TheRPGSite

Over on the GURPS hacking thread, it was brought up that Steve Jackson will take the GURPS IP with him to his grave. That's his prerogative, and I'm not interesting in sneaking into someone else's pool party.  

So I decided to start my own party. Let me begin by setting down my design goals, as much for myself as for others.

Building a character will be done in distinct modules, with points sequestered between the categories. There may not even be points, simply arrays of abilities. Character can be classified by tiers, with higher tiers increasing the potency of the starting character. Depending upon the genre and tier, entire categories may appear. For example, in a Fantasy setting, the 'Species' Category appears, but it is absent in a realistic Western setting. Likewise, a Supers setting has a Superpowers category, while the Fantasy setting does not.

There are Character Creation categories that are universal, however.
1. Attributes - The basic aptitudes and physical traits that the character possesses. We're all familiar with this part. Attributes, in humans, range from 3-18.
2. Skills- The application of those aptitudes to specific tasks or sets of related tasks.
3. Psychology - The internal state of the character's mind. Because internal states are not easily quantifiable, I want to steer far away from the GURPS methods-- I've always found the idea that there's a definable value to say, Bloodlust, a bit silly. I'll go into my approach later.
4. Background - These are the events that have happened, perhaps even in the distant past, that have defined the character's place in the setting. It is important to note that these are all things that are linked intrinsically to the setting. Being hereditary nobility may mean little or everything depending on society's views on government.

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Action resolution is a fairly simple roll 3d6 and compare to a skill rating. Difficult tasks either add to the roll or subtract from the skill (depending on how it goes in the playtests).  There are a few benefits to a roll-under system: it's fast, it's easy to eyeball your chances of success, and its extremely easy for a newbie to understand how competent their character is.

That said, there are some drawbacks that I may have to workaround, and the biggest is skill contests. In a roll-over system, you just compare the two character's rolls. Whoever rolled higher, wins.  

So here's my first option: Roll 3d6 and subtract it from your skill. This gives a margin of victory, and the Margin of victory can be treated as the difficulty of an opposed check.

I'm not totally happy with that-- my wife is one of my players, and she has a hard time with math. My rule for RPG systems is that if I my wife can't play it, the system is too math heavy. I'm pretty numerically dyslexic myself, and its' really easy for me to get confused by numbers.

I don't want to give up on the roll under method just yet, but if it's untenable then so be it.

My complaint with the GURPS mental disadvantages is that too many players will take blood lust and sadism in the belief that sense of duty and code of honor are too restrictive.  Much like D&D's alignment system  where players will often play chaotic evil characters out of the belief that evil is less restrictive.

More mature players don't of course but I'm juggling half a dozen new 17 year old players at my store most Saturdays and I often go home feeling sick to my stomach and wondering why I bother.

I'm probably a bit farther down the road on my own GURPS replacement but I don't really know where I'm going with it.  I keep thinking that trying to capture another game's fan base is probably a waste of time.  To capture a decent chunk of the fanbase you have to be pretty close to what that game is doing.  Another problem is that HERO system already exists and is in many ways  simpler than GURPS but less realistic.

The question you have to ask yourself is "Do I want a new universal standard or just my own private little corner of the world."

If any such attempt fractures at all you end up with the OGL effect where in a couple years we wound up with around three dozen fairly significant variations on the theme.

I don't know how it would be done, but I'd like to suggest a more united approach and standard.

Why did D&D cross the road?  To get to the middle.

And I think the middle of the road would be the place to be if we wanted a united GURPS Alternative Solution to succeed.

Here's a couple points to consider.

1-10 stats.  Yes this divorces the game from GURPS and D&D a bit but it's a useful distinction.  First, it reduces the power of stats a bit and second GURPS really runs on a 10 - 15 scale most of the time when you think about it.  1-10 gives the same functional range, is a common way of rating things, and appeases the cult of stat normalization a bit, I don't think they'll really be pleased until everyone in GURPS has an 8 in their base stats and no one ever is allowed to buy a score higher than a 9.

BANG! Skills as core skill with additive specialties.  This cleans up the default skill mess.  You can just buy the core skills and not mess too much with the specialties if you don't want to while still having full access to a detailed skill treatment if you want it.

Roll Over target number.  This is a popular rule that's mathematically not any different than roll under and both methods can be supported but it opens up the full range of people who won't play roll under systems.  It also means the game can be flexible with governing stats and allows skills to simply be the number of points put into them.

I wouldn't want to get rid of points entirely, you lose too much of the potential user base that way but I would like to get it so you can make a character by picking a few modular objects (cards for instance) and calling it done.  I'm thinking template / lens cards of equal value rather than one point per card with different cards having different values.

In terms of points systems I'd like to argue for a no discounts approach.  The cost of an effect is the cost of an effect no-matter where you got it.  It's always bothered me when gadgets are always more powerful than innate powers in supers games.  I think it would be good to treat tech level as an omni-power.  The five points per TL in GURPS 4e is ridiculous when considered in the light of how powerful the steps are there.

I think it would be wise to have a physics based vehicle design system but it would be interesting if you could stat the vehicle with points and then reverse engineer its physical characteristics and tech-level with the design system.  It doesn't matter to everyone, but when trying to build a new platform with a follower base it doesn't hurt to remember that SJG has basically snubbed us vehicles gear heads for ten years now.

Spells are powers bought as skills.  I'm not quite sure how that works, probably no more points in the power than in the skill or something.  I'd rather have a shorter and more modular magic system.  More universal elements like Create or Enhance rather than the thousands of different spells approach.

At any rate, if such a project were to go forth, everyone would need to check their ego at the door, or the effort would fail.

"GURPS handles this well, and my Abstract System (I may call it that) uses the same method: A skill is based on the statistic, or general predisposition. It is relatively cheap to purchase the first few skill points, with costs rising precipitously after that."

You just solved the skill, stat divide issue for the cards, do you know that?

Remembering that I'm talking about broader skills here that cost two points and contain around a dozen specialties that cost one point here:

Stats cost four points per point.  Skills start at a -2 default (remember 1-10 stats).  A card buys four points of a skill, which is general professional competency and if we went roll under is also skill = stat, so a card buys two in the Skill (which costs four for skill = stat).  Specialty cards buy +1 in four specialties or +4 in one specialty.

