Michael Thayne's RPG Blog

 Awhile back, I floated this suggestion for how to handle the Medium advantage in GURPS  in the official GURPS Discord, and thought it might be worth preserving here: You automatically know whether there are any "unbound" spirits within Per yards of you. For purposes of this advantage, "unbound" spirits are any spirits not bound to objects, currently possessing someone, etc. Furthermore, you count as a spirit for the sole purpose of communicating with spirits (not seeing them), if this would be helpful. This allows you to hear the voice of a spirit with Mute (Substantial Only, -10%), or be contacted telepathically by a spirit with Telesend (Spirits Only, -20%). Relative to the text of GURPS Basic Set: Characters , this does a few things: Ignores the bit about spirits of the dead, but incorporates some stuff about excluded categories of spirits in Powers and Template Toolkit 4 . Tries to make clearer how it differs from Detect (Spirits). Replaces "nearby" w...

While searching the SJGames forums for something else, I stumbled across an interesting post by Kromm about party creation : Many groups (okay . . . most of mine as a GM and several I've been in as a player) do something like this: Discuss general goals: "We need a healer," "More ranged weapons this time! We always get hosed by flying things," "No barehanded martial artists, ok? Tired of paying for replacement fists," "Don't forget to have two heavy fighters this time . . . I still remember when Sam the Ogre got mind controlled," and so on. Choose specific roles: "I'll take the cleric," "I'll play a scout," "Put me down for a barbarian," "I like knights," etc. Create characters (or dig up previously created ones) – and yes, however many the player likes. Sometimes done collaboratively. Select characters from among that stable. Sometimes done collaboratively. Tweak characters in collaboration...

 In GURPS , picking weapon skills is fairly easy—figure out what weapons you want your character to use, then buy the skills for those weapons. Occasionally you'll have a weapon that can be used with multiple skills, making the choice less obvious, but most of the time it's very straightforward. With unarmed combat skills, though, the choices get a bit confusing, especially for grappling skills. In picking unarmed combat skills, it helps a lot to know what tactics are game-mechanically favored. One tactic that works quite well is a grapple followed by the Knee Strike technique. To do this, you need at least 1 point in Brawling or Karate (Knee Strike doesn't default to DX), but you don't actually need a grappling skill—you can just roll against DX for the grapple. For this and other reasons, putting even 1 point in Brawling goes a long way for characters who mostly fight with weapons but want to be prepared for the possibility of an unarmed scrape. In contrast, following...

The Knight in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy  is mostly just an analog for D&D's fighter class (the text even calls out that "fighter" was avoided mainly because it sounds "boring"). It doesn't actually support historically-inspired elite warriors very well, something made more conspicuous by the release of Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Swashbucklers  and its Aristocrat template. Here are three options to help make the Knight a little more interesting. The lenses are intended to be used the same way as the other lenses in the Dungeon Fantasy Denizens  series, available to starting characters and paid for with points budgeted for optional advantage and/or gotten from quirks. New Occupational Template: Bow Master 250 Points Historically, archery was extremely important to many elites outside Europe, first in the form of Bronze Age chariot archers, then mounted archers in societies stretching from the Middle East to Japan.  GURPS Dungeon Fantasy , however,   assumes all...

I've been a long-time poster on the SJGames' forums, particularly the  GURPS  forums. Unfortunately, they've never been super-easy to search, and it seems to have gotten worse over time. So I thought it would be worth collecting some of the best stuff that's been posted on the forums somewhere else for ease of reference. Today's question: how do you build a monster that doesn't initially seem hard to kill (so not unmodified Unkillable), but can come back from the dead an unlimited number times, like infinite copies of Extra Life? Former GURPS  assistant line editor PK has an answer : In the Powers playtest, Kromm was emphatic that it is not a -50 point break (because Unkillable 2 by itself is still worth more than 50 points). IIRC, the consensus ended up hovering around -20%, but no one could decide so it never made it in.  (This was a very short introductory post for a blog—I expect it to be mostly a repository of things I'm worried will be lost if they exi...