Tuesday, August 26, 2025

How to Bring Your Face to a Sword Fight

Parrying Unarmed Attacks GURPS Basic Set Campaigns p.  376 says:

Parrying Unarmed Attacks: If you successfully parry an unarmed attack (bite, punch, etc.) with a weapon, you may injure your attacker. Immediately roll against your skill with the weapon you used to parry. This roll is at -4 if your attacker used Judo or Karate. If you succeed, your parry struck the attacker’s limb squarely. He gets no defense roll against this! Roll damage normally. 

This rule has some problems. It's actually pretty vague about what kind of damage you do ("normal damage", duh) and it can result in some silly outcomes and degenerate tactics.

Friday, March 28, 2025

Disadvantage "Load"

GURPS Characters p. B11 suggests limiting disadvantages by total number of points in order to keep the game from becoming a "circus". This is at best a blunt instrument.

Thursday, March 20, 2025

The Ultra Simplified GURPS Combat System You Probably Don't Know About

Are you a person who wishes there was a way to run combat in GURPS that was super simple? One even simpler than the Combat Lite chapter of GURPS Characters (pp, B324-328)? What if I told you this system exists in an often overlooked GURPS book and that even if you are aware of it, you might have missed that you could just use it as your only combat system?

Friday, September 6, 2024

Wealth in Glasstown

Working my way around wealth rules in GURPS was done with intent. I needed to work out how I wanted Wealth to matter in Glasstown (my in-development six-guns-and-sorcery megadungeon). 

Friday, August 9, 2024

Wealth and Money in GURPS: Bean-Counting vs Abstraction

The one part of character creation that I like the least, (and the one that I often see players forget they need to do) is buying starting equipment. I know that some people really do enjoy the fantasy shopping minigame, but I have always seen it as a necessary evil. Even after that is done, in play, characters often need to buy (or sell) things. Regardless of how you feel about it, role-playing games need rules for player character economics and GURPS is no exception.

Friday, September 22, 2023

A Possibly Nonsense But Playable Solution to The Crossbow Conundrum

So there's a problem with crossbows in GURPS. I go into it here. Essentially Rated ST has no limits, and nor does it change bow stats no matter how arbitrarily high it gets. This is despite the TL4 Steel Crossbows saying they exceed this nonexistent limit at the cost of halving ST for range and damage (which pretty clearly makes them useless).

Friday, March 17, 2023

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Maurakappi

Continuing the adventure seeds for The Bugstiary, (written by me and published by Gaming Ballistic LLC for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game) we have the ant-folk.