Switching to GURPS (Character assistance requested)

[Fhaolan]

Okay, the DM of one of the games I play in is intending to switch from a D&D 3.0 (with some bits from 3.5) to GURPS 3rd edition (yes, I know both editions are behind, it's based on what books the group has). The intent is to convert the existing (and high-level) characters over the GURPS.

I used to play GURPS ages ago, but haven't really put a lot of time into it for quite some time, and even then I was playing in Sci-Fi or Modern Horror settings. I know you can't convert nicely, as feats/skill/class features don't map 100% to advantages/disadvantages/skills. However, I'm going to make a game attempt with my own character, and my wife (who's never played GURPS) wants to try to convert her own character in an attempt to learn the system. :smallcool:

The problem I'm running into is the characters themselves. My character started as a Bard for flavour reasons, but quickly switched over to Wizard. The intent was a Sage type, so Diviner specialization and Loremaster PrC. He's also a Half-Elf and regularly pretends to be a member of the nobility through disguises, bluffs, and diplomacy. I was doing fairly well in the conversion process until I hit the spell lists. Having never played a wizard-type in GURPS, I was utterly and completely lost. I tried matching spell-to-spell, but in GURPS spells have pre-requisite spells that cause chains of 'what you know', rapidly creating an insane spell list. And many of the spells that are bread-and-butter for D&D (magic missile, for instance), don't have GURPS equivalents that I could find.

So, my questions to the forums are: Should I just abandon the existing spell list, and build it up from scratch? In GURPS Fantasy, what spells are critical to a Knowledge-based character? What spells should I have for just general adventuring? What skill levels should I push these spell skills up to?

Now, on to my wife's character: She's playing a half-orc ranger (two-weapon fighting style), with a tiger animal companion with the warbeast template. The intent is she's from a culture of mounted wilderness warriors who make a point out of taming and training *anything* as a mount. Since we can break out of the D&D classes, she's thinking of giving it a bit more of a Barbarian and/or Scout feel, downplaying or eliminating the spellcasting while keeping the animal companion connection. We haven't even started looking at converting this into GURPS, but does anyone have any suggestions? Gotchas we have to be careful about?

[Ruerl]

GURPS is a great system, especially 3rd edition (wich I personally prefer vastly to 4th edition), however, a few things to keep in mind:

1: GURPS are *far* more deadly than D&D, be sure to get a good dodge value and a good passive defence value both, remember that unlike in D&D armour in gurps does'nt limit your manouverability or your ability to dodge things, on the contrary it helps you dodge. (through a passive defense value, for example a scale armour has a PD of 3 (adding 3 to any defense value you have) and a damage reduction (DR) of 4.

This is *added* to your active defenses, if you say have a good dodge rating for example 6 and a PD of 4 (for scale armour and a buckler) then you won't be hit if you roll 10 or below on 3d6.

2: nearly all rolls in GURPS except damage rolls are 3d6, rolling low is a *good* thing, if you roll below your skill you have a success, some skill rolls are contested however, for example if I wish to shadow someone through a crowd then my success on the roll needs to be greather than my targets success on his roll, if I fail he nothices me following, if I win, or fail by less than him however, then I can proceed.

3: Be sure to look through both disadvantages and advantages when creating the character, they can be characterfull and give you that edge you often need.

4: Remember that skills often defaulth to a certain attribute, GURPS has four of these: DX, IQ, ST and HT, nearly all skills defaulth to either DX or IQ with some penalty however, for example the skill "crossbow" is DX-4, meaning that your basic skill in it -if untrained, is your dexterity score, minus four.

Finally how many points are you playing with? It makes a huge difference after all.

[Crow T. Robot]

Also keep in mind Half-Orcs (and orcs in general) are a bit different. They aren't strong so much as annoying to kill. they have a few more hit points then everyone else, and might take another hit to take down.

Also, neither get a racial reducation to apperence though they take a hit to reputation, and her half orc is bound to lead to trouble. Also Half-Orcs only have a -1 IQ.

Now magic. First things first. Try to have at least a breast plate for armor. Unless you in a desert, then ditch the armor or risk death. With a magic skill of 12 or over, you only need a few words and hand gestures. So unless you wear guntlets you can be armored. Your options for more armor improve as skill improves. At 18 you can be in fill armor and still freely cast. Hell, at that point you can freely cast if compleatly tied down. The specifics on this are buried either the Basic book, or magic.

Also it is worth thinking about having the body of a professional athlete. (High Strength and Health.) The reasoning is that once you run out of power stone energy, you are now faced with haveing to draw down strength and even health to keep going.

If both stats are high this means you can get in more spells. It is also important to note that you should try to draw down the strength first. This is considered fatigue. And this is restored fairly fast.

Still a high IQ and magical aptitude take priority. Magical aptitude not only lets you gain access to the really powerful spells but acts as a crutch to have a higher effective IQ for learning spells. There for an IQ of 14 with a MA of 3 means an effective IQ of 17 which makes learning spells very cheap. Though it will cost you 80 points. Which is 20 points cheaper then a IQ of 17.

I might look up some spells later that you might be interested in. If you have access to the book "Wizards" look through that for some hints on how to build a wizard.

[Rad]

So, my questions to the forums are: Should I just abandon the existing spell list, and build it up from scratch? In GURPS Fantasy, what spells are critical to a Knowledge-based character? What spells should I have for just general adventuring? What skill levels should I push these spell skills up to?

Yes. Yes you should.

There are a good number of good spells in both Magic and Grimoire; try to pick what comes closer to your usual spells.
You can also homebrew some and change the flavor of existing ones: Magic Missile can be substituted with a force dart modeled along the lines of fireball or ice ball. Keep in mind that the true balancing factor in GURPS' magic system is the number and usefulness of the prerequisites, so be sure to reflect that in your homebrew. Another one is the general limit of 3d damage for low-tech stuff. Do not cross that unless you allow for hi-tech armor, in which case you will need to raise or remove that cap.


Now, on to my wife's character: She's playing a half-orc ranger (two-weapon fighting style), with a tiger animal companion with the warbeast template. The intent is she's from a culture of mounted wilderness warriors who make a point out of taming and training *anything* as a mount. Since we can break out of the D&D classes, she's thinking of giving it a bit more of a Barbarian and/or Scout feel, downplaying or eliminating the spellcasting while keeping the animal companion connection. We haven't even started looking at converting this into GURPS, but does anyone have any suggestions? Gotchas we have to be careful about?
Treat the animal companion as an ally (it should have a comparable power i.e. point value). Just read through the feats on Compendium I and you'll find too many that would fit.
For the spellcasting, you can drop it altogether or use the knacks for that couple of spells you want her to have. Keep in mind that they can get pretty expensive, so it would be better for her to be a real caster if she wants too many of those, but it lookslike that's not the case.

[Kurald Galain]

I'd hate to break this to you but this is not really such a good idea.

While GURPS is a very good system, high level D&D characters do not map well to GURPS, not at all in fact. GURPS is more on the gritty / realistic side, so if your characters are overly versatile, powerful, and paragon-ic, they won't really have a GURPS equivalent.

[Yahzi]

While GURPS is a very good system, high level D&D characters do not map well to GURPS, not at all in fact. GURPS is more on the gritty / realistic side, so if your characters are overly versatile, powerful, and paragon-ic, they won't really have a GURPS equivalent.
Very true.

A 300-pt Gurps character (about the highest you can imagine) is a demi-god. He can fence two or even three mooks at time! He can swing across the chandelier to escape, sneak through the woods, raise an army of rogues, and look good while doing it all.

A 15th level D&D character can fence two or three hundred mooks at a time... or, if he has magic, he can kill gods and reshape reality at will.

Put it this way: in Gurps, Arnold Shwarnegger has 18 hps, and an M-16 does 7D6 (doubled!). In D&D, Arnold has 200+ hps, and an M-16 does 3d8.