But for those using the full point system, you have to buy one point in a specialty and upgrade it by another point to get a point in the skill and we can do that for every point in the broader skill.

Quote from: JonWake;778007So here's my first option: Roll 3d6 and subtract it from your skill. This gives a margin of victory, and the Margin of victory can be treated as the difficulty of an opposed check.

Blackjack is the easiest solution; whoever succeeds with the higher roll wins.

Another thing: We need to get strength scaling right from the start.  It's something GURPS hasn't managed to do once in its history.  Super strength levels should just be very high strength levels with perhaps some kind of comic book physics advantage to keep you on the pavement when your ground pressure hits ridiculous levels.

I'd also like the damage to scale well at the low end, so, a 5 St should be doing more than 1d damage.  The swing and thrust distinction can probably go as that should be reflected in scalable weapon stats anyhow.

So
ST 1: 1d+1
ST 2: 1d+2
ST 3: 2d-2
ST 4: 2d-1
ST 5: 2d
ST 6: 2d+1
ST 7: 2d+2
ST 8: 3d-2
ST 9: 3d-1
ST 10: 3d

?

Have y'all looked at Warrior Rogue & Mage?

It's a free game from Stargazer Games.
http://www.stargazergames.eu/games/warrior-rogue-mage/

WR&M is not a GURPS clone, but it's GURPS-ish. I have found it much more fun than GURPS Fantasy with a similar feel for customization.

Doesn't FUDGE have a pretty direct lineage from GURPS?

Only in that Stephan O'Sullivan was so sick of the GURPS approach that he created something completely different than it.

We're wanting to do something universal and open, so someone else's proprietary system is right out.  I think we also want only d6s so Mutants and Masterminds is out.

I was thinking about the turn sequence.  Why not in order of movement rate but with ten second rounds, the ability to pause or interrupt a move and one second attacks?

I'm not exactly clear on what the goals are, or in general how far people are intending to deviate from GURPS' underlying design, or a GURPS expert, but interesting project and I wish it well. :popcorn:

Quote from: apparition13;778056Blackjack is the easiest solution; whoever succeeds with the higher roll wins.

I think blackjack is more suited to linear rolls like d20 than 3d6. It wouldn't say it won't work, but it will have some strange results with 3d6, like very high skill levels not affecting opposed rolls that much.

Quote from: David Johansen;778125Only in that Stephan O'Sullivan was so sick of the GURPS approach that he created something completely different than it.

Basically this. A few things in FUDGE are yoinked from GURPS, a few other things are attempts to escape from its problems, like scaling and highly-attribute dependent skills. Fudge's design notes mention it a bit: http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/fud-des.html (http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/fud-des.html)

Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback.

I wrote a thousand words on my thinking about the relationships that stats have to real-world abilities, but then I hit the 'x' button and deleted it by accident.

So the super duper short version:
In the real world, the agility of a creature is directly related to the strength to weight ratio of the creature. In a game, there's no way to model this without a whole bunch of math that nobody outside of OCD loons wants to do with every  character.

This is important because it determines how the statistics scale. I'll go more into depth on it in a minute. I need food. And coffee.

Okay, so I have some coffee and my brains are working at almost peak capacity.

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I've gone over those a thousand and one times, and I think I'll end up going over them a thousand and one more times. Every iteration ends up looking much more like DnD stats than the last. Too few and you have the issue that GURPS has always had, which is everything basing off of a couple stats. Too many and you get the Rolemaster/Millenium's End issue, where the character is this mush of numbers that means nothing.  I think I've settled on five to seven stats.
Strength, Health, Dexterity, Intelligence, Focus, and Presence.

Aaaand we're right back to the Dungeons and Dragons Six. It's really hard not to reinvent the wheel here, folks.

I'm on the fence if Strength should become Size, or Body, or Physique, because of the implicit link with mass, HP, and slight negative correlation with movement speed, but honestly, I've gone down that pathway a dozen times today and it only leads to fiddly madness, which is what I'm trying to get away from in the first place.

So just like in GURPS, Hit Points are determined by Strength, and Fatigue Points are determined by Health.
Now, Strength and HP are roughly analogous to Mass. At least, they're linked. Which leads us to the big, $10,000.00 question: How does it scale?

Whoo, here's the tough part. If you're going to avoid insane number bloat, it has to scale by Logs. So I'll steal the HERO system calculation:
Overhead Press = 25*(2^(STR/5)), round up to the nearest 10's.
So a STR 10 character can lift 25*(2^(10/5)) = 25*4 = 100 lbs.
And a STR 18 character can lift (2^(18/5))*25 = 300 lbs.
For the record, the world record of overhead Press is 445 lbs, which is just under a STR of 21.

Next up, let's talk about damage.

But only if you are sticking to strictly realistic values.

Even so, one of the advantages of a points system is that it tends to produce trade-offs by default.  If you have a high Strength then you'll have fewer points to produce a high Dexterity.  It's mostly a matter of setting the cost relationships and total points properly.  If you give out too many points or have the wrong relationship between say the cost of everything then you get less realistic results.  Of course that can be good in a supers game and if there's one thing I feel GURPS 4e completely dropped the ball on its' supers.

On the other hand I think that the card based or per unit based system should probably be designed to support base-line, gritty / realistic play.  It's a matter of keeping everything's cost to one card or unit for the sake of making it very simple to make a character.

It might even tie into a card based LARP idea I have.

The term Strength covers the broadest generic effect so it's the stat.

The substats or advantages that it includes are size, build, and musculature.  But for a super hero you'd just buy Strength.

I'd lean towards fewer stats, one of the appeals of GURPS is the small stat blocks for cannon fodder.  More detail can be applied with advantages if needed.  But Thief: ST 5, DX 6, IQ 6, Athletics +1, Stealth +1, Throwing +1 should be a fully viable npc stat block.

