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Thursday, April 10, 2014

GURPS - Back in my day . . .

Someone asked me about an (old) GURPS calculation today, and I was thinking that many rules changed in my years playing GURPS.

Here is a tiny handful.

Back in my day . . .

. . . Block was 1/3 of your Shield skill, because Block at 1/2 Shield skill was deemed too effective.

. . . Karate did impaling damage to the vitals!

. . . Head was one location, not two. And then it was Brain and Head, not Skull and Face.

. . . there was no limit to Shock penalties.

. . . Stats cost 10/10/10/15/15/20/20/25/25 (and so on)

. . . you could stack up enough PD (which is also gone, good riddance) that defending wasn't necessary to defend.

How about you? No cheating by peeking in the books. Just from memory, what's changed since you started playing?

This one is GURPS - non-GURPS players feel free to steal this topic.

24 comments:

  1. Guns had a "Snapshot" stat. Acc was about double what it is now. Guns did crushing instead of piercing but had all kinds of wonky rules that made them different from normal crushing.

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    1. Oh and Rapid Fire grouped shots into tetrads and had a roll table.

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    2. Let me tell you about the time one of my players shot a ROF 32 gun loaded duplex rounds at an android . . . Ah, 64 grouped into 3s.

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  2. Psionics were different enough that it made it hard for me to grok the way powers are done in 4e, even coming back after more than a decade away.

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  3. Instead of a unified speed-range table, every missile weapon had an "Increment" stat. You were at -1 per every Increment yards away you were from the target. There was no Acc. stat; long-range weapons like sniper rifles simply had larger Inc. ratings.

    Automatic weapons fire was...different. And shotguns weren't treated as automatic weapons. You just applied the damage against DR one die at a time (except at point-blank range).

    You could spend a half-point on skills, and candy was only a penny...sorry, wrong set of old memories.

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    1. I won't lie - I do miss half-point skills...

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    2. Ah, PB and Inc. stats. And guns doing 3-4d even for really nasty ones . . .

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  4. Let's see.. I don't think anything at all has changed since I started playing GURPS. Is that cheating?

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  5. The books are now hardback and not in a box!

    - Ark

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  6. There were only three stats: ST, DX, and IQ. Each started at 8, and you had 8 pts to distribute as you wanted.
    You got skill pts equal to your IQ score.
    Traps were rated on the number of dice you rolled under your IQ to defeat.
    Armor lowered your DX.

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    1. I think counting "The Fantasy Trip" as "GURPS" is cheating a bit . . .

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    2. Okay, fine, but folks have gotten most of the low-hanging fruit already (PD and Eidetic and Fencing)

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  7. Eidetic memory essentially halved the cost of IQ-based skills, such that it was nearly mandatory for everyone except pure "tank" characters.

    Practically nobody spoke languages with an accent, because languages were IQ-based skills, and anyone planning on speaking a non-native language took a high enough IQ that they could get language fluency for just a point or two.

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    1. I once convinced a GM to let me ahave a Natural Athlete advantage that halved the cost of physical skills, just like Eidetic memory did for mental. Most munchkin moment of my GURPS life.

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  8. Fencing parries were 2/3 skill plus PD. Getting Parry-15 with Skill 15 was quite practical. Hit Location was a technique that let you buy off hit location penalties - all of them, with one technique. By gum, we could swashbuckler!

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  9. Did anyone else use Full Eidetic Memory to buy mental skills for 1/8 point? Ooo, ooo, and buying things for half-a-point! I still miss that for my swiss-army-skill characters...

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    1. I sure don't miss half-points. It made checking PC and NPC point totals have just one more extra step. Making 1 the minimum has saved me a lot of "wait, let me total that again . . ."

      It also discouraged "I have 20 skills at a 1/2 point each!" as a character type, which I like, too - I'd rather have generalists go with talents and stats, because it's smoother than looking across giant skill lists.

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    2. The degenerate state of a GURPS character is high stats and ½ (or these days 1) point in each of a bunch of different skills. Because that's still more cost-effective than using defaults. GURPS4 did a fair bit to make this approach less attractive, but it's still not perfect.

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  10. Physical skills requiring +8 per level after attribute +3.

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    1. And mental topping at 2/level, VH at 4/level. One of my players still thinks 4e is unfair to spell casters because of this.

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  11. Wait. I can't use this as an excuse to dig out my copy of Orc Slayer?! Darn.

    Okay. Increment stat on ranged weapons (which I liked a lot for the simplicity). Eidetic Memory halving mental skill costs -- munchkin bait in the pure form. Boxes! For that matter: Printed on Paper!

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    1. Well, you posted. So now you can go read it.

      You liked Inc for simplicity? But every weapon had a different Inc. stat to remember . . .

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  12. Crossbows and Prodds had rated ST, but regular bows just had minimum ST scores in the same way melee weapons did.

    Authorial intent aside, that's the way the rules were written.

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  13. I most miss the half point skills; it let you squeeze a whole lot of decent rollsvout of 75 to 100 points; equivalent charcters slide into the next bracket.

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