They don't model the same game experience.

[Kizara]

Very true.

A 300-pt Gurps character (about the highest you can imagine) is a demi-god. He can fence two or even three mooks at time! He can swing across the chandelier to escape, sneak through the woods, raise an army of rogues, and look good while doing it all.

A 15th level D&D character can fence two or three hundred mooks at a time... or, if he has magic, he can kill gods and reshape reality at will.

Put it this way: in Gurps, Arnold Shwarnegger has 18 hps, and an M-16 does 7D6 (doubled!). In D&D, Arnold has 200+ hps, and an M-16 does 3d8.

They don't model the same game experience.

Amusedly enough, 7d6x2 is vastly superior to 3d8.

"Reshaping reality" is pretty vague, but a 15th level DnD character certinally can't kill gods.

[Dalboz of Gurth]

I'd hate to break this to you but this is not really such a good idea.

While GURPS is a very good system, high level D&D characters do not map well to GURPS, not at all in fact. GURPS is more on the gritty / realistic side, so if your characters are overly versatile, powerful, and paragon-ic, they won't really have a GURPS equivalent.

I've transferred AD&D 2nd edition characters pretty easily to GURPS 4th. But I could see the difficulty in using 3rd edition characters to GURPS.

I also used the old GURPS CONAN as a guide, so that probably made it easier.



The problem I'm running into is the characters themselves. My character started as a Bard for flavour reasons, but quickly switched over to Wizard. The intent was a Sage type, so Diviner specialization and Loremaster PrC. He's also a Half-Elf and regularly pretends to be a member of the nobility through disguises, bluffs, and diplomacy. I was doing fairly well in the conversion process until I hit the spell lists. Having never played a wizard-type in GURPS, I was utterly and completely lost. I tried matching spell-to-spell, but in GURPS spells have pre-requisite spells that cause chains of 'what you know', rapidly creating an insane spell list. And many of the spells that are bread-and-butter for D&D (magic missile, for instance), don't have GURPS equivalents that I could find.


GURPS Magic is an intensely different situation than Dungeons and Dragons on the surface. HOWEVER, if you actually stick to your guns you can more or less figure a comparative relationship between the actual effects of the spells themselves.

The best way to describe the different systems is this:

GURPS Magic is Primordial. It is an evolution of complexity from base forms into more elaborate concoctions. This basically allows you a sort of rooted "Growth of Learning", and an almost unlimited capability to possess spells.

AD&D/D&D Magic is Memorize and Store. You can only have so many spells in your spell book, and you are only allowed to learn so many spells per your wisdom score, so what you do as a wizard is you cherry pick what you want to do, and what you don't want to do, providing for 0 growth in exchange for instant access to magical effects.

Hopeless? No! Because many magical spells in GURPS while they seem simplistic, can actually be molded into accomplishing great feats. What you need to concentrate on is how your character resolves situations more than what spells your character possesses.

For example: my "first level" Half-Demon Good aligned type card player used a simple level 1 gurps move earth type spell to initiate a cave in and kill/suffocate high level occultists who were trying to kill the whole town.

If you were to try that in AD&D at level 1 wizard... you'd need to get pretty creative with the spells on hand but you could still do it:

* Using "Enlarge" on the support beams in order to distabilize the tunnel (accomplishing the same feat)
* Using magic missile to damage the support beams to cause the same effect.

etc...

So for magic wise, try converting your playing style more than the actual spells you possess.



And if that fails and you give up on GURPS then I seriously and honestly suggest you purchase Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. It is NOT the same as Warhammer Miniatures, and is very fun! I've had 0 trouble converting characters into WFRP.

http://www.amazon.com/Warhammer-Fantasy-Roleplay-Perilous-Adventure/dp/1844162206

I've only needed to buy 2 books to make a good WFRP game :D It's also a pretty easy system to learn.

