From: laird@think.com (Laird Popkin)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc,rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: Gurps Supers is still broken : was Re: Best Super system
Date: 13 Aug 1992 20:35:14 GMT
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Distribution: na
NNTP-Posting-Host: django.think.com

In article <1992Aug13.143555.22025@news.columbia.edu> jhk6@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (John H Kim) writes:
>dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan) writes:
>>jhk6@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (John H Kim) writes:
>>|	Champions ambushes are quite nasty due to the x2 STUN multiplier. 
>>|Good chance that a number of people will be knocked out by the first shots 
>>|as a result - if they are killed or seriously wounded here then much more 
>>|force was used than neccessary to take them out. After that point, the 
>>
>>	Not from the ATTACKER'S point of view! 
>>You have to crock it in Hero too;
>>why don't the villains just kill everyone once they're knocked out?  
>
>	It is not solely a 'genre convention' that even criminals are not 
>all bloodthirsty killers. By this train of logic, normal criminals should 
>kill all the cops they can - they don't. Even anti-social types will 
>often have an aversion to senseless waste of life: and will use only enough 
>force to get the job done. This will include weapons sufficient to ensure 
>defeat of the opposing forces - stun weapons would only be used if using 
>them results in just as sure a win as normal weapons. 
>
>	The difference in the system is that Champions makes ambushes 
>effective without making them neccessarily more deadly - becuase the STUN 
>damage is doubled but not the BODY. Yes, if the villians are bloodthirsty 
>then you have to 'crock' it to let the PC's survive, but if not, then 
>just let them strike full force at the PC's. The PC's will be knocked 
>out most likely, but will take no more BODY damage than from a non-ambush 
>assault. 


The "crock" is that ambushes in Champions are covered by a completely
unrealistic rule that for some reason ambushers do twice as much (stunning)
damage as they would normally do, with the same weapons, and that, even
weirder, weapons that do twice as much stun damage don't have their body
damage likewise increased.  I suppose Champs needs something like this
since without this "crock" the rules don't model ambushes well at all,
since you just end up with one normal round of attack, which doesn't
normally mean that much in Champs.  But arbitrary rules like this in games
make me a bit leery.

In GURPS, ambushes are already quite effective (there's that realism thing
again), so you don't need to make attacks magically do double damage, so
all you need to do to model comic books is allow people to survive absurd
damage by using the stun rules.

I still don't see much of a difference between the way Champions and GURPS
with the cinematic options differ in modeling an ambush, aside from Champ's
double stun damage, but I guess that's there to counter Champ's tendency to
make PC's which can't be knocked out in a single attack.

>>|The question is, given an *average* situation, what will happen. 
>>
>>	An ambush is not an average situation -- it is a planned encounter.
>(Thus the GM can take steps to influence the outcome.) (Paraphrase)
>
>	The average situation involves no combat or superheroics at all - 
>and is most likely walking down the street or something. I meant the 
>average ambush situation. 
>
>	I find manipulating the system to often be much preferrable to 
>manipulating characters' actions and otherwise contriving situations. If 
>you want to let your PC's live where they realistically should not, then 
>I think it is probably best to use a non-realistic damage system. 

I guess we disagree.  I would rather that the players "got with the genre"
and did things which are appropriate to the genre than the system warp its
rules in an attempt to force the players to do the right thing.  In my
experience, players who are straight out told that, for example, they're
playing comic book good-guys who don't shoot to kill, play along, whereas
players who are forced by unrealistic rules (e.g. ambushes do double
damage) end up sitting around making fun of the rules.  Your mileage
obviously differs...

>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>John Kim                    | "Remember: a running man may slit a thousand
>jhk6@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu | throats in a single night."
>Columbia University         |                    - Klingon proverb


-- 
- Laird Popkin, Thinking Machines

Connection Machine: Massively parallel supercomputer.  Also a cool black
cube with more blinking lights than you can shake a stick at.
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc