Recent comments

Short answer: I dunno!Let's leave aside the bullet damage issue -- the amount of brainpower visited on that subject by the gun nuts on the GURPS forums is frightening enough to believe it's generally OK.

1. If DR represents "stopping all force and objects from getting through" and EP represents, "letting force, but not the damaging object itself through," it's a matter of determining a) what those numbers are for a given armor material, and b) how each damage type plays with those numbers. And I don't know what realistic values for a) and b) should be. And, c) it should be relatively simple to use in play.
2. Without any evidence, I'm instinctively in favor of the "all of nothing" tweak for EP. If a weapon breaks through the "stopping all force and objects" hard part, the "stops objects but not force" soft part wouldn't do much either, would it? The odd detail of a stab-through-mail producing a small crushing (damage within EP) and a small impaling (damage above EP) wound doesn't seem right either.
3. The DR and EP concept you've laid out here looks good, it's just bullets and ballistic armor that don't fit very well. How well do bullets punch through mail and plate? How well does ballistic armor protect against bats, or swords?

There might be three possible numbers for a given piece of armor:

• * How well it keeps its shape and rigidity; raw material strength (DR, sort of)
• * How difiicult it is to break through to reach the wearer directly (EP)
• * How well it disperses or absorbs force (the quality inherent to ballistic armors, also represented by DR).

This last quality could be represented with a Damage Reduction number, but assessing realism is next to impossible, and retaining playability is quickly going out the window...

I hear you, on the question of bullet damage. I rationalize it by saying that the "modifiers", if they existed, would basically even out. As in, the damage as listed represents the energy of the bullet hitting you. Then there would be a big divisor representing how little mass a bullet has, then a big multiplier representing the deep wound. Call it "high velocity tiny impaling" and be done with it :) Regarding bullets, ballistic armor and EP, you may need to come up with a fourth category for it. I don't know if the "very flexible" bucket is right because I am not sure kevlar is just a really good version of chainmail or a different substance entirely. 4/2* sure looks different from 35/5* or whatever! You could also have both DR and EP count as DR vs. bullets but that would inflate the value of ballistic armor rather than deflate it. Another idea I'm toying with is saying that imp damage always halves EP, instead of setting the EP of certain armors lower vs imp

Hi! I think your question is answered toward the end of the article, under "EP and bullets". In short form: 

GURPS says impacts hurt you, and hurt you even more when sharp edges pierce flesh. That's sensible, and it's handled cutting and impaling weapons right from the game's beginnings.

EP is a great way to model protection against those edges: With EP, the edges don't pierce, so the extra hurt isn't there. 

Then bullets came along, and GURPS said that the impact from pi bullets hurts you... but doesn't hurt you any more by piercing flesh. 

So EP fails to have any effect there, but that's not EP's fault. The game's pi bullets just don't follow the sensible lead set by cutting and impaling impacts.

I've always thought bullet rules should sensibly work like cutting or impaling: some basic impact, plus a damage modifier greater than 1 for piercing flesh. (That is the case for bullets hitting the vitals – and as expected, EP works great to protect that location against bullets.) 

But assuming no changes to bullet rules, then for non-vitals targets, you have to implement some patch to overcome that quirk and make bullets play nicely with EP. : (

never really did it for me. I prefer more restrictive rules. Taste, I guess?

You may have seen it by now, but I review some ideas for just that, in a follow-up series to this post. The Action Point discussion is at http://www.gamesdiner.com/about_time_part3 (you'll find links in there to the preceding Parts I and II as well). 

Anything of interest in there?

I remember some old RPG sessions that started out using regular rules to let super-powerful PCs wade into armies of foes, and start taking them down... and more the next round... and the next... again and again... It got so repetitive that the GM just started hand-waving the actual rules, and decreeing that the PCs took down X enemies per round. And after some time of that, finally, it just devolved into "Okay, you wipe out the rest of them." Done.

It might sound a wee scandalous to by-the-rules GMs, but it was good for keeping the story going (in a not-too-serious cinematic game), and good from a fictional story-telling point of view, too. That's how a good book or movie would handle such a mass fight as well: Start with some detailed scenes highlighting the actions and capabilities of all involved, and as soon as that starts dragging, condense the rest and get on with the conclusion!

Hello Captain. Say, those tall aliens wouldn't be blue cat-people, would they?

Average ST 13? Sounds high at first glance, especially in GURPS 4e, where that means almost 70% more lifting ability... but quick tapping on the calculator shows that they're 30% taller than the average human, and so that 30% ST bonus is spot-on.

The 30% added ST does assume, of course, that the aliens (and their muscles) are that much thicker in width and depth dimensions, too, not just longer. If that's the case, then they should be scarily powerful. (And if they aren't any thicker, then they'll just look bizarrely lanky, with no ST bonus needed.) 