[Fhaolan]

I'll try to answer the questions so far. :smallsmile: I don't have 'Wizards'. I have Basic 3rd Revised, Grimoire, Magic, Fantasy, Compendium I & II, Bestiary, Religion, Martial Arts.... I could keep going. I'm a bit of a collector, but it doesn't mean I've memorized this whole mess, and I stopped buying GURPS a long time ago when I thought I wasn't going to be playing much in that ruleset. I think the last one I picked up was Undead.

I don't know what the point value we're working towards. The GM hasn't told us yet. In fact, I'm not sure there *is* one yet. She's talking about doing the conversions herself, and just handing us the finished product. Meaning she's going to build all the characters (5 or 6, depending as one of the players just had a baby and may not be joining us again for awhile), based on the existing D&D characters, and then try to even the point values out so they're balanced. I'm feeling a bit twitchy on that, as you can probably understand. I'm fairly sure this is going to end in scrapping the characters completely and rebuilding them all to a point value, but I just don't know what the point value is going to be until she starts with the exercise and discovers what a task she's set for herself.

While the characters are high-level, the GM has spent the last dozen sessions regretting that and wanting to pull the characters back into a more grim & gritty campaign. Which is what prompted this conversion, I believe. Also she had a DruZilla happen, completely by accident on the part of that player. Part of this is supposedly to have that player retire the DruZilla and come up with a new character concept to play.

Okay, so converting the spell list sounds like a dead end beyond 'what *kind* of spells do you use' and going from there. So... are there 'bread and butter' spells in GURPS that all spellcasters should have, the way there are for D&D?

[Dalboz of Gurth]

Okay, so converting the spell list sounds like a dead end beyond 'what *kind* of spells do you use' and going from there. So... are there 'bread and butter' spells in GURPS that all spellcasters should have, the way there are for D&D?

I believe the most powerful spell you can use in GURPS is your brain. Literally. My character (the half-demon I mentioned before), basically operated on a "half pick your spell"/"half random spell situation" with his deck of cards (which sealed his demon power so it wouldn't control him, kind of an inuyasha type thing, only it then gave him magic powers). When he got random spells (roll of the dice) I was still able to use the spell for my situation.

Although I am sure that some members can tell you some good specific spells to use, don't let that stop you from manipulating the spells in a creative fashion ^_^

IF all else fails and you're in a dark room with magic missile - attack the darkness :wink:

[Crow T. Robot]

If you have the magic books, then your going to need to take a look at the flow charts in the back. They will tell you what leads to what. They are scary looking and can be a bit confuseing. But it is not GURPS vehicles so don't worry too much.

Keep in mind, yout going to need to learn at least 3 spells to learn one battle spell. Fireball needs Ignite fire, shape fire, and create fire. There is an entire tree for knowledge spells.

What determines where you want to go, is what you want to do. If you want to be scolerly then you going to be hitting the knowlege tree hard. If you just want a agressive spell to be at your call when you need it, then you could get way wiht investing only a few spells in an elemental college then move on.

Also, the wizards book is available at e23 for $8. It is not a great book, but can give ideas on what to do.

[Forrestfire]

if you have GURPS supers, then I say that you should use the nigh-infinite variety of powers as your spells.

Some examples:

Magic missile: Generic Damage power with the homing enchantment and a power of 2 (18 points +the points for the skill, which must be 14 or over)

Fireball: Fireball power with the explosive effect enchantment and a power of 4 (34 points +the points from skill)

[Crow T. Robot]

I'd avoid using advantages in place of magic unless it is a knack spell. Also Get Enchant, and Enchant Power stone. These are the life blood of magic, and if you can roll your own, your going to have fewer problems.

Just buy some quartz as it is reasonably hard and will probly not break unter normal strain. Try for a few high power stones. And if that powerful stone develops a flaw, consider unloading it on a chump and starting again.

Unless you want to wake up as a purple turnip.

Also, as far as leathality goes, you should keep in mind Discworld translated easly into GURPS. And in those books people seldom servive to get hit twice with a weapon.

300 points is very high level, even super human. But gods and superman lerk around 1,000. Well small gods do. Any bigger they no longer need stats.