# Help Me Understand the GURPS Design Perspective



## innerdude (Oct 23, 2019)

On the eve of our gaming group getting together tomorrow, I've found myself mustering very little enthusiasm for the current campaign. 

And I don't know if it's the system (GURPS 3e), the campaign (a supers setting riffed directly from Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners novels), the GM's handling of the "plot" (is there a plot? None of the characters know a damn thing about anything, so we're mostly wandering aimlessly) . . . but the whole thing is falling way beyond flat for me, and is coming nigh unto full-on cratering.  

Truthfully it's probably a combination of all of the above (in addition to disliking GURPS and the plot being non-existent, supers is my least favorite speculative fiction genre by a country mile). But we're now 9 or 10 sessions in to the campaign. And I've played two other GURPS 3e campaigns that lasted about as long as this one.

So while my experience with GURPS probably barely crosses the "total newbie" threshold, I can say without any hesitation, after 30+ sessions of GURPS, I just don't get it. 

Or more appropriately, I just don't get _who_ this system is _for_. 

And the inner gnome tinker inside my head wants to know why. It's about exploring the design space of GURPS as an academic exercise.

I'd describe GURPS as being "high input dependent exception based design." 

The "exception based design" qualifier is easy to spot, as every modifier to the base mechanic in GURPS is a circumstantial exception. It's a modifier based on range/distance/speed, some mitigating character advantage/disadvantage, equipment modifiers, modifiers based on previously completed (or aborted) actions (things like readying a weapon, facing, available active defenses, etc.). 

Obviously this is hardly new design space. It's pretty much _de rigueur _for what we'd consider "modern" game design, and considering GURPS first arrived on the scene in 1986, this isn't "new tech" on the design scene.

To me the difference with GURPS lies in that every exception is "high input dependent"---the frequency and breadth of inputs needed to adjudicate a single rules application is high. At least, if you're playing rules-as-written.

At it's core, GURPS' base resolution mechanic is simple. Roll 3d6, try to roll less than a target number. Yet this simplicity could be used to much greater effect _if the players are willing to remove the high input dependencies_ and simply accept that the relative scale of results are to be applied as broad strokes rather than singular, narrow ranges. But the very essence of GURPS plays against the "broad strokes" approach.   

For me, rules adjudication is about finding out _what happened_ in the fictional state. Yet GURPS very much seems to believe that the rules should explain---in as concrete, representative terms as possible---_how _things happened in the fiction. And that the _how _should be transparent to every player.

The ethos seems to be, if you account for as many "pre-input" factors as possible, it leads to more satisfying outcomes and adjudication on the back end, because there's less volatility between GM and players about "what actually just happened inside the game world." 

The very ethos of GURPS expects that you will embrace as much of the system as you're willing to handle---and not only does the system generally give off that vibe in its writing, you're exposed to that same line of thinking from long-time, experienced GURPS fans. _Playing GURPS is a complete waste of time if you're not using Compendium I and II, Martial Arts, Magic, and Psionics. Oh, and you should really use UltraTech I and II, and Sci-Fi as well. _

To really "get" the point of GURPS, it seems, you're supposed to embrace the crunch. Wrap it lovingly around you. Because if you actually _don't want_ that level of crunch, why did you choose GURPS in the first place? If you're going to just kind-of, sort-of eyeball stuff and make off-the-cuff adjudications, wouldn't it be better to go with a system that's designed to do that?

So what kind of players does a "high input dependency" game appeal to? What kind of "fun" should I be getting from this kind of system that I'm not achieving?


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## Doug McCrae (Oct 23, 2019)

There's a level of detail in GURPS seldom found elsewhere in rpg-ing. This, from 4e GURPS Low-Tech, is, I think, a good example of your concept of exception based design -

At TL3-4, glasses are held up to the eyes by the frame or a handle (a _lorgnette _design), occupying a hand, or are clamped to the nose (a _pince-nez_ design). *Pince-nez fall off on a roll of 12 or less on 3d if the wearer moves faster than a walk*; they’re often attached to a chain.​


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## DrunkonDuty (Oct 24, 2019)

Yeah, GURPS is very crunchy. Too crunchy for me. And I say this as a HERO player.

I think GURPS works better with less. Use the minimum rules you need to achieve the style of game you want.

That being said I do like the GURPS source books. They are great inspiration for settings even if you aren't using the GURPS rules.


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## doctorbadwolf (Oct 24, 2019)

The point of GURPS isn’t to use all the rules all the time. 

It’s to use the rules that add to the style of game you’re running.


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## pemerton (Oct 24, 2019)

innerdude said:


> For me, rules adjudication is about finding out _what happened_ in the fictional state. Yet GURPS very much seems to believe that the rules should explain---in as concrete, representative terms as possible---_how _things happened in the fiction. And that the _how _should be transparent to every player.
> 
> The ethos seems to be, if you account for as many "pre-input" factors as possible, it leads to more satisfying outcomes and adjudication on the back end, because there's less volatility between GM and players about "what actually just happened inside the game world."
> 
> ...



I've never played GURPS but I've played bucketloads (as in thousands of hours) of Rolemaster, which has a comparable design ethos. (It's d100 rather than 3d6 but in this context that's just detail.)

I think that Ron Edwards discussion of Purist for System RPGing in this essay is the best thing I've ever read about this sort of RPGing. More than anything else it helped me understand what I was doing when I was playing RM, why some issues seemed to recur without easy solution, why the debates on the publisher forum revolved around the issues that they did, etc.

The bottom line is that, exactly as you say, the mechanical resolution should map not just to _what _but to _how_. Therefore metagame mechanics and "fortune in the middle" are anathema. (So as you say everything is "pre-input" - and the roll comes at the end of all that. Nothing is narrated post-hoc to explain the rolled outcome. It's a completely different design ethos from classic D&D.)

Who does it appeal to? Someone who wants the system to deliver the fiction. It's an alternative to authorship. I don't play RM anymore, but I still get the appeal of it. It combines some of the ethos of neutral refereeing with this crystalline beauty of the fictional world unfolding before your eyes with these rolls of the dice. . . .


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## Umbran (Oct 24, 2019)

Hm.  No, GURPS is not designed for the system to deliver the fiction.  The system rather strictly does not itself offer much in terms of new elements or action in the fiction that wasn't intended by one of the actors in the fiction.  This, as compared to, say, Cortex+, which explicitly has moments where new elements get added to the fiction that were not planned by players or GM.

I am not sure the term "design ethos" is what I'd use - the basic design of GURPS dates back to before we'd really explored RPG design possibilities very far that broader families of games would be identifiable.  

GURPS is probably best described by the results it gives - fairly detailed, gritty action resolution.  GURPS Supers... is an artifact of calling the system "Generic" when it is really not.  The core mechanics of the system are not a great model for superhero action, IMHO, but since it was supposed to be "generic" they had to try.


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## Celebrim (Oct 24, 2019)

In the early 90's I left D&D in frustration over its lack of skill system, inelegance, and inability to deal with combat maneuvers or really much of any other sort of cinematic rather than abstract combat propositions.  My assumption was that GURPS would deliver the experience I was looking for.

And I did learn a lot of things trying to run a GURPS campaign, but ultimately I decided that GURPS read far better than it played. There are a number of problems:

a) It's too extensible and specific. It may be realistic that skills represent highly specialized knowledge but it's terrible for gameplay. 
b) 3d6 is a terrible fortune mechanic. Having results glom around an average result may be a natural idea, but it's terrible for gameplay. 
c) Point buy is a lousy chargen mechanic, especially in such a free form and extensible system, and most especially in a social game. Not only is it less balanced, but counter-intuitively it reduces player freedom. You end up as the players gain system mastery with a bunch of specialists that can only do a limited number of things well. I think it's worth noting that that in cRPGs true point buy is usually used only in single player games. 

What GURPS is trying to accomplish is something I call "cinematic". A rules system is cinematic if the propositions and resolutions within the rules explicitly make clear to everyone collectively playing the game the sort of things which should be imagined. I don't however think that it is accomplishing that goal very well. The GURPS design dates to a period in RPG design history were realism was fetishized as the solution for every table issue. Whatever was ailing your game could be solved by greater realism. GURPS is what cured me of that mindset, though it took going into a GURPS rules subset called GULLIVER in an attempt to fix what was wrong with GURPS before I really started questioning my assumptions about how to play an RPG.

Aside from that you're dealing with a genre (Supers) that requires highly proactive villains that bring the protagonists into action, and it sounds like you have a GM that is trying instead to wing a loose sandbox game and you've ended up in a rowboat world. Rowboat worlds are characterized by complete freedom of choice but no real content to interact with and often very limited ability to carry out a plan even if you had a clue which way to go. 

'Supers' as a genre by reputation requires players that counter-intuitively prefer low melodrama as a primary aesthetic of play. To make it work I think requires players that actively RP with each other.

GURPS has influenced the way I run many games, but I'd never go back.


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## Kel Ardan (Oct 24, 2019)

As someone who has been playing Gurps on and off over the past 26 years or so (got it for my 18th birthday) I feel its for the ultimate crunch/ fatal players. The super games seem to always turn into more of a Image comic style Wetworks game instead of a Fluffy old DC or Marvel comic game because people die, all the time. Depending on Tech levels it can be a better Sci Fi game then others or a better Cyberpunk/ Shadowrun game as well but it really is about being able to everything with crunch to me. Also playing a fantasy game where if you get hit once or twice you will probably die makes it very fatal. I'd say the best Gurps games I had ever played was a "Black Ops" campaign (Black Ops is a book for Gurps), where we dealt with the Alien and Magical Monster menaces to keep the world safe (Mix of Hellboy and Men in Black).


Just my $0.02


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## darjr (Oct 24, 2019)

I loved GURPS. Till I was a player in a longer term campaign. Maybe my tastes just changed and I didn’t notice. Maybe it was 4th edition itself.

The problem I have with GURPS is that way too much crunch has to be figured out at the table during play. Not enough is cooked ahead of time to make play smooth enough for me.


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## John Dallman (Oct 24, 2019)

Life is a bit busy for me at present, but I'll try to answer some more at the weekend. Until then, here's an answer I compiled for SE.RPG (with help from the SJ Games GURPS forum) on how GURPS rules are intended to be interpreted:

*Rule Zero*
The game assumes that there is a GM, and that their rulings will be sensible, at least for their desired game. A GM does have to establish what kind of game they want to run, and it is assumed that the overall game objective is fun for the players and GM. Enabling adversarial play is not a priority, nor is ensuring that play will comply with a specific authorial vision.

*GURPS is a toolkit, not a game-ready-to-play.*
It is not expected that everything from all published GURPS 4e supplements, or even everything in the core rules, will be available to characters in any given single campaign. Some rules are mutually exclusive, on the grounds of different assumptions about genre and play style. For example, the gritty-realism martial arts or shooting rules likely have no place in an anime campaign set in a Japanese high-school.

*"Use the rules you need for your game, but no more."*
It is quite normal for campaigns to have some house rules, or conventions about which optional rules will be used. Changing these during a campaign is best done with player agreement, if at all. Do not expect different GM's campaigns, or even two campaigns run by the same GM, to be completely compatible.

*GURPS is a point-buy system*
If you want something, you should buy it, rather than trying to contort rules into giving it to you for free. Disadvantages are only worth points if they will cause you problems, likewise limitations on advantages and other traits. Buy the effect, not the description: the description and special effects can be defined later.

*The "ABC" principle*
Abilities should be:

*A*ccurate, to your vision
*B*asic, in that it uses the least convoluted of the possible ways of buying it
*C*heap in that if there are several viable ways of doing something, _use the one that costs the fewest points_ is a good guideline but not an iron-clad rule.
Character design involves social mechanics and personality-defining traits, as well as combat abilities. The game mechanics don't ensure that every character has something to contribute to every problem, that's a matter for character design.

*Play style concepts*
The default play style assumed in the rules writing is "realistic cinematic." Characters need to make plans, assemble resources, and use good tactics. Things that are difficult in reality are difficult in the game, and it is assumed that players, guided by the GM, will make reasonable efforts to find bonuses for equipment, taking time, and so on to improve their odds of success. Characters should not assume that everything they might want to do will be possible for them; finding the easier way to cope with a problem is sensible.

The source material for the game is quite varied. Because the game is intended to be generic and universal, it concentrates on the basic foundations of storytelling, rather than current fashions. You're as likely to see The Scarlet Pimpernel referenced as Firefly or Mass Effect.

*Rules concepts*

The rules are written in informal language, and are not intended to support legalistic interpretation, especially across multiple books. They say what they mean to say, and if they do not say something, that should be viewed as intentional. They are not written to be proof against exploits and rules holes: dealing with those is part of the GM's job.
Because there are many optional rules, there may be several RAW answers to a question. Deciding how things work is the GM's job, although suggestions from players should be considered. More recently published rules are intended to take priority over older ones. Specific rules override general ones. Generalising specific rules should be done with caution, if at all.
An appeal to reality, or at least Occam's Razor for things that are not real, is generally worth considering. _Using rules interpretations that make sense and are fun is more important than sticking to the letter of the rules_.


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## Parmandur (Oct 24, 2019)

innerdude said:


> Or more appropriately, I just don't get _who_ this system is _for_.




A fairly small number of people, apparently.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Oct 24, 2019)

> Point buy is a lousy chargen mechanic, especially in such a free form and extensible system, and most especially in a social game. Not only is it less balanced, but counter-intuitively it reduces player freedom. You end up as the players gain system mastery with a bunch of specialists that can only do a limited number of things well.




As a HEROphile, I have to disagree with this...pretty much completely.  I’m no lover of GURPS, but in the many times I’ve played it- including as a playtester for the odd product or two- this resembles no GURPS campaign I’ve ever seen.

To the original point, IME, GURPS shines best when used for games where grim & gritty is expected & desired.  So quasi-hitorical, noir, super spy, survival horror, classic horror, hard Sci-Fi, swords & sorcery, and low/medium power Supers and the like all have a natural home in GURPS.


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## evileeyore (Oct 24, 2019)

innerdude said:


> _Playing GURPS is a complete waste of time if you're not using Compendium I and II, Martial Arts, Magic, and Psionics. Oh, and you should really use UltraTech I and II, and Sci-Fi as well._



Any 'fan; saying that should be ignored... in the same way you'd naturally ignore someone proclaiming that the only way to play D&D is to use books X-Z and 'anyone not using those books isn't playing 'real D&D'."



> To really "get" the point of GURPS, it seems, you're supposed to embrace the crunch. Wrap it lovingly around you.



Nah.  Now, don't get me wrong, there is some crunch, whole heaping boxes of it.  But there are also supplements explicitly designed around excising crunch and running minimalist or narrativist.




doctorbadwolf said:


> The point of GURPS isn’t to use all the rules all the time.
> 
> It’s to use the rules that add to the style of game you’re running.



doctorbadwolf gets it.

And I have nothing I can really add to John Dallman's post, it's complete in its perfection.


I've run grim and gritty, high loose _Action!_, 4-Color supers, over-the-top kitchen sink Gygaxian Dungeon Fantasy, super spies, Lovercraftian horror, low-magic Conan fantasy, etc.  GURPS has been my goto system since the late '80s.


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## The Crimson Binome (Oct 24, 2019)

John Dallman said:


> *GURPS is a toolkit, not a game-ready-to-play.*



This is the most important factor, and also the reason why it's such a pain to run the game. Not only are you supposed to liberally excise all of the rules that don't support your specific game style, but the GM actually needs to go through and define everything that exists in their game.

It isn't as simple as toggling a couple of switches, to say that elves exist but Klingons don't. The GM has to manually go in and create the template for what an elf looks like in their world. They essentially have to create, as though they were characters, every single type of thing that they'll need.

It's not enough to say that you want to play Giant Robots, and apply some standardized rules for that. The GM needs to go through and stat out all of the giant robots, before the players can choose between them. If you just hand the rules to the players, and ask them to create their own giant robots, then it's not going to work out.


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## John Dallman (Oct 24, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> It isn't as simple as toggling a couple of switches, to say that elves exist but Klingons don't. The GM has to manually go in and create the template for what an elf looks like in their world.



Or use one of several templates already published in existing settings. 


> They essentially have to create, as though they were characters, every single type of thing that they'll need.



Nope. It is not in any way necessary to design-with-points all the races in the world, only the ones that are liable to be PCs. Nor is it necessary to design opponents with character points: it's far quicker to just chose their attributes and abilities. If you were designing a D&D wizard as an enemy, you wouldn't roll his stats and hit dice, would you? You'd just pick them. 

It is _sometimes_ worth doing full character sheets for NPCs, if the party are likely to associate with them for a long time and get a good idea of their abilities. I've done this for exactly one NPC in my current GURPS campaign, which has run for about 180 sessions so far. She's a mathematician who doesn't go on adventures, but tries to weave the information adventurers come back with into a coherent theory of the universe.


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## The Crimson Binome (Oct 25, 2019)

John Dallman said:


> Or use one of several templates already published in existing settings.



If you do that, then you move away from the one great strength of the system - the ability to model exactly what you want, exactly as you imagine it. The rules of the game are capable of modeling anything you can think of... as long as you go through the work of actually building that model out of the component parts provided.


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## billd91 (Oct 25, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> As a HEROphile, I have to disagree with this...pretty much completely.  I’m no lover of GURPS, but in the many times I’ve played it- including as a playtester for the odd product or two- this resembles no GURPS campaign I’ve ever seen.
> 
> To the original point, IME, GURPS shines best when used for games where grim & gritty is expected & desired.  So quasi-hitorical, noir, super spy, survival horror, classic horror, hard Sci-Fi, swords & sorcery, and low/medium power Supers and the like all have a natural home in GURPS.




Yeah, point buy works for certain genres of games, particularly superhero games where the character abilities, skills, and powers are generally designed to fit a player's desires. I've played Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, Mighty Protectors (the latest point-buy version of Villains and Vigilantes) and they all work pretty well. I've played GURPS but never in a superhero setting - always more mundane and gritty. I fact, compared to the others, I'm convinced GURPS would suck as a 4-color superhero game.

GURPS is a good system for some things. It can do Thieves World style fantasy well. We played a pretty bang-up good Star Trek campaign with it. GURPS Traveller was a very good version of that game. But, for a generic universal system, it's best within a certain segment of the spectrum of RPGs.


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## Celebrim (Oct 25, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> As a HEROphile, I have to disagree with this...pretty much completely.  I’m no lover of GURPS, but in the many times I’ve played it- including as a playtester for the odd product or two- this resembles no GURPS campaign I’ve ever seen.




Everyone has different experiences, but it's a danger so obvious that it is even called out in several places in the text as potential problems you may encounter - "Johnny One-Tricks" I think the are called in one place.

And it's a danger I've seen repeated in every single point buy system I've ever played in, including for example White Wolf's WOD system. The most successful strategies involve dumping all your points into being really good at one thing, and then using that great big hammer to treat every problem as a nail.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Oct 25, 2019)

To clarify: I have seen “Johnny One-Tricks” in GURPS.  But I’ve seen as many in class-based and other systems as much as I have in GURPS and other point-buy systems.  

Which is to say, I don’t think it’s a system issue, it’s a player/playstyle thing.


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## billd91 (Oct 25, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> And it's a danger I've seen repeated in every single point buy system I've ever played in, including for example White Wolf's WOD system. The most successful strategies involve dumping all your points into being really good at one thing, and then using that great big hammer to treat every problem as a nail.




Successful... but *at what*? If a Johnny One-Trick can be successful at or dominate everything, it means the approach the campaign is probably unbalanced.


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## lordabdul (Oct 25, 2019)

@John Dallman is completely right, and I think this "_GURPS is a toolbox_" thing is way too often overlooked. People  say that GURPS is crunchy, and they're mostly right, but that's not totally correct either: I know people who run GURPS with just the super basics (either GURPS Lite or GURPS Ultra-Lite rule sets). It's very important to not only pick the rules that you need for a specific game and nothing more, but also try not to expose the players to all the stuff you _didn't _pick. I made the mistake a couple times of giving the Basic Set book to my players, telling them "_here, but try and make a normal FBI agent_", instead of printing out just the relevant bits, some character templates, etc...

So _who_ is it for? I compare GURPS to Linux, really. It's like Debian or something. It's for tinkerers and DIY people. From this complex toolbox, they're going to make something hopefully user-friendly (like, say, Ubuntu), hiding most of the work and only exposing what's needed for a good game. And I totally realize that me turning this into a Linux analogy might actually lose half the people that this analogy is supposed to help 

And _what_ is it for? It's for any game where you want a specific way that mechanics work. Remember, a decade or two... or three... ago, there wasn't such a wide breadth of game systems, so if you wanted something specific, you kinda had to design it yourself... or hope that GURPS had some rulebook for it, which it often did. Nowadays, arguably, there's a lot less of a need for something like GURPS, because we have sooooo many different game systems that do so many amazing things in their own way, but I still find GURPS very effective for gritty games, modern games with firearm combat, or any game where you need some "original" magic system. Other people might find it useful for other things too. My players really like the point-buy system (so that there are mechanics to back up their character choices), and the player agency in mechanical effects (as in: they can say "_I do this thing but I do it this way_" and it often has a simple modifier or outcome bonus or something that makes it interesting, instead of always boiling down to the same roll).

As for the "_high input dependent exception based design_" comment, it's indeed possible to end up there. I think it happens when the GM puts too many rules in play, i.e. "takes too much of the toolbox out". It could get ugly pretty quick with GURPS 3e, actually, and to me the Compendiums were a symptom of that problem... if your GM uses the Compendiums for more than one or two odd rules, that's a red flag for me. GURPS 4e streamlined a lot of this "exceptions explosion", and there's no Compendium in sight so far. There shouldn't be "high input" though -- in theory GURPS front-loads information at character creation/advancement so that when you're in play, there aren't many factors to take into account (unless you find that looking distance penalties is "high input" in which case you should tell your GM you want something less crunchy). In practice, our GURPS action scenes tend to play as fast, if not faster, than our D20 action scenes.

All in all, I'd say GURPS, at its core, still has some very particular "feel", and I can totally imagine people not liking it. I know people who don't like D20 systems, or dice-pool-based systems, or whatever. That's all fine, like I said, there are hundreds of other games waiting to be loved.


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## Retreater (Oct 25, 2019)

I tried to get into it a decade ago, but it wasn't for me. I would say that it was the one system that failed my group in execution the greatest of anything I have tried. Lasted three sessions.


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## innerdude (Oct 25, 2019)

Doug McCrae said:


> There's a level of detail in GURPS seldom found elsewhere in rpg-ing. This, from 4e GURPS Low-Tech, is, I think, a good example of your concept of exception based design -
> 
> At TL3-4, glasses are held up to the eyes by the frame or a handle (a _lorgnette _design), occupying a hand, or are clamped to the nose (a _pince-nez_ design). *Pince-nez fall off on a roll of 12 or less on 3d if the wearer moves faster than a walk*; they’re often attached to a chain.​




Right ---- EXACTLY. Like, there's soooo much to unpack in just this one little "throwaway" item. It's a fantastic example of the GURPS mindset. The fact that the game's creators took any amount of effort AT ALL to even fabricate this item's mechanical effects speaks volumes about what they see as "important," and by association, what the players should see as important as well.

As a player you're being subtly told, over and over again, that to "have fun," you must successfully compartmentalize these details. The very existence of this item as an actual, codified snippet of rules naturally presupposes that the group as a whole has already agreed that these kinds of mechanical effects are relevant, germane, and necessary to have a successful play experience. If you want to have a pince-nez pair of glasses, it's your job as a player to mentally compartmentalize its conditional effects.

