make fighters not suck

G

gibberingmouther

Guest
i'm using a significantly homebrewed version of GURPS, available here: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/3e/gurpslite.pdf

i have casters in my game and they are pretty powerful. dipping into magic is pretty powerful, but I want people who choose mainly physical stats (min max) to be able to do well also. how can i make "high level" fighters better able to stand out against low level ones in this system? i don't want the hero to be easily killable by mooks, basically. so one thing i'm going to do is change criticals so low level characters can't auto-hit high level ones and kill them in like one shot.

in the actual GURPS handbook (which you have to buy) there was a way to lower the opponent's chance to hit if the hero had really high skill but i can't use that because it's in the book you have to buy. but that's kind of the idea i'm going for.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Skimmed through the book... this feels way more complicated than the lite version IMO. x3
Since the GURPS is all about playing roles as if you were actually the character in real life, I think the best way to balance mages would be to impose a "realistic" way of balance. For instance, their spells would use some sort of energy, so they would either have a hard limit to how many times they can solve things with each spell (e.g. via a mana pool or a Vancian Magic system with limited uses for each spell), or possibly be able to do spells as much as they want, but exhaust themselves in the progress, introducing penalties to rolls? I'm thinking something like -1 penalties to mind rolls and -0.5 penalties to physical rolls (or vice versa) for each major spellcast (AKA something that's not absolutely trivial in the context of your game).

As for high-level fighters... if you don't just want stat points to be the main thing setting a high-level character apart from a low-level one, the best thing I can come up with is introducing new skills only usable by high-level fighters. Not necessarily skills in the 'cool special attack' sense, but also passive ones, and generic ones - they should be usable by both humans, goblins and zombies without being weird. For instance, a Lv.2 active skill would be holding a weapon in both hands, allowing you to hit harder (bonus to damage) and block hits with the weapon more efficiently (bonus to appropriate rolls), but meaning you can't hold something in your off hand. A higher-level skill would be being aware of lightsources in the vicinity, and thus be able to position yourself so your enemy gets blinded if they face you - enemies would get a dexterity/attention/other suitable penality each time you take a turn, which increases up to a certain limit based on how dark the area is and how strong the lightsources are - a campfire provides less debuffs than an ally with a flashlight or a lightning storm, and the sun is bright enough to give the maximal debuff as long as the weather is clear. And so on.
 
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