As a philosophical point, I'm curious - do GURPS GMs, especially GURPS Dungeon Fantasy GMs, prefer to place magical treasures that enhance PC defense, or enhance PC offense?
I personally lean towards offense.
PCs with a good offense can deal with more and bigger and deadlier monsters. Increased offense allows them to threaten foes they couldn't otherwise easily threaten. Or maybe threaten at all, given appropriate immunities or powers. Even if only one or two PCs can threaten a foe, they can - as a group - confront such a foe.
PCs with a good defense, however, can neutralize monster's attacks. They increase the whiff factor (if literally improve defense) or reduce the effect of hits (if DR). In order to get such PCs to feel some concern in combat, monsters have to get tougher. Every increase in defense on one PC means more, stronger monsters are needed to threaten that PC. And thus all of the other PCs need to keep up . . . or the GM has to keep up, or both.
So I tend to think it's better to give out artifact-level offensive items over letting out even moderately-powerful defense-enhancing items. You'll see some magical defenses in GURPS DF Felltower, but a lot more power offensive weapons. For every suit of awesome plate or mage-scale, or protective ring, or set of armor-providing bracers, you'll see 2-3 magical weapons or offense-enhancing items of equal or greater potency.
How about in your games?
A different way to think of it is that offense protects the entire party while defense protects the one guy. It can work if the tank can draw fire away from the squishies. Otherwise, like a party with both an HP 40 ogre barbarian that walks through everything and and HP 4 leprechaun that has to spend his time hiding in the backpack, they better enjoy role playing.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point and a good perspective. Defense also encourages sending in the one or two nearly or actually unhittable/unhurtable guys to beat all the bad guys while everyone else stands around. Offense can have that effect in the sense of "buff the best attacker to make that PC unhittable/unhurtable." But in my experience they'll do that anyway.
DeleteI have found that players tend to perceive a larger awesome factor with offensive items, so I've hues that direction. They're happier with moar dakka than thicker armor (until they need it)
ReplyDeletePeople do get more excited about powerful magic weapons than powerful armor, for sure.
DeleteYou did call out GURPS GMs specifically but if you'll allow I'd like to comment philosophically. On the "buff offense" side you end up amplifying the differences in combat capability. Already some characters will be built more for offense than others and putting the powerful offensive items out there tends to amplify the strongest offensive characters (in my experience players first seek to max out one PC before balancing the rest). This could result in having to include foes that only one person has a chance of harming to give the party any challenge, but that means to challenge the one you need to make it impossible for anyone else to cause harm, relegating them to support of the killer. On the other hand, as you point out, the corresponding problem exists for defence. Players max out the defense of one PC before balancing the party, so to have a chance of endangering that one PC you put in monsters that will outright kill any other PC. If the one PC is occupied, incapacitated, or for any reason unable to occupy your super-hitter you face a TPK. None of this is the GM's fault, it is created by player strategy choices. But good luck trying to convince all the players to distribute items in a manner that keeps the party capabilities within reach of each other! (Relevant experience is with D&D from 1974 to 5E [minus 4E] and Savage Worlds. When I GM I usually give more non-combat magic, then offensive and defensive in about equal amounts. When playing party-based CRPGs I try to keep defense balanced but I also stack offense for maximum effect in the hopes of having a one-hit kill reduce the amount of incoming damage.)
ReplyDeleteYour comments are always welcome. That's an accurate assessment of the dilemma either way you go.
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