And then you have to do it for every single rule that may be even remotely applicable.

So as I try to answer my own question---"Who is the system actually _for_?"---the answer actually is starting to become a bit more clear.

GURPS represents an RPG experience that is most readily enjoyed by someone who derives satisfaction from the ability to mentally compartmentalize the totality of the system's bits and pieces. Actually creating a roleplaying _story_ or experiencing any sense of drama or stakes in the fiction is secondary to the experience of the mental satisfaction of spinning the wheels and cogs and levers of the GURPS machine, and the emotional satisfaction that the game world has the highest possible levels of "similitude" and "fictional transparency."

As I think about this more, GURPS' most vocal proponents have invariably fallen into one of two categories:

Group 1 --- People who, if not actually on the autistic spectrum, exhibit similarly obsessive attention to detail and logical construction. Computer programmer types who absolutely revel in this kind of mental gymnastics. They're actually somewhat in heaven when they get to mentally engage in a system like GURPS. And this isn't entirely unrelatable for me; I enjoy board games a great deal, and in some ways my mental state when I'm progamming Javascript/SQL feels much the same as playing an intricate strategy board game.

But even I have my limits of complexity when it comes to board games. _Terra Mystica _is a fantastic board game, but I have to really, really want to spend 2.5-3 hours being mentally taxed at every turn to want to play that game. That's what every GURPS session feels like to me mentally---a 4.5 hour deep dive into an incomprehensible game whose rules span no less than seven or eight thousand printed pages.

Group 2 --- The ultimate, far, far extreme end of the power gamer spectrum. They LOVE GURPS, because it so thoroughly rewards system mastery with _power_. They are abundantly willing to tackle the mental compartmentalization needed, because once their system mastery reaches an overwhelmingly complete and unapproachable level, no one---player or GM---stands a chance against them. It's about being and feeling _in control_. These are the ones, in my experience, who loudly declare that starting a GURPS character at less than 350 or 400 points is a waste of time, and absolutely insist that every possible optional rule should be allowed.

I'm sure there are other reasons people might enjoy playing GURPS, but of the 15 or so people I've met who were absolutely passionate about the system, 100% belonged to one or both of these general categories.

_EDIT_ --- It may or may not be noteworthy that the GM of our current GURPS campaign would absolutely, unequivocally fall into the "Group 2 Powergamer" category when he's a player and not the GM. He's not as far-end-of-the-spectrum as some of the other GURPS players I've gamed with, but it is hands-down his default mode of play. 




Celebrim said:


> Aside from that you're dealing with a genre (Supers) that requires highly proactive villains that bring the protagonists into action, and it sounds like you have a GM that is trying instead to wing a loose sandbox game and you've ended up in a rowboat world. Rowboat worlds are characterized by complete freedom of choice but no real content to interact with and often very limited ability to carry out a plan even if you had a clue which way to go.
> 
> 'Supers' as a genre by reputation requires players that counter-intuitively prefer low melodrama as a primary aesthetic of play. To make it work I think requires players that actively RP with each other.




100% this, in every conceivable way. You couldn't have described the way the GM is running our game any better. Especially this: "Rowboat worlds are characterized by complete freedom of choice but no real content to interact with and often very limited ability to carry out a plan even if you had a clue which way to go."

I've been feeling this way FOR THE ENTIRE CAMPAIGN. There are no meaningful choices to be made, because there's no meaningful way of interpreting the absolutely scarcity of information we've been given.


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## pemerton (Oct 25, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Hm.  No, GURPS is not designed for the system to deliver the fiction.  The system rather strictly does not itself offer much in terms of new elements or action in the fiction that wasn't intended by one of the actors in the fiction.  This, as compared to, say, Cortex+, which explicitly has moments where new elements get added to the fiction that were not planned by players or GM.



Cortex+ and GURPS have almost nothing in common beyond the bare fact of being dice-based RPGs. Cortex+ is laden with fortune-in-the-middle and authorship-based resolution. GURPS and allied systems have none of that.


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## pemerton (Oct 25, 2019)

innerdude said:


> GURPS represents an RPG experience that is most readily enjoyed by someone who derives satisfaction from the ability to mentally compartmentalize the totality of the system's bits and pieces. Actually creating a roleplaying _story_ or experiencing any sense of drama or stakes in the fiction is secondary to the experience of the mental satisfaction of spinning the wheels and cogs and levers of the GURPS machine, and the emotional satisfaction that the game world has the highest possible levels of "similitude" and "fictional transparency."



That's why Ron Edwards called it _purist-for-system._

Rolemaster falls into the same category. Runequest certainly can as well. So can Classic Traveller, especially if you follow the lead suggested by some of the refereeing advice and some of the published modules.


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## Umbran (Oct 25, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Cortex+ and GURPS have almost nothing in common beyond the bare fact of being dice-based RPGs. Cortex+ is laden with fortune-in-the-middle and authorship-based resolution. GURPS and allied systems have none of that.




Yep.  And Cortex+ came much later than GURPS, which is from an age where we were primarily thinking of a system as a way to resolve tasks in a simulated world, rather than as a way to resolve challenges in a fiction.


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## lordabdul (Oct 25, 2019)

innerdude said:


> As a player you're being subtly told, over and over again, that to "have fun," you must successfully compartmentalize these details.



Absolutely not. Again, if that's the case, your GM is doing GURPS completely wrong, and no wonder you seem to feel so angry about this... which, by the way, you shouldn't internalize, and instead communicate to the GM that you're unhappy with that aspect of the game. If the GM isn't changing anything, you might as well find another group. No RPG is better than a bad RPG.


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## John Dallman (Oct 25, 2019)

innerdude said:


> To me the difference with GURPS lies in that every exception is "high input dependent"---the frequency and breadth of inputs needed to adjudicate a single rules application is high. _*At least, if you're playing rules-as-written.*_



I think that may be at the root of your problems, apart from having a GM who doesn't tell you much (my preferred tactic for GMs who persist with that is to start doing things myself and ignore their attempts to impose their plot, at least for a while).

No GURPS players that I know try to use _all_ the applicable RAW. It is, as you say, too much like hard work. However, this does not "unbalance the game". It may lead to less-than-optimal tactics, but suggesting better ones is something the GM, and even the other players, can and should do. 

In the two overlapping GURPS groups I play in, it's completely normal for the different players to be operating at different levels of system mastery. This doesn't have to upset anyone, because suggesting better GURPS tactics usually maps onto applicable real-world tactics. 

For example, you want to shoot someone. If the gun you're using makes sense for shooting your target in the default location, the torso, then you have a decent tactic, and nobody will try to coach you. If you have a low-powered pistol, the target is wearing body armour, and the primary objective is to capture them, it's reasonable for another player to suggest shooting them in the leg, both in GURPS and real-world terms. 

Yes, this means that the _players_ aren't usually in competition with each other. That's fine with me. The groups I play in are mostly composed of people in their fifties or older; we have someone in her thirties, but she's not playing or GMing at present because she's just had a child. 

She's a college librarian; the rest of the people in the groups are computer programmers or sysadmins, a professional games writer, and an accountant. They are all people who are happy with a fair amount of detail, but none of them seem to be on the autistic spectrum. They _are_ willing to think about the games they play in outside sessions, make plans, and think about the plots they're interacting with.


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## innerdude (Oct 25, 2019)

evileeyore said:


> Any 'fan' saying that should be ignored... in the same way you'd naturally ignore someone proclaiming that the only way to play D&D is to use books X-Z and 'anyone not using those books isn't playing 'real D&D'."




This is a great sentiment . . . . but literally, EVERY SINGLE GURPS GROUP I'VE EVER PLAYED IN, this has been the default mode of thinking. For a fantasy campaign, the BARE MINIMUM material they expected to be allowed to use was core + Fantasy + Magic + Psionics + Compendium I and II + Martial Arts + Swashbucklers. 3 of the 5 players essentially refused to play in the campaign if that wasn't the minimum available material, and 2 of those 3 were begging to be allowed to use more. 

And that probably should have been my first warning that I wasn't going to enjoy playing with that group (I didn't), even though I really liked the GM's core concept a lot.


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## innerdude (Oct 25, 2019)

John Dallman said:


> She's a college librarian; the rest of the people in the groups are computer programmers or sysadmins, a professional games writer, and an accountant. They are all people who are happy with a fair amount of detail, but none of them seem to be on the autistic spectrum. They _are_ willing to think about the games they play in outside sessions, make plans, and think about the plots they're interacting with.





Did you miss this part of my previous post?



innerdude said:


> GURPS represents an RPG experience that is most readily enjoyed by someone who derives satisfaction from the ability to mentally compartmentalize the totality of the system's bits and pieces. Actually creating a roleplaying _story_ or experiencing any sense of drama or stakes in the fiction is secondary to the experience of the mental satisfaction of spinning the wheels and cogs and levers of the GURPS machine, and the emotional satisfaction that the game world has the highest possible levels of "similitude" and "fictional transparency."
> 
> ......
> 
> People who, if not actually on the autistic spectrum, exhibit similarly obsessive attention to detail and logical construction.




A Librarian. Computer programmers. System administrators. Accountants. Are you seeing the trend yet?


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## lordabdul (Oct 25, 2019)

innerdude said:


> For a fantasy campaign, the BARE MINIMUM material they expected to be allowed to use was core + Fantasy + Magic + Psionics + Compendium I and II + Martial Arts + Swashbucklers.



That's totally bonkers and wrong... well I'm very sorry you only had bad experiences with GURPS! You may want to clear you head with a light PbtA-game or HeroQuest or something


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## John Dallman (Oct 25, 2019)

innerdude said:


> Actually creating a roleplaying _story_ or experiencing any sense of drama or stakes in the fiction is secondary to the experience of the mental satisfaction of spinning the wheels and cogs and levers of the GURPS machine, and the emotional satisfaction that the game world has the highest possible levels of "similitude" and "fictional transparency."
> 
> A Librarian. Computer programmers. System administrators. Accountants. Are you seeing the trend yet?



Except that isn't what they're doing. They're interested in the outcomes, not how they got there. They are strongly invested in the game world, but as a environment they experience via imagination, not via game mechanics.

You seem to be conflating three things, which to me are separate: 

Creating a roleplaying _story_ or experiencing any sense of drama or stakes in the fiction
Mental satisfaction of spinning the wheels and cogs and levers of the GURPS machine
Emotional satisfaction that the game world has the highest possible levels of "similitude" and "fictional transparency."
The story, as experienced and modified by the players through the characters, is the mechanism for getting fun out of the time we spend playing RPGs. Satisfaction with the apparent verisimilitude of the game world contributes to that, because it means one can think clearly about the setting, and communicate clearly with the other players and the GM. The game mechanics are a means to an end, no more. 

If you're determined to apply the model of GURPS players you've come up with to _all_ GURPS players, I can't stop you. But I'm quite sure you're mistaken.


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## Michael Silverbane (Oct 25, 2019)

innerdude said:


> A Librarian. Computer programmers. System administrators. Accountants. Are you seeing the trend yet?




The group that I'm currently running a GURPS game for consists of An artist, a fast-food worker, two department of corrections employees and a kindergarten teacher. The group before that was a financial advisor, a social worker, a factory worker, a retail store manager and a dockworker.

They possess varying levels of system mastery ranging from, "rules?" to, "well, actually, the eratta for page 62..."


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## Mookus (Oct 25, 2019)

OP, I feel for ya, getting "stuck" in a game you're not enjoying sucks. Does seem like it has more to do with the group, though, not the system. Most of this has already been mentioned by others -- I, too, have GMed GURPS games for decades running the gamut from "super simple romp with cartoon characters" to "hyper-gritty spec forces squad using every optional rule I can cram in" and everything in between with none of the issues described, etc. -- but in particular, this...

"Actually creating a roleplaying _story_ or experiencing any sense of drama or stakes in the fiction is secondary to the experience of the mental satisfaction of spinning the wheels and cogs and levers of the GURPS machine..."

...is completely opposite to my experience. We've always loved GURPS because you *don't* have to endlessly fiddle with the rules (once the group decides which they're using/ignoring) and they just sort of fade to the background so we can concentrate on the story and the people in it.

Granted, this is partly because I've played long enough to have internalized everything I need, but the players themselves need to know very little. If they _want_ to, if the player is into it, they _can_ just go nuts and, for example, dig up obscure rules like the pince-nez above. But the fact that rule exists does not mean it's a signifier that the game is designed to be the most fun when rolling to keep your glasses on.

GURPS to me is more additive than subtractive (guaranteed those are the wrong terms lol, sorry)... I start with a barebones skeleton and add in a rule here and there _if I think they'll make this particular game_ more fun.

Who is GURPS "for"? I can only speak for myself, but I've stuck with it _for_ever because I like to run a huuuuge variety of games. With GURPS I can use the same basic framework and just put together what I need for, say, "Aliens Colonial Marines," then the next month "Jem and the Holograms," then "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh," then "Watership Down," on and on and on.


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## pemerton (Oct 26, 2019)

innerdude said:


> A Librarian. Computer programmers. System administrators. Accountants. Are you seeing the trend yet?



I can certainly see the trend you're pointing to.

But (partly from intuition, partly from some of the posts in this thread) I'm going to guess that there's a second sort of approach to GURPS, in which the system detail is used mostly at character build to establish a "picture" of the character, and actual resolution leans very heavily on the GM to manage the fiction and narrate outcomes that broadly conform to those initial "pictures" plus whatever else has been established on the way through.

On this second approach the players don't really engage with the mechanics in the sort of fashion suggested by the pince-nez rules. And on this approach, for those players the play experience may not be wildly different from what it would be with Ars Magica or RQ or even perhaps a certain sort of approach to 2nd ed AD&D.


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## Tonguez (Oct 26, 2019)

innerdude said:


> .
> 
> At it's core, GURPS' base resolution mechanic is simple. Roll 3d6, try to roll less than a target number. Yet this simplicity could be used to much greater effect _if the players are willing to remove the high input dependencies_ and simply accept that the relative scale of results are to be applied as broad strokes rather than singular, narrow ranges. But the very essence of GURPS plays against the "broad strokes" approach.
> 
> ...




You’re own explanations here seem to very much hit the nail on the head (with appropriate modifiers to target size, hammer velocity and carpentry skill). The glory of GURPS was very much its toolbox approach to creating chartacters and settings and figuring out how things interact for vissimilitude sake. Its the Tasty crunch that help to create its worlds, But which can also bog things down into confusion if the gm allows too much to be used.

Most recently I’ve taken to playing Fate Accelerate which is all about the narrative and using the mechanics of aspects and to create the story rather than to design the setting


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## aramis erak (Oct 26, 2019)

GURPS was originally aiming to be a detailed simulation; 1 point represented (IIRC) 250 hours of study/training in a feature.

The fundamental design elements are, at least by the 1E designers notes, were the low attribute count, high melee realism, buy the cause (rather than the effect), skill difficulties varied by difficulty of learning the skill in the setting, bell curve, and boardgamable combat.

Somewhere along the line after 1E and before 3E, the variability of skill difficulty by setting went the  way of the dodo...

The buy the cause element isn't called out in the designers notes directly, but the correspondence to specific training times is, and when psionics were added in G:Horror, you bought the power, then the skill or skills to use it. Likewise, the magic system is a lot of fiddlingly narrow spells with lots of prerequisites. 




Dannyalcatraz said:


> > Point buy is a lousy chargen mechanic, especially in such a free form and extensible system, and most especially in a social game. Not only is it less balanced, but counter-intuitively it reduces player freedom. You end up as the players gain system mastery with a bunch of specialists that can only do a limited number of things well.
> 
> 
> 
> As a HEROphile, I have to disagree with this...pretty much completely.  I’m no lover of GURPS, but in the many times I’ve played it- including as a playtester for the odd product or two- this resembles no GURPS campaign I’ve ever seen.



I've seen it happen a fair number of times. Usually with players new to point buy and used to niche protections.



> Point buy is a lousy chargen mechanic,



 Like Danny, I fully disagree with this



> especially in such a free form and extensible system, and most especially in a social game.



I disagree on both counts here. point buy is about the only sane way to let players create the types of characters they want in a system with as many options as GURPS has.

I also disagree that GURPS is all that free form, but that's just another quibble



> \You end up as the players gain system mastery with a bunch of specialists that can only do a limited number of things well.



I find exactly the opposite to be true... it's the novices who build specialists... catch them storywise a couple times with the wrong character having to do something, and it gets a very different player reaction next set of Char Gen.

GURPS is less fit for turning players loose autonomously to do CGen than Hero, in part because it doesn't have the GM and group generate the limits first. Hero makes that a core element of the campaign: Defining the limits. There's even a nifty form for it.

Many hero fans (including myself) like hero for doing things more sanely than GURPS. It is buy the effect, which makes the balance actually happen, it calls out in the rules where optimizations are easily done, it uses campaign limits to help establish feel, and it fully endorses the concept that PC's ARE better than normals.


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## aramis erak (Oct 26, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> That's totally bonkers and wrong... well I'm very sorry you only had bad experiences with GURPS! You may want to clear you head with a light PbtA-game or HeroQuest or something



It's also been my experience with many players... and not a few GMs...

GURPS is very good at encouraging "use more, not less" just by the nature of the "book for everything" sales strategy.


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## lordabdul (Oct 26, 2019)

aramis erak said:


> GURPS is very good at encouraging "use more, not less" just by the nature of the "book for everything" sales strategy.



It is easy to go down the slope of "use more, not less" indeed, by virtue of there having lots of books on sale, and by virtue of people getting easily carried away. However, the GURPS community (as evidenced by people on this thread) and the _text_ of those books (if you ever read the introduction) is actually not too bad at warning people against this. But yes, I'm totally willing to believe that not many people hear those warnings, and are sadly going down the slope.


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## aramis erak (Oct 26, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> It is easy to go down the slope of "use more, not less" indeed, by virtue of there having lots of books on sale, and by virtue of people getting easily carried away. However, the GURPS community (as evidenced by people on this thread) and the _text_ of those books (if you ever read the introduction) is actually not too bad at warning people against this. But yes, I'm totally willing to believe that not many people hear those warnings, and are sadly going down the slope.



The culture of the GURPS players on SJG isn't very good at keeping things narrow, either.

And, for 1E, at least, the core wasn't good for much besides medieval to modern mundane settings. you needed the supplements to get the supernatural/sci-fi working well.


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## 5atbu (Oct 26, 2019)

Sounds to me like the OP has a weak GM who is starving the group of actionable knowledge and plot they can either create or interact with. 

The GM needs to telegraph what is coming more, drop more blatant clues, and probably ask the players to telegraph what they want, what they imagine happening, so they can work together.

Not a GURPS problem.

Did you have a Session Zero


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## Doug McCrae (Oct 26, 2019)

5atbu said:


> Not a GURPS problem.



It's not exclusively a GURPS problem but I think it's related to GURPS being a toolbox that demands a lot of initial setup work from the GM. What happens if the GM doesn't put that work in?

Also GURPS, unlike OD&D frex, lacks a default mode of play. OD&D tells the DM to build a dungeon stocked with monsters and treasure and provides random tables to make this easier. Once the top levels of the dungeon have been constructed the game is ready to be played.


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## Doug McCrae (Oct 26, 2019)

The rpg-ers in real life I've known who were into GURPS liked it for its realism. They liked that combat was deadly and that players have to adopt real world tactics, like taking cover, to increase their PCs' chances of survival.

Some people I've known who were into the, quite similar, HERO System in its Champions form liked it because it rewarded system mastery. They probably also enjoyed system for its own sake. In other words, they didn't only engage deeply with the system because it helped them to win the game, but also because the activity of engaging with it was one they enjoyed. The social aspect of interacting with other gearheads was important too.

At the time, the early 90s, I recognised their approach to Champions as being different from my own. I was into Champions mostly because I liked comic book superheroes. They were into Champions because they liked the intricacy of the HERO System.


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## John Dallman (Oct 26, 2019)

Doug McCrae said:


> The rpg-ers in real life I've known who were into GURPS liked it for its realism. They liked that combat was deadly and that players have to adopt real world tactics, like taking cover, to increase their PCs' chances of survival.



Well, I like historical and semi-historical games, because of their excellent background material. Using "I've got tons of hit points, ignore the machine-gun fire!" tactics in those would feel utterly implausible. 

This is a specific case of something general about GURPS, it does "human-scale" gaming easily and naturally. You can be highly competent at doing a few things without being an amazing all-rounder, and being superhuman is quite expensive in character points. Hero System, in contrast, has many similar mechanics, but its easy and natural thing is superhero action.


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## Beleriphon (Oct 26, 2019)

Doug McCrae said:


> There's a level of detail in GURPS seldom found elsewhere in rpg-ing. This, from 4e GURPS Low-Tech, is, I think, a good example of your concept of exception based design -
> 
> At TL3-4, glasses are held up to the eyes by the frame or a handle (a _lorgnette _design), occupying a hand, or are clamped to the nose (a _pince-nez_ design). *Pince-nez fall off on a roll of 12 or less on 3d if the wearer moves faster than a walk*; they’re often attached to a chain.​




GURPS has a roll to not have your glasses fall off? Really?


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## Retreater (Oct 26, 2019)

Doug McCrae said:


> It's not exclusively a GURPS problem but I think it's related to GURPS being a toolbox that demands a lot of initial setup work from the GM. What happens if the GM doesn't put that work in?
> 
> Also GURPS, unlike OD&D frex, lacks a default mode of play. OD&D tells the DM to build a dungeon stocked with monsters and treasure and provides random tables to make this easier. Once the top levels of the dungeon have been constructed the game is ready to be played.



When I was running GURPS for the first time, I didn't know what to allow/disallow since I didn't have the system mastery. Couple that with being a GM who doesn't like to reign in players and has a time saying "no" in life in general, and it was a recipe for disaster.


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## Celebrim (Oct 26, 2019)

Beleriphon said:


> GURPS has a roll to not have your glasses fall off? Really?




It is pretty typical of GURPS, but it's also important to remember that it's one of the few systems you could be playing where it's actually a real possibility that your character is near/far sighted and wears glasses.

Where GURPS is strongest is if you are playing in a realistic, low or no magic, probably low tech setting. The number of skills available in the setting is manageable. The lethality of the weapons is manageable. Things are more or less at human scale. The math is more or less manageable and the setting is something that is within human ability as a GM to detail.


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## lordabdul (Oct 26, 2019)

Doug McCrae said:


> It's not exclusively a GURPS problem but I think it's related to GURPS being a toolbox that demands a lot of initial setup work from the GM. What happens if the GM doesn't put that work in?



What happens is that bad things happens. Similarly, bad things happen when using a narrative system with a GM who doesn't understand dramatic tension and letting player characters shine (it can lead to extreme railroading, or a "me vs. the players" syndrome). And other bad things happen if the GM tries to run investigation-based adventures without having put in the work to keep track of all the clues/leads/NPCs/events/etc. Or if the GM runs a horror game without making the effort to manage player expectations. Or a whole bunch of other scenarios where things can go bad if the GM doesn't make some extra effort. Being a GM is often hard.



Beleriphon said:


> GURPS has a roll to not have your glasses fall off? Really?



GURPS has an optional rule in an optional book about not having your glasses fall off. I expect 99.9% of people to ignore it unless it's important for a particular campaign or a particular scene (that's what optional rules are for! To be ignored until they're needed!).

