Upper Chest

Upper Chest

Low-Tech splits torso (9-11) into chest (9-10) and abdomen (11), which are not sublocations of torso, but are two separate hit locations, with chest becoming the default one. The coverage is 75% for the chest and 25% for the abdomen. However, it seems that area 9 is upper chest and area 10 is regular/lower chest, and those yet again seem to be separate locations, unless I'm missing some brain cells.

The coif from Low-Tech can be extended to cover shoulders and upper chest. A regular coif has 30% coverage, and the extended coif has 45% coverage. It says that it adds 50% (why only 50%?) of its DR to area 9 (but not the shoulders for some reason, even though they are explicitly mentioned above). As chest has coverage of 75%, the upper chest is 37.5% (more on that below). Since this coif provides 50% DR, I assume that these 37.5% are halved again for extra 18.75%. 30% + 18.75% = 48.75%, which presumably got rounded down to 45%.

Pectorals from Instant Armor protect the vitals (I assume only the chest vitals and not the abdomen vitals), and also partially protect upper chest (area 9). Now we also know that upper chest can be deliberately targeted at -1. The odds of protecting range from 1/6 (5% coverage) to 5/6 (16% coverage). For some reason, you cannot have armor that covers your entire upper chest, but if you extrapolate the coverage progression, you get the same 18.75% as from the extended coif above. Pectorals by default protect only from the front, so the full coverage for your hypothetical upper chest armor is 37.5%, which is half of 75% (chest). This means that chest is indeed split into two separate hit locations of equal size, but one of them is targeted at +0, and another one at -1. If you assign a -1 penalty to hit the regular/lower chest due to it having the same size as upper chest, you become unable to attack without a penalty (unless you attack a random body part?).

But why would you even target the upper chest specifically? There are only two kinds of armor mentioned that protect it and not lower chest, and there is no exclusively-lower-chest armor, unless you design it specifically. And since you target the entire chest by default, you can only hit upper chest either by striking it deliberately for some reason or when attacking a random hit location and rolling a 9.

If upper chest were a sublocation of chest, then you'd have to roll 1d upon hitting chest to see what you hit. "1" is already taken by vitals, and you cannot split 5 evenly between upper chest and lower chest. Thus, either you have to roll 1d twice - first to see what part of the chest you've hit, and second to see if you hit the vitals - or I am a complete knuckle dragger, or I am missing something here, or the rules are dumb. What the hell is going on here?

Comparing Shields: Low-Tech and Shields Up!

Comparing Shields: Low-Tech and Shields Up!

Shields Up! is one of my favorite GURPS supplements that introduces plenty of fun mechanics and patches up some holes in the rules. However, let's investigate the equipment sections of these books and see what is different. Should a GM decide between using one of these books for shields, or can he use both?

GACKS AAR: Week 13/Post Mortem

GACKS AAR: Week 13/Post Mortem

In the last post, I mentioned that my campaign was approaching an organic conclusion and specified that it wasn't going to collapse. I lied. It did collapse prematurely, so it's time for a post mortem. I have to analyze what worked and what didn't work, and try to understand why it didn't work. In addition, I'll share some fun stuff that wasn't public knowledge.

GACKS AAR: Week 12/Session 10

GACKS AAR: Week 12/Session 10

Now that was an intense week with lots of activity on the faction level. Let's see the SEEN posts first.

GACKS AAR: Session 9

GACKS AAR: Session 9

This week's session started exactly where the previous one left off despite 1:1 time, as last time the PCs went just far enough into the future. The situation was quite dire - four adventurers, one of whose was under 1/3 HP, stuck on the 3rd level of a barrow mound dungeon after a difficult fight against 5 wheeps. Initially, I was planning to manually create the rest of the dungeon, but didn't have enough free time for that, so we continued with Appendix A. Will the PCs find a way out, when there is only 1-in-20 chance to get a staircase on the periodic check table, and then you have to get lucky to get a staircase that goes up? They only had ~4 torches left, so they had to do it within 4 hours or be eaten by a grue in pitch blackness.

GACKS: Week 11 and GURPS BrOSR Flaws

GACKS: Week 11 and GURPS BrOSR Flaws

First, let’s list the SEEN posts for the last week, then quickly discuss what happened, and then I will have a lot to say about what needs to be done for the game to run more smoothly.

GACKS AAR: Week 10/Session 8

GACKS AAR: Week 10/Session 8

Let's see what happened last week on the faction level and what happened during today's session. As usual, I'll list last week's SEEN posts firsts, then provide some commentary, and then go over the session recap.

GACKS AAR: Session 7

GACKS AAR: Session 7

Let's see how the week went. Below is a compilation of SEEN posts, for the most part caused by faction players, and a session report.

GACKS AAR: Session 6

GACKS AAR: Session 6

We've reached the point where statistically most of the conventional games fall apart - session #6. We had a short hiatus in terms of in-person sessions due to lack of free time, but after two weeks we gathered again for a session. These two weeks between the sessions were dense with faction-level events, so let's dive into what happened there first. Note that only public events are posted below - there was a lot of secrecy behind the scenes.

GACKS AAR: Session 5

GACKS AAR: Session 5

We had not one, but two sessions this week. The previous one ended on something of a cliffhanger, where the party was preparing defenses near the entrance to a dungeon overrun by undead.

GACKS AAