Glasstown: Introduction

 My current GURPS Game is Glasstown, a six-guns and sorcery megadungeon campaign. Here's the overview.

Random Effects Roulette

People often want abilities that produce random effects when activated but GURPS doesn't have a published modifier that does this. 

Kicking Grenades For Fun And Profit

 

How (Not) to Cook a Hand Grenade

Never, ever, "cook" a hand grenade. The fuse is supposed to be four seconds and was made by the lowest bidder. 

- USMC Instructor c. 2003

Listen up Marines, this is how you "cook" a grenade.

- USMC MOUT Instructor c. 2008.

Gun Stats: M252 81mm Mortar

Now that GURPS Gun Stats is out, I can finally stat the gun that, while absent from GURPS High Tech, will forever live in my head rent free: the M252 81 mm mortar.

Steel Rain, Steel Pain

Fright Checks: Rule of 19

The GURPS Rule of 14 (p. B360) says:

If final, modified Will exceeds 13, reduce it to 13 for the purpose of the Fright Check. 

This means that there's no way to ever not fail a fright check at least 16.2% of the time (unless you have Unfazeable; or 9.25% of the time with Rule of 15/Brave (GURPS Power Ups 2: Perks p. 13, GURPS Monster Hunters 1: Champions p. 25) no matter how many positive modifiers apply.

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.

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.

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?

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). 

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.

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).

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Giant Hermit Crab to Maddening Cricket.

I missed several weeks so here's a longer post of adventure seeds for The Bugstiary, written by me and published by Gaming Ballistic LLC for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Elder Spider to Goblin Spider

This is the third post in a series of adventure seeds for my new book The Bugstiary, published by Gaming Ballistic for The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game. 

Bugstiary Adventurer Seeds: Astral Spider to Dauðaprestr

 The second post supporting my new book The Bugstiary, published by Gaming Ballistic for The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Gold-Digging Ant and Ant-Lion

The Bugstiary, written by me, and published by Gaming Ballistic for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (Powered by GURPS) is a bestiary supplement to The Nordlond Bestiary and Enemies Book, that contains 34 new arthropod monster entries for the DFRPG. 

In this series of posts, I'm going to give one or two adventure seeds for each monster entry in The Bugstiary.

GURPS Rules Kalzazz Doesn't Use, Replaces or Revises (Guest Post)

Kalzazz asked me to host his post on this month's GURPS blogger topic. Here it is:

GURPS Rules I Don't Use, Replace, or Revise (or at Least Consider Doing So)

    Nobody's perfect, not even GURPS. There are a few rules that I think are actually pretty bad as written and should really be revised. I'm not including optional rules that I don't ever use, or even obscure traits that I just haven't seen a use for (but acknowledge there might be). I'm also not going to cover rules that saw a significant revision in later works (e.g. GURPS High-Tech's treatment of hiking, GURPS Gun Fu's revision of Gunslinger, or GURPS Horror's rules for mental stun). Instead these are all general rules that I think just don't work as intended and don't have a good fix in print. I'll cover three of them here, but there are more, so I may revisit this topic in the future.

GURPS Vehicle Stat Line: M2 Bradley

Over on the GURPS Discord, Kalzazz said:

I admit I always want to use military things which for some reason lack stats

I think a Iowa Class Battleship, Bradley IFV or M1 Abrams are all cool things My urban fantasy suffers greatly from 'all tanks are T72s' I sorta justify that as possibly the US has rules saying street gangs and dark cults of Great C'thulhu should not buy Abrams tanks

 

Which is a common sort of complaint in GURPS 4e, especially from players used to 3e's GURPS Vehicles. 

Planet Mercenary and DFRPG

I've gotten my copies of Planet Mercenary and the pdfs of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game . I'm reading them, and I'll try to review both here soon.