Another example is GURPS Tactical Shooting (I think?) having rules for how breath control and focus affects your aiming when shooting a firearm. Again, in the vast majority of cases, you would ignore this, the same way you often ignore fatigue or encumbrance rules in a lot of game systems. However, those optional rules might come in handy in a game that's about playing snipers. Or in a wild-west game for gun duels. Or whatever.



Retreater said:


> When I was running GURPS for the first time, I didn't know what to allow/disallow since I didn't have the system mastery. Couple that with being a GM who doesn't like to reign in players and has a time saying "no" in life in general, and it was a recipe for disaster.



Oooooh yeah. I think too many people look at GURPS' book line-up and feel like they can't run a game with just the Basic Set (which isn't that big, it's about the same size as D&D's PA and DMG). The only extra book you might need these days is "How to be a GURPS GM" which explains in detail all the things we've been talking about in this thread. And yes, before you point it out, it's a common joke on the SJG forums that it's ironic to explain to people that they should use less GURPS books in their game... by telling them to buy one more GURPS book. You can see the author's pitch and links to reviews on the author's website.


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## Beleriphon (Oct 26, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> GURPS has an optional rule in an optional book about not having your glasses fall off. I expect 99.9% of people to ignore it unless it's important for a particular campaign or a particular scene (that's what optional rules are for! To be ignored until they're needed!).




I'm aware its optional, I'm just... not surprised actually that it exists. It just amuses me that it outright says if you aren't "walking" they might fall off. I get what they're going for here, if they fall off an the character needs glasses apply appropriate penalties or whatever from such and such a flaw.

I supposed my incredulous surprise is more amusement that is just confirms what I know about GURPS.


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## Doug McCrae (Oct 26, 2019)

From How to Be a GURPS GM (2014) -


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## billd91 (Oct 26, 2019)

Beleriphon said:


> I'm aware its optional, I'm just... not surprised actually that it exists. It just amuses me that it outright says if you aren't "walking" they might fall off. I get what they're going for here, if they fall off an the character needs glasses apply appropriate penalties or whatever from such and such a flaw.
> 
> I supposed my incredulous surprise is more amusement that is just confirms what I know about GURPS.




For me, it more confirms what I know about certain types of gamers. If someone's playing in a late-Victorian setting and spends the effort determining that one of his character's points of style are a pair of pince nez to correct his vision, I kind of expect he might be actually wanting their quirks to come into play - like falling off very easily. GURPS is going to provide that support.


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## uzirath (Oct 26, 2019)

I was initially drawn to GURPS in the early '90s after playing D&D for about a dozen years. I loved D&D-style fantasy gaming, but my players and I were chaffing at the class/level system. I'd played GURPS a few times with other GMs and thought the point-buy system with advantages, disadvantages, and skills was both elegant and powerful. I enjoyed the way you use disadvantages and quirks to build a flawed character and how you can adjust, replace, and evolve these over time to reflect character growth and change. I loved the fact that I could create pretty much any character imaginable. I recall in the early days having a blast with my players just coming up with different character concepts. It seemed magical that we could start with a cool story and then build a character out of it. 

I don't know why I'm using the past tense because all of this has largely remained true to the present day. Just yesterday I had an extended conversation with a colleague who has recently gotten into GURPS about some character ideas that he was bouncing around. My children and their friends have had a blast designing all sorts of wacky characters from She-Ra to a dragon to a mermaid to a bunch of faeries armed with pixie dust.

Unlike some, though, it's not really the gritty realism that draws me to GURPS. Nor is it the potential to run so many genres. I've been mostly running D&D-style games ever since I first started gaming. (I _play_ in lots of other genres, but as a GM I've stayed in my happy fantasy lane.) People sometimes ask why not just play D&D. I've purchased and played (extensively, sometimes) each edition), but I always turn back to GURPS. For me, ultimately, GURPS does what I'm looking for in a fantasy game better than D&D.

For my first big 15-year GURPS campaign, we totally ignored most of the advanced combat rules. Since then, most groups I've played with have wanted to use some additional options like hit locations and whatnot, but we don't let it get too bogged down. It is, however, comforting to know that there are options for just about anything that we could ever want to include. So, although I have never rolled the dice to see if someone's glasses fell off, I think it is kinda cool in a nerd-cool way that that could be an option if we were playing that sort of game.


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## MichaelSomething (Oct 27, 2019)

innerdude said:


> For me, rules adjudication is about finding out _what happened_ in the fictional state. Yet GURPS very much seems to believe that the rules should explain---in as concrete, representative terms as possible---_how _things happened in the fiction. And that the _how _should be transparent to every player.
> 
> The ethos seems to be, if you account for as many "pre-input" factors as possible, it leads to more satisfying outcomes and adjudication on the back end, because there's less volatility between GM and players about "what actually just happened inside the game world."




Would you rather deal with ludonarrative dissonance?


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## pemerton (Oct 27, 2019)

Doug McCrae said:


> Some people I've known who were into the, quite similar, HERO System in its Champions form liked it because it rewarded system mastery. They probably also enjoyed system for its own sake. In other words, they didn't only engage deeply with the system because it helped them to win the game, but also because the activity of engaging with it was one they enjoyed.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> They were into Champions because they liked the intricacy of the HERO System.



I got into Rolemaster in 1990 - so around the same time you're talking about. Before then I had played D&D and a bit of Classic Traveller.

There were three things that drew me to RM straight away, as soon as I encountered it in play: (1) the PCs had a vibrancy, in respect of their mechanical definition and what that implied about them as protagonists, that D&D simply couldn't match; (2) the resolution (combat and spell casting) actually revealed what was happening in the fiction _on the way through_- it wasn't just outcome states; (3) because of the first two factors, it promised a type of sophistication in the fiction that D&D seemed not to.

In the interventing 30 years I've learned of other RPGIng techniques to achieve vibrant PCs and hence sophisticated fiction that lean a bit less heavily on mechanical definition and also that pare the mechanics back while still bringing them to bear for this purpose. (The leanest model I know is Cthulhu dark, where you get a bonus die in your pool if what you're doing falls within your field of occupational expertise: occupations I've seen in play include journalist, longshoreman, legal secretary and butler, and this system achieves both (1) and (3) with nothing more than that descriptor on the PC sheet and a four-page rulebook.)

But as I posted upthread, this doesn't stop me appreciating the attraction of these "simulationist" systems, and seeing that it can extend well beyond (though can also encompass) power-gaming.



Doug McCrae said:


> At the time, the early 90s, I recognised their approach to Champions as being different from my own. I was into Champions mostly because I liked comic book superheroes.



Have you tried Marvel Heroic RP?


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## pemerton (Oct 27, 2019)

MichaelSomething said:


> Would you rather deal with ludonarrative dissonance?



This seems something of a false dichotomy - there are many systems that avoid the (alleged) ludonarrative dissonance of 5e D&D's hit points but don't have the features of GURPS (like the extreme focus on "pre-input" factors) that @innerdude has identified.



billd91 said:


> If someone's playing in a late-Victorian setting and spends the effort determining that one of his character's points of style are a pair of pince nez to correct his vision, I kind of expect he might be actually wanting their quirks to come into play - like falling off very easily. GURPS is going to provide that support.



I think it can be cool for someone's pince-nez to fall off. But the GURPS way of handling it seems pretty unappealing to me. Rolemaster also has similar sorts of rules, and the search-and-handling burden they impose tends to outweigh the benefit they shield.

Pendragon's way of handling some related things (like weapon breakage or fumbling) is not perfect (in my view) but is already an improvement (again in my view), as it builds the resolution of these things into the bigger framework (eg on tied combat rolls, a sword breaks an opposing non-sword weapon). Prince Valiant uses a similar rule for broken lances in a joust.

With pince-nez, the resolution system could tie the falling off of the glasses to some aspect of the resolution of the physical activity that generates the risk of them falling off in the first place.


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## Beleriphon (Oct 30, 2019)

pemerton said:


> With pince-nez, the resolution system could tie the falling off of the glasses to some aspect of the resolution of the physical activity that generates the risk of them falling off in the first place.




I agree there. I mostly just laughed becasue: 1) it seemed silly to have to roll whenever a character is moving faster than a brisk walk (kind of like rolling dice to see if your character can navigate that 3inch sidewalk curb safely); and 2) I realized what it was actually doing as a rule, your character is this guy.



Spoiler











And that guy doesn't run anywhere if he can help it.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Oct 30, 2019)

Oooorrrr...place your pince nez in a waistcoat pocket when your perambulations become vigorous.


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## Beleriphon (Oct 30, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Oooorrrr...place your pince nez in a waistcoat pocket when your perambulations become vigorous.




I found a picture of Teddy Roosevelt wearing a pair I wanted to use, but then somebody would argue that Teddy Roosevelt most certain run at me like a madman, after calmly placing his pince-nez in his waistcoat pocket.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Oct 30, 2019)

i suspect Teddy just had dozens of pairs upon his person at any time in case he lost a pair, and clattered when he walked.


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## MichaelSomething (Oct 30, 2019)

pemerton said:


> This seems something of a false dichotomy - there are many systems that avoid the (alleged) ludonarrative dissonance of 5e D&D's hit points but don't have the features of GURPS (like the extreme focus on "pre-input" factors) that @innerdude has identified.




Not in methodology but certainly in objective.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 4, 2019)

innerdude said:


> And I don't know if it's the system (GURPS 3e), the campaign (a supers setting riffed directly from Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners novels), the GM's handling of the "plot" (is there a plot? None of the characters know a damn thing about anything, so we're mostly wandering aimlessly) . . . but the whole thing is falling way beyond flat for me, and is coming nigh unto full-on cratering.
> 
> Truthfully it's probably a combination of all of the above (in addition to disliking GURPS and the plot being non-existent, supers is my least favorite speculative fiction genre by a country mile). But we're now 9 or 10 sessions in to the campaign. And I've played two other GURPS 3e campaigns that lasted about as long as this one.
> 
> ...




Two things no one has mentioned. Firstly that GURPS Supers is just a bad combination. GURPS is full of gritty detail, and that just does not mesh with most superhero settings _at all_. And second that GURPS source books tend to be among the best researched and written for their setting/game style of any RPG source books I've read. I'd recommend them even for people who don't play GURPS.

As for who it's for - it's for the same sort of person who likes D&D 3.X (or to a lesser extent Pathfinder) but wants a gritty and realistic rather than a larger than life super-heroic game relying on Holywood Physics and Holywood Action Movie Damage. You have an extremely detailed character, fleshed out in a whole lot of ways from their skills (and there are a lot of skills) to their advantages to their spells to their equipment. Every physical factor is taken account of in a highly process-mapped game that takes you through the phases of physical combat in second by second increments.



Celebrim said:


> Everyone has different experiences, but it's a danger so obvious that it is even called out in several places in the text as potential problems you may encounter - "Johnny One-Tricks" I think the are called in one place.




This is less of a problem for GURPS than it is for a lot of other systems due to the escalating costs for higher levels. I'm far more used to GURPS producing hyper-_versatile_ PCs than one trick ponies.



pemerton said:


> Have you tried Marvel Heroic RP?




On that note have you seen the Sentinels Comics RPG? It's as close to a streamlined Marvel Heroic 2e as there is ever going to be.


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## Celebrim (Nov 4, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> This is less of a problem for GURPS than it is for a lot of other systems due to the escalating costs for higher levels. I'm far more used to GURPS producing hyper-_versatile_ PCs than one trick ponies.




The escalating costs roughly match the escalating gains in marginal utility often precisely because GURPS uses a bell curve that makes each step further from the norm more and more profitable.  For example, having an active defense gets increasingly good the closer you can get that active defense to succeed on a 16.  Similar things are true about damage resistance.  Each point of damage resistance is a little bit better in practice than the one before it, as it raises the possibility that you'll be effectively immune to any attack which would be fair to unleash on the party as a whole or at the least, that if you are subjected to such attacks, it won't be long before the more balanced characters are all dead.   As a spell-caster, it's much better to have one or two really good spells that you can cast for free and at a good effect than a wide variety that will fatigue you.   The game, as with many point buy games, is balanced around the assumption that role-play concerns will push PC's into making 'realistic' well-rounded characters that can do a lot of things with average or above average skill.


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## lowkey13 (Nov 4, 2019)

*Deleted by user*


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## Mookus (Nov 4, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> GURPS Supers is just a bad combination. GURPS is full of gritty detail, and that just does not mesh with most superhero settings _at all_.



I do hear GURPS isn't good at Supers-- a lot -- so I imagine I'm missing something, somewhere, since I've never had any issues. But in addition to being full of gritty detail, it's also full of cinematic, over-the-top options that make it easy to run games even more gonzo than the typical four-color supers world.

To me, that's the GURPS Design Perspective -- "a game 85% as good for _all _genres as specific games are for their one, single genre."


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## lordabdul (Nov 4, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> This is less of a problem for GURPS than it is for a lot of other systems due to the escalating costs for higher levels. I'm far more used to GURPS producing hyper-_versatile_ PCs than one trick ponies.



Yeah, 2 common types of characters I see in GURPS are either super versatile PCs that aren't expert at much, or the munchkin cliche of a super specialized/expert character that always has the same flaws like Addiction or Nightmares or whatever because the player wanted extra points (as opposed to actually wanting a character with those flaws for roleplaying purposes).



Neonchameleon said:


> And second that GURPS source books tend to be among the best researched and written for their setting/game style of any RPG source books I've read. I'd recommend them even for people who don't play GURPS.



That's one of the the biggest strengths of GURPS. As far as I understand, a good chunk of GURPS books are actually selling to people who don't use GURPS at all. The reason the "_How to be a GURPS GM_" book recommends all kinds of genre/style sourcebooks is because they're very very good at deconstructing the tropes of whatever genre you're interested in. They have extensive bibliographies and references, drop a whole bunch of cool ideas throughout every page, and explain a few game design principles that help get the result you want at the table... the bits that are GURPS-specific are often split between re-visiting the core book traits and rules to highlight which ones can be helpful for the given genre/style, and some new rules that complement or replace the core ones (but we're talking about a small chunk of the book... again, these books are often generic enough to appeal to non-GURPS GMs).... although, like I said before, these past 10 years I've seen other games release similar sourcebooks (like, say, FATE) where, before, GURPS was pretty much the only one doing that.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 4, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> The escalating costs roughly match the escalating gains in marginal utility often precisely because GURPS uses a bell curve that makes each step further from the norm more and more profitable.  For example, having an active defense gets increasingly good the closer you can get that active defense to succeed on a 16.  Similar things are true about damage resistance.



The big thing with GURPS though, and particularly with 3e, is just how effective Dex and Int were to drop skill points into. (Health wasn't bad either). High Dex, High Int, and half a point in a huge range of skills went a pretty long way towards flexibility for a low cost.


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## lordabdul (Nov 4, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> how effective Dex and Int were to drop skill points into.



Yeah, 4e fixed a bit of it, but it's still stupid how Dex and Int are dominating everything else (which is why they cost double compared to the rest). I generally prevent players from making characters with more than 14 in any stat, at least when playing "gritty" campaigns.

As for GURPS with superheroes, it just doesn't feel right to me. I prefer using lighter/freeform rules for that... although I guess if I was doing a "street-level" supes game like, say, a Watchmen or Daredevil thing, it might work for me.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 4, 2019)

Mookus said:


> I do hear GURPS isn't good at Supers-- a lot -- so I imagine I'm missing something, somewhere, since I've never had any issues. But in addition to being full of gritty detail, it's also full of cinematic, over-the-top options that make it easy to run games even more gonzo than the typical four-color supers world.




Not in my experience - there are just too many details involved, and GURPS emphasis on physics even with the cinematic rules means that it's never anywhere near as free-wheeling as e.g. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying or the Sentinels Comics RPG. It's not about the options so much as the theming and the consequences.


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## lowkey13 (Nov 4, 2019)

*Deleted by user*


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## Celebrim (Nov 4, 2019)

lowkey13 said:


> That said, it had some of the best "settings" that I recall; I still have the... what is it... Car Wars settings books.




I always loved Car Wars in theory, but looking back on it now I realize it was part of an era that I refer to as "paper software", in that the game rules were aiming for such a high level of detail that it was really trying to use the players brain like a computer to run the game on.  I can't really imagine playing the game now, given that if you wanted to do that sort of thing, it would probably be more fun to play on an actual computer, and if I was going to play it today I'd probably find myself writing software tools so that I could push a button and have the software tell me what the next board state should be.


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## lordabdul (Nov 4, 2019)

lowkey13 said:


> So, maybe the issues were fixed with different editions; my experience with GURPS is from long ago, in the pre-history.



I came to GURPS on the tail end of 3e, and I found it quite kludgy indeed. I didn't play much with it, but I enjoyed the sourcebooks a lot for use with other systems. I only came to like (and actually use) GURPS when they released 4e which I would say was a very welcome clean-up and improvement overall. However, since it obviously still retains the core philosophy of GURPS, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is allergic to DIY GM toolboxes, point-buy character creation, or simulation-based mechanics (as opposed to narrative-based mechanics).



lowkey13 said:


> if the "standard" scale is supposed to be normal human variance, then it gets kludge-y quickly when you need to account for the Hulk.



If everybody is the Hulk, it's probably fine. However if you mix vastly different power scales, I'll argue that no system really does it well anyway. I don't think GURPS is particularly worse on that front -- it might only be worse in the sense that it tries to pretend it's good at it when it's not really. But then again I never quite used GURPS for that so I'm the wrong person to ask. I use GURPS for gritty/street-level/human-scale games only.


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## billd91 (Nov 4, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> Yeah, 4e fixed a bit of it, but it's still stupid how Dex and Int are dominating everything else (which is why they cost double compared to the rest).




I don't know that it's stupid. That's a design decision and I can't it's a bad one. But when something is dominant, it's OK *as long as the costs reflect that dominance* - which they do in GURPS. Similarly, Dexterity is an extremely important stat in Champions as well and so it costs 3x what Strength costs. If the things you're buying aren't balanced in utility, they shouldn't cost the same.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 4, 2019)

billd91 said:


> I don't know that it's stupid. That's a design decision and I can't it's a bad one. But when something is dominant, it's OK *as long as the costs reflect that dominance* - which they do in GURPS. Similarly, Dexterity is an extremely important stat in Champions as well and so it costs 3x what Strength costs. If the things you're buying aren't balanced in utility, they shouldn't cost the same.




And this is where GURPS basic premise falls apart a little. Strength is much more useful in a stone-age setting where all combat uses your strength for damage than it is in an ultratech one where you might be wearing powered armour that has its own strength score and combat uses rayguns.


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## Umbran (Nov 4, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> Two things no one has mentioned. Firstly that GURPS Supers is just a bad combination.




Um... 



			
				me said:
			
		

> GURPS is probably best described by the results it gives - fairly detailed, gritty action resolution.  GURPS Supers... is an artifact of calling the system "Generic" when it is really not.  The core mechanics of the system are not a great model for superhero action, IMHO, but since it was supposed to be "generic" they had to try.




But, who reads the first page of a thread, anyway?  



> On that note have you seen the Sentinels Comics RPG? It's as close to a streamlined Marvel Heroic 2e as there is ever going to be.




Backed the Kickstarter.  Hoping and waiting...


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## practicalm (Nov 4, 2019)

Interesting, I didn't see much discussion about why I like GURPS better that most other RPGs.
GURPS allows me to world build the way I like to world build. I can add the different books to find the things I want to put into my game that serves a narrative or game purpose.

Do I want a fantasy world with low tech robots?  Can do it.
Do I want a street level supers game?  Can do it.
Do I want a space game where I can duplicate a setting from some of my favorite novels?  Can do it.
If there isn't already a source book, it's not hard (if you are willing to put the work in) to make it happen.
And if you look carefully someone probably already has done some work (Star Wars, Harry Potter) even if there isn't an officially licensed book.

GURPS was built around fact checking rules.  It breaks down where the facts are too far outside what can be fact checked.

Most times there just isn't a reason to get bogged down into the rules details unless that was the point of the game you are creating and you let your players know where you are taking them.
Just be aware that you have to stop the players from building characters that will not fit into the world.


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## The Crimson Binome (Nov 4, 2019)

Mookus said:


> I do hear GURPS isn't good at Supers-- a lot -- so I imagine I'm missing something, somewhere, since I've never had any issues. But in addition to being full of gritty detail, it's also full of cinematic, over-the-top options that make it easy to run games even more gonzo than the typical four-color supers world.



The specific issue with GURPS and Supers has to do with scaling. If you have enough points, it's fairly easy for a Superman-type to get +100 damage to their attacks, and they can also buy DR 100 against all attacks. They end up punching for 2d6+100, which means they can meaningfully interact (through punching) with anyone who has DR in the 90-112 range; if they go slightly outside that range, then the fight is over in one punch, or it's impossible.

Meanwhile, Batman is out there with his 4d6-damage exploding Batarangs, and he has to _really_ hope that Zod doesn't bother to look in his direction, or else he's dead before he has a chance to react.

GURPS doesn't generate comic book stories. GURPS tells us what would happen if these characters existed in the real world.


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## Beleriphon (Nov 4, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> The specific issue with GURPS and Supers has to do with scaling. If you have enough points, it's fairly easy for a Superman-type to get +100 damage to their attacks, and they can also buy DR 100 against all attacks. They end up punching for 2d6+100, which means they can meaningfully interact (through punching) with anyone who has DR in the 90-112 range; if they go slightly outside that range, then the fight is over in one punch, or it's impossible.
> 
> Meanwhile, Batman is out there with his 4d6-damage exploding Batarangs, and he has to _really_ hope that Zod doesn't bother to look in his direction, or else he's dead before he has a chance to react.
> 
> GURPS doesn't generate comic book stories. GURPS tells us what would happen if these characters existed in the real world.




And I think that's where it falls down. GURPS is mired in tying everything to certain genre conventions, specifically the ones outside my door. Things that slightly bend they way I'd expect the real world to operate work well, the farther we get from that the weirder the rules interactions get.

GURPS is bad at modeling the Justice League and okay at modeling the X-Men.


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## pemerton (Nov 5, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> if you mix vastly different power scales, I'll argue that no system really does it well anyway.



The only supers game I've ever played is Marvel Heroic RP. In my experience it hasn't had these power-scale issues.


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## corwyn77 (Nov 5, 2019)

practicalm said:


> Interesting, I didn't see much discussion about why I like GURPS better that most other RPGs.
> GURPS allows me to world build the way I like to world build. I can add the different books to find the things I want to put into my game that serves a narrative or game purpose.
> 
> Do I want a fantasy world with low tech robots?  Can do it.
> ...




This sums up a lot of what I love about GURPS. Combined with the fact that you don't always have to tell players what the genre really is. One of my favourite campaigns ever, we started out as 25-point normal people impressed into the British army in 1752 and shipped out to a new colony port - Saint John, Newfoundland.

After a few traditional mundane adventures, we encountered a witch, then time travellers, cyborgs, a mecha-kraken, a t-rex while each of us discovered 100 points in cinematic/supernatural abilities tied to our characters' personalities - Gunslinger, Gadgeteer, Regeneration, regrowing limbs, Doctor Who-type regeneration, snatching items out of nothing, etc. and a time machine of our own.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 5, 2019)

Thing is, most low-powered Supers- good, evil or wandering in the grey- have some kind of ”plot armor.”  

I mean, even though it has been written that Batman has a plan to deal with every super being he knows of, there’s no question many of the more godlike ones- Kryptonians, Daxxamites, Green Lanterns, etc.-  could _easily_ take him out simply by dropping big rocks from space if they didn’t care about collateral damage...and many don’t.

