One thing I use in my current DF game is creatures who cannot be easily hurt by non-magical weapons.
Lucky for me, GURPS lets me customize this in a few ways right out of the box. I do two, primarily.
Resistance to non-magic weapons. Some monsters I use can't be hurt willy-nilly with non-magical attacks. How I generally do this is some form of Injury Tolerance (Damage Reduction), with an Achilles' heel of weapons with the Puissance enchantment. The Damage Reduction level depends on the creature - /10 isn't uncommon, and for effectively immune ones I'll give them /100 or better, with Cosmic (drop all fractions) (GURPS Supers) to ensure it zeroes out.
This allows for truly massive blows to hurt them - but it's not easy. You can squish a wight by dropping the ceiling on it, maybe, or a golem might be able to tear it limb from limb, but it's not easy to kill it by beating it with a club. Better get a magic club.
This extends to physical manifestation of magic, in some cases, but not in others. Some creatures might also shrug off fireballs and lightning and stone missiles, while others might not. It depends on their overall trait list.
This can get confusing, though - my players have asked "Is my sword with Accuracy +1 a magic weapon for purposes of hurting (wights/gargoyles/whatever)?" "Is my broadsword with Flaming Weapon magic? It worked on those wights!"
My simple answer is no. It's Puissance that matters. That's what makes a weapon "magic" in my games for purposes of bypassing resistance to non-magical weapons. It's the enchantment that increases basic damage and I figure it's damage we are talking about. If the weapon lacks Puissance, it's not magical for these purposes, sorry.
False clues exist, though - wights clearly suffer from fire, so that's why the flaming broadsword worked on them pretty well. Not because it was a magic item, but because it was fire.
Can only be slain by magic weapons. This one is even easier to do - it's either Unkillable 1, 2 or 3 plus an Achilles' heel, or Supernatural Durability with an Achilles' heel. Either way, if you deal the death blow with a magic weapon, it's dead. Otherwise, lacking the Damage Reduction from above, it's just as easy to hurt as anything else with the same traits.
I'm generally stingy about the death blow. You can't beat everything to death then go around whacking the twitching remnants with a Puissance +1 sword and call it a death blow. It's got to be the actual blow that takes the creature to -5xHP or forces a death check that it fails. This gets to the heart of what I figure this represents - some kind of supernatural key that unlocks the mortality of the creature. You can't just willy-nilly throw it in at the end (or the beginning - cut it with a magic sword and then finish it with non-magic ones). You have to do the right thing at the right time or it doesn't matter if you did it at all. It's either very mystical, or it's like getting into the BIOS screen during bootup - oops, sorry, missed it. Wait until it's fully up and then try again.
The first of these works well for things you just can't easily hurt - or hurt at all - without magical weaponry. The second works for things you can hurt just fine (usually anyway) but won't stay dead until you break the supernatural attachment to existence that they have.
Hey, neither of these are immunity! Well, no. GURPS makes damage immunity pretty hard to come by. Immunity is effectively infinite DR vs. a given damage type, and infinite power is hard to define in finite points. You can do it, but I prefer not to, not for damage anyway. It avoids weird circumstances like dropping a wight down a 1000' pit and it takes no damage because the floor isn't magical (or silver, or on fire, or whatever). I find it makes for a "do it the hard way, or do it the easy way" split with monsters. You can still brute force your way through these guys with a non-magical weapon, but in the first case it'll be brutally hard and in the second case you can't solve the problem permanently.
I hope these are useful to folks who like a little bit of AD&D-ish immunity in their games.
Ah, so you don't allow Penetrating Weapon to count for this?
ReplyDeleteI'm toying with the idea myself. On the one hand, it makes a sort of sense on the face of it, with Penetrating Weapon being good for, well, penetrating magical immunity. On the other, I'm not certain I want to encourage Penetrating Weapon in my game, mostly due to lack of experience with its effects at the table.
Halving DR is already pretty powerful, and is extremely useful against high-DR targets.
DeleteBut mainly it's because I have to draw the line somewhere, and "Puissance only" is very clear "Puissance and things that help penetrate DR" is much broader, and encourages argument at the table.
Do you allow holy weapons to affect undead and the Infernal? Or do you not have a distinction between magical and holy puissance? I do agree with the fact that undead should be harmed at least a little by non magical attacks. Do you have any fire resistance for the undead? I keep some damage resistance to fire but it takes a lot of fire damage to kill them, PCs with flaming swords can hurt undead more than with mundane weapons but they need to burn the undead to ashes for it not to reform and attack again.
ReplyDeleteI don't have any difference between holy and magic items in that sense. Puissance just works, no matter the basis for it.
DeleteI feel that there could be a decent pdf for DF discussing magic weapons and how they are supposed to work in GURPS. I would be curious about what kinds of defenses you would give to Acererak, the demi-lich in the Tomb of Horrors.
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DeleteIf I use a demi-lich, I'll post it after I use it. But not before, my players read this blog too!
DeleteI guess I would think that a +1sword in AD&D would have both +1 Accuracy and +1 Puissance. Maybe I would make the + rating on a weapon (Accuracy+Puissance)/2. That way a person with a sword of Accuracy +2 and no Puissance would be able to hit undead as though it were a +1 sword. I mean the sword is magical and basically it takes a magic weapon to hit undead. I am not sure how I would handle Penetrating Weapon though.
ReplyDeleteCould be. I'm after flavor, though, not exact conversion. And Accuracy runs +1 to +3 in GURPS, Puissance +1 to +3, and weapon quality (for swords) from +0 to +2 for damage and +0 to +1 for to hit. That gives a pretty broad range if you want to make magic swords vary.
DeleteBut I'm not looking at, say, a demon in AD&D and saying "+2 or better to hit" and then figuring out what that means in GURPS, or what +2 is in GURPS. I just want "largely ignores non-magic damage" or "need a magic weapon to slay."
It is interesting to look at AD&D rules whichvseemed to make a lot of sense at the time and the convert it to GURPS and have the essence of the rules fall a part. What is it about a magic weapon that makes it able to do damage to undead and demons? I don't know but it is interesting to think about.
DeleteOr what is it about those creatures that lets them shrug off non-magical weapons?
DeletePacts and Vows come in to play here.
Pacts and Vows? That is interesting. I always thought that magic weapons sort of acted as something that bypassed the immunity somehow. Maybe wights are affected by silver weapons but magic weapons act as something that can bypass resistance as well. They are a sort item that can filled a weakness universally. If something has a weakness in their immunity then magic items can act as that agent and bypass the immunity.
DeleteWell, it can either bypass their defenses by targeting a weakness, or represent something they don't have some kind of supernatural immunity pact against. "Weak against silver" or "Strong against everything, except silver" is a subtle difference. The latter is a great explanation for a supernatural defense - it's rare that magic really lets you be immune to everything, usually there is some (fated to kill you) escape clause your immunity didn't cover.
DeleteLike a heel, say.
Another question: do you have this stepped in levels, so that a monster might have, say IT (DR 100) (Achilles Heel: +2 weapons), or is it just Magic vs Not Magic? If the former, how do you figure out the right places to put higher-resistance monsters?
DeleteI don't bother with stepped levels. I think they change it too much from "find the mystical weapons" towards "you must be this high to ride this ride." One is solving a puzzle (albeit an often obvious puzzle), the second is just satisfying prereqs for fighting something.
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