Friday, January 3, 2014

GURPS Problems; Small characters

I've finally found something that GURPS doesn't give reasonably clear rules for, at least as far as I've found thus far.

I'm presently trying to build a tiny character, SM -3 relative to the rest of the humanoids in the party. He rides a warboar (a constant companion ally worth a LOT of points), and uses a lance. But here's the problem I face. It's all well and good, making a character is fine, but in terms of strength and dex and such, I'm basing him on the Basic Set house cat (BS 456). Based on this, he'd be ST 4, or 6 to be fairly burly for his size. But he wields a lance, which requires ST 12 according to normal rules. The GURPS Character Assistant has rules for modifying equipment to be larger or smaller, but they only affect price and weight. So, that lance requiring strength 12, still requires strength 12 to wield when scaled down to the size of a beefy meercat. Thus far my efforts to find where the rules for modifying equipment for different size modifiers has been in vain. The GCA has some issues with things, so I suspect that the minimum ST should be reduced accordingly.

Setting 10 as "average" for a scaled down campaign works just fine, my problem is having a very small character able to dish out damage comparable to that of his larger companions by virtue of the power of his mount. I can't very well have a meercat have ST 12 where ST 10 is a human. If there are rules for it, I'd like to use those, instead of just arbitrarily declaring that it works


In case you were wondering, I'm building a twisted knight version of Timon and Pumba for the randomly-generated fantasy campaign I mentioned a while back.

4 comments:

  1. One of my books had an answer for this. I stumbled onto it looking for something else, so of course I can't find it now.

    Powers?

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    Replies
    1. Checked powers, fantasy, dungeon fantasy, space, and supers thus far and haven't seen it as of yet. As a stopgap I added an attack mode to the javelin (required ST 6) to use it like a lance. Given that fantasy gives a small race (-2) who's default ST is 5 (Halflings), and all melee weapons that are larger than a small knife require at least 6 or higher to use, I'm assuming that somewhere there are rules for scaling weapons down that include the ST requirement. I'll keep looking for it, so far google has not been helpful in identifying which book it actually is in (but has yielded little rules all over the place).

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    2. Found it. Generic equipment modifiers are in High Tech and Ultra Tech, but not in Low Tech. Dungeon Fantasy 3 has rules for tiny tools, including scaling of weaponry for smaller races.

      I think I'm going to make a compendium of all of the rules you normally have to hunt through all kinds of books to find that might reasonably be desired in the main book (Rules for buying used gear, scaling for weaponry and equipment of different sizes, that sort of thing)

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