So the fact that a given RPG can deliver a Batman and a Superman within the same campaign constrictions is, in some way, faithful to a great many comic book settings.


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## innerdude (Nov 5, 2019)

corwyn77 said:


> One of my favourite campaigns ever, we started out as 25-point normal people impressed into the British army in 1752 and shipped out to a new colony port - Saint John, Newfoundland.
> 
> After a few traditional mundane adventures, we encountered a witch, then time travellers, cyborgs, a mecha-kraken, a t-rex while each of us discovered 100 points in cinematic/supernatural abilities tied to our characters' personalities - Gunslinger, Gadgeteer, Regeneration, regrowing limbs, Doctor Who-type regeneration, snatching items out of nothing, etc. and a time machine of our own.




And this is basically anathema to my entire concept of why I roleplay. I absolutely despise genre-mash / RIFTS / "Infinite Worlds" style settings, for much the same reasons I despise plane-hopping / planar adventuring in D&D---because you never really know the "rules" of the world, and as such, I can never clearly picture how my character would be interacting/reacting to what's going on around them. 

And this is a huuuuuuuuuuge problem in our current campaign, and GURPS isn't helping. For example, I have absolutely zero concept of how weapon damage and related defenses scale in our campaign. 

Why? 

Because I have absolutely no desire, zero, zip, zilch, none, to spend hours of my life poring over GURPS Ultratech and Sci-Fi just so I can figure out which TL-9 or TL-10 armor I'm supposed to be wearing. I just don't give a crap. That's not why I roleplay. But in context of the gameworld that is presupposed by the GURPS rules, my character would probably have to care about it, even though I, in the real world, don't want to spend a single second thinking about it.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 5, 2019)

practicalm said:


> Interesting, I didn't see much discussion about why I like GURPS better that most other RPGs.
> GURPS allows me to world build the way I like to world build. I can add the different books to find the things I want to put into my game that serves a narrative or game purpose.
> 
> Do I want a fantasy world with low tech robots?  Can do it.
> ...




The problem here is that the GURPS answer is "can do it" but unfortunately not "can do it well".



pemerton said:


> The only supers game I've ever played is Marvel Heroic RP. In my experience it hasn't had these power-scale issues.




GURPS runs on a linear scale for damage as stats increase, MHRP runs on a logarithmic one. This means in GURPS if something has even the faintest chance of resisting the Hulk Iron Man can't scratch the paintwork, and Hawkeye might as well not turn up at all unless he is going for a munchkin called-shots build beause it's the only way he stands a vague chance of keeping up. In MHRP Hulk's rolling a d12, Tony's rolling d10s, and Clint d8s.



innerdude said:


> Because I have absolutely no desire, zero, zip, zilch, none, to spend hours of my life poring over GURPS Ultratech and Sci-Fi just so I can figure out which TL-9 or TL-10 armor I'm supposed to be wearing. I just don't give a crap. That's not why I roleplay. But in context of the gameworld that is presupposed by the GURPS rules, my character would probably have to care about it, even though I, in the real world, don't want to spend a single second thinking about it.




I see this as no different from D&D 3.X with its vast amounts of gear and magic items. Not a choice I'd make - but a choice a _lot_ of games made in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s.


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## macd21 (Nov 5, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Thing is, most low-powered Supers- good, evil or wandering in the grey- have some kind of ”plot armor.”
> 
> I mean, even though it has been written that Batman has a plan to deal with every super being he knows of, there’s no question many of the more godlike ones- Kryptonians, Daxxamites, Green Lanterns, etc.-  could _easily_ take him out simply by dropping big rocks from space if they didn’t care about collateral damage...and many don’t.
> 
> So the fact that a given RPG can deliver a Batman and a Superman within the same campaign constrictions is, in some way, faithful to a great many comic book settings.




Well, no. An RPG that was faithful to those settings would give Batman some kind of plot armour, so that he doesn’t get swatted by some godlike villain that superman is punching to death.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 5, 2019)

Plot armor in a work of written fiction makes much more sense than plot armor in an rpg.

Even though we know it’s extremely unlikely that Batman would be killed in an issue of JLA where the plot involved the team fighting off Kryptonians who escaped the Phantom Zone, it doesn’t negatively impact our enjoyment.

But in an RPG campaign with an analogous plotline, an actual “plot armor“ rule protecting hyper talented mundane heroes like Bats would likely be viewed as an unfair safety net by players of characters more like Supes.

Hence my caveat, “in some way”.


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## macd21 (Nov 5, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Plot armor in a work of written fiction makes much more sense than plot armor in an rpg.
> 
> Even though we know it’s extremely unlikely that Batman would be killed in an issue of JLA where the plot involved the team fighting off Kryptonians who escaped the Phantom Zone, it doesn’t negatively impact our enjoyment.
> 
> ...




Er, no. Plenty of RPGs use some form of plot armour (or something like it). Including as a balancing mechanism.


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## Umbran (Nov 5, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Plot armor in a work of written fiction makes much more sense than plot armor in an rpg.




I'm going to disagree with that.



> But in an RPG campaign with an analogous plotline, an actual “plot armor“ rule protecting hyper talented mundane heroes like Bats would likely be viewed as an unfair safety net by players of characters more like Supes.




Go take a look at... Shadowrun.  A mundane person, who has not spent a lot of their build capacity on being magical, or having lots of cyberware, and so on, can have higher Edge.  Edge is the game's luck stat, allowing the player to manipulate their die results somewhat - rolling more dice, rerollng dice, buying off critical fumbles, and the like.  Edge is powerful - and you can only have lots of it if you are basically mundane.

In Shadowrun, Edge is the thing that allows an unmodified, skilled human to stand up next to orc street samurai with cyberware and submachine guns and elf wizards throwing fireballs and still be viable.  It is totally equivalent to "plot armor", and it works pretty well in that respect.

So, imagine a game that allows you to build Superman.  Now, assume you have the same build points - enough to build a virtual god.  But you don't make them super-fast, super-strong, or armored.  Where do you figure all that power goes?


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## Beleriphon (Nov 5, 2019)

Umbran said:


> So, imagine a game that allows you to build Superman.  Now, assume you have the same build points - enough to build a virtual god.  But you don't make them super-fast, super-strong, or armored.  Where do you figure all that power goes?




Mad skillz yo. That's the M&M answer tons and tons of skills, or power armour.


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## Umbran (Nov 5, 2019)

Beleriphon said:


> Mad skillz yo. That's the M&M answer tons and tons of skills, or power armour.




And, quite possibly, absurd luck on the level of "plot armor"...


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## billd91 (Nov 5, 2019)

Beleriphon said:


> Mad skillz yo. That's the M&M answer tons and tons of skills, or power armour.




And bases. And gear. And a special power pool that allows a player to kit up the specific device(s) necessary to take a big, blue boy scout down a peg on a Gotham City back alley.


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## uzirath (Nov 5, 2019)

innerdude said:


> And this is basically anathema to my entire concept of why I roleplay. I absolutely despise genre-mash / RIFTS / "Infinite Worlds" style settings, for much the same reasons I despise plane-hopping / planar adventuring in D&D---because you never really know the "rules" of the world, and as such, I can never clearly picture how my character would be interacting/reacting to what's going on around them.




Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of that either, yet GURPS has been my go-to system since discovering it 25 years ago. So although the "universal" thing is definitely part of the design philosophy, it's not the only element that makes GURPS appealing.  



> Because I have absolutely no desire, zero, zip, zilch, none, to spend hours of my life poring over GURPS Ultratech and Sci-Fi just so I can figure out which TL-9 or TL-10 armor I'm supposed to be wearing. I just don't give a crap. That's not why I roleplay. But in context of the gameworld that is presupposed by the GURPS rules, my character would probably have to care about it, even though I, in the real world, don't want to spend a single second thinking about it.




This seems like a GM issue to me. I've encountered the same thing with D&D wizards or clerics overwhelmed by all the spell options. What would happen if you asked your GM or the other players in your group, "What armor do you think I should be wearing?" Or, if that seems to break table culture, you could do it in-character. If your character has a high IQ or relevant skills, you could make a skill check yourself. Barring that, you can seek out an NPC, "I ask General Awesome to recommend a new suit of armor for me to pick up at the commissary."

As a GM, I field questions like that all the time, whether in-character or not. I encourage them. I want people to be having fun, and if "poring over GURPS Ultratech" isn't their cup of tea, then I hope they never touch it.


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## aramis erak (Nov 5, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> On that note have you seen the Sentinels Comics RPG? It's as close to a streamlined Marvel Heroic 2e as there is ever going to be.



No, it isn't. Cam Banks has stated that one of the Cortex Prime flavors will essentially be MHRP 2 without the Marvel Characters. (Cam's also been involved in SCRPG.) SCRPG is closer to AWE/PBTA than to Cortex Plus. 

Also, having run the two back to back (last winter), MHRP is a different feel in play. It's the difference in approaches to and effects of damage. SC's HP system makes boosts/hinders different mechanically from damage; MHRP's damage is literally just another die-trait; one can make boosts/hinders with exactly the same mechanics as doing damage. The metacurrency Plot Points of MRHP are different from the much more limited metacurrency in SCRPG.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 5, 2019)

Umbran said:


> I'm going to disagree with that.
> 
> Go take a look at... Shadowrun.  A mundane person, who has not spent a lot of their build capacity on being magical, or having lots of cyberware, and so on, can have higher Edge.  Edge is the game's luck stat, allowing the player to manipulate their die results somewhat - rolling more dice, rerollng dice, buying off critical fumbles, and the like.  Edge is powerful - and you can only have lots of it if you are basically mundane.
> 
> ...




I’m familiar with Shadowrun.  HERO has Luck, plus a whole suite of powers, feats and talents that can be used for lucky character builds, depending on how theyre defined.  (Wealthy, for instance, could be defined as always winning lottery scratch-offs for a Lucky character.)

But I was hasty in my initial reply.  To clarify, I meant RPG plot armor that is available for lower or even relatively unpowered/mundane characters and not so much for the demigods, OR is for whatever reason of lesser utility to “higher power” characters.

i mentioned HERO’s Luck.  Since HERO is point-based, any character who takes Luck is perforce giving something up.


And yet I can still build an amoral Superman type character that could kill a Batman type PC from orbit, because he couldn’t afford enough Luck to counteract the other PC’s hyperorbital attack capabilities _AND still be Batman._

Furthermore, I would also note that when you look at official builds for such disparate character types within officially licensed game systems for Marvel or DC, “luck” mechanics are seldom included for the hyper-talented mortals.  IOW, even if the game mechanics allow it, they don’t have it.

As for RPG vs comic- it’s extremely unlikely that a major comic character will die or be permanently altered in a “team-up type title.  Such changes are almost exclusively reserved for titles those characters headline, their own little part of the comic company’s shared continuity.  Exceptions exist, of course, especially in those big, limited run titles that are meant to change the entire setting, like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinity Gauntlet, Secret Wars, and the like.



However, the JLA title- as well as Marvel’s similar Avengers- is pretty infamous for slinging high-power foes and high-stakes plotlines at the team. And yet, the most vulnerable members of the team still come through as unscathed as the ones flying unprotected in naked vacuums and shrugging off direct fire from invaders’ starships.  Supes may not need plot armor, but Bats almost certainly does...as would others like Green Arrow or Black Canary.


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## Umbran (Nov 5, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> But I was hasty in my initial reply.  To clarify, I meant RPG plot armor that is available for lower or even relatively unpowered/mundane characters and not so much for the demigods, OR is for whatever reason of lesser utility to “higher power” characters.




Well, of course it is of lesser utility.  It is the hammer principle - when you have the biggest gorram hammer around, screwdrivers really cease to be useful to you.



> And yet I can still build an amoral Superman type character that could kill a Batman type PC from orbit, because he couldn’t afford enough Luck to counteract the other PC’s hyperorbital attack capabilities _AND still be Batman._




No, you can't.  Because in calling him underpowered and mundane, you have thoroughly under-stated Batman's prowess, and your game system probably isn't built for modeling him properly.

Batman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Superman - they are all gods.  Now, approaching this as a D&D/Hero/GURPS atomic action simulation player, and primarily basing action on "the character knows what they player knows", you are going to run into trouble.  Why?

Superman is strong, sure.  He can fly in space.  He's nigh invulnerable.  But Batman has the _GREATEST ANALYTICAL MIND ON THE PLANET_.  He has one of the largest fortunes on the planet, and technology not seen in anyone else's hands. Did you model all that properly? Or, were you worried about how hard Batman can punch? 

Did you note that Batman really should have hooks into satellite detection systems so that if the Red Son comes to drop a rock on him, Batman has known for an hour and a half? No? Then you have failed to understand Batman. Batman lives in this world 24/7/365, and sleeps for 15 minutes a day, and then only lightly.  Your player does not.  Batman will always know more than any player at the table.  Batman knows more than the GM.  If your Batman does not have a power equivalent to, "I know things before anyone expects me to know them", you have not modeled Batman properly.

I submit that any primarily action-resolution based system fails to understand comic books.  Task-resolution games give us, in effect, a sort of game-world physics.  Comic books _do not have consistent physics_!  Comic books are a media in which Squirrel Girl, with the proportional strength and agility of a squirrel, can defeat Galactus off screen, and have that be satisfying!  Because, at their root, comic books aren't about action resolution, so much as they are about _conflict_ resolution.  A system like Fate or Cortex+, which is less about what the character can do as a physics model, and is more about who the character is in the fictional world, is a far better match for superhero play.



> Furthermore, I would also note that when you look at official builds for such disparate character types within officially licensed game systems for Marvel or DC, “luck” mechanics are seldom included for the hyper-talented mortals.  IOW, even if the game mechanics allow it, they don’t have it.




I take it you have little or no experience with the Cortex+ based Marvel Heroic Roleplaying? The game never went anywhere because it failed to come up with a good character generation system.  However, if you look at the official characters there... yep, you have the relatively mundane Daredevil and Hawkeye able to work quite successfully alongside Thor and Iron Man, despite what seems like a power differential.  The "plot armor" isn't in the form of a special separate luck ability.  It is in, for example, how Captain America is basically the best tactical leader on the planet - such that when he's working with a team, anything he tries to do with that team has the same weight in the fiction as getting punched by Thor.



> As for RPG vs comic- it’s extremely unlikely that a major comic character will die or be permanently altered in a “team-up type title.




Right.  So, why are you modeling them with a game in which, "Are you going to die?" is a mechanical question that you have to worry about?  Why aren't you modeling them with a game in which that is a question of fictional positioning and dramatic appropriateness?

You worry about "plot armor" because "plot armor" is a patch to a physics model to make up for its lack of ability to do what the genre asks of it.  

This is why GURPS Supers stinks.


----------



## billd91 (Nov 5, 2019)

Umbran said:


> No, you can't.  Because in calling him underpowered and mundane, you have thoroughly under-stated Batman's prowess, and your game system probably isn't built for modeling him properly.
> 
> Batman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Superman - they are all gods.  Now, approaching this as a D&D/Hero/GURPS atomic action simulation player, and primarily basing action on "the character knows what they player knows", you are going to run into trouble.  Why?
> 
> ...




Um, no. Not really. 
There are plenty of examples in the comics of Batman being completely unable to stop Superman from doing what Superman wants to do. None of his "greatest analytical mind" and wealth can do anything about it... except when the author wants it to.

The reason that we don't have Superman wiping the floor with Batman whenever he wants to, or some random Krypton survivor/Daxamite doing the same after bathing under a yellow sun for a while, is because it wouldn't be genre appropriate* to just haul off and do that kind of thing. And that's pretty much plot armor.

My take on why Marvel Heroic Roleplaying didn't catch the same kind of mindshare as earlier versions of superhero games based on the same licensing is because people *want* more simulative, action-resolution games than Cortex provides.

*Except in specific genre-subverting examples ranging from The Watchmen to The Boys in which the heroes act in ways that are contrary to the superhero genre


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## GrahamWills (Nov 5, 2019)

macd21 said:


> Well, no. An RPG that was faithful to those settings would give Batman some kind of plot armour, so that he doesn’t get swatted by some godlike villain that superman is punching to death.




Batman has a huge supply of the GUMSHOE skill Preparedness. Whenever you try anything, he has already prepared a counter for it. 

Or, he has a lot of FATE points. When you try anything, he can tag 3 things to stop it happening.

Basically, if you want to mix power levels, I think you need some for of meta- currency or skill, so the mundanes have a way to be effective.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 5, 2019)

billd91 said:


> Um, no. Not really.
> There are plenty of examples in the comics of Batman being completely unable to stop Superman from doing what Superman wants to do. None of his "greatest analytical mind" and wealth can do anything about it... except when the author wants it to.




Big questions include whose book it's in. Batman in Detective Comics is not the same as Batman in the Justice League.



> My take on why Marvel Heroic Roleplaying didn't catch the same kind of mindshare as earlier versions of superhero games based on the same licensing is because people *want* more simulative, action-resolution games than Cortex provides.




My take is a lot simpler than either of you. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was published for almost exactly a year and no more. The basic set was published on the 17th of April 2012 and it took off like a house on fire. On the 24th of April 2013 it was announced that MWP wouldn't be continuing with the license and the sale of PDFs and distribution would be ending the very next week.

It took off like a house on fire because it was _exactly_ the Marvel game people wanted to see. Marvel SuperHeroes (FASERIP) was published in 1984, and had supplements coming out continually until at least 1991.  That's why it gets so much talk. Marvel SAGA was published in 1998 and was in print until at least 2001, and I don't recall many people ever talking about it. Marvel then produced their own Marvel Universe RPG diceless system, and I don't recall much love for that game.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was published for a mere 54 weeks and in that time took off like no RPG I can think of other than D&D. And as for people playing it right now I've just checked RPOL, Dream-Weavers, and Roll 20. A search of each of them finds Marvel Heroic being played on all of them - and I spotted no other Marvel games using published rules.

Also a huge selling point of FASERIP is just how full of meta-mechanics rather than direct simulation it is. Everything from the spending Karma rules to Longshot's luck allowing him to reverse dice to its proto-Fate ladder show that what made FASERIP stand out from its contemporaries were the ways it _wasn't _a simulation based action-resolution game. People in general want the Marvel Cinematic Universe more than they want Zack Snyder's Watchmen and his Justice League (although some people do want Watchmen and a more simulative, action-resolution approach).


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 6, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Well, of course it is of lesser utility.  It is the hammer principle - when you have the biggest gorram hammer around, screwdrivers really cease to be useful to you.
> 
> No, you can't.  Because in calling him underpowered and mundane, you have thoroughly under-stated Batman's prowess, and your game system probably isn't built for modeling him properly.
> 
> ...



I haven’t understated Batman at all- the first thing I posted about him was that he has a plan to take down _every super being he knows of.  _In a sense, that’s his “superpower”- being prepared beyond what most mortal beings (and some immortal ones) would ever conceive of being.

The problems for him are that:

1) he doesn’t know all of the various superbeings out there, not being omniscient.  For example, does he know the difference between a Kryptonian and a Daxamite?  (I’ve been away from comics in general for decades, but I don’t recall him ever encountering on.). Despite their similarities in ability, their vulnerabilities differ.

2) he is perforce dependent on his training and ”wonderful toys”, whereas many of the more powerful characters in the DC Universe are largely self-contained.  If Superman decided to nuke Gotham from orbit, he might not be able to activate his anti-Supes plan without some mind-reading tech, and even if he had that, he might not have the ability to activate it while he’s otherwise occupied punching out the Joker for the Nth time.  

Given that Supes- depending on the era and the writers- has demonstrated he’s capable of FTL, Bats may NOT have known for “an hour” that he‘d been targeted with a rock from space.  New 52 Superman reached Pluto from Earth in 15 seconds, and had flown 45 billion light years to the Earth in 60 days. With only 60 days having passed on Earth, so no time dilation. Which has been calculated to have required a speed above 5 trillion times the speed of light.  

A 2018 story had Superman covering some significant distance between him and a guy pulling the trigger on a hostage whose head is virtually in contact with the barrel in- and I quote- an “attosecond” in order to interpose his hand between gun and head. Given that kind of speed, could Bats react- or even design attack/defense systems to react- in time to defend a _punch_ thrown at that speed (or a reasonable fraction thereof, depending on how fast he can accelerate from being motionless) from arm’s length?








						Rebirth Superman's new speed feat (AC 1000 spoilers) - Gen. Discussion - Comic Vine
					

Clark has a nice little speed in the latest issueGallery




					comicvine.gamespot.com
				




(Side note: if you look at those panels, you have to wonder what happened to the building materials he smashed through.  Some clearly remained intact as chunks...how fast were they going?  Did they vaporize into plasma before impacting anything else?)

Or getting away from Superman, remember when Hal Jordan went rogue?  What if, instead of what happened in the books, Hal had gone nutso on his way back from a mission in space, and simply decided to use his ring to create a giant crystalline lens between the sun and earth.  Superman might be able to stop GL, as might others of similar capability, but Batman probably lacks tech and facilities significantly beyond the current capabilities of NASA.  He would in some way have to figured out that _THIS_ was the mission that would break Hal Jordan’s mind before he left on it, and taken preemptive measures,  

Bats is preternaturally good, but he’s NOT an oracle.

As for Cortex+, what you describe is nothing special.  There are many systems in which PCs of radically different “combat power levels” operate side-by-side in long running campaigns.  HERO for sure.  Some would say several editions of D&D are like that.


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## macd21 (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I haven’t understated Batman at all- the first thing I posted about him was that he has a plan to take down _every super being he knows of.  _In a sense, that’s his “superpower”- being prepared beyond what most mortal beings (and some immortal ones) would ever conceive of being.
> 
> The problems for him are that:
> 
> ...




None of this matters to an RPG designed to emulate comic books. If you’re emulating comic books and want your Batman PC to be as effective as your Superman PC, then you give Batman a meta currency to deal with these problems. He doesn’t need to know all the different types of super beings out there. He just spends a ‘Batpoint’ and has access to something that can stop whatever super being is bothering him this week. Is Superman coming at him at a trillion times the speed of light? Spend a Batpoint.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 6, 2019)

Which is plot armor of a kind that would probably annoy a lot of players with a Superman type build.  Just sayin’.

The saving grace of comics in Hero v Hero combats between grossly mismatched opponents is that the plot has been written in such a way that the demigod won’t be wiling or able to simply turn the talented mortal into a grease stain.  See Batman vs Guy Gardner.  While numerous Green Lanterns has figured out they could have a low-level force field 24/7 or with an instantaneous creation, Guy was too stupid, too cocky or both and didn’t do that.  Bats decked him.


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## macd21 (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Which is plot armor of a kind that would probably annoy a lot of players with a Superman type build.  Just sayin’.




As opposed to the Batman-player being annoyed because his character is reduced to being a sidekick?

A lot of games use some version of ‘plot points’ to smooth over power discrepancies. The greater the power discrepancy, the more powerful the plot points need to be to compensate.


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## pemerton (Nov 6, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> On that note have you seen the Sentinels Comics RPG? It's as close to a streamlined Marvel Heroic 2e as there is ever going to be.



Sorry, no, don't know it (other than the references in this thread).



Neonchameleon said:


> GURPS runs on a linear scale for damage as stats increase, MHRP runs on a logarithmic one.



In a loose sense, I guess that's true. For instance, for Strength (p OM85):

* *Enhanced Strength d8* allows you to turn over cars, break through solid barriers, and bend ordinary iron bars.

* *Superhuman Strength d10* allows you to lift and throw vehicles, smash through stone and metal, and tear apart most barriers.