I'd go full TFT.  Strength, Coordination, Intelligence and possibly Perception.  I like Perception as a stat because sometimes you need a generalized Perception and stacking sense modifiers feels wrong somehow.  Also, Perception as a stat lets rangers with average Intelligence still be fantastic woodsmen.

Health doesn't really need to be a stat if Strength = Hit Points.  But you could have a health stat and make Hit Points = Strength + Health.

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So here's the thing about GURPS unarmed damage: In the grand scheme of things, raw strength doesn't matter all that much when weapons are involved. Swords, axes, daggers, and spears are all pretty damn efficient. If you have the strength to move them around, the weapons do most of the work.
Oddly, the notable exception is Archery. It's the reverse of most games since D&D, but in order to do damage with the an arrow, you have to be able to draw the bow, and a powerful warbow can have a draw weight of upwards of 100 lbs.

So, there arise two options: Either have damage scale with the same logarithmic rate that lifting strength does, or have it scale at a different rate. I will say that scaling at a different rate is acceptable, provided that it is linked with how HP's scale.

Hit Points-- I have a love/hate relationship with them. On the one hand, they can be far more unforgiving than real world damage is, on the other, they can be far too forgiving. However, on the average, if you've set up damage and HP's right, they can be roughly accurate, so again, go for ease of use over teensy tiny accuracy.

So, that being the case, and an average human of about 100-150 lbs has 10 HP (I have another fancy function for mass by HP, but I'll just roll that into the table later), what does that mean for damage capacity?

So, if we look at some emergency medicine figures, knife wounds have a mortality rate of 0-4%, because about 85% of stab wounds would be qualified as 'scratches' only effecting subcutaneous tissue. Of the other 15% that require immediate medical attention, the mortality rate is 15%, so that puts the 'Instant Kill' chance at 2.25%, on average. This is, thankfully, right in the zone of the critical hit chance of 3-4 on 3d6, with a decent damage roll of a knife does 1d6-2 damage. (Let's assume that penetrating damage gets doubled after armor, and Lethal damage always does at least 1 point if there's no DR to stop it.)

So where does Strength enter into this?  Well, while the actual act of say, stabbing requires very little strength, breaking through an opponent's defenses DOES require strength. Most stabbings are more like wrestling matches, where the bigger, stronger enemy controls the smaller one and stabs the shit out of him.

This makes a good case for close combat being strength based (Brawling/Grappling) , but anything that works off of longer ranges to require more coordination (Melee). And in a fight between a man with a spear and a man with a knife, bet on the man with the spear.

Okay, enough beating around the bush. So how much damage do things do? Well, I'll set the base damage a STR 10 character can do to, say 1d6, and the upper bounds by STR 20 to 2d6.  The possible steps between are 1d6+1, 1d6+2, and 2d6-1. You'll note that I removed the 2d6-2.  That completely throws the average progression. With the above progression, the mean damage is 3.5, 4.5, 5.5, 6, 7.

STR        DMG
9            1d6
10          1d6
11          1d6
12          1d6+1
13          1d6+1
14          1d6+1
15          1d6+2
16          1d6+2
17          1d6+2
18          2d6-1
19          2d6-1
20          2d6-1
21          2d6

Quote from: David Johansen;778256The term Strength covers the broadest generic effect so it's the stat.

The substats or advantages that it includes are size, build, and musculature.  But for a super hero you'd just buy Strength.

I'd lean towards fewer stats, one of the appeals of GURPS is the small stat blocks for cannon fodder.  More detail can be applied with advantages if needed.  But Thief: ST 5, DX 6, IQ 6, Athletics +1, Stealth +1, Throwing +1 should be a fully viable npc stat block.

I'd go full TFT.  Strength, Coordination, Intelligence and possibly Perception.  I like Perception as a stat because sometimes you need a generalized Perception and stacking sense modifiers feels wrong somehow.  Also, Perception as a stat lets rangers with average Intelligence still be fantastic woodsmen.

Health doesn't really need to be a stat if Strength = Hit Points.  But you could have a health stat and make Hit Points = Strength + Health.

I'm not a huge fan of having Advantages and Disadvantages making adjustments to derived stats. I think it just obfuscates complexity. GURPS stats look simple until you start adding Charisma, Status, Perception, Will, Lifting Strength, and so on. I'd rather have a few more stats.

I see what you're saying with Health-- it's sort of a one-note stat.  What if Health became Fitness, measuring a combination of Agility and Endurance that marks a fit person. Then Strength can become Body, and it's easy to see at a glance what a character looks like.
So the Stats are more like:
Body- Size and Strength
Fitness- Agility, Speed, Endurance
Coordination - Hand-Eye coordination, fine motor control, 3d spatial reasoning
Reason- Logical, Abstract reasoning, speed of reaction
Focus- Ability to narrow or broaden attention at will, mental resilience.
Presence- Verbal and interpersonal intelligence, functional empathy.

I think with these stats you can pretty quickly describe a broad range of characters.  For example, take two Firefly Characters: Kaylee and Simon Tam

Body 8; Fitness 10; Coordination 12; Reason 14; Focus 13; Presence 8
Body 8; Fitness 9; Coordination 10; Reason 14; Focus 12; Presence 14

At a glance you can tell which character is which. Start dropping stats and you lose that clarity. Start adding stats and you get the same problem, the character becomes a sea of numbers.

I guess it depends on what you feel qualifies for a stat.  Is it that skills are based on it?  GURPS could be better with a social stat on that count.  Is it a fundamental ability that's used in combat?  I think that's the metric GURPS uses.

I don't think you can escape having some advantages that relate to stats.  Perception, sight and hearing for example.  Really, I always want eyesight as a major factor in missile combat.  Because it really is and it's almost never done in rpgs.

You could look at all the in game uses of stats and treat those as advantages and then combine them to make stats.  For instance Strength is made up of Hit Points, Lifting Strength, and Striking Strength (which is unfairly unbalanced against innate attack)

As far as the relation of strength and weapons, I think you have to look at it as there being a base line strength to use a weapon and the weapon gets faster or slower beyond that (penalty to hit and defend?) whereas the damage is fairly fixed.  So the Strength Requirement to damage table would reflect the size of the weapon.  Even so, there should probably be an All Out Attack (Strong) where a higher Strength does add a damage bonus.  

