURPS is optional. The very fact that Ultra-Lite exists (a pocket pamphlet of rules for running a quick one-shot) is proof of how far it can be parsed down to the most basic elements. And it still manages to have enough optional complexity available to let it overtake other systems for particular play styles. I know I became a GURPS convert after playing a d20 Modern game and finding that my full auto only machine gun was useless in the style of game we were playing because it could only spray 5 round bursts at a general area, which meant wasting ammo just for a chance to hit.
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Feb 7, 2015 03:13
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Thank you everyone for all the advice, again. Between being able to run it "map light" and the templates, I think I'm ready to give this a shot next week. A couple of final questions: * since I'm planning a WW2 game, there will not be a lot of Damage Reduction options, if any, correct? Cover and anything to inflict penalties to enemy shots will be essential because a single good hit is often going to knock someone out if not kill them outright, right? * you can dodge against any number of shots against you, (except as the book says, the ones you don't know about) correct? Just checking because I may be getting confused by other systems where you can only take one "active dodge" in a turn so getting shot at twice means you're only counting on a failed attack roll for the second shot.
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Feb 7, 2015 06:28
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quote:* since I'm planning a WW2 game, there will not be a lot of Damage Reduction options, if any, correct? Cover and anything to inflict penalties to enemy shots will be essential because a single good hit is often going to knock someone out if not kill them outright, right? There IS body armor in that era, but it's limited to light stuff like silk vests or heavy steel plate like the Soviets used that can only stop an MP 40 at medium range. So generally few or no people will be wearing armor, which means cover is vital. Tactical Shooting has some recommendations to let you make combat more survivable: * Make most fire from enemies suppressive fire or blind firing. * Make sure enemies suffer penalties from things like darkness, smoke, range, concealment, etc. * Make Luck mandatory or at least available for all characters. * Use the Random Hit Locations table to increase the chance of less lethal limb wounds, rather than the default assumption of torso shots. * Use optional rules like Bleeding to let the players deal more damage.
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Feb 7, 2015 06:54
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Yeah, you can dodge anything you're aware of, but you only get one option per turn like retreating for melee or dropping prone for ranged. The way the three defenses work out is that Block is often relatively high but can only be used once a turn (and probably won't come up in a WW2 game anyway), Parry is also high if you are good with a melee weapon but drops with each parry in a turn, while Dodge is the hardest to improve but also has no real penalties for doing it often. Flak vests/helmets or whatever they used in WW2 will give a little DR but the best thing will be not getting hit in the first place.
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Feb 7, 2015 06:56
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Remember that WW2 steel helmets are basically useless against actual gunfire. They protect against blades, bumps, and shrapnel. A 9mm pistol at close range is likely to punch through, to say nothing of a battle rifle or machine gun.
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Feb 7, 2015 06:58
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chitoryu12 posted:There IS body armor in that era, but it's limited to light stuff like silk vests or heavy steel plate like the Soviets used that can only stop an MP 40 at medium range. So generally few or no people will be wearing armor, which means cover is vital. Tactical Shooting has some recommendations to let you make combat more survivable: I knew about using modifies for light and ambient factors, but how exactly does cover work in GURPS lite? Either you aim for an uncovered area, or try to punch through, right?
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Feb 7, 2015 17:18
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So I bought GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills on a lark and my gosh, this concept cuts out so much of the skill crunch. I'm even more excited now.
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Feb 7, 2015 17:35
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Wildcard skills are pretty great, and Monster Hunters makes pretty good use of them and adds some extra stuff to them, but for some reason the main books make all this talk of them unbalancing games (the horror!) and burning down your village if you don't use them juuuust right.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:26
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Tias posted:I knew about using modifies for light and ambient factors, but how exactly does cover work in GURPS lite? Either you aim for an uncovered area, or try to punch through, right? Objects and vehicles have their own DR that you subtract from the damage roll, like with armor. The objects also have their own HP, which their natural DR protects from. So let's say you're behind a wall that has an HP of 20 and a DR of 15 (just throwing random numbers out here). A Walther P38 pistol will deal 2d+2 damage, so let's say the Nazi rolls really well and gets a 14. This is less than the DR of the wall, so the bullet totally fails to penetrate or cause any damage to the structural integrity of the wall. Unless you get into more complex situations with ablative damage (where the wall's DR gradually degrades as it takes damage), you can safely assume that the pistol simply can't penetrate the wall and the shooter needs to try something else. The proper GURPS Basic Set (Campaigns) provides more information if you wish to add it, regarding penalties for hitting specific body parts and further breaking down cover based on how much it covers the body behind it. For a light game, I'd suggest just taking the hit location table for penalties to hit certain body parts and figure out at the table what's poking out enough to shoot.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:56
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Thanks. Another question: Any of you ever run SEALS in Vietnam?
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Feb 21, 2015 14:10
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Tias posted:Thanks. I haven't, but I wanted to. If you need inspiration, watch all of Tour of Duty, aka NAM: the TV show
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Feb 21, 2015 21:22
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Tias posted:Thanks. I haven't but also take note of the alternate campaigns chapter that goes crazy with US Navy mages and lurking aliens ala Predator and horrible mer-beasts stalking mangrove forests. It's really not GURPS unless you can take things off the rails.
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Feb 22, 2015 01:09
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Tias posted:Thanks. I've been in a short lived SEALS in Vietnam game.
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Feb 22, 2015 01:10
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DocBubonic posted:I've been in a short lived SEALS in Vietnam game. Any observations you'd like to share? I'm hella stoked for trying it sometime. BattleMaster posted:I haven't but also take note of the alternate campaigns chapter that goes crazy with US Navy mages and lurking aliens ala Predator and horrible mer-beasts stalking mangrove forests. It's really not GURPS unless you can take things off the rails. I really like the "Germany won WW1, Kaiserliche Kriegsmarine vs. Viet Minh" crazy alt suggestion!
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Feb 24, 2015 21:59
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Tias posted:Any observations you'd like to share? I'm hella stoked for trying it sometime. It was a real gear heavy game. Characters were loaded up with a lot of gear and ammo. You can be ridiculously realistic with it too. Its a combat heavy game to say the least. Plenty of full auto firing and all that fun. EDIT I looked over the pdf and I noticed it referenced GURPS High tech a lot. It seems like the necessary stats are in the Seals book at least. DocBubonic fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Feb 24, 2015 |
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Feb 24, 2015 22:29
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Just wanted to bump this thread to remind people its around.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:11
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