* *Godlike Strength d12* confers the power to hurl objects into orbit, push over tall buildings, and demolish most structures.​
But there's more to it than that. (As I'm sure you know. But for those out there who don't . . .)

The descriptors (Enhanced, Superhuman and Godlike) each bring a default die size with them. They also set the parameters of fictional positioning and action declaration (in HeroQuest revised this is called the "credibility test"; MHRP doesn't have a label for it, but discusses it on p OM55). And those two things can come apart: for instance, a character might have an ability that allows stepping up a die (so eg turning the d8 Enhanced Strength die into a d10). But that doesn't necessarily mean that the character can, on those occasions, throw and lift vehicles rather than just overturn them. That would depend on the relevant fiction that explains the die step up ability.

This feature of MHRP - namely, that it assumes a _prior _fiction that serves as a constraint on action declaration and resolution before any dice are pooled and rolled - was a source of numerous complaints when it was first released, from RPGers who don't want to treat the fact that (say) Spider Man can't normally beat The Hulk in an arm wrestle as a fiction-derived constraint on permissible action declaration, but rather want the action resolution mechanics to produce this as an outcome.

(And this ties back to @innerdude's OP. I think GURPS is definitely for that second sort of person, who wants the mechanics to establish what is possible in the fiction, rather than treating already-known fictional states of affairs as constraints on what is possible via the mechanics.)



aramis erak said:


> MHRP's damage is literally just another die-trait; one can make boosts/hinders with exactly the same mechanics as doing damage.



This is something I like very much about MHRP. It's also a big part of what is fun in our Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy Hack game, which is mechanically pretty much the same as MHRP. (Our hack game is influenced by the Hacker's Guide, but makes fewer changes to to system than the suggested hacks in that book - only the speciality list (= skills, for non-MHRPers) is different.)


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## pemerton (Nov 6, 2019)

billd91 said:


> There are plenty of examples in the comics of Batman being completely unable to stop Superman from doing what Superman wants to do. None of his "greatest analytical mind" and wealth can do anything about it... except when the author wants it to.



I don't quite get this.

In an RPG there typically isn't _when the author wants it to _ - unless we have table consensus, but in Batman-PC fighting Superman-PC I'm assuming that such consensus is lacking!

So that's when we turn to the mechanics. If Batman's player wins the contest, then we know that his anlaytical mind or wealth or whatever (details will of course depend on the minutiae of the resolution system) was enough to beat Superman. If not, then we know -conversely - that they weren't. Perhaps because Batman didn't anticipate that Superman would throw a trillion-times-FTL punch _right now_!



Dannyalcatraz said:


> when you look at official builds for such disparate character types within officially licensed game systems for Marvel or DC, “luck” mechanics are seldom included for the hyper-talented mortals.  IOW, even if the game mechanics allow it, they don’t have it.



In the case of MHRP, there is no need for "luck" mechanics because the issue is addressed at a more fundamental system design level.

I take it that this is what @Umbran is getting at in saying "You worry about 'plot armor' because 'plot armor' is a patch to a physics model to make up for its lack of ability to do what the genre asks of it. "


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 6, 2019)

macd21 said:


> As opposed to the Batman-player being annoyed because his character is reduced to being a sidekick?




You mean how some people complain about “Linear Fighters and Quadratic Wizards”?  See also the spoof of the superheroic equivalent:



> A lot of games use some version of ‘plot points’ to smooth over power discrepancies. The greater the power discrepancy, the more powerful the plot points need to be to compensate.




And for some, that’s as bad as the problem you described above. No system solves all problems; all solutions introduce their own issues.  Which is why there’s more than one RPG system out there.

One of the biggest gripes about Mutants & Masterminds several players in a group I was in was how the system handled Autofire attacks.  They wanted each shot to get its own roll like other systems do.  M&M’s mechanic interfered with how they viewed their PCs’ actions.

Those same guys played D&D for 20 years mainly playing martial PCs while another player almost always played some slight variation of the highly optimized  Wizard PC he’d played campaign after campaign.  No complaints.

I’d imagine players like that would be far more annoyed by plot armor neutering “trillion mph“ punches than by being sidekicks to demigods.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 6, 2019)

> In an RPG there typically isn't _when the author wants it to..._




Kinda my point about plot armor making more sense in comics than RPGs.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 6, 2019)

billd91 said:


> Um, no. Not really.
> There are plenty of examples in the comics of Batman being completely unable to stop Superman from doing what Superman wants to do. None of his "greatest analytical mind" and wealth can do anything about it... except when the author wants it to.



Not only that, Batman was unable to prevent Bane from breaking his back.

He has also been unable to prevent the Joker from racking up a body count of @600 in the comics and over 1000 in movies and TV shows.

Batman may have plans, but _his plans don’t always work._


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> One of the biggest gripes about Mutants & Masterminds several players in a group I was in was how the system handled Autofire attacks.  They wanted each shot to get its own roll like other systems do.  M&M’s mechanic interfered with how they viewed their PCs’ actions.
> 
> Those same guys played D&D for 20 years mainly playing martial PCs while another player almost always played some slight variation of the highly optimized  Wizard PC he’d played campaign after campaign.  No complaints.




And here I'd say you've put your finger on a problem. You have a group that has adapted to one specific mode of play and wants to see everything through that mode of play. I can think of no RPG that uses fully automatic modern guns and has you roll once per bullet, which is what they would apparently have demanded. And they must have been playing extremely slow fighters to only swing their swords once or twice per six seconds or even per minute.

The problem here is not M&M - ordinary people don't have this problem. It's the bad habits they'd picked up from D&D that in the context of D&D make no sense anyway.



Dannyalcatraz said:


> Kinda my point about plot armor making more sense in comics than RPGs.




But if you aren't trying to replicate what happens in the setting why are you using that setting at all other than to deconstruct it?


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## macd21 (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Not only that, Batman was unable to prevent Bane from breaking his back.
> 
> He has also been unable to prevent the Joker from racking up a body count of @600 in the comics and over 1000 in movies and TV shows.
> 
> Batman may have plans, but _his plans don’t always work._




Which can be represented by plot points having limitations. They’re not ‘I win’ buttons, they’re a balancing mechanism. They don’t let the Batman character beat Superdude 100% of the time, but they increase his success rate from what would otherwise be zero.


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## Umbran (Nov 6, 2019)

pemerton said:


> So that's when we turn to the mechanics. If Batman's player wins the contest, then we know that his anlaytical mind or wealth or whatever (details will of course depend on the minutiae of the resolution system) was enough to beat Superman. If not, then we know -conversely - that they weren't. Perhaps because Batman didn't anticipate that Superman would throw a trillion-times-FTL punch _right now_!




Yes.  The point is that if you are modeling both characters well, the result _isn't a foregone conclusion_.  Superman doesn't automatically win.  Batman has talents of similar fictional weight that could counter Superman's abilities.  So, we need to use the mechanic. 



> In the case of MHRP, there is no need for "luck" mechanics because the issue is addressed at a more fundamental system design level.
> 
> I take it that this is what @Umbran is getting at in saying "You worry about 'plot armor' because 'plot armor' is a patch to a physics model to make up for its lack of ability to do what the genre asks of it. "




Pretty much. 

In real physics, you do not typically use the same equations at different scales - the model we use on the quantum scale is different from the model we use on the normal human scale, and that's different from the model we use an relativistic scales.  But, for some reason, we expect the same rules engine to handle Aunt May and Superman's strength.  That's silly.

Moreover, when we pay so much attention to _physical_ action, we give short shrift to non-physical things that, in fiction, typically carries a lot of weight.  Powers that aren't based in the physics model are undercounted and undervalued.  Bruce Wayne's billions are probably only used to determine if he can acquire something expensive in play.  Superman doesn't have to think about how his Invulnerability is applied - it is always effective in the instant it becomes relevant.  Batman's money, not so much.

So, we put a patch on the game engine that is designed to help us resolve physical tasks, to make up for what the model doesn't do well.  And gee, you know, patches are never as good as native design to do the same thing.

In games like MHRP, there is no patch, because the system isn't designed to be a task-based physics engine.  It is more a conflict-based fiction engine, with broad concepts of what can be effective.


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## Umbran (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Batman may have plans, but _his plans don’t always work._




And Superman died.  So, his strength doesn't always work. 

So, there is a question, for each of them, if they will prevail.  _That's what we have a mechanic for._

I have to ask:  In the comics, Batman works with Superman all the time.  Somehow, he not only survives, but remains relevant and effective.  Is that, in and of itself, a problem for you?  Do you find it easy to accept a man who can fly around the world fast enough to travel in time, but find it hard to accept an exquisite mind greater than that of any person at your gaming table might have preparations the player didn't think of before play began?

If that's the basic conflict, your conflict is with the genre, and we can't help you.  You are trying to emulate a genre with aspects you don't like, and the best we can say is, "well, don't play games with that aspect."

If your problem is the implementation of making the mind and money competitive with the strength and speed, then we can help you - we are laying out what the issues are with many mechanics that lead to the need for a layered on, kludgey, "plot armor".


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## The Crimson Binome (Nov 6, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Go take a look at... Shadowrun.  A mundane person, who has not spent a lot of their build capacity on being magical, or having lots of cyberware, and so on, can have higher Edge.  Edge is the game's luck stat, allowing the player to manipulate their die results somewhat - rolling more dice, rerollng dice, buying off critical fumbles, and the like.  Edge is powerful - and you can only have lots of it if you are basically mundane.



I don't remember Edge, or any other luck-type stat, in 2E. Do you know when they added it? Because that seems like a pretty significant genre shift, to suddenly introduce a plot armor stat. Back in 2E, the mundane person simply had no chance against a street samurai, and that seemed like an important part of the setting.


Umbran said:


> Comic books _do not have consistent physics_!  Comic books are a media in which Squirrel Girl, with the proportional strength and agility of a squirrel, can defeat Galactus off screen, and have that be satisfying!



Squirrel Girl defeated Galactus _on_ screen, and it was satisfying. You might be thinking of her defeat over Thanos.

This is also the series where they do go out of their way to make the physics as consistent as possible, given the seemingly-inconsistent precedents from across the decades. For example, they describe why giant bugs can't exist due to square-cube law, and then make explicit exceptions for Pym particles and cosmic radiation.


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## Umbran (Nov 6, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> I don't remember Edge, or any other luck-type stat, in 2E. Do you know when they added it? Because that seems like a pretty significant genre shift, to suddenly introduce a plot armor stat. Back in 2E, the mundane person simply had no chance against a street samurai, and that seemed like an important part of the setting.




I think Edge came up in 5e.  And I don't think of it so much of a genre shift as realizing that their mechanics rather cut out large portions of the genre - the typical cyberpunk story has a fairly mundane character along as a viewpoint, after all.



> Squirrel Girl defeated Galactus _on_ screen, and it was satisfying. You might be thinking of her defeat over Thanos.




You ever notice how many of the Marvel biggest bads are... mostly purple?



> For example, they describe why giant bugs can't exist due to square-cube law, and then make explicit exceptions for Pym particles and cosmic radiation.




I laud them for noting the actual sicnece, but... really, dude, this is still the Marvel universe.  Iron Man gets to fly around all day without refueling, while everyone else has to put gas in the tanks of their cars.  Don't try to tell me there's any consistency or sense to it in the long run.

Also, in the story where she defeats Galactus, she equates dietary calories to life energy for Galactus, which is pretty much nonsense, because if "energy you can get from oxidation" is Galactus'  "life energy", then any and every gas giant would be a better target than a planet with lots of life on it.  

So much for consistency


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## The Crimson Binome (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Plot armor in a work of written fiction makes much more sense than plot armor in an rpg.



There is a premise, which not everyone will buy into, that the rules of an RPG reflect the natural laws of its setting. GURPS is solidly in that camp, and I'm right there with them on that. Rules that operate outside this context are anathema.

Do the natural laws of the DC Universe include plot armor? If so, then nobody within that universe has ever been able to detect it, which makes it extremely hard to codify into any ruleset. If not, then the writers are cheating a bunch in order to tell their stories; and GURPS doesn't abide cheating.


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## The Crimson Binome (Nov 6, 2019)

Umbran said:


> I laud them for noting the actual science, but... really, dude, this is still the Marvel universe.  Iron Man gets to fly around all day without refueling, while everyone else has to put gas in the tanks of their cars.  Don't try to tell me there's any consistency or sense to it in the long run.



The premise of a fictional world is that it could actually exist, though. That needs to be the case in order for us to role-play there, and pretend to be an actual person who actually lives there, rather than playing as narrative constructs. (You can't role-play as a narrative construct, because they don't have independent thought or agency.) And yes, this is extremely difficult for the Marvel universe, due to a variety of reasons.

Still, our options are to either _try_ and reconcile these many issues, or concede that it's _just_ a story. Only one of those options will allow for role-playing in-character within that world.


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## pemerton (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> pemerton said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I don't follow this at all.

In the post you're quoting from, I went on to explain how decisions are made in RPGs when there is no table consensus, namely, via mechanical resolution. If that resolution allows Batman's wits to anticipate Superman's superfast punch, well, we have "plot armour" (in some generic sense) at work. All "plot armour" means here is a resolution system that gives Batman a chance of winning. I know two RPGs that can handle this pretty easily - Marvel Heroic RP, and HeroQuest revised. I suspect Fate could also, but makt that suggestion a bit more tentatively.



Dannyalcatraz said:


> Batman may have plans, but _his plans don’t always work._



And Superman may have superspeed, but he doesn't always get everything he wants either.

This is why RPGs have resolution mechanics. They resolve this uncertainty, most typically via the use of dice rolls.

EDIT: Ninja'd by @Umbran, although I might say that he was in turn ninja'd by my first post on the same point not too far upthread! @macd21 has also made a similar point about "plot points" in particular.


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## Celebrim (Nov 6, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Batman may have plans, but _his plans don’t always work._




In fact, they rarely work. They work only as often as often as would be interesting for the story. Batman's villains are regularly able to thwart the caped crusader despite having merely ordinary villainous skills which would present no real challenge to The Flash, Superman, or the like.

Likewise, whenever teamed up with Superman in the old comics, there would always be some contrivance where Superman would completely lose his powers and conveniently Batman would be there to save Superman.   Of course, this would only happen while Superman was teamed up with Batman, and when Superman was out on his own facing beings of enormous power the ability to deprive Superman of his powers wasn't in the cards.

I suppose you could use a variant of the JarJar Binks fan theory her to justify it, in as much as maybe Batman was arranging for Clark to lose his powers while pretending to be helpful, which would in fact suggest Batman was incredibly capable since he could keep coming up with ways to reduce Superman to a mere mortal that the villains Superman normally faced - even geniuses like Lex Luthor and Brainiac - could never have come up with.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 7, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> And here I'd say you've put your finger on a problem. You have a group that has adapted to one specific mode of play and wants to see everything through that mode of play. I can think of no RPG that uses fully automatic modern guns and has you roll once per bullet, which is what they would apparently have demanded. And they must have been playing extremely slow fighters to only swing their swords once or twice per six seconds or even per minute.
> 
> The problem here is not M&M - ordinary people don't have this problem. It's the bad habits they'd picked up from D&D that in the context of D&D make no sense anyway.




He closest I can think of off the top of my head is HERO (and possibly Spycraft).  Where additional hits in M&M Autofire adds a little extra damage based how well you rolled on a single attack, HERO adds the full effect of the power- you roll all the attack dice, you generate additional triggered/linked effects, etc.*

When presented with the difference, the players affected by the M&M rule expressed a strong preference for the HERO version.  Actually rolling those dice resulting from additional hits _feels_ more like real, discrete successful attacks, at least to some.  (Myself included.)



> But if you aren't trying to replicate what happens in the setting why are you using that setting at all other than to deconstruct it?




Plot armor is a device the _author_ uses to protect a key character or characters.  In RPGs, that’s most directly analogous to DM fiat, not so much a mechanic someone incorporates into a character.

As such, it can exist in any RPG in which a game master chooses to use it.

Luck, Edge, etc, are close, but they’re _usually _not as final or powerful as actual plot armor.



* It‘s been several years, so I don’t recall whether additional hits with M&M Autofire also generated additional possible linked/triggered effects.


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## pemerton (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Plot armor is a device the _author_ uses to protect a key character or characters.  In RPGs, that’s most directly analogous to DM fiat, not so much a mechanic someone incorporates into a character.



It can easily be a player-side mechanic. Eg in Burning Wheel, if a PC suffers a mortal wound the player may spend a Persona point to have his/her PC survive (this is the "will to live" rule).

One consequence of this mechanic is that if a player spends his/her last Persona point to buff his/her dice pool in a conflict, you know s/he _really _means it!


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 7, 2019)

pemerton said:


> It can easily be a player-side mechanic. Eg in Burning Wheel, if a PC suffers a mortal wound the player may spend a Persona point to have his/her PC survive (this is the "will to live" rule).
> 
> One consequence of this mechanic is that if a player spends his/her last Persona point to buff his/her dice pool in a conflict, you know s/he _really _means it!




i agree that it _can_ be, but if we’re talking about a mechanic whereby a hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane character- IOW, a Batman, not a Longshot- can thwart a “trillion mph” punch, that’s a system I _personally _wouldn’t want to be playing.


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## aramis erak (Nov 7, 2019)

I think several people are forgetting... Batman ALWAYS prevails in the end... but his opponents are then entrusted to Arkham Asylum. And that's his weakness: He trusts the system to keep these super-potent nutjobs off the street, and Arkham keeps failing to do so. Repeatedly. Again, and again.

The one thing Bats is _consistently _blind to is the failure of others to be at his level and to do their part.

There's not likely anyone who can play Bruce/Bats the way he needs in a gritty ruleset; he's almost always the smartest guy in the room until the villains show. And then, most of the time, he still is. But Smart and Prepared fall victim to human frailties of others. 

In MHRP, Bats can plot-point a needed item that, in GURPS, would need a creation roll beforehand.
In Hero System, Bats is a guy with a gadget pool that hasn't been limited to "prepared first only"... and some excellent stats and wealth, and massive piles of all-combat levels.

It's also worth noting: DC has been done in Cortex Plus. In fact, the first CP ruleset was a DC property: Smallville. MHRP wasn't just a hit on its own; it was a system related to DC, but tuned to be Marvel in tone and execution.


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## macd21 (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> i agree that it _can_ be, but if we’re talking about a mechanic whereby a hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane character- IOW, a Batman, not a Longshot- can thwart a “trillion mph” punch, that’s a system I _personally _wouldn’t want to be playing.




See, I’d rather a system where he can. It feels appropriate for the genre.


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## lordabdul (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> i agree that it _can_ be, but if we’re talking about a mechanic whereby a hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane character- IOW, a Batman, not a Longshot- can thwart a “trillion mph” punch, that’s a system I _personally _wouldn’t want to be playing.



Sounds more like rejecting the premise than rejecting the system to me. The story always comes first, and the mechanics are only there to support that and add a little randomness and fun. If, in terms of narrative, you want Batman to be able to dodge/block/whatever Superman's punch, you come up with a rationalization of that. In the comics it might be a "_wtf, how did he do that??!_" moment, followed by a flashback where you see Batman preparing for that eventuality, and using some BatPlotDevice gear that uses kryptonite to weaken and slow down the punch at the last millisecond, enough for him to dodge, or maybe Batman turns out to have been a hologram for the whole scene, or whatever.

Now, assuming you wouldn't reject the rationalization presented in the comics (which is possible... I mean, comics often have very dumb and implausible plot twists, so it's ok to say "_this is naughty word, I don't want to read this_"), then the key is to figure out how to represent that in terms of mechanics. If you're OK with "flashback mechanics" like the Preparedness rolls in Gumshoe, you can have Batman roll for that, retroactively declare that yeah they have the BatPlotDevice, spend some extra points, and that takes whatever numbers aways from Superman's roll, maybe enough to indeed survive the attack. In something like HeroQuest or FATE or SavageWorlds you might spend some HP/FP/bennies to do that, but you would also have to work with the GM to justify what's going on (_i.e: _BatPlotDevice, hologram, or something else)... it's not like a free ride where you get to change the story without explaining how in the context of that story. Just saying "_I spend the points and I dodge it_" is not OK.

There are plenty ways to go about it depending on the system. My point is that the mechanics are irrelevant at first though -- the question is whether that story is OK or not. If it is, the GM will figure out the rules to make it happen.


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## aramis erak (Nov 7, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> Sounds more like rejecting the premise than rejecting the system to me. The story always comes first, and the mechanics are only there to support that and add a little randomness and fun. If, in terms of narrative, you want Batman to be able to dodge/block/whatever Superman's punch, you come up with a rationalization of that. In the comics it might be a "_wtf, how did he do that??!_" moment, followed by a flashback where you see Batman preparing for that eventuality, and using some BatPlotDevice gear that uses kryptonite to weaken and slow down the punch at the last millisecond, enough for him to dodge, or maybe Batman turns out to have been a hologram for the whole scene, or whatever.
> 
> Now, assuming you wouldn't reject the rationalization presented in the comics (which is possible... I mean, comics often have very dumb and implausible plot twists, so it's ok to say "_this is naughty word, I don't want to read this_"), then the key is to figure out how to represent that in terms of mechanics. If you're OK with "flashback mechanics" like the Preparedness rolls in Gumshoe, you can have Batman roll for that, retroactively declare that yeah they have the BatPlotDevice, spend some extra points, and that takes whatever numbers aways from Superman's roll, maybe enough to indeed survive the attack. In something like HeroQuest or FATE or SavageWorlds you might spend some HP/FP/bennies to do that, but you would also have to work with the GM to justify what's going on (_i.e: _BatPlotDevice, hologram, or something else)... it's not like a free ride where you get to change the story without explaining how in the context of that story. Just saying "_I spend the points and I dodge it_" is not OK.
> 
> There are plenty ways to go about it depending on the system. My point is that the mechanics are irrelevant at first though -- the question is whether that story is OK or not. If it is, the GM will figure out the rules to make it happen.



Flashbacks are not handled in GURPS rules ... but they are stock in several other superhero games just fine. And GURPS GM's have been known to use them.
Cortex Plus (either MHRP or Smallville), the BatMacguffin is a plot point spend and an instant d6 item, or a plot point for the flashback and single roll to create a different rated device. 
In Hero System, Bat's got a gadget pool, and the narration determines which skill roll he's making to allocate the gadget. All of which are OAFs once created.
Fate, a fatepoint for a  flashback to create a temporary aspect is in at least a couple flavors, so not out of the question.


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## doctorbadwolf (Nov 7, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> Sounds more like rejecting the premise than rejecting the system to me. The story always comes first, and the mechanics are only there to support that and add a little randomness and fun. If, in terms of narrative, you want Batman to be able to dodge/block/whatever Superman's punch, you come up with a rationalization of that. In the comics it might be a "_wtf, how did he do that??!_" moment, followed by a flashback where you see Batman preparing for that eventuality, and using some BatPlotDevice gear that uses kryptonite to weaken and slow down the punch at the last millisecond, enough for him to dodge, or maybe Batman turns out to have been a hologram for the whole scene, or whatever.
> 
> Now, assuming you wouldn't reject the rationalization presented in the comics (which is possible... I mean, comics often have very dumb and implausible plot twists, so it's ok to say "_this is naughty word, I don't want to read this_"), then the key is to figure out how to represent that in terms of mechanics. If you're OK with "flashback mechanics" like the Preparedness rolls in Gumshoe, you can have Batman roll for that, retroactively declare that yeah they have the BatPlotDevice, spend some extra points, and that takes whatever numbers aways from Superman's roll, maybe enough to indeed survive the attack. In something like HeroQuest or FATE or SavageWorlds you might spend some HP/FP/bennies to do that, but you would also have to work with the GM to justify what's going on (_i.e: _BatPlotDevice, hologram, or something else)... it's not like a free ride where you get to change the story without explaining how in the context of that story. Just saying "_I spend the points and I dodge it_" is not OK.
> 
> There are plenty ways to go about it depending on the system. My point is that the mechanics are irrelevant at first though -- the question is whether that story is OK or not. If it is, the GM will figure out the rules to make it happen.