The question is where does it just become another generic game and not a GURPS like and is being a GURPS like and pursuing GURPS fans who want a medium in which to publish their own stuff the goal.

If you are wanting to create an open GURPS alternative, it needs to map closely to GURPS.  In that case I'd suggest the 3-18 attribute and skill scale but I'd really strongly suggest basing defaults on 1/2 stat and making broad skills the main tier.

For stats I think it would have to be Strength, Coordination (not only more correct but also more people know what it is), Intelligence, Health, Perception, and Willpower for compatibility reasons.

It does need to be somewhat different than GURPS, for legal purposes.  I don't think the point system can totally be copied but most stuff is done in fives.  So I'd suggest dividing all the costs by five.  IRRC BANG! Skills are 4 x regular skills so that's close enough as they're a pretty good deal already.

God, another response written and mistakenly deleted. I have to have my hands checked from hand gremlins.

I was thinking about the issue of cross compatibility. I think it's a good idea to steer away from direct compatibility. Aside from dodging the possible litigation issues with SJ Games, trying to maintain compatibility in anything more than basis assumptions is doomed to headaches. You run into the Pathfinder problem, where it's ostensibly compatible with 3.0, but god help the sucker who tries to convert an older edition into Pathfinder. You *can* do it, but you'll constantly run into little corner cases that will eat up your time and leave you none the richer.

It's better to break the law and save the spirit, if you get my drift.

Well, that leans towards my roll over, 1-10 stats, and flat bonus skill concept.

So what about this as a directive?


1. A system that only uses d6s.

2. An open source universal roll playing system with open character creation by application of a fixed number of units such as could be printed on cards.

3. A tiered approach to abilities wherein it is better to buy the general ability than half a dozen instances of the specialties within that ability.

4. A "realistic / gritty" core system that can be scaled up to cinematic and super levels of without play without undue levels of additional complexity.

5. A modular support system that is cross compatible.  General support for multiple play styles tactical play and maples, hack and slash and narrativist.

6. Traits for supplying detail and special abilities but not for social and psychological effects.  These should be supported otherwise, being a sadist is in no way a qualification for law enforcement powers.

7. Supernatural powers separated out from mundane abilities.  Spells as powers bought as skills but with a more modular, structured form to constrain the size of the spell book.

8.  Technology levels and attack powers balanced.  Technology levels cost as much as an omnipower of maximum effect for a personal weapon.

9. Core rules under 32 pages.  Keep it simple stupid.

10.  Core genre supplements 16 pages, Fantasy, Super Heroes, Space Opera, Horror and the ubiquitous how to role play and GM information.  This would allow for fast development of fixed parts of the game and keep the interactions small enough to integrate and crosscheck easily.  Puts the complete core at 200 pages which could be kickstarted when ready.

Quote from: David Johansen;778555Well, that leans towards my roll over, 1-10 stats, and flat bonus skill concept.

So what about this as a directive?


1. A system that only uses d6s.

2. An open source universal roll playing system with open character creation by application of a fixed number of units such as could be printed on cards.

3. A tiered approach to abilities wherein it is better to buy the general ability than half a dozen instances of the specialties within that ability.

4. A "realistic / gritty" core system that can be scaled up to cinematic and super levels of without play without undue levels of additional complexity.

5. A modular support system that is cross compatible.  General support for multiple play styles tactical play and maples, hack and slash and narrativist.

6. Traits for supplying detail and special abilities but not for social and psychological effects.  These should be supported otherwise, being a sadist is in no way a qualification for law enforcement powers.

7. Supernatural powers separated out from mundane abilities.  Spells as powers bought as skills but with a more modular, structured form to constrain the size of the spell book.

8.  Technology levels and attack powers balanced.  Technology levels cost as much as an omnipower of maximum effect for a personal weapon.

9. Core rules under 32 pages.  Keep it simple stupid.

10.  Core genre supplements 16 pages, Fantasy, Super Heroes, Space Opera, Horror and the ubiquitous how to role play and GM information.  This would allow for fast development of fixed parts of the game and keep the interactions small enough to integrate and crosscheck easily.  Puts the complete core at 200 pages which could be kickstarted when ready.

You've got a real knack for getting to the guts of the thing!  I like all of these.  When I've had more than three hours of sleep in 100 degree weather, I'm gonna work on the core elements.

Okay so I've been thinking about powers and magic.

The enabling ability for magic needs to scale directly to damage, area, range potential.  I'd suggest simply calling it Magic Level and making it link directly to spell level.  I don't know why but spell levels just make sense to me.  Like technology level I suppose.

Oh, and the name of the game shouldn't be a silly five letter acronym that puts people off from ever trying it.

Dedicated
Eccentric
Role
Playing
System

So you're selling out to the cult of stat normalization already are you? ;)

Has either of you looked at JAGS or EABA? JAGS seems pretty close to GURPS, and I think EABA has similar design goals.

Yeah, I've taken a look at them. They sort of have the scent of the early 2000's on 'em, don't they? Very over designed. It was a different age then. We all were experimenting with long division at the table and clever dice mechanics. Why, I still have the scars from Godlike.  Good times, good times.

There is much to commend JAGS and Marco is a swell dude.  However, the 4d6-4 mechanic is really annoying and there are other issues I have with it.  I don't know if I'd complain of over design but it's more of a closed structure that can do anything than an open one that can have anything added onto it.

Corps has scaling issues when it comes to doing superheroes and giant monsters, just like GURPS.  It's good at what it does and Greg Porter is the past master of technically detailed systems.  But such systems often are too restrictively realistic and rigid at times.  I'm aware of the exhaustvvelocity issues but if I want to do The Mote In Gods Eye I need fuel driven ships that can do 3 gs for days on end and have force shields that coruscate through the spectrum.  DERPS will have a physics based design system that derives real statistics from game statistics rather than the other way around.  You'll say I want a ship that can do 3gs for days and you'll find out how big it is or what tech level you need to get it down to a given size.

EABA uses dice pools and such must die by fire.

