From: talbert@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (Robert Talbert)
Subject: Re: Burn, GURPS, BURN!
Organization: Vanderbilt University Mathematics Department
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:56:49 GMT

In article <2337@blue.cis.pitt.edu> seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp) writes:
>
>	(Followups sent to rec.games.frp.advocacy, so don't flame me here)
>In article <1993Jan21.174827.10057@news.vanderbilt.edu> talbert@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (Robert Talbert) writes:
>>Well, no superhero game is going to accomodate a sci-fi campaign, or a spy
>>campaign, or really anything else besides the genre for which it was created.
>
>	I never had any problem, myself. I've run SF in a D&D game, fantasy
>in a Space Opera universe, spies in CoC and superheroes, and so on.

Sure, you can *do* it, but isn't it easier to just use a generic system to 
start with? 

>>The rule systems for a given game do not *do* anything. The action and the 
>>modifications are done by the GM and the players. Nobody plays the rules for
>
>	Well, then, you aren't discussing the rules, ARE you? If you assume
>a good GM and players, ANY game can do anything.
>	You're really grasping at tiny straws here. You know perfectly well
>what is meant when people say "...the rules do x...".

The rules in GURPS make it easy to take a generic sort of skill result and 
allow the GM to flavor it to the taste of the genre and group. That's what I
mean. 

>>What's a "universal campaign"? I usually stick to one genre at a time. 
>
>	A campaign which has the potential for all genres within it at
>any one time. Mine has been like that for many, many years, although I
>tend to concentrate, along with my players, on one or two genres at
>a time. Nonetheless, elements of all of the genres show up in all the 
>games at some point or another.

OK, I see what you mean... A friend of mine ran a hybrid Space/Special Ops 
game once. I will agree with you there, the costs add up... but again, you'd
be spending the same kind of money to mix & match different games (non-GURPS)
anyway. So you might as well not have to worry about discontinuities in the
rules. 

>>The rules for most games will not even get you a tenth of the way there 
>>as far as creating atmosphere -- "Chill" and "Paranoia" may be exceptions.
>>As a GM, *I* am responsbile for creating the suspension for disbelief. The
>
>	You're beating the wrong drum again. Of COURSE the GM is responsible
>for MOST of those things, but, given the same skilled GM, this is just another
>little, annoying thing about GURPS that bothers me.

See above.

>>>	Problem is people who can get, say, an 18 INT (not difficult in
>>>a fairly powerful campaign) and then can do EVERYTHING AT ONCE. Hell,
>>>their DEFAULT skills are as good as someone who was taught the subject.
>>>Even if they have no experience in the field.
>
>>It is hard to get an 18 in *any* attribute in GURPS. You have to spend a
>>*hell* of a lot of points, or take some god-awful disadvantage. And yes, 
>>this is realistic -- 18 on the bell curve for 3d6 would correspond to about
>>the upper 2% or something like that.
>
>	Here is where you're making a mistake. If GURPS numbers like the
>stats are on the bell curve, I'm Queen Elizabeth. 18 is 1 out of 216. That's
>a respectable intelligence but not all THAT impressive. If you use IQ scores
>at all, that would put me out around 19 or 20. And *I* can't do anything like
>all the things a GURPS *16* can do... and a 16 can be gotten fairly easily in a
>reasonable power game. Get your 16, spend a few points on skills, and there's
>virtually NOTHING you can't do, and do pretty damn well.

Don't flatter yourself. I advise you to get out a chart of the bell curve, one
that has percentiles superimposed on it somewhere. You'll see that the further
away from the norm you deviate, the smaller the area under the curve, and 
hence the smaller the probability you'd be there in the first place. Rolling
3 6's on 3d6 has a probability of 1/216, but the percentile is different.
   The mean IQ is considered to be 100. That's a z-score of 0 (0 standard 
deviations from the mean). An IQ of 180, on the other hand, corresponds to a
z-score of *5* (assuming the Stanford-Binet IQ scale), which would be around
(hmm.. don't have the chart with me) the 1st percentile, or somewhere around 
an 18 in GURPS language. The higher level you achieve, the harder it is to 
improve upon it, in other words; that's why the points are scaled the way 
that they are. 
   And a 16 is *not* gotten easily. Well, you can blow a bunch of points to
get that high, sure, but you'd be better off going for a 14 (probably about 
college grad level?) and using the rest of the points on skills. Another 
point of realism: raw ability generally does not go far. It's a matter of
how much you *know* that enables you to perform tasks, not a matter of how
much you are *capable* of knowing. There are probably 5-year-olds who have 
IN scores higher than you or me (cf. Mozart), but we can do things they 
can't. 
 
> People who are *that* smart (using IN
>>for an example) generally *can* do lots of things, that or have serious 
>>disadvantages (Stephen Hawking, for example).
>
>	Hawking isn't in the upper *2* percent. He's somewhere in the upper
>*.02* percent or better. 

Matter of opinion, I guess, but that was just an example, anyway. The point 
was about the disadvantage balance. 

>>ture trying to survive in the jungle, the GM can say "OK, you can only spend
>>these character points you got on Jungle Survival skill." It's not like,
>>*poof* you're a nuclear physicist or anything.
>
>	Yes, it is... when you make the character. You can create a character
>who can do anything, and do it well, for relatively few points compared
>to what such ludicrous combinations SHOULD cost.

That's because when you make a character, he/she starts out already knowing
stuff. If somebody made me into a character right now, they wouldn't start
off with zilch in, say, Mathematics. They'd start off with what the charac-
ter would *have*. Traveller tried to solve this non-problem by having that
insipid "military tour of duty" thing in their character creation -- and 
hence we had the only game in which your character could die while he was 
being rolled up. =) (For the record, I loved Traveller, but the character
generation system was dumb.) 

>	That is precisely the PROBLEM.  In, say, high-tech worlds, physical
>strength shouldn't cost the same. It's not as valuable, overall, as it is
>in, for example, a swords-and-sorcery world.

Well, if it's not that valuable, it doesn't mean it's any less difficult to 
achieve. Being able to be a blacksmith isn't a very valuable skill these 
days, but it would still take a hell of a lot of effort to achieve the skill
at mastery level -- no less than in the days when it *was* a vital skill.
   What if you made a Space character and did what you suggest, say halve 
the point cost for ST levels, and then suddenly he falls through a wormhole
or something and ends up in a Medieval campaign? Then you'd have paid x 
points for a *valuable* attribute while others would have to pay 2x points.
That's hardly realistic or fair. (Then again, neither is falling through a 
wormhole.)

>>Yeah, but only in silly movies and books are there characters who can 
>>do amazing things without having disadvantages to counterbalance them. 
>
>	These "silly movies and books" are the ones that get many people
>INTO this kind of gaming. We want to LIVE those kind of lives through the
>characters. 

Speak for yourself! 

>>Just how many times have you actually *played* (or ran) GURPS, anyway? 
>
>	Five overall. Ran one person who preferred GURPS, so I let him
>use his GURPS rules while most of the other people stayed in the semi-
>kinda-warped AD&D/Arduin/Arcanum/AMBER crossbreed I run.

Eek! I bet those are some funky rules indeed! =) 
   
-- Robert



--
Robert N. Talbert    		  | "I saw what cannot be seen
Mathematics Department  	  |  She spoke to me
Vanderbilt University		  |  'Take what you've learned, set it free
talbert@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu |   See what you'll see.' " --- King's X