I have been using flashbacks more and more to explain rolls that just can't easily be explained by moving the scene forward another step. 

It started with a caper adventure, where we jumped right into the action, and then went back and asked, "what was the backup plan, or bait and switch, or other planning stage device, that is going to change this scene back to your favor?" I used Inspiration to help control the flashback frequency, and gave everyone a free Inspiration at the start of each of the 3 Acts of the adventure. 

the best one was when the wizard rolled a 2 on his Arcana check to hack into the security system of the vault where 1 of the mcguffins was kept, in order to allow the bard to walk out with _his _box that contained the real nonagon, while the fake nonagon was sitting in the lock box that _had_ held the real one. 

Someone used their Inspiration to flash back, and we established that him failing the check was actually part of the plan. See, he'd enchanted the fake nonagon to implant code into a rebooting security system when it scanned all contents of the vault, switching the ID markers of the two lock boxes so that the bard's lockbox wouldn't read as containing the wrong goods upon exiting the vault. He _had_ to trigger the alarm in a specific way, by "failing" to hack it, so that the system would need to be reset, and booted up from scratch. 

A new arcana check with advantage told us how well the device worked, he hit some high number, and the caper continued. 

The entire idea of needing to reset the magical security system was invented as part of the flash back, as the players recalled their planning around the table before the caper. The effect was that it mirrored the sort of voice over dialogue about "the plan" you see in a caper movie or TV episode, where we are jumping back and forth between the action, and the planning stage. 

Such a mechanic formalised would be perfect for a Batman character.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 7, 2019)

> If, in terms of narrative, you want Batman to be able to dodge/block/whatever Superman's punch, you come up with a rationalization of that. In the comics it might be a "_wtf, how did he do that??!_" moment, followed by a flashback where you see Batman preparing for that eventuality, and using some BatPlotDevice gear that uses kryptonite to weaken and slow down the punch at the last millisecond, enough for him to dodge, or maybe Batman turns out to have been a hologram for the whole scene, or whatever.




That’s all well & good in comics (where the writers have a month to figure things out), or even as DM fiat.  But if a PC’s game mechanic makes the GM have to figure out how to make this happen, that’s unanticipated work on the fly for the person on the other side of the screen.

“It was a hologram!”
“Then how was he busting skulls on thugs the second before?”
”Ummmmm...it was a solid-light hologram?”
”How long has he had solid-light holograms, and why doesn’t he use those 100% of the time?”
”Ummmmmm...”

Kryptonite zaps Supes’ powers, but doesn’t stop momentum.*  Superheroic physics are wonky, but they’re not Coyote vs Roadrunner wonky.**

And if Superman is indeed capable of attacking in attoseconds*, that’s faster than an electrical signal can travel the circuitry of a BatDevice- the attack would be completed before the device could trigger.




* I love superhero comics, but sometimes the writers put things in print that are just..._super_ problematic.  See also Spider-Man being able to walk in walls due to static electricity, or soloing Firelord.

** Welllllll...not usually.  See assorted superheroes saving not splatting people falling at terminal velocity.  See as counterpoint The Autocar from Automan- a holographic Lambourghini Coutache LP400 capable of making 90-degree turns without losing control and overtaking merely by strafing, rather than turning. However, human passengers not properly secured in their seats would often be thrown around inside with the momentum from the sudden position change.


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## lordabdul (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> But if a PC’s game mechanic makes the GM have to figure out how to make this happen, that’s unanticipated work on the fly for the person on the other side of the screen.



I'd like to think I would be able to pull it off as a GM. But if I couldn't, again, that would be premise rejection, not a game system problem. _"In this game/world, Batman is really just a human, and no amount of training or gadgetry will make him able to face Superman. Since Chad is playing Superman already, I'd recommend you all set your sights on playing Green Lantern or Wonderwoman or someone else that isn't weak_".

It's the same with time travel, for instance. Many GMs avoid it because it's really really hard to pull off. Games like Timewatch go with a system that actually embraces paradoxes, so that it's a lot easier to play, but I know even people who don't want to play that (it's sad... Timewatch is super fun once you embrace the premise). And that's totally fine! I mean, GMing even a normal fantasy campaign is already a lot of work.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 7, 2019)

> _"In this game/world, Batman is really just a human, and no amount of training or gadgetry will make him able to face Superman. Since Chad is playing Superman already, I'd recommend you all set your sights on playing Green Lantern or Wonderwoman or someone else that isn't weak_".




i would _never _tell that to my players in _any_ genre of RPG.  Part of the Art of GMing is balancing adventures for all.

Besides, that quoted section is simply a straw man position no one is advocating:

1) Superman may be very capable, but he isn’t GOD.  He has limitations, he can’t do everything simultaneously.  Even he has to decide what to do and when, which is why you have allies.  

2) as noted, _if_ _Batman plans properly_, he can definitely take down all kinds of foes, including those as powerful as Supes.


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## lordabdul (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> 2) as noted, _if_ _Batman plans properly_, he can definitely take down all kinds of foes, including those as powerful as Supes.



My understanding from your post was that the whole concept of Batman as a character _in a world where he might fight Superman_ was putting too much work on the GM's shoulders to make it work. Apologies if I didn't understand that correctly, but then maybe that means I didn't understand your point at all.


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## macd21 (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> i would _never _tell that to my players in _any_ genre of RPG.  Part of the Art of GMing is balancing adventures for all.
> 
> Besides, that quoted section is simply a straw man position no one is advocating:
> 
> ...




And with regard to 2), that’s something that plot points can be used to represent.


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## John Dallman (Nov 7, 2019)

innerdude said:


> And I don't know if it's the system (GURPS 3e), the campaign (a supers setting riffed directly from Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners novels), … supers is my least favorite speculative fiction genre by a country mile ...



It is worth mentioning that the super-power mechanics of GURPS 3e were ripped out and completely replaced in GURPS 4e. I don't know how well they work for high-powered four-colour supers because I've never tried playing that under any edition of GURPS. The 4e mechanics work well for psionics, magical abilities that aren't spellcasting, and the like.


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## dbm (Nov 7, 2019)

You can also have variable power pools and ‘gizmo’ gadgets. Flexible and adaptive powers can be had in GURPS. 

To be sure, the Supers genre pushes GURPS hard, and you need to apply quite a few optional rules to make it work. Other systems are a more natural fit, but if you aren’t playing Supers every game and still want to mainly stick to one system then GURPS can cover you.

To the original question, GURPS core premise is to assume physics and then say ‘if this can happen in game, what is the logical extension of it’. Typically, a person strong enough to lift a tank could punch through a wall, though they might smash their hand at the same time (strong <> tough, unless you want it to).

The benefit of this is that you can extrapolate to figure out niche scenarios that matter to you, but may not matter to everyone else (perhaps no one out side your table). This allows you to implement the specific game of your choice, be that a completely home-brewed world or an adaption of a book etc.

Traditionally, the downside of this has been that the GM needs to make huge amounts of material to implement their vision. This is less and less the case. There are ever more assets available to help quickly implement popular genres like dungeon fantasy, modern action, urban fantasy, post-apocalyptic and steampunk. These can give you a 75-80% solution for you to tailor. With the right group of players the creation work can be shared around, too.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 7, 2019)

macd21 said:


> And with regard to 2), that’s something that plot points can be used to represent.



_Sometimes._

But if Supes simply _snapped_ with no precursors, Bats would have to be an Oracle or time traveler to avoid:





RPG plot armor mechanics- to me- handle this much worse than DM fiat, which _usually_ works worse than the actual plot armor comic book writers.

Plot armor mechanics- for the most part- depend on resources the character has.  Like the comic book writer, though, the GM has no such restraint.

Batman having access to personal time travel devices to save himself from a suddenly rogue Kryptonian would require some serious ‘splainin; a GM using a time traveling NPC to save Batman really doesn’t.


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## lordabdul (Nov 7, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> But if Supes simply _snapped_ with no precursors, Bats would have to be an Oracle or time traveler



Sure, at which point you can apply hefty penalties to the flashback mechanics rolls, or whatever you're using to model Batman's ability to be super prepared and have awesome gadgets at the ready. With those penalties, the player would probably fail the roll, and you have Bat-juice dripping out of the cowl. But, frankly, I'm sure pretty Batman prepared for this eventually _the very first day he met Superman_. Batman's like that. He doesn't trust anybody.

The point, I guess, is that you can't ask the player do the whole "_Batman investigates and prepares_" in game because, by definition, the player can't be as clever as Bruce Wayne. And also because it would be boring, as it could have all the other players sit around while the Batman player is doing his thing for 20 minutes. So "flashback mechanics" and other "let's justify this on the spot" seem to be the best viable/gameable way to do this... (people already mentioned several game systems that do this). I'd be happy to hear other ways to model that, though.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 8, 2019)

lordabdul said:


> My understanding from your post was that the whole concept of Batman as a character _in a world where he might fight Superman_ was putting too much work on the GM's shoulders to make it work. Apologies if I didn't understand that correctly, but then maybe that means I didn't understand your point at all.



I have no problem with masterminds being able to pull the levers of the campaign world in order to take down characters with more inherent, reality bending powers.

i have issues with “I Batman this problem, let’s move along.” when we’re talking about the extremes of probability.  Bats may have a terabyte of plans covering scenario where Superman (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) goes rogue, but they may not be effective in the moment at hand.

The comic book writer could devise such scenarios with ease- an evil daxamite disguised as Superman will shrug off kryptonite based tactics; Superman could decide to kill Batman by deeply inhaling while they’re in certain enclosed spaces, resulting in oxygen deprivation and/or exposure to vacuum.  

But part of a GM’s duty to the players is to avoid such scenarios.  I would no more place a Supers character in an unescapable death trap than place a Paladin in a paradox between being faithful to their vows or saving the day.

That said, I also would not save a player’s PC from their own idiocy,  For instance, if a high-level Warlock- but not otherwise fireproof- character decided to use a magical device and set off a Fireball in his mouth, depending on their hit points alone to save them, my response would likely be “OK, roll up a new character.”


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 8, 2019)

> Sure, at which point you can apply hefty penalties to the flashback mechanics rolls, or whatever you're using to model Batman's ability to be super prepared and have awesome gadgets at the ready.




”Snapped with no precursors” means exactly that- Batman has no information upon which to base a plan.*  To be prepared for an attack of _every possible type Superman could use at any time_ with *zero* info strains even comic book credulity for a non-omniscient character.

If he were capable of _that_ level of preparation would require insight so great that his plans should _never_ fail.  It would mean he should never be “outwitted” by characters like Bane, meaning he should never have had his back broken.


* think of it like this: for some people, the first sign that they are at risk for a heart attack is having a heart attack.  Because they have none of the normal risk factors, their heart attacks are more likely to be fatal.  Now, substitute “Superman” for “heart”.


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## pemerton (Nov 8, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Plot armor mechanics- for the most part- depend on resources the character has.



In Marvel Heroic RP, the plot point that (as per @aramis erak's post upthread) allows Batman's player to delcare that Batman has such-and-such a gadget on him that he prepared earlier for just such a contingency is not a resource the character has. The resource the _character _has is the gadget. And the capabilities the character has include skill in prepraging gadgets, and cleverness in anticpating when they'll be needed. The plot point is a resource that the player has which s/he can spend in accordance with the rules of the game.



Dannyalcatraz said:


> That’s all well & good in comics (where the writers have a month to figure things out), or even as DM fiat.  But if a PC’s game mechanic makes the GM have to figure out how to make this happen, that’s unanticipated work on the fly for the person on the other side of the screen.



Wouldn't this be on the _player_? (At least primarily.)



Dannyalcatraz said:


> Superman may be very capable, but he isn’t GOD.  He has limitations, he can’t do everything simultaneously.  Even he has to decide what to do and when



Given the speeds at which you are saying Superman can move, in fact he can do everything worth doing in the context of a RPG scenario effectively simultaneously.



Dannyalcatraz said:


> why doesn’t he use those 100% of the time?”



This is a more general question that arises in any superhero fiction (and often in genre fiction more generally). In some Marvel comics (I think 70s Super-Villain Team-Ups) Magneto could control minds by manipulating blood flow in the brain by manipulating the iron in the blood. Why not do it all the time?

Superman can (you've been emphasising) travel much much faster than light, yet he doesn't race around the world stopping every act of violence, or taking every gun from every villain, before anyone can react.

Just like readers do (whether for an official No-Prize, or not) in a RPG we can construct our own explicit or implicit rationalistaions. And the system mechanics establish the rationing (eg in MHRP the GM can establish that Dr Doom was really a Doombot, but that costs points; Nick Fury can turn out to really be a Life Model Decoy, but that costs points; etc).

Playing a superhero game with the mindset and aesthetic expectations of ASL seems misguided.



Dannyalcatraz said:


> ]Kryptonite zaps Supes’ powers, but doesn’t stop momentum.*  Superheroic physics are wonky, but they’re not Coyote vs Roadrunner wonky.**



You give your own counterexamples to this.

In literal terms there's no such thing as "superhero physics". There's genre convention and narrative conceit.



Saelorn said:


> they do go out of their way to make the physics as consistent as possible, given the seemingly-inconsistent precedents from across the decades. For example, they describe why giant bugs can't exist due to square-cube law, and then make explicit exceptions for Pym particles and cosmic radiation.



But this is incoherent. In our world, _the very same things that explain the square-cube law make it the case that there are no Pym particles or cosmic radiation _as those things exist in the Marvel Universes.

There's no _physics_ there - in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge that explains the fundamental ways that the world is. It's all tropes - the use of particular vocabulary, paritcular sorts of fictional framing, etc - used to tell a story.


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## Umbran (Nov 8, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> i agree that it _can_ be, but if we’re talking about a mechanic whereby a hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane character- IOW, a Batman, not a Longshot- can thwart a “trillion mph” punch, that’s a system I _personally _wouldn’t want to be playing.




You get to play what you like, of course.

But... do you realize that you're kind of cherry picking here?  The "trillion mph punch" is faster than light, by several orders of magnitude - that is _completely nonsensical_.  If you want to have the physically nonsensical, but not other forms of nonsense, that's your choice.  But, maybe it isn't a good position to criticize from.

For me...

Batman is the greatest detective, and a far more technically trained fighter than Superman.  Bats is an expert in psychology and at reading body language - to him, there is no such thing as "no precursors" only precursors that others don't notice, and Clark Kent is known for wearing his heart on his sleeve.  Bats sees the signs - the narrowing of the eye, the furrowing of a brow, the vocal tone - that sub-consciously Superman has come to the point where he'll throw a punch, several entire seconds before Supes is even consciously aware of his own decision.  Knowing that, when upset with another hero, Superman uses an emotionally demonstrative roundhouse punch to the head rather than the controlled jab to the torso, all Bats does is lean back 2.3", just outside Superman's roundhouse reach... and while the punch is moving too fast for Bats to see, it doesn't connect....

Note - I'm not actually a huge Batman fan.  I just accept the genre for what it is, and I'm okay with absurd mental gymnastics as narration alongside the physical.  Failing to do this... basically says that brawn beats brains, and I'm not up for all my stories ending up like that.

Late edit:
Nor am I saying "Batman always wins".  I give plausible narrations for how he could win.  The point being that Batman and Superman are both top heroes in their universes.  For our purposes, their game stats are built with the same level of build resources, and so in some way, shape, or form, their abilities are of equal effectiveness.  We note that they are also both top _combatant_ characters.  So it isn't like we are putting Superman against, "Captain IncrediblySmartWimp".  So, we put the mechanic to them, and if we find Bats succeeds, we find a plausible narration for it.

I note that the "without precursors" is not really a valid stipulation for Superman.  He is not known for being stone-faced or unreadable - so it isn't in his power-set.  Superman is actually fairly emotional and open with his feelings.  If Bats sees Superman even seeming to be cold and unreadable, that actually twigs Bats that something is up even earlier, because that's uncharacteristic.


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## DrunkonDuty (Nov 8, 2019)

I'm not sure I'm following the plot armour discussion properly. I get the feeling that people are not all using the same definition of what plot armour in an RPG actually is. I think that plot armour is anything that protects the character but is not a game mechanical benefit which the player had to spend their resources to acquire.

So Fate/Hero/Plot Points are NOT plot armour. Buying a power that you call Plot Armour that is mechanically represented as a massive resistance to damage is NOT plot armour. In both these cases the player has expended some of their game resources to acquire a game mechanical benefit.

The GM having to regularly come up with reasons why a given character is not targeted by bad guys, even when there is no in-game reason, IS plot armour. The goodies always win IS plot armour.

... So, um, I'm not sure what my definition contributes to the discussion at hand. But it came to my mind and I felt the need to share. <insert I feel kinda awkward emoji here>


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## billd91 (Nov 8, 2019)

DrunkonDuty said:


> I'm not sure I'm following the plot armour discussion properly. I get the feeling that people are not all using the same definition of what plot armour in an RPG actually is. I think that plot armour is anything that protects the character but is not a game mechanical benefit which the player had to spend their resources to acquire.
> 
> So Fate/Hero/Plot Points are NOT plot armour. Buying a power that you call Plot Armour that is mechanically represented as a massive resistance to damage is NOT plot armour. In both these cases the player has expended some of their game resources to acquire a game mechanical benefit.
> 
> ...




I think I get what you’re saying. I’d include genre expectations into the realm of plot armor. Superman, based on his powers, technically *could* throw high strength, supersonic punches at living targets... but he doesn’t. He generally doesn’t seem to throw them at all. While they’d be undeniably effective, it’s more genre appropriate that he doesn’t, and so skilled combatants like Batman, Black Canary, or Chameleon Boy have a chance to outfight someone in Superman’s league (even if they can’t out-slug him). The plot armor they receive from the genre conventions enable the powers and abilities they have to be effective.


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## DrunkonDuty (Nov 8, 2019)

Agreed. Genre conventions are, by my definition, plot armour.

Whether plot armour is good or bad can vary from situation to situation. Generally, I'd prefer not to have it. To me it feels like lazy writing. 

But there are times it's needed. I think it becomes bad when it is *required *to keep the game running. And a game that includes Superman level threats against Batman level heroes is in danger of requiring a lot of plot armour.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 8, 2019)

Umbran said:


> You get to play what you like, of course.
> 
> But... do you realize that you're kind of cherry picking here?  The "trillion mph punch" is faster than light, by several orders of magnitude - that is _completely nonsensical_.  If you want to have the physically nonsensical, but not other forms of nonsense, that's your choice.  But, maybe it isn't a good position to criticize from.



Umbran, I’m criticizing from the basis of the comic books’ *actual storylines.*

In one femtosecond, light travels just 300 nanometers. According to the panels in the Superman comic I linked to in post #97, Superman covers _several city blocks_ in a femtosecond, but he still hasn’t reached the hostage with the gun to her head when the trigger is pulled.  When that happens...

Quoting the panels:
“She’s reckless...It catches him off guard...It buys her an attosecond.

But it’s not enough to stop the bullet.  Fortunately...”

NEWS FLASH: He then bursts through the building wall, crosses the room, and stops the bullet he just said would end her life in an attosecond!  (FWIW, in a shared conversation, Flash has _also_ mentioned being able to percieve events lasting under an attosecond as well.  So I’m pretty sure Supes understands just fine what an attosecond is.)

It should also be noted that in previous panels in that sequence, he says he knows what his top speed is...but that he hasn’t traveled like this ”since Pa.”  AFAIK, at no point is there an indication that- like the Flash- he has traveled through time.

So, even if “trillion mph“ punch is off, according to the writers creating the DC universe, Superman can indeed travel several orders of magnitude faster than light in normal space.  Maybe not all day, every day, but occasionally is enough to be problematic.

If, in the stated scenario, Batman is indeed badass enough to anticipate that previously perfectly fine Superman with that kind of speed & power is homicidally snapping RIGHT NOW so well that he survives, he has no business being outwitted by The Joker or Bane.  Whatever mental blocks reign in his speed (and other powers) to sub-FTL levels probably wouldn’t be operant if Superman went full Ed Gein.

I’m pretty sure, brilliant though he is, Batman hasn’t invented any gear that can trigger in under an attosecond.

About the only only way Bats could survive would be the intervention of a similarly powerful being- say, Green Lantern- or being tipped off by a time traveler (the Flash?).



> For me...
> 
> Batman is the greatest detective, and a far more technically trained fighter than Superman.  Bats is an expert in psychology and at reading body language - to him, there is no such thing as "no precursors" only precursors that others don't notice,




....so he‘s hyper aware of Kryptonian psychology and microexpression?  Or his in particular?  Do Kryptonians HAVE microexpressions?  Hell- do Kryptonians change from sane to insane at humanlike speeds, or are they faster?  Or slower?

(If we include the disguised Daxamite variant of the scenario I mentioned upthread, Bats may detect that something is off, but if he’s relying on his familiarity with Clark or with Kryptonians in general, his reactions to the attack could doom him.)

I am no expert- I’m not even an MD- but I personally witnessed and correctly diagnosed my paternal grandmother having a stroke, missed by the two MDs in the room.  It was a miniscule change in expression, a fleeting thing, but I saw it.

But I was looking her dead in the face, nobody else was.

Even for The World’s Greatest Detective, anticipating Supes‘ trigger flipping would require great fortune indeed.

Besides which, “he’s noticing things others missed“ in this case changes the posited scenario.  If Kryptonian insanity has tells, what’s the time window between “Supes seems a little off...” to full-on super rampage?



> ...and Clark Kent is known for wearing his heart on his sleeve.  Bats sees the signs - the narrowing of the eye, the furrowing of a brow, the vocal tone - that sub-consciously Superman has come to the point where he'll throw a punch, several entire seconds before Supes is even consciously aware of his own decision.  Knowing that, when upset with another hero, Superman uses an emotionally demonstrative roundhouse punch to the head rather than the controlled jab to the torso, all Bats does is lean back 2.3", just outside Superman's roundhouse reach... and while the punch is moving too fast for Bats to see, it doesn't connect....
> 
> Note - I'm not actually a huge Batman fan.  I just accept the genre for what it is, and I'm okay with absurd mental gymnastics as narration alongside the physical.  Failing to do this... basically says that brawn beats brains, and I'm not up for all my stories ending up like that.




I‘m not positing brawn beats brains 100% either, but I AM saying there are times when Batman can and will be caught flat and unprepared, and will not be able to save himself or the person he’s trying to save.  That’s how Bane beat him.

In those cases, he’ll need an ally who can either percieve what Bats cannot or who can supply a counterbalancing force he cannot.  The ”Supeman snapped” scenario is one such situation.

Even a more mundane situation like being in a crashing airliner may take him out, or greatly restrict the number of people he can save, depending on the reasons for the impending disaster.



> Late edit:
> Nor am I saying "Batman always wins".  I give plausible narrations for how he could win.  The point being that Batman and Superman are both top heroes in their universes.  For our purposes, their game stats are built with the same level of build resources, and so in some way, shape, or form, their abilities are of equal effectiveness.  We note that they are also both top _combatant_ characters.  So it isn't like we are putting Superman against, "Captain IncrediblySmartWimp".  So, we put the mechanic to them, and if we find Bats succeeds, we find a plausible narration for it.