I do really like Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying big gold book.  However, it is a game that eschews any balance beyond the general tendency of people aiming for the most powerful guy first and is more truly and gleefully unstructured and old school than Palladium is in Kevin Siembiada's darkest nightmares.  

DERPS will be a small, tight structure designed to have modules installed.  It will have an implicit combat balance built into character design, something GURPS has always eschewed in favor of a somewhat wishy-washy guestimate of how much an ability can be abused in play.  GURPS advantages scale poorly in high level play and DERPS will scale cleanly without resorting to a whole book of equivocation on the matter.  GURPS Supers serves no other purpose that I can discern.

In the end we're talking about a hyper-staturated niche market where everyone in the market believes they're qualified to break into the market and make a fortune.  I really don't have a big problem with GURPS as a system.  I love GURPS warts and all.  I have a problem with GURPS as an absence of supporting products and a sand box I'd like to play in that is well guarded and walled off.  So, I want to create what I believe GURPS could be to show that it can be done and that the ideas I have put forward have merit.  The proof is in the pudding as they say.

For me at least, the key value is in proving a marketing model and product design path that I've advocated for GURPS for a long, long time, as much as it is about providing a superior replacement for GURPS.  Which isn't to say that I won't take any money if it makes a million dollars.  I'm not made of stone you know?

God, we really need a better name than DERPS. I keep giggling whenever I see it written in earnest.

Yeah, I have to agree with David. That 4d6-4 mechanic is a solution in search of a problem, which is frankly something I see a lot of in those early 2000's games.

On to actual design issues.

It seems that there are two possible dice mechanics issue on the table at the moment: 2d6+Stat (where stats, for humans, range from 1-10) vs. a Target Number (where 10 is Predictability easy, 12 is Challenging and 14 is Hard), or 3d6 vs. Stat, where stats range from 3-18 in a human. Both have their benefits and drawbacks.

2d6+Stat

Benefits
There's no obscuring how easy it is to resolve. Simply have the players roll off and the highest result wins. Additionally, the results scale linearly.There's no question that 10 in a stat is better than 5 in a stat.

Drawbacks
The problem of huge numbers: When players are rolling 2d6+35 vs a Target number of 40, players lose all sense of scale. It becomes incredibly easy to get on a stat treadmill: higher stats necessitate higher TNs, which drive higher stats. Dungeons and Dragons 5e had to institute a full armistice on stat bloat and call it 'bounded accuracy'. The problem is true in pretty much every Roll+mod system. This can be ameliorated by instituting a similar 'bounded accuracy' system.

There's also a psychological variable at play here. Give players a chance to increase a result by +1, and they will move heaven and earth to get that +1 bonus. Look at the absurdities that D&D players will go through to get that +5% bonus to hit.

Roll 3d6 Under Skill
Benefits and drawbacks: It's quick. Calculations can be made before a roll is made, or figured into the roll itself.
High skills are qualitatively different than low or middling skill. As your skill increases, you become immune to more and more penalties. Eventually, there's just no point in rolling, or you're spending more time figuring out penalties than actually playing. (Okay, I'm moving, 10,000 meters from the target, it's raining, and my right hand is crippled-- that's -25 to hit from my score of 36, so that's 11 or lower.)

This is mathematically identical to rolling 3d6+Stats and having a base TN of 20. But in practice, the two different methods create different attitudes at the table.

So let's look at the statistical differences
(When I get home from work.)

I meant 3d6 + 1-10 Stat.  As I noted it's really no different than the GURPS all stats in the 10 - 15 range.  The functional range is actually the same.  It's just that the top end 16 -18 has been reserved for things that are better than humans.  You just lower the target number to reflect it.  Also, with skills starting at 0 instead of -5, it actually duplicates the GURPS skill roll range pretty well.

I'm not married to it, but it's in the class of things that can be 100% GURPS compatible while looking nothing like GURPS.

Quote from: David Johansen;779307I meant 3d6 + 1-10 Stat.  As I noted it's really no different than the GURPS all stats in the 10 - 15 range.  The functional range is actually the same.  It's just that the top end 16 -18 has been reserved for things that are better than humans.  You just lower the target number to reflect it.  Also, with skills starting at 0 instead of -5, it actually duplicates the GURPS skill roll range pretty well.

I'm not married to it, but it's in the class of things that can be 100% GURPS compatible while looking nothing like GURPS.

Okay, I can see where you're going there. So the average stat can be, say, 4, and the TN for basic checks becomes 15. Gives the same success rate as a skill of 10 vs. 3d6 roll under.

I'd go with 5 as average, so a TN of 16.  But then an average skill would be 5 or better as 0 = -5 default.  Though that'd be the total of the skill and the Specialty.  With specialties costing half what skills do and one level of a specialty being upgraded to get a level of a skill there's a reason to take specialties but it doesn't outweigh the value of skills. That way we can have less than twenty skills and more than a thousand in the same breath.

Quote from: David Johansen;778879Okay so I've been thinking about powers and magic.

The enabling ability for magic needs to scale directly to damage, area, range potential.  I'd suggest simply calling it Magic Level and making it link directly to spell level.  I don't know why but spell levels just make sense to me.  Like technology level I suppose.

Oh, and the name of the game shouldn't be a silly five letter acronym that puts people off from ever trying it.

Having spell levels is good if you're wanting to prevent starting characters getting access to fireballs or flying castles or etc. The higher level spells need to be better, but you probably also want some disincentive so characters don't entirely give up using a lower-level spell when they get a higher-level version.
Assuming you're mixing the idea with 'spell points', that suggests either tying spell level to spell point cost, or giving higher level spells some other issue (like a penalty to spellcasting rolls).

Quote from: David Johansen;779375I'd go with 5 as average, so a TN of 16.  But then an average skill would be 5 or better as 0 = -5 default.  Though that'd be the total of the skill and the Specialty.  With specialties costing half what skills do and one level of a specialty being upgraded to get a level of a skill there's a reason to take specialties but it doesn't outweigh the value of skills. That way we can have less than twenty skills and more than a thousand in the same breath.

