This is a monthly r/GURPS thread for anything and everything related to your own campaigns. Tell us how you and your friends are making out. Update us on the progress of your game. Tell us about any issues you've run into and maybe we can help. Make suggestions for other players and GMs.

This is a monthly r/GURPS thread for anything and everything related to your own campaigns. Tell us how you and your friends are making out. Update us on the progress of your game. Tell us about any issues you've run into and maybe we can help. Make suggestions for other players and GMs.

So, I finally tore GURPS Calculator apart and put it back together. Some of that code was old enough that I didn't recognize it as mine, which made for a fun couple of days.

If you haven't run into it, it's a free site with GURPS calculators and character sheets, and it's been around since 2015. This is the biggest update it's ever had.

Here's what's new:

• Campaign Rolls: Roll from a character sheet, a calculator, or the GM Board, and everyone in the campaign sees it in a shared panel. GMs can roll privately too.
• GM Board: Your whole party in one table. You can run a Fright Check on everybody with one click, or search the party when you need to know who has Forced Entry.
• GCS 5 import is back and working. Sheets also have counters now for ammo, coins, and whatever else you're tracking.
• Everything runs in your browser and updates as you type, so no more round trips to the server like the old days. Every tool has a Help button now too.
• New look, plus 10 themes if you want something different (I'm partial to the green-phosphor CRT one).

I also fixed a pile of rules the old version got wrong, mostly critical hits and hit locations. If you ever got a weird result and figured you'd messed up, it might have been me. Sorry about that.

It's still free and there are still no ads. The home page has a support bar now so you can see what it costs to run (about $15 a month) and where anything past that goes. Right now that's Encounters on the GM Board, where you build fights ahead of time and have the monsters ready to go when the players kick the door in. If the site has ever saved you some flipping through Basic Set mid-session, there's a Patreon.

So what should come after Encounters? I've got a list, but I'd rather hear what you'd actually use. What's the GURPS math you still end up doing by hand?

gurpscalculator.com

Some background:

I've been reading through Shadowrun Anarchy 2.0 (SRA2.0) recently. I was a kickstarter backer, the PDF / print copies will be public soon.

The whole system essentially boils down to test rolls, and in the case of combat, contested rolls that then also use the margin of success for the winner. I've been finding it a very elegant system so far!

There are concepts in the system that gesture towards narrative vs simulation, but they aren't deeply baked into the test system itself, so can be adapted easily into a more simulationist style. I tend to have a mix of both, so it hasn't been a problem for me.

The discovery:

SRA2.0 combat uses contested rolls, and if the attacker beats the defender, they hit. The number of hits / successes gets added to the damage.

All weapons have a base damage, so it's the successes that add some variables to how hard the hit is.

There are a lot of other elements in the book (ranged vs melee, other defender options, etc) but this mechanic just struck me as so elegantly done.

It means that your attack roll and damage roll happen at the same time, and a high success in attacking transfers directly to damage. (Avoiding the sometimes underwhelming result of rolling to hit and then rolling low damage.)

My idea: Apply the overall concept to GURPS.

• current method currently is attacker rolls, defender rolls if attacker succeeds, then damage rolls

• GURPS Anarchy:

  • attacker roll
  • defender chooses available defense skill and rolls
  • count the margin of success
  • standard weapon damage applies plus margin of success

• if defender succeeds, possibility of a riposte? Especially if margin of success is high. Maybe riposte is a technique or a sub-maneuver attached to Wait or something.

Questions:

I like this idea quite a bit, but I'd love to get feedback. Would something like this obstruct any useful advantages / disadvantages, etc? (Or could those adapt into this easily?)

note: I've formatted this for readability, but in this strange world, that might make folks think this was generated by an LLM. That is not the case! Every letter was 'generated' with my fingers on the keyboard!

Looking to run a setting with Magic in it for the first time, and wanted some input on some of the rules. Some spells (like Tickle for instance) seem to have crazy strong effects if used in combat, given that it's a full minute incapacitate if they fail the check. Has anyone run a D&D-style system where effects like that allow you to repeat the resistance roll on your turn? If so, were there any specific spells you thought were made better or worse by it? It feels like a spell like that would be basically a free kill, either used by the players or against them.

What I mean is, how would you go about building a power that does the following:

After hitting the target with your initial attack, a “bomb” (or whatever explanation you want it to be) begins to build inside them. Each turn, this “bomb” grows in power, but does not actually go off and hurt the target until the user decides to trigger the bomb.

I initially thought it may be some combination of Delay (trigger) and Cyclic, probably with an Accessibility limitation that states damage does not happen each cycle, but is built up until the trigger, but I am curious how others would go about something like this.

I'm planning on getting into GURPS because I liked the idea of running a game which takes place in an alternate 1934 San Francisco with magic. I want to run a game with firefights (with mostly period correct guns), some mystery and some encounters with monsters and such. Would GURPS suit this and what should I look at? I am getting into the system and I am looking forward to trying something new!

From my reading of the Basic Set and Magic (and even Zombies!), it seems like there is no clear rule for how long a zombie lasts nor to limit the number of zombies a caster can control (for instanelce, in D&D the spell lasts 24 hours and allows 4 controlled zombies at once). All I see is a vague sentence in the Basic Set about zombies decaying into skeletons. And Zombies! also doesnt explicitly deal with this, it seems more geared towards running campaigns that focus on zombies as a setting fixture.

I have a player who is casting Zombie on pretty much any corpse they can get their hands on and I dont really know how to keep them from just amassing a game-breakingly-large zombie horde. I dont want to get in the way of the player enjoying a necromancer, but I also don't want a horde of zombies to take over play from the rest of the party, either, not to mention balance issues and the plot line. The game is a run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy campaign with a party of 5 adventurers.

I would love some advice about how to handle this. Or am I just missing something in the rules?

Edit: Thank you all for the advice and information, it has helped me to get my head around this topic much better.

Namu wiki even said that we entered it since 2023

So based on the 4th edition premise for a civilization capacity to think ahead (which back when 4e was written, it consider itself as TL8 level of knowledge perspective.), meaning that you can speculate as much as TL + 3 of your current tech level. Which is why TL11 is the limit and TL12 is so vague. See here: https://gurps.fandom.com/wiki/Tech_Level

What's your thought on this? Do you agree or even have your own ideas? Especially for TL12+ technologies.

I just can't help but to speculate, coming from someone who love

• Far future setting (which I assume TL12+): W40k Dark Age of Technology, Iain Bank's Culture, Xeelee Sequence, End Game + modded Stellaris
• Alternate Universe, with retrofuturism tech: Fallout (TL7+3), Wolfenstein New Order (TL7+2), Prey 2017 (TL8 + 3), STALKER/Metro series (TL8^+1).
• Space Sci fi/Space Opera (definitely TL10-11): Halo, Starcraft, Stellaris, Dead Space.
• Near future (TL9-10): Deus Ex series, XCOM, Crysis series, Watchdogs.