That’s what writers and GMs are for, not game mechanics hard baked into BP characters.



> I note that the "without precursors" is not really a valid stipulation for Superman.  He is not known for being stone-faced or unreadable - so it isn't in his power-set.  Superman is actually fairly emotional and open with his feelings.  If Bats sees Superman even seeming to be cold and unreadable, that actually twigs Bats that something is up even earlier, because that's uncharacteristic.




I didn’t say he was unreadable, but he IS an alien.  Just because he looks like us doesn’t mean he has all the same kind of tells as we do.  They may count megalomaniacs (Zod), serial killers (Faora) and psychopaths (Rog-Ar) among their number, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to react to a Rorschach test like an insane human.

So what Bats knows of humans could conceivably wrongfoot him if/when profiling Kal-El.  Some/much/all of his terabyte of data and plans to handle Superman could be founded on flawed hypotheses.  (See again the disguised Daxamite*.)

For all I know, it might be in DC’s unwritten rules that Kryptonians simply don’t have anything resembling psychotic breaks, for whatever reason.   But that we cannot know.



* I’ve seen “evil Supeman“ type stories printed in Marvel, Dark Horse and other companies’ lines, but the Daxamite swap would be an interesting one for me.  Imagine, the Daxamite teams up with Lex Luthor, who thinks his stockpile of kryptonite will keep his hand on “Superman’s“ leash.   Which seemingly works fine until the ruse is dropped...


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 8, 2019)

pemerton said:


> In Marvel Heroic RP, the plot point that (as per @aramis erak's post upthread) allows Batman's player to delcare that Batman has such-and-such a gadget on him that he prepared earlier for just such a contingency is not a resource the character has. The resource the _character _has is the gadget. And the capabilities the character has include skill in prepraging gadgets, and cleverness in anticpating when they'll be needed. The plot point is a resource that the player has which s/he can spend in accordance with the rules of the game.




But if it doesn’t make sense- a device operating faster than it has any reason to be able to- that’s a solution that creates more problems.

(This isn’t unique to comics.  You see it in all kinds of fiction.)



> Wouldn't this be on the _player_? (At least primarily.)




The GM is the one who has to make sure the solution fits within the setting universe, not just now, but at any point in the future if/when the situation arises, not players.



> Given the speeds at which you are saying Superman can move, in fact he can do everything worth doing in the context of a RPG scenario effectively simultaneously.




That’s not me saying it, it’s DC Comics writers.  And yes, people have pointed this out as a big problem.



> This is a more general question that arises in any superhero fiction (and often in genre fiction more generally). In some Marvel comics (I think 70s Super-Villain Team-Ups) Magneto could control minds by manipulating blood flow in the brain by manipulating the iron in the blood. Why not do it all the time?




Agreed.



> Superman can (you've been emphasising) travel much much faster than light, yet he doesn't race around the world stopping every act of violence, or taking every gun from every villain, before anyone can react.




Yup.

Or more likely, taking those weapons from everyone, because moving that fast, he may not be able to ascertain which of all the living statues he encounters were actually the aggressors, because he isn’t all-seeing either, and presumably, as a mortal being, even he needs to rest.

(They did a storyline along those lines decades ago, hen he took out all the nukes,  Don't recall how that one ended, though.)

Of course, what’s to stop someone from rearming themselves when he does so? 

First he gets the guns.  Then the knives.  Then the rocks.  Then the _poin-ted _sticks. Then the bananas.  It’s a never ending job, protecting humans from themselves.  Logically, the only way to solve the problem of human on human violence is to get rid of all the humans.

(OK, that’s more of a Sci-Fi storyline, not very comic book-y...at least not for fallen heroes.)



> Just like readers do (whether for an official No-Prize, or not) in a RPG we can construct our own explicit or implicit rationalistaions. And the system mechanics establish the rationing (eg in MHRP the GM can establish that Dr Doom was really a Doombot, but that costs points; Nick Fury can turn out to really be a Life Model Decoy, but that costs points; etc).
> 
> Playing a superhero game with the mindset and aesthetic expectations of ASL seems misguided.




ASL?



> You give your own counterexamples to this.




Of course- I want honest discussion, and not pointing out known exceptions exist wouldn’t be right.



> But this is incoherent. In our world, _the very same things that explain the square-cube law make it the case that there are no Pym particles or cosmic radiation _as those things exist in the Marvel Universes.




Agreed.  And no subatomic worlds for the Hulk to visit.



> There's no _physics_ there - in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge that explains the fundamental ways that the world is. It's all tropes - the use of particular vocabulary, paritcular sorts of fictional framing, etc - used to tell a story.




Agreed.

But the more you have to contort to answer the question ”why/how did this happen?”, the worse the story becomes.  Can you think of anyone into superheroes who thought the static electricity explanation for Spidey’s wall-walking was anything besides extremely bad writing?


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## dbm (Nov 8, 2019)

DrunkonDuty said:


> Genre conventions are, by my definition, plot armour.



This is the key, in my opinion. Super hero comics usually pit heroes again ‘appropriate’ enemies, which works fine in isolation but really stretches credibility when put into a more flexible RPG context. ‘What would happen if Superman went berserk in Batman’ is a non-question in the comics, as that just wouldn’t happen. I don’t claim to have read all the Batman vs Superman comics but I really doubt it has happened.

RPGs with built in mechanisms for genre conventions (e.g. having campaign aspects in Fate)  can mechanically enforce these. For everyone else, there is the social contract. And if you can’t agree on a social contact with your table for a game then it is simply the case that this game and system combo won’t work for your table.


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## pemerton (Nov 8, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> But the more you have to contort to answer the question ”why/how did this happen?”, the worse the story becomes.  Can you think of anyone into superheroes who thought the static electricity explanation for Spidey’s wall-walking was anything besides extremely bad writing?



I'm not familiar with that; it sounds a bit midichlorian-like. And like mid-chlorians, it seems to be the result of an attempt to transform genre tropes into would-be scientifid explanations.

The reason that Spidey can walk on walls is because he was bitten by a radioactive spider. We don't need more explanation than that! (And no more expalanation than that is available.)



Dannyalcatraz said:


> But if it doesn’t make sense- a device operating faster than it has any reason to be able to- that’s a solution that creates more problems.
> 
> (This isn’t unique to comics.  You see it in all kinds of fiction.)
> 
> ...



If you think this sort of thing is a big problem, then I don't see how you can take superheroes very seriously as a genre? (Except very austere versions, perhaps, like Watchmen? Maybe the Phantom?)

I've always assumed that if someone wants to play a supers RPG, then they're prepared to just suck up issues like superfast heroes nevertheless sometimes being too slow, or The Hulk's pants not tearing, etc.



Dannyalcatraz said:


> ASL?



Advanced Squad Leader.


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## pemerton (Nov 8, 2019)

dbm said:


> This is the key, in my opinion. Super hero comics usually pit heroes again ‘appropriate’ enemies, which works fine in isolation but really stretches credibility when put into a more flexible RPG context.work for your table.



But _superheroes_ also includes teams as part of the genre. And those teams can be like the Avengers (Hawkeye together with Beast together with Thor) or the New Mutants (Cypher with Wolfsbane with Sunspot and Cannonball).

A RPG that is going to do justice to this genre needs to be able to manage _story impact_ of a character in different terms from _physical impact_ or _scientifically ascertainable impact_. This is what GURPS struggles with; whereas HeroQuest revised or Marvel Heroic RP have no trouble with it.


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## dbm (Nov 8, 2019)

pemerton said:


> A RPG that is going to do justice to this genre needs to be able to manage _story impact_ of a character in different terms from _physical impact_ or _scientifically ascertainable impact *whilst being fun to play*_



Fixed that for you 

I jest, but my group simply bounce off HeroQuest, Fate, Cortex+ and other games with a strong narrative viewpoint as opposed to a (for want of a better word...) simulationist view point. So, for my group GURPS with its limitations would be a better super hero system than Marvel Heroic.

I would never try to sell GURPS as the answer to every question of ‘what system should I play for X’ for everyone. But for _some_ people it is the right answer. A better answer than Cortex+ etc.

The OP wanted to understand GURPS so they can decide for themselves if it would be a good game for them. Hopefully the information being provided by people who play GURPS is helping with that.


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## macd21 (Nov 8, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> _Sometimes._
> 
> But if Supes simply _snapped_ with no precursors, Bats would have to be an Oracle or time traveler to avoid:
> View attachment 115528
> ...




IMO if you want to run a game with Batman and Superman in the same team, then you need to accept some compromises. And IMO DM Fiat is inferior to giving the players the tools to handle these issues. Superman snaps and attacks Batman? PC spends a Batpoint: ‘Good thing Superman gave me a kryptonite ring to defend myself with if he ever went rogue!’ Things continue to escalate. Spends second : ‘looks like it’s time to get out my armoury of kryptonite weapons that I keep for emergencies!’ Superman continues to be unreasonable. Third Batpoint: ‘I set off the Kryptonite Nuke.’


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## Umbran (Nov 8, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Umbran, I’m criticizing from the basis of the comic books’ *actual storylines.*




As I said - if you have a problem with the genre itself, we can't help you with that.  We cannot change the genre itself - we can at best munge a game system into emulating it..



> It should also be noted that in previous panels in that sequence, he says he knows what his top speed is...but that he hasn’t traveled like this ”since Pa.”  AFAIK, at no point is there an indication that- like the Flash- he has traveled through time.




Note:  Flash typically needs the "Cosmic Treadmill" to travel in time.  His speed alone is not sufficient.  



> So, even if “trillion mph“ punch is off, according to the writers creating the DC universe, Superman can indeed travel several orders of magnitude faster than light in normal space.  Maybe not all day, every day, but occasionally is enough to be problematic.




Except, of course, the real issue here is not the action, so much as it is the nonsensical labels the writers put on it.  Whether Superman knows what an attosecond is isn't the issue - whether the writers do is.  

So, again, I say you are getting mussed up by how a genre with inconsistent physics is using physics words, and then holding it to that by putting it into a physics simulation, and finding issues with the results...

Well, _what else did you expec_t?

The thing that's been said several times, which seems to be getting ignored, is that the physics simulation form _does not work well for superhero comics!_.  Should I say that in all caps, so it comes across? 

_PHYSICS SIM GAMES (and interpretations) DON'T WORK WELL FOR SUPERHERO COMICS!_

Thik of this instead in terms of the narrative.  Superman does not have the power: "moves faster than light".  He really has the power, "moves at the speed of plot".  When he pushes to the point seem in the segment you show, from our perspective, what is going on is the GM is asking, "How much do you want to put into saving her?  You may be able to do it, but it'll cost you..."



> If, in the stated scenario, Batman is indeed badass enough to anticipate that previously perfectly fine Superman with that kind of speed & power is homicidally snapping RIGHT NOW so well that he survives, he has no business being outwitted by The Joker or Bane.




Again, with asking for consistency?

Superman comics are not true crime novels.  Nor are they biographies.  They are mythologies.  Mythology isn't clean, or consistent.  Mythology is built over generations by various authors, and sometimes the stories don't mesh too well.  Asking DC comics depictions of Superman over the decades to be consistent is like asking the musical _Camelot_, Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_, and Peter David's _Knight Life_, to be consistent.  

They are consistent in THEME.  Not in the specifics of what characters can physically do.



> ....so he‘s hyper aware of Kryptonian psychology and microexpression? Or his in particular?  Do Kryptonians HAVE microexpressions?  Hell- do Kryptonians change from sane to insane at humanlike speeds, or are they faster?  Or slower?




Fictionally, Superman is positioned as an immigrant with superpowers.  He grew up among us - his displayed emotions and reactions are entirely human, as are those of other Kryptonians.  Kryptonians blend in with humans perfectly, without setting off anyone's sense of the uncanny valley.  Humans behave like Kryptonians.  Same for Daxamites, who are positioned as alternate Kryptonians.  Anyone who knows evolutionary science would take this to be complete horsepucky, but we are also talking about a universe in which you have multiple species with outward morphology that's basically indistinguishible from each other anyway.  

If you want a character who might not signal as a human being, you want Martian Manhunter, who is positioned as an Alien Among Us.  J'onn J'onzz is frequently depicted with what humans would call a flat affect, and hard to read.  J'onn also has occaisional trouble understanding human choices, and humans sometimes don't quite get him.  He can pass when he wants to, because he can also shapeshift and read minds to meet expectations, but sometimes he doesn't use that power.  He is, however, not quite as strong or fast, so he doesn't pose the same problems as Superman, either.



> Even for The World’s Greatest Detective, anticipating Supes‘ trigger flipping would require great fortune indeed.




Well, he is a god.  Not just in the "among the most powerful" sense, but in the mythological sense.  



> I‘m not positing brawn beats brains 100% either, but I AM saying there are times when Batman can and will be caught flat and unprepared, and will not be able to save himself or the person he’s trying to save.




Sure.  Game mechanics do not _ensure_ success.  We are only arguing that you _apply the mechanic_ rather than pre-decide, "Bats can't succeed at this."  



> That’s how Bane beat him.




So, let's go back to one of the very first superhero role playing games - "FASERIP" Marvel Super Heroes.  It had the concept of "karma points".  Characters of a given power level could stretch their abilities up to higher levels... but it cost them Karma.  When they ran out of karma, they were at the mercy of dice.

So, for our purposes... Bats ran out of Karma.  And then, he's a little more vulnerable.



> I didn’t say he was unreadable, but he IS an alien.  Just because he looks like us doesn’t mean he has all the same kind of tells as we do.  They may count megalomaniacs (Zod), serial killers (Faora) and psychopaths (Rog-Ar) among their number, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to react to a Rorschach test like an insane human.




Except, they totally do.  I mean, in canon, it is all over the place that Superman's expressions are entirely human - he hangs his head when ashamed or sad.  He furrows his brow and grits his teeth when angry.  He smiles and laughs.  Imagine - Clark Kent and Lois Lane will not be attracted to each other if their sub-conscious tells are not readable to each other!  The comics very specifically draw Kryptonians and Daxamites with entirely human expressions.  For whatever reason, they are exactly like humans in these respects.


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## The Crimson Binome (Nov 8, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> ....so he‘s hyper aware of Kryptonian psychology and microexpression?  Or his in particular?



We know that Batman is very aware of Martian body language, and J'onn is probably a better actor than Clark is. Of course, that's not really the deciding factor here, after choosing "Hino Rei" for a pseudonym.


Spoiler


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## Umbran (Nov 8, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> We know that Batman is very aware of Martian body language, and J'onn is probably a better actor than Clark is.




Nice catch!



> Of course, that's not really the deciding factor here, after choosing "Hino Rei" for a pseudonym.




He thought the name "Ford Prefect" would be nicely inconspicuous...


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## aramis erak (Nov 9, 2019)

ASL generally refers to either American Sign Language or Advanced Squad Leader.


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## pemerton (Nov 9, 2019)

dbm said:


> I would never try to sell GURPS as the answer to every question of ‘what system should I play for X’ for everyone. But for _some_ people it is the right answer. A better answer than Cortex+ etc.
> 
> The OP wanted to understand GURPS so they can decide for themselves if it would be a good game for them. Hopefully the information being provided by people who play GURPS is helping with that.



Back on the first page (and in some follow-ups too) I posted about my (very extensive) RM experience, and what the appeal is. I've never played GURPS, but I think its appeal is pretty close to RM.

But I don't think you can do supers with RM. Or, rather, while the PCs might look superheroes, the _stories_ won't look like superhero comics.


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## Neonchameleon (Nov 9, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Back on the first page (and in some follow-ups too) I posted about my (very extensive) RM experience, and what the appeal is. I've never played GURPS, but I think its appeal is pretty close to RM.
> 
> But I don't think you can do supers with RM. Or, rather, while the PCs might look superheroes, the _stories_ won't look like superhero comics.




If I'd touched MERP (or even seen the rulebook) in the last decade and a half I might be tempted to take this as a challenge to hack. But it would end up as very different to MERP.

One thing I'm sure about - the armour types would be replaced by defense types, and "Invulnerable" defenses like Superman's and The Hulk's would take very little damage other from banes (kryptonite, etc.) but instead of bleeding a la Rolemaster there would be environmental damage and bullet ricochets that endangered the bystanders. But we're getting very deep into hack territory here.


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## pemerton (Nov 9, 2019)

Neonchameleon said:


> If I'd touched MERP (or even seen the rulebook) in the last decade and a half I might be tempted to take this as a challenge to hack. But it would end up as very different to MERP.
> 
> One thing I'm sure about - the armour types would be replaced by defense types, and "Invulnerable" defenses like Superman's and The Hulk's would take very little damage other from banes (kryptonite, etc.) but instead of bleeding a la Rolemaster there would be environmental damage and bullet ricochets that endangered the bystanders. But we're getting very deep into hack territory here.



Modelling superheroes can be done with the PC build elements in RM, though not with the existing build rules.

Eg Superman etc have Invulenrability (as per the spell in RMC I), which is half concussion hits and only super-large crits. Jean Grey has the Mentalist lists, and Telepathy, to 50th level with no ESF and a very big PP pool. Wolverine has Self Healing to 50th level with no PP required (or maybe a max number of PP to spend per round). Etc.

But you would need completely new resolution rules to get anything like superhero gameplay - like the ricochet rules you mention. Personally I don't think it would be worth it. Just go with Champions!


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## Beleriphon (Nov 9, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I’ve seen “evil Supeman“ type stories printed in Marvel, Dark Horse and other companies’ lines, but the Daxamite swap would be an interesting one for me.  Imagine, the Daxamite teams up with Lex Luthor, who thinks his stockpile of kryptonite will keep his hand on “Superman’s“ leash.   Which seemingly works fine until the ruse is dropped...




Isn't this where Flaw: Deadly Lead Allergy comes into play for GURPS? Does that mean Daxamites are actually really vulnerable to most small calibre handguns in GURPS?


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## dbm (Nov 9, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Back on the first page (and in some follow-ups too) I posted about my (very extensive) RM experience, and what the appeal is. I've never played GURPS, but I think its appeal is pretty close to RM.
> 
> But I don't think you can do supers with RM. Or, rather, while the PCs might look superheroes, the _stories_ won't look like superhero comics.



Rolemaster was our game-of-choice for years, across both Second Edition and Standard Edition. The longest running campaign I have ever played in is still a RM campaign. So I am well aware of its strengths and quirks.

Comparing any attempt to run supers with RM versus GURPS is meaningless. The amount of effort needed to get RM like a supers game would be at least one order of magnitude, probably two or even three orders of magnitude larger than running the game in GURPS.

RM is too similar to DnD and, I am sure you will know, originally started off as a set of optional rule systems you could bolt-on to your DnD game. To run supers in DnD you need to make so many changes it basically becomes a completely new game - Mutants & Masterminds. M&M now has so few shared components with DnD OGL it’s a vestigial relationship at most.

GURPS 3e sucked at supers, big time. 3e was a time of rapid expansion for GURPS, and every genre book was standalone, with limited shared design space (yay for the thread topic!). The most egregious example of this was Supers vs Psionics. Both games include psionic powers, but the cost of these powers was at least twice as expensive in Supers. If you tried to mash-up the psychic systems from the two books, any character made with Psionic version would wipe the floor with a Supers version (and throw shade at most other super characters with the same point total, too). This is because the two genre books were created with different baseline assumptions.

GURPS 4e (which is now 15 years old) was written to take all the stuff created across the lifetime of 3e (which itself lasted 16 years), distill it down, find the good stuff and eliminate as much as the rules cruft as possible. Yes, there are still a lot of rules available in GURPS but the vast majority of those rules all exist in the two core books (Characters and Campaigns). The other books provide guidance on _how to use the existing rules_ to play a game of the type you (the hypothetical ‘you’) are looking for. They may provide more detailed options to increase the emphasis on different aspects, but these are just that - options. There are also ever more books with pre-made materials so that you don’t need to create everything whole-cloth if you are the GM.

Which brings me back to the core question: what is the GURPS design perspective? It is that people want to play different games, and there isn’t a perfect (or even imperfect, in many cases) system already existing that will support those games. And even if there was, why learn a new system with rules that are 70-80% new ways of doing the same thing when you can instead have one system you learn that covers core actions with the same rules and just tops-up with optional rules for the more unique stuff?

Also, since RPGs are about a shared experience and there is an element of chance (as opposed to books etc. where everything runs on author fiat) there needs to be a mechanism to help ensure all players have the same amount of spot light time / game impact. There are several different ways of doing this. GURPS has tried to use a fairly scientific approach as the observable world is the most accessible benchmark we have available. If you like games with strong internal logic, then you will probably find GURPS enjoyable. If you think this kind of stuff gets in the way of having a cool game with your friends then there are other systems which might be a better fit for your needs.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 19, 2019)

@Umbran 


> Again, with asking for consistency?




Nope.  

I’m pointing out comics are RIFE with inconsistencies, many of which are addressed with plot armor, handwavium, and the like.  Because, as you no doubt realize- as do most in this thread- writers often have only the most fleeting acquaintances with the Sci-Fi terminology they use.

Complicating things further, what a given character can do can vary wildly upon the writers assigned to the title.  Character bibles (if they exist) for superhero comics are suggestions and guidelines, not rulebooks.

RPGs based on comic, though, ARE rulebooks.  Games that rely on/permit too much plot armor & handwavium lose internal coherence.  And a loss of consistency _in a game/campaign _can kill it.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 19, 2019)

macd21 said:


> IMO if you want to run a game with Batman and Superman in the same team, then you need to accept some compromises. And IMO DM Fiat is inferior to giving the players the tools to handle these issues. Superman snaps and attacks Batman? PC spends a Batpoint: ‘Good thing Superman gave me a kryptonite ring to defend myself with if he ever went rogue!’ Things continue to escalate. Spends second : ‘looks like it’s time to get out my armoury of kryptonite weapons that I keep for emergencies!’ Superman continues to be unreasonable. Third Batpoint: ‘I set off the Kryptonite Nuke.’



From this post, it looks to me like only Batman gets those plot-shaping “points”.

Where’s Snapped Superman’s?  
Point 1: “Glad I gave Batman that fake kryptonite to put him at ease?”

Point 2: “I wonder when he’ll realize I used my heat vision to ruin the circuits of his kryptonite arsenal?”

Point 3: “While he’s trying to trigger that deadman switch, I’ll zip out to the asteroid belt and start lobbing rocks in his general direction.  Nuking Bats from space is the only way to be sure.”


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## macd21 (Nov 19, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> From this post, it looks to me like only Batman gets those plot-shaping “points”.
> 
> Where’s Snapped Superman’s?
> Point 1: “Glad I gave Batman that fake kryptonite to put him at ease?”
> ...




Superman gets plot points if he has enough chargen points left over for them after buying up his strength, speed, heat vision, flight etc.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 19, 2019)

pemerton said:


> I'm not familiar with that; it sounds a bit midichlorian-like. And like mid-chlorians, it seems to be the result of an attempt to transform genre tropes into would-be scientifid explanations.
> 
> The reason that Spidey can walk on walls is because he was bitten by a radioactive spider. We don't need more explanation than that! (And no more expalanation than that is available.)



Spectacular Spider Man, 134-136.  








						Spectacular Spider-Man #134-136 : SuperMegaMonkey : chronocomic
					





					www.supermegamonkey.net
				




Thankfully, an idea that quickly got ignored and replaced with other unlikely rationales for the ability that are less obviously wrong.