That's great. So what we're talking about with skills is essentially a 3 tiered system.
Untrained, or attempting something completely foreign = Stat -5
Broad Skill training (Melee, Brawling, Science, Stealth, etc.) has a purchase rank that looks something like:
Skill            Cost
Stat-3           1
Stat -2          2
Stat -1          3
Stat              4
Stat +1          7
Stat +2          10

Or however the costs balance out. Specialties would have a cost structure of something like
Specialty        Cost
Skill +1             3
Skill +2             5
Skill +3             7

You'll notice that the costs for taking a specialty only make sense if you're buying up the Skill to Stat+0 at least. Otherwise you're specializing before you've mastered the basics.
I'm not wedded to the cost structure. I would like it to track with the general amount of time it takes to master a subject, but that will change dramatically when we're dealing with supercomputers, ultra-geniuses, and angelic beings.

A science office on a star ship might have skills and stats that look something like
Intelligence 7
-   Science 7
       -Biology 8
        -Astrophysics 9
- Navigation 5

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;779455Having spell levels is good if you're wanting to prevent starting characters getting access to fireballs or flying castles or etc. The higher level spells need to be better, but you probably also want some disincentive so characters don't entirely give up using a lower-level spell when they get a higher-level version.
Assuming you're mixing the idea with 'spell points', that suggests either tying spell level to spell point cost, or giving higher level spells some other issue (like a penalty to spellcasting rolls).

If you want Magic to be pointedly Not Technology, there has to be some intrinsic drawback to using it. For example, while having a tank is a big benefit, getting a tank is almost impossible for pretty much anyone.

So here's an option: there is a skill called Mana that is simply unavailable in some settings. Casting a spell is a two step process.

1. Channel the Energy from the Heavens, Ambient Energy, Chi, whatever the idiom needed. The more energy channeled, the higher the TN of the Mana roll. The Mana stat also determines the Mana reserve the character can maintain. Mana might drain at a random interval, making it hard to horde mana. Maybe you can channel over your Mana score, but you start taking damage if you hold all that juice in.

If the Channel check fails, you just don't get any Mana and have to sit it out. If you flub the roll, say roll 10 under the TN, and you've created a Mana geyser, soaking everything around you in mystic energies. Things without Mana skill just take damage.

2. You have to shape and release the spell. This is where the Thaumaturgy (or whatever) skill comes in. Once you've charged the battery, you have to build a circuit in your mind and release the spell. The more powerful the spell, the more Mana required, and the harder it is to cast.

This does a couple things. From the in-game perspective, it makes the rarity (or commonality) of spellcasters make sense. The simple act of Casting a spell is dangerous, and not for the risk averse. However, a caster that knows his limits and has studied his art down pat is reasonably safe.

I think the nature of a modular system is such that not everything has to fit into a prescribed box. Unlike say, Hero System, building a spell, like building a vehicle, robot suit, or superpower, should be based primarily around the in-world object.

It totally acceptable to have an alternate spell casting system in place, one similar to Ars Magica where effects are built off of nouns and verbs, or one like Epic Spell Wars of the Duel Wizards, where spells are built out of three components that can each be used individually.

Quote from: robiswrong;778122Doesn't FUDGE have a pretty direct lineage from GURPS?

As a long standing fan of FUDGE I am not sure I can see the lineage from GURPS to FUDGE at all, and SoS didn't stop playing GURPS when he wrote FUDGE, and anyway how do the publication dates stack up anyway?

He'd been writing for GURPS for at least a couple of years when he wrote FUDGE.

I definently want to see DERPS as a modular system but I'd like it to be a modular system with a strong intristic balance.  I want things from book X to work with things from book Y as much as possible.  Ideally the substructure, the rules that are used for building things, will be tight enough to avoid introducing broken things in supplements.

Actually I was thinking of going the D&D 4 and 5 route and making unskilled zero and boosting the target numbers for skilled actions.  The downside is that stat rolls need lower target numbers or for stats to be doubled.

Again, it depends on how tightly we want the character system to map to GURPS.

I suspect that the further we get the less successful the game will be with GURPS fans.  I'm not saying that's the only metric of success but the market is a crowded place.

I think you're right about diverging from GURPS will lose GURPS fans. On the other hand, there aren't that many of them. But there is a niche there that GURPS doesn't really fill: Realism without the cruft. It's better to build a good, fast system than worry overmuch about the market just yet.

I suppose I'm not sure what you mean by 'Balance'. It's a loaded word. If you mean that a laser pistol build on the same point value as a laser blast spell does the same damage at the same range with the same armor penetration and whatnot, that's good.

The issue arises if you want a character who has purchased a Zap-ulon 9000 from the local Spacemart for 200 credits to have expended the same character resources that the dedicated worshiper of Gorig the Unmaker has to get access to Burning Ray, who has expended the same resources as Captain Eyeborg the Superhero, then there's going to be some logical issues.

So I think I need to better understand what balance means for you.

Essentially I want 1 die of damage and 3 points of armor to have the same cost across the board.  It's one of those things GURPS doesn't do that makes supers work better.

That's why I want to set the cost of tech levels as an Omni power. Everyone in the setting has paid for it so it's often irrelevant but it gives a much better comparison between a cave man and a transhuman space warrior in battle armor.  In GURPS that's only 50 points.

Quote from: David Johansen;779748Essentially I want 1 die of damage and 3 points of armor to have the same cost across the board.  It's one of those things GURPS doesn't do that makes supers work better.

That's why I want to set the cost of tech levels as an Omni power. Everyone in the setting has paid for it so it's often irrelevant but it gives a much better comparison between a cave man and a transhuman space warrior in battle armor.  In GURPS that's only 50 points.

So here's what I propose. Imagine spells, superpowers, and technology as containers for powers and effects. How each of them are used is distinct, but within the bucket we can measure what the gross effects are.

For example, if we a rocket propelled grenade and a disintegration spell, the mechanics in the container might look pretty similar.

RPG-7
Damage: 5d6 Lethal, Armor Piercing 18
Range Increment 100', max range 1500'
-- An RPG-7 is a Soviet made anti-tank weapon. It fires a single warhead that arms after 30'. If the target is struck before 30', the warhead won't detonate and the damage is 2d6 Lethal. The RPG-7 has a backblast. Anyone standing within 5' of the RPG-7 backblast takes 2d6 lethal damage.
Point Value: 50

Disintegration (Rank 6 Necromancy Spell)
Damage: 5d6 Lethal, Armor Piercing 18
Range: 500'
Mana Cost: 25, Casting TN 21
-- The spell of disintegration strips the elemental bonds that hold a living creature together, cutting through the hardest armors and felling the mightiest beasts. It requires enormous amounts of Mana, however, making it outside the grasp of all but the most powerful mages. Should the mage fail her casting roll by more than ten, roll 1d. On a 6 the spell targets the caster.
Point Value: 50


The core mechanical information is held in the bucket and is consistent across settings. But how they act in the game world is very different. A spellcaster may never get the guts to try a disintegration spell, but if you're playing British soldiers in Afghanistan c. 1980's, then you can find piles of RPG-7s.

This way you can eyeball the gear and powers a character has, but it's not a straight jacket. If you're playing that British soldier and you commandeer a tank, your character's Point Value doesn't go up except for the GM being able to estimate the effectiveness of the character-- and even then it's always going to be dependent on more variables than we really need to deal with.

We could get into the real nitty-gritty of item creation, and start number crunching the point value of the back blast, or mana burn, or weight, or how much ammunition you can carry, but HERO already does that, and I don't think we need to follow their lead.

No, HERO does what it does better than anyone but it's still not that hard to break.   I don't think we need that kind of balance.  I'm thinking more about ensuring that getting an effect from one source or another should cost the same points.

For example, those soldiers in Afgahnistan all paid 50 points for their tech level while the wizard has to pay 50 points to learn the spell.  So, in the end they actually have balanced point costs.  The balancing limitations of the technology level Omni power would be expendability, accessibility, legality, and price but the cost to get the same damage effect remains the same.

Quote from: David Johansen;779876No, HERO does what it does better than anyone but it's still not that hard to break.   I don't think we need that kind of balance.  I'm thinking more about ensuring that getting an effect from one source or another should cost the same points.

For example, those soldiers in Afgahnistan all paid 50 points for their tech level while the wizard has to pay 50 points to learn the spell.  So, in the end they actually have balanced point costs.  The balancing limitations of the technology level Omni power would be expendability, accessibility, legality, and price but the cost to get the same damage effect remains the same.

I think hard coding equipment to a character can lead to problems. If a character requisitions a tank, do their point values suddenly increase? If they go broke and live as a hobo, do you re-adjust their point value?   I can tell you that will be the very first bit of bookkeeping people ignore.

The things that should be locked into the character are their Stats, Skills, and Powers. Backgrounds and Equipment (at least at character creation) only define what the character has acquired up to the point immediately before play begins. That means that Tony Stark can lose his company, Baron von Klevitch can be excommunicated, and Trainyard Willie can strike it rich all without having to readjust their core point value.

That's why I want Tech Level priced as an omni-power.  It's not the gear you have you pay for it's the gear you can have.  If we want money as money then it should also factor in there.  It's about access.

Quote from: David Johansen;779905That's why I want Tech Level priced as an omni-power.  It's not the gear you have you pay for it's the gear you can have.  If we want money as money then it should also factor in there.  It's about access.

My concern there is that things like access and availability are so dependent on a thousand in-fiction variables that they are impossible to balance. Case in point:

A 1920's occult investigator is built as a bumbling old professor. He's tenured, has a beat up old jalopy and a collection of books on ancient history.

He sells his books for $30.00, and buys a Thompson SMG from a mail-order catalog. There is no way to make the Thompson machine gun have the same point value as an ill-tended collection of books, but a mail order machine gun is a fact of life in 1920's America.

So how do you balance that? Does the Professor's point value increase when he gets the gun, and decrease when he sells it again? What about the other player who paid the 40-odd points in character creation to get access to the machine gun? Do you decide that the Professor has to give up the gun somehow, or compensate the other player an equal amount of points?

So what if we try to balance with wealth? It seems like it would work-- a tank costs several hundred million dollars, after all-- but there are enough corner cases that that measure loses value as a balancing method.

Take for example a sword. A fighting blade can cost in excess of $1000.00. Spend any less and it's probably going to be clumsy, break easily, and likely get you killed. But you could walk into a pawn shop with half that amount and get a decent pistol that is superior in game terms in every single way.

If you want to try and balance things out, you have to make a system as detailed as HERO is, but then you lose any semblance of simplicity and only make the game more, not less exploitable.  The more moving parts included in a game, especially one dependent on human interaction like an RPG, the more exploits will arise, unless you limit the design space to a narrow field like DnD 4e did.

I don't think achieving parity between character's equipment, spells and powers is a design goal that can be reached.

To look at it as a GURPS issue, a guy goes to the store and buys a DR 30 flak jacket and pays $500.  The guy next to him buys DR 30 with 90 points.  He's now at a 90 point disadvantage relative to the other guy.  Sure he can go and buy a flak jacket too but it doesn't work for his superhero in tights character concept.

So what I'm saying is, the base line cost for stuff you can do with the general technology level of the setting should cost less some how or the technology level should carry a significant cost of its own.

The problem is that technology as handled in GURPS has a disproportionate and undue advantage over alternatives unless you stack it.

What if the cost of wealth scales with the tech level?

Or at least if it doesn't scale, could the cost of things scale linearly so higher tech stuff always costs more?

I think the issue is that most tech items are going to be generally quite available to characters, whether bought borrowed or stolen. A skill costing a few points may be required for some of them, but your best bet may be to design permanent powers so they're intrinsically better than tech, rather than trying to balance powers against them.

At lower TLs, at least. At the point Tech becomes equivalent to super powers, characters should be able to buy them with cash and a night in the mutation tank or whatever.

What does it mean to be skilled? It turns out that this is a big question in competitive sports and in purely mental competitions such as chess. It's not as simple as RPGs make it out to be, but they do get a lot of things right.

A skilled person is fast: they can predict complicated situations from incomplete data based upon seeing millions of iterations.

A skilled person is resilient to pressure: when under a lot of pressure, the elite competitor can call upon reserves of focus less skilled people lack. This seems to be because they need to use less resources to maintain focus, not that they are necessarily more focused (though they often are).

A skilled person's skill doesn't translate into other fields. A major league baseball player can get struck out by a softball pitcher because the ingrained responses needed to hit a 70mph ball are not applicable to the trajectory of a softball.  Likewise, when someone brings a new or unexpected technique in a MMA fight, even the most trained fighters will be thrown off.

When two very skilled individuals compete, victory depends on the slimmest margins. In a boxing match, victory is not a matter of your success, but of the opponent's mistakes. In a chess match, victory among grandmasters depends upon who can take the game 'out of the book' and present the opponent with completely novel situations. In an elite competition, players will attempt to fake each other out, triggering an incorrect reaction and then seizing the initiative.

When a talented fighter meets a weaker fighter, the chance of the weaker fighter's success drops significantly in the macro resolution. In the micro resolution, the weaker fighter will find gaps in defense fewer and further between, and will often be put on the defensive, because any mistake will cost them greatly.


There's an old saw that says that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a task. That statistic is misleading, because the amount of time it takes to learn a skill is highly dependent on a person's natural inclinations. In his book The Sports Gene, David Epstein points out how much genetics and inclination matters in sports. Elite athletes, despite what you may thing, tended to muck around with lots of different sports before finding something they were really good at. As he says, a slow kid will grow up into a slow adult. Training is important, but it's better to be talented and trained.


In most games that use a roll-over system, player make opposed checks to determine success in a competition. This creates a situation where two evenly matched opponents will have a 50/50 chance of winning. This gives a result very much in line with the Elo chess ranking system, in fact, very nearly identical to it.

However (and here's a big But), the Elo system only ranks the end result of a game, not the thousands of events that occur in play. The Elo system works because all of those thousands of individual choices aggregate into a likelihood of success.  Which is exactly what you're talking about with an RPG skill.

It seems breaks down, though, when you start talking about task vs. goal resolution. In a goal resolution system, the player states the overarching goal, rolls the dice, and interprets the results. In task resolution systems, the unit of choice is down to individual actions. I like task resolution systems, because each step gives a chance for the game to spin off into unexpected directions.

This 'breakdown' is an illusion, though. Over at Fightnomics.com, the statistician Reed Khun ranks fighters by statistics like striking defense, power shot accuracy, and takedown defense. At these highest levels of competition, in as close to a close-combat situation as you can get, the statistics falling within a 50/50 chance for two evenly matched fighters. In fact, you can quickly pick out the dominant fighter in a match up based upon their accuracy and knockdown ratio, and Kuhn's analysis has shown these stats to be an accurate predictor of likely outcomes.

So where does that lead us? Well, rolling 3d6+Skill vs. 3d6+Skill gives us the most realistic measure of a skilled opponent. And like all statistics, there's room for flukes: a lucky shot, a poorly timed defense, and a sudden change in tactics can throw a fight suddenly.

Ah, one last point about skills being contextual: even a very talented athlete will find himself in trouble when faced with an opponent that does not do what is expected. Which is why defending against a technique or weapon style is dependent on the defender's skill in the attacker's technique.

For example, if you attack Chuck Lidell with a cestus, he will know how to defend against that. It's similar enough to a fist that his millions of iterations stored in his brain will inform him of the proper response.  But if you say, come at him with a spear or a sword, he will be in real trouble, because he has to defend with whatever generalized skill set he has, and his Specialization is useless.

Big things don't move quickly-- or if they do, it's for very short periods of time and they require tremendous amounts of energy. For organic creatures, the ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly is called Agility. Small, light things are more agile than say, an elephant. A blue whale may be absurdly powerful, but it can't exactly turn on a dime.

So I was playing around with different methods to accomplish this. I could create an inverse link between Body and Agility, but that would require including an additional stat that essentially just neuters the Fitness statistic.

I thought about creating some complicated mathematical formula baked into the game that would mimic the cube-square law, but that was insane and stupid.

Instead, I settled on a modification to Agility skills (the primary subset of Fitness) based upon Body.

Agility Penalty =(Hit Points-10)/4. This means that Fitness will have to be higher to compensate for very strong characters. Note that HP = Body*2

This means that while HP and Body are linked directly in character creation by default, they can be disaggregated to better represent creatures with phenomenal strength for their size. For example, a chimpanzee weights about 160 lbs, but can pull around 1,000 lbs with one hand. If we run the numbers, that gives a Body of 13 but only 12 HP instead of 26 hp.

Actually, this makes me wonder if it doesn't make more sense to come up with a STR/HP ratio to give a bonus to Agility.

I think something like that could work.  I got into some real arguments when I was on the Rolemaster revision panel.  The person in question would jump to personal attacks and strawman arguments at the drop of a hat but would never answer the following questions:

Which is more Agile, a world champion heavy weight boxer or a world champion gymnast?

Which is more Agile, a house cat or a tiger?

He always wanted to compare the boxer to the tiger.  There are many other factors than the cube square law and he made some valid points, but he was such an ass that I eventually left the revision projects and washed my hands of Rolemaster forever.  A big part of the problem is that Rolemaster ties reaction speed to movement rate and hand eye coordination to agility which is okay in many cases.  I can understand and support their refusal to change the stats.  I think that's an awful big step towards being another game entirely.

Dexterity is another question of course.  A paraplegic in a wheel chair isn't very agile but the can still work with their hands or be a good shot.  Not so much with bows of course but still.

And really, with bows and bullets it's less about fine motor control (though that matters) and more about maintaining concentration when hell is erupting around you.

Tying HP to mass and Agility penalty kills two birds with one stone: If you know the mass of something, you can estimate it's HP, and it gives a nice Realistic/Pulp lever. Pulp characters can have much higher HP totals without increasing mass, because the switch from Realism to Pulp means HPs stop being Abstract Mass and start being Narrative Importance.

Sure, as long as you maintain cross genre statistical compatability.  I think that's really where Fuzion failed.  The books weren't very cross compatible due to the various switches being thrown.

I still think Fuzion was a good idea, even if the execution was less than spectacualar.