The nice thing about building creatures on core rules for size etc. is that when players hear a description of this alien, they'll have smart expectations about its abilities (including whether it'd be smart to take one on in combat). As opposed to a game that might hand out damage dice or "hit dice" more or less by fiat, regardless of physical properties. 

Anyway, thank you for the kind words. SJG knows of GULLIVER, but hasn't inquired about doing anything with it; I think it'd be a little tough to turn into an e23 product, as it deals with core game rules, not peripheral details like typical supplements. But I guess it'd work as a Pyramid article offering non-official design options; you're right, I should ask about that!

Hi PK. Actually, I didn't call anything "silly". I called the lack of any overall skill for experience with magic "funny", in the sense of a bit curious. Not up to the level of silly, and certainly not wrong!

I also don't specify the lack of a required prerequisite skill for spell-learning as the funny bit; that idea is offered as a "how I like to do things" option, just as you suggest. The funny bit would be, again, just the long-running absence of any skill for magical understanding, even after the rules specified good uses for such a skill. From the start, the game gave mages an IQ+Magery roll to sense magic, though with no allowance for the experience of an ancient mage with a hundred spells vs that of a teen wizard with Ignite Fire. GURPS Magic later offered magical research and invention rules, but again, with zero consideration of the ancient mage's experience.

The fun thing about magic, of course, is that any setup is perfectly valid! A particular gameworld could work like the above, pegging success in magical research to innate talent alone, with experience counting for nothing. But I think few GMs would prefer that as the system's default assumption, especially when the game offers invention rules for other fields that are all about experience. If a game had rules for inventing new chemicals that called on IQ, but made no allowance for skill and expertise with chemistry, well, I'd cheerfully call that funny.

That's the game's past, though; Thaumatology eventually appeared (GURPS Grimoire?), and is now there to handle the magical research problem (if not the matter of sensing magic; I don't see it suggested as replacing the IQ+Magery roll for that). The skill is a good addition to the game. I should probably change the article's opening words from "GURPS is funny..." to "GURPS was long funny...".

Re skill name: Thaumatology it is, on B225. And there's a whole book by that name too (which I don't have). Hmm, was it Thaumatology way back in Grimoire, too, or was it the Thaumaturgy that I had fixed in the brain? Either way, thanks for the correction! Will update the article.

Something else I'm reminded of, many rolls of a single die also start to look like dice pools when there's little opportunity for change in the target numbers throughout.

Any game that makes you roll 10+ checks to get a result becomes very tightly bound to some specific target number that will succeed almost all the time, while 1 step harder will fail almost all the time. DnD4 suffers from this in combats even with all the possible modifiers (because the mods are effectively constant at +2 to you or -2 to opponent and are cancelling out), and their "skill challenge" rules are a disaster by being more obvious about the results and having more variation between character's target numbers.

Games really need to let the players see they're losing a contest, and give them a way to change that relative to the unfolding situation (so you don't just throw your obvious winning option first round).

Never have seen a game that produced anything like a sensible range of target numbers, dice pool size, or required successes.

The math is genuinely unintuitive, and the probabilities are all extremely jumpy when the target numbers move off 50% per die, especially with large dice pools.

Then you get into designers losing themselves in the possible modifiers, without calculating how severely one can effect the others. Number of dice, target number, number of successes, ratio of success to failure, degrees of success, and so on. You end up with games were you're more likely to accidentally kill yourself by being more skilled.

For anyone playing one: get yourself 4-6 dice to lower the chance of total failure below where you'll notice it, then do everything you can to ease the target numbers. -1 TN is almost always worth more than another half dozen dice, and you'll never have more dice than -2 TN is worth on d10's.
If there's degrees of success, and you want rare special success results, take a couple more dice. If there's a ratio of success to failure, make sure you have an odd number of dice, and focus on minimising that target number at all costs. Never roll anything in play against high target numbers, take action to lower them first, range, lighting, magic, or whatever.

Really, it's all just a clunky way of making very small modifiers have huge effects on your success at tasks, in ways that most people won't understand.

Hi Tbone,
I do understand its not required but it seems to be there as the default of magic is to be Intuitive, vs creating Theoretical underlying system. THe way a person can learn mechanic (specific) but not need engineering.
Like the difference between a sorcerer and the mage. The mage is more versatile but the trade off is in points emphasizing on the basic theoretical knowedge. On the other hand, the Sorcerer may have a retinue of spells but not completely understand (and thuse work these spells backwards) how they work, relying on tradition, routine and patterns instead of a process.
Although the options you provide are great :D.

Isn't it Thaumaturgy? Its also covered in the new Thaumaturgy Books.