> If you think this sort of thing is a big problem, then I don't see how you can take superheroes very seriously as a genre? (Except very austere versions, perhaps, like Watchmen? Maybe the Phantom?)




Dude, I’ve been reading superhero comics since my youth, mostly Marvel & DC.  My collection goes back to the early 1960s, and I only stopped in the late 1990s because of space considerations.

I enjoy the HELL out of superheroic comics, fiction like _Wildcards_ and (to this day) playing the games.  None of which stops me from noticing the inconsistencies.

To me, they’re no more a barrier to my enjoyment of THAT fiction than 10klb flying fire-breathing reptilians are for fantasy or galaxy spanning empires for Sci-Fi.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 19, 2019)

Oh yeah...@Umbran 

Why should we assume Superman is an “easy read“ for Batman?  As in, tipping Bats off that he’s going kookoo?


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## Umbran (Nov 19, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I’m pointing out comics are RIFE with inconsistencies...




I am not sure why you are doing so... given that this point has been in... pretty much every post of mine in the thread?  I mean, like, you didn't think I was aware of this, or something?



> RPGs based on comic, though, ARE rulebooks.  Games that rely on/permit too much plot armor & handwavium lose internal coherence.  And a loss of consistency _in a game/campaign _can kill it.




Again... (I think we are getting repetitive here, perhaps circular)  if you are treating your rules as a physics engine, yes - you'll lose coherent physics.  Because, as we both clearly agree, the comics do not have consistent and coherent physics to begin with.  

But, physics models are not the only way to get coherent game play and resulting stories.  If you stop worrying about _exactly how much_ the Big Strong Guy can lift, and just remember that he's a Big Strong Guy, what you get out can be quite consistent.

Now, that may not be a system you particularly want to play.  But, again... the genre is what it is - we can't fix that for you.  Not all genres can be satisfactorily modeled with all system types - to get a satisfactory game play, you have to pick the right system for the job.

Otherwise, you end up complaining that you can't eat soup with a fork.


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## pemerton (Nov 19, 2019)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I enjoy the HELL out of superheroic comics, fiction like _Wildcards_ and (to this day) playing the games.  None of which stops me from noticing the inconsistencies.
> 
> To me, they’re no more a barrier to my enjoyment of THAT fiction than 10klb flying fire-breathing reptilians are for fantasy or galaxy spanning empires for Sci-Fi.





Dannyalcatraz said:


> RPGs based on comic, though, ARE rulebooks.  Games that rely on/permit too much plot armor & handwavium lose internal coherence.  And a loss of consistency _in a game/campaign _can kill it.



Given the first quoted passage here, I don't get the second.

As @Umbran has said, It's easy to have rules that are consistent qua rules but have no trouble coping with superheor fiction. Examples have been given in this thread multiple times by multiple posters: Marvel Heroic RP; HeroQuest revised; and I would expect Fate, though others are better qualified than me to judge that.

For instance, in MHRP it costs a plot point to perform a power-related stunt and add a d8 to the dice pool. Whether that stunt is Electro using electricity control to interfere with Spidey's climbing, or Magneto controlling iron in someone's blood, or Superman making a superfast punch, the system can handle it.

I'm not getting what the issue is.


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## Argyle King (Nov 26, 2019)

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find that have some semblance of "realness" adds to the fantasy of the game rather than getting in the way of it.  There are plenty of rules I ignore because they do not fit what I am trying to do with a game, but -even when doing some handwaving of the system- I have found that GURPS creates something which is more within the general ballpark of what I want from storytelling and narrative conflict resolution than many other games.


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## Neonchameleon (Dec 11, 2019)

I think that everyone finds that some semblance of realness adds to the fantasy. What they also find is that time spent interacting with the mechanics takes away from the fantasy - and that realness is setting-dependent.


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## innerdude (Dec 13, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> -even when doing some handwaving of the system- I have found that GURPS creates something which is more within the general ballpark of what I want from storytelling and narrative conflict resolution than many other games.




Whereas my experience has been the 180-degree polar opposite.

No matter what genre or setting, GURPS to me always feels overly mechanical, stilted, and sterile. I'm sure the experience level and quality of GMs have played a role in this as well, but GURPS certainly hasn't been part of the solution either.


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## Argyle King (Dec 14, 2019)

innerdude said:


> Whereas my experience has been the 180-degree polar opposite.
> 
> No matter what genre or setting, GURPS to me always feels overly mechanical, stilted, and sterile. I'm sure the GMs I've had have played a role in this eventuality as well, but GURPS certainly hasn't been part of the solution either.




just different preferences...

If it matters, I'm most familiar with GURPS 4th Edition.

For me, GURPS addressed the gripes I had with the d20 games I had been playing at the time.  The rules less often got in the way of the vision I had for stories I wanted to tell and worlds I wanted to build.  Ironically, I think, in the end, it was the things I liked about those other games which had more influence in pushing me toward GURPS more so than the things I disliked about them.

I also found GURPS rules to be more intuitive to me.  A lot of people criticize the game for being complicated, but I don't find remembering GURPS rules to be any more complicated than the various feats, class abilities, spells, and etc of D&D.  In many ways, I find it less complicated.

It's not perfect.  There are styles of play which I feel aren't served by the system very well.


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## Argyle King (Dec 14, 2019)

Umbran said:


> .
> 
> Otherwise, you end up complaining that you can't eat soup with a fork.





I think all of that is possibly ignoring the possibility of the soup being the problem, not the fork.  With better and more robust ingredients, the soup can become a nice hearty stew -a stew which can be eaten by both the person using a spoon and the person using a fork.


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## Umbran (Dec 14, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> I think all of that is possibly ignoring the possibility of the soup being the problem, not the fork.




The soup is what it has been for longer than any poster here has been alive.  If you approach it with a fork, and don't realize that's going to be difficult, that isn't exactly a problem with the soup.  Sorry.



> With better and more robust ingredients, the soup can become a nice hearty stew -a stew which can be eaten by both the person using a spoon and the person using a fork.




Aside from mis-identifying which bit is which in my analogy, not all soups can be made into stews in a way that is palatable to everyone.  And, that's kind of the point - we _should not try_ to make all games work well for everyone.  Sometimes two people have valid, but incompatible, desires.


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## Neonchameleon (Dec 14, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> For me, GURPS addressed the gripes I had with the d20 games I had been playing at the time.  The rules less often got in the way of the vision I had for stories I wanted to tell and worlds I wanted to build.  Ironically, I think, in the end, it was the things I liked about those other games which had more influence in pushing me toward GURPS more so than the things I disliked about them.
> 
> I also found GURPS rules to be more intuitive to me.  A lot of people criticize the game for being complicated, but I don't find remembering GURPS rules to be any more complicated than the various feats, class abilities, spells, and etc of D&D.  In many ways, I find it less complicated.




This makes sense to me - D20 goes in quite hard on "the game rules are the physics engine of the world" (with it being hardcoded to the extent that someone calculated the number of chickens in Greyhawk) - and when it comes to rules-as-physics GURPS is one of the best and most detailed, while D20 is fighting hard against D&D having been designed as a slightly abstract game first and Gygax having railed against realism in games.


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## Argyle King (Dec 14, 2019)

Umbran said:


> The soup is what it has been for longer than any poster here has been alive.  If you approach it with a fork, and don't realize that's going to be difficult, that isn't exactly a problem with the soup.  Sorry.




I'm not so sure I'd agree. That line of thinking would, I think, preclude soup from ever having been invented in the first place. At some point, the various individual components of soup were deemed less desirable than the culinary options which came before.


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## Umbran (Dec 15, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> I'm not so sure I'd agree. That line of thinking would, I think, preclude soup from ever having been invented in the first place.




I don't see why.  I mean, unless you haven't worked out the very basic technology of the spoon...


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## John Dallman (Dec 15, 2019)

Umbran said:


> I don't see why.  I mean, unless you haven't worked out the very basic technology of the spoon...



I think the metaphor has got confused. I'm certainly confused about who's saying what.


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## Argyle King (Dec 16, 2019)

(curiosity) What utensil do you typically use while eating ramen noodles?

Also, while I somewhat agree with the earlier discussion that sometimes all you need to know is that the strong guy is strong, I personally feel that there are times when the narrative inconsistency of comics (and really, literature, movies, and storytelling in general) can hamper the quality of the story.  Tastes vary, and what is a mental block to buying into a story for one person may not be noticeable at all to someone else; additionally, those media have a different structure than an interactive game -so certain things work better/worse than they might otherwise work when writing for a game.  

I suppose I'll put it this way: I'm of the belief that roleplaying games (and arguably comics) are (or should be) a lot like professional wrestling.  

When it's done well, I can buy into it -even though I know it's a show.  I'm willing to accept a lot of fantastic and unrealistic things, but -when it's done well and done in a way which really sucks in the audience- it's done with an underlying edge of reality.  With adequate explanation and good-ish writing to flesh out and define the character, I'm willing to buy into Undertaker being some sort of zombie or undead revenant.  He's a supernatural force, but there's some idea about how his powers work and some in-universe shared understanding of his strengths and weaknesses which allows for that character to exist on the same stage as a beer-drinking bald redneck from Texas and have the resulting product somehow make sense.  In contrast, when it's done poorly, it's hard to buy into even a simpler character and simpler concepts which lack any of those supernatural elements.  I can't necessarily explain why, but there are actually times when a wrestler without any of those elements actually seems less believable.

I guess what I'm trying to say (and perhaps doing poorly) is that I agree that sometimes all you need to know is that strong guy is strong guy. However, sometimes, it can help the story to have some nuance to the hows and whys behind strong guy being strong guy. That's especially true when a narrative experience is being crafted and consumed by a collective group of people.

In the end... I dunno... maybe there are times when chopsticks or just eating straight from the bowl is the right answer.


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## pemerton (Dec 17, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> I guess what I'm trying to say (and perhaps doing poorly) is that I agree that sometimes all you need to know is that strong guy is strong guy. However, sometimes, it can help the story to have some nuance to the hows and whys behind strong guy being strong guy.



I doubt that this is very controversial. But what counts as _nuance as to the hows and whys behind strong guy being strong guy_? In GURPS, that nuance is build points and the associated system build elements. That will produce one sort of play experience (again, my analogous experience in this respect is Rolemaster). In Marvel Heroic RP, that nuance is (probably) a distinction plus a SFX or two plus backstory. That will produce a different sort of play experience, in which the number of tons that strong guy can bench press will be less important to what happens than the framing resulting from character history/backstory plus the immediate details of the GM-established situation.

You can't capture these real difference in experience by reference to nuances about hows and whys.


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## Argyle King (Dec 17, 2019)

pemerton said:


> I doubt that this is very controversial. But what counts as _nuance as to the hows and whys behind strong guy being strong guy_? In GURPS, that nuance is build points and the associated system build elements. That will produce one sort of play experience (again, my analogous experience in this respect is Rolemaster). In Marvel Heroic RP, that nuance is (probably) a distinction plus a SFX or two plus backstory. That will produce a different sort of play experience, in which the number of tons that strong guy can bench press will be less important to what happens than the framing resulting from character history/backstory plus the immediate details of the GM-established situation.
> 
> You can't capture these real difference in experience by reference to nuances about hows and whys.





I have no experience with the Marvel game. Though, I assume it contains some way to determine who wins when Strong Guy attempts to match strength with Power Lad.


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## pemerton (Dec 17, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> I have no experience with the Marvel game. Though, I assume it contains some way to determine who wins when Strong Guy attempts to match strength with Power Lad.



Yes - it has an action resolution system and also it uses fictional considerations to govern the framing of permissible action declarations. This latter consideration becomes important when (eg) Power Man tries to arm wrestle the Hulk. Unless some other factor is at work which makes it possible for Power Man to win (eg the Hulk is suffering a Weakened complication) then the Hulk just wins.

If the framing is permissible then the appropriate dice are pooled, and rolled, and the outcome thereby determined.


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## Argyle King (Dec 17, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Yes - it has an action resolution system and also it uses fictional considerations to govern the framing of permissible action declarations. This latter consideration becomes important when (eg) Power Man tries to arm wrestle the Hulk. Unless some other factor is at work which makes it possible for Power Man to win (eg the Hulk is suffering a Weakened complication) then the Hulk just wins.
> 
> If the framing is permissible then the appropriate dice are pooled, and rolled, and the outcome thereby determined.




Hulk is recognizably a physically strong Marvel character, so that's likely a better example than using some generic "Strong Guy."

Correct me if I am wrong, but -from what you have said- it sounds as though there is some attempt to quantify what is plausible, given a shared understanding of the fiction.

Below is a small selection of canon Marvel characters:
Thing
Thanos
Beavis & Butthead

To save the world, Hulk needs to compete in an arm wrestling contest and win. 

Are the chances or plausibility of defeat at the hands of the various choices different?


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## aramis erak (Dec 17, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> Hulk is recognizably a physically strong Marvel character, so that's likely a better example than using some generic "Strong Guy."
> 
> Correct me if I am wrong, but -from what you have said- it sounds as though there is some attempt to quantify what is plausible, given a shared understanding of the fiction.
> 
> ...



Just shy of  even odds for Thing and Thanos... so plausibility 100%... 
Beavis and butthead would cheat, so Hulk definitely would lose, then smash them both, but like most of his victims of temper tantrums, somehow survive... If, for some reason, they don't cheat, he snaps both their forearms, dislocate their elbows, and breaks the table by accident.

Thing is, Supers are about the WORST genre for detailed strength scores.. the range is way too wide, and performance in the mags and the films is wonderfully inconsistent...


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## pemerton (Dec 17, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> Hulk is recognizably a physically strong Marvel character, so that's likely a better example than using some generic "Strong Guy."
> 
> Correct me if I am wrong, but -from what you have said- it sounds as though there is some attempt to quantify what is plausible, given a shared understanding of the fiction.
> 
> ...



I think Beavis & Butthead introduces genre issues that the system isn't necessarily the best at handling. Can I make it Aunt May instead? Hulk wins - there's no resolution required.

If it's Emma Frost (the White Queen) then the situation is more interesting, because if she gets to put a telepathic feeling of weakness onto the Hulk then maybe she can defeat him. If she's in a mutant-shutdown zone, then again Hulk wins with no resolution required because Emma Frost as a normal person can't beat the Hulk.


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## BronzeDragon (Dec 17, 2019)

Damn, OP, you can really pick'em...

GURPS Supers is *the* worst possible GURPS iteration. It does powers very poorly, and I've never seen it play well at the table.

The system is exceptional at handling realistic games. GURPS WW2 is amazingly well done and runs like a dream in actual play. GURPS Space wouldn't be my first pick (Traveller all the way), but it still plays well. GURPS Vikings, Ancient Rome, Middle Ages, all of those play really well.

As someone put it before, GURPS is a toolkit. It presents you with a great deal of options, but you have to be savvy enough to get yourself organized around what you actually want from the system. The sourcebooks tend to provide that organization, and are often exceptionally well-researched.

But if you really wanna go Supers, just get FASERIP or DC Heroes. A lot fewer headaches and systems actually designed around the interaction of powers.


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## DrunkonDuty (Dec 17, 2019)

I love FASERIP. Very quick and intuitive.
I also love Champions. Not so quick and requires more system mastery but very good at detailing a very wide range of power levels.

I've gotta say I never liked GURPS Supers but, like many posters here, I find it a good system for more "realistic" genres. I remember with great fondness a GURPS swashbuckling game from back in the olden days.


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## Argyle King (Dec 18, 2019)

I would agree that GURPS tends to do better with "realistic" genres.

Personally, I've had success running Supers games, but that success has come from wanting to add an underlying edge of reality. (Which isn't the same as saying it was realistic; I simply wanted to address elements which are typically glossed over or handwaived in a typical comic.)


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## Argyle King (Dec 18, 2019)

pemerton said:


> I think Beavis & Butthead introduces genre issues that the system isn't necessarily the best at handling. Can I make it Aunt May instead? Hulk wins - there's no resolution required.
> 
> If it's Emma Frost (the White Queen) then the situation is more interesting, because if she gets to put a telepathic feeling of weakness onto the Hulk then maybe she can defeat him. If she's in a mutant-shutdown zone, then again Hulk wins with no resolution required because Emma Frost as a normal person can't beat the Hulk.





How would a character like Squirrel Girl be handled?


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## Numidius (Dec 18, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> How would a character like Squirrel Girl be handled?



With care, of course


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## pemerton (Dec 19, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> How would a character like Squirrel Girl be handled?



I'm relying on Wikipedia here:

a furry, prehensile tail roughly 3–4 feet long, sizable buck teeth strong enough to chew through wood, and superhuman strength and agility that allows her to easily jump between trees. Her fingers have sharp claws that assist her with climbing, and she possesses retractable "knuckle spikes" roughly 2-3 inches long on each hand. Most importantly, she can communicate with and understand squirrels, but does not communicate with squirrels telepathically. Squirrels have also been depicted as understanding her when she speaks in English.​
That looks like Enhanced (d8) or Superhuman (d10) Strength, similar Reflexes, Climbing d8, Leaping d6, Weapons d8. Probably also Squirrel Control d6 with an SFX to step up squirrel-related assets. Probably one or two other SFX but I'd need to know a bit more about them to make useful suggestions.

Her specialties (roughly, skills) would seem to be Psych and Tech Expert. (Judging from a quick skim of that Wikipedia entry). Maybe also Acrobatics Expert.

Is this the sort of answer you're looking for? Or are you asking more about quirk/comedy? Both Deadpool and She-Hulk have "breaking 4th wall" SFXs that allow stepping down a Doom Pool die. Maybe that would also fit Squirrel Girl.


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## pemerton (Dec 19, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> How would a character like Squirrel Girl be handled?



A follow-up - are you meaning _Squirrel Girl vs Hulk_?

Hulk has Godlike Strength d12 and the SFXs _Strongest There Is! _and H_ulk Smash! _

In a reaction against an opponent with a Strength power trait, spend 1 PP or step up your emotional stress to add a die equal to the opponent’s Strength to your dice pool.

Against a single opponent, double a Gamma-Charged Genetics die. Remove the highest-rolling die and add another die to your total.​
If the table, given whatever is established in the fiction (maybe Squirrel Girl is tickling Hulk with her tail), wants the arm-wrestle to go to resolution rather than just declaring "Hulk wins", Hulk is likely to have a bigger pool with bigger dice and so has a pretty good chance of winning.


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## Umbran (Dec 19, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> How would a character like Squirrel Girl be handled?




Squirrel Girl is a difficult character to deal with, in that she doesn't really play by the same rules as everyone else.  The fiction establishes successes for her that, by other things established in the fiction, should not work, and does not explain these successes.

F'rex - she defeats Dr. Doom with a swarm of squirrels.  Doom's armor is well established as being impervious to anything squirrels can dish out, but she won anyway.  Why?  _shrug_. She's the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. SHe beats Thanos (one of the most powerful villains extant) offscreen, with no explanation given.

It is the lack of explanation that makes it difficult to build in game terms.  It is rather like being Squirrel Girl is secondary to being Unbeatable.  So, SFX to the effect of "I am _Unbeatable_" would probably be called for.


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## Argyle King (Dec 19, 2019)

Part of my point is that, Squirrel Girl's power seems to be to simply win -even when it makes no sense at all that she should be able to.

That's an inconsistency which is (maybe) fun in a narrative comic. But, even there, I think it can often stretch what the reader is willing to buy into. 

In a game (or something which relies on a shared understand of success/failure,) I'm inclined toward believing that simply announcing an end result of an action without some manner of explanation would be unsatisfactory to most. From what I am hearing, the Marvel game attempts to have some method of quantifying how and why powers work. There's at least some idea and measurement concerning who is stronger, faster, smarter, etc.

Otherwise, I find the dismissive nature with which Beavis was treated to be unfair. His ability to transform into Cornholio wasn't even considered. Hulk gets TP'ed, cannot break out of the paper before being kicked in the nads, and loses.


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## pemerton (Dec 19, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Squirrel Girl is a difficult character to deal with, in that she doesn't really play by the same rules as everyone else.  The fiction establishes successes for her that, by other things established in the fiction, should not work, and does not explain these successes.
> 
> F'rex - she defeats Dr. Doom with a swarm of squirrels.  Doom's armor is well established as being impervious to anything squirrels can dish out, but she won anyway.  Why?  _shrug_. She's the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. SHe beats Thanos (one of the most powerful villains extant) offscreen, with no explanation given.
> 
> It is the lack of explanation that makes it difficult to build in game terms.  It is rather like being Squirrel Girl is secondary to being Unbeatable.  So, SFX to the effect of "I am _Unbeatable_" would probably be called for.





Johnny3D3D said:


> Part of my point is that, Squirrel Girl's power seems to be to simply win -even when it makes no sense at all that she should be able to.



In mechanical terms, for Marvel Heroic RP, this sounds to me like an ability to step down Doom Pool dice (I mentioned an example from Deadpool and She Hulk upthread). Perhaps also an ability to reroll by spending a PP - this would be the _Unbeatable_ suggested by Umbran.

The issue of whether squirrels vs Doom actually allows a check, or not, is a GM/table call. Whether Doom is statted as a major character (affiliations of d10, d8, d6) or minor character (affiliations of d8, d6, d4) is a GM call.

In these ways MHRP is "fiction first" - decisions have to be made about narrative weight and narrative possiblity _before_ the mechanics are deployed.


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## Umbran (Dec 20, 2019)

pemerton said:


> The issue of whether squirrels vs Doom actually allows a check, or not, is a GM/table call. Whether Doom is statted as a major character (affiliations of d10, d8, d6) or minor character (affiliations of d8, d6, d4) is a GM call.




The idea of having Doctor Doom be a minor character... it boggles the mind.



> In these ways MHRP is "fiction first" - decisions have to be made about narrative weight and narrative possiblity _before_ the mechanics are deployed.




Yes, well, that's kind of analogous to how we come by some of the inconsistencies of the superhero comics genre, which gives us issues if we are trying to use the comics as a guide - different GMs might make different calls on that - just like authors don't all do the same thing.  In _every other comic_, the idea of squirrels being an issue for Doctor Doom would be ludicrous.  In Squirrel Girl?  Nope, it can happen.  The narrative weight of anything Squirrel Girl does in her own comic is not consistent with the rest of the comics universe.


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## pemerton (Dec 20, 2019)

Umbran said:


> The idea of having Doctor Doom be a minor character... it boggles the mind.



Sure, but that seems to be one way of getting at what's going on in Squirrel Girl if you want to run a version of that in MHRP.

I'm not advocating for that (in general) and am not advocating for a Squirrel Girl game (in particular). But I think it is one of the devices that MHRP has available that helps answer the question that was asked.

Somewhat similarlly, if I was running a game with The Punisher, Cloak and Dagger I think it would be reasonable to apply/interpret Vehicle, Science and Tech skill in a more constrained way than if it was Iron Man, The Fantastic Four and Spidey.

I see this as part of what makes MHRP a better fit for supers (and frankly a lot of other non-gritty genre stuff) than GURPS.


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## Umbran (Dec 20, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Sure, but that seems to be one way of getting at what's going on in Squirrel Girl if you want to run a version of that in MHRP.




No argument.  It is more a comment on Squirrel Girl, and comics in general, than anything else.



> I see this as part of what makes MHRP a better fit for supers (and frankly a lot of other non-gritty genre stuff) than GURPS.




Again, no argument.  There's plenty of things GURPS does well.  4-color supers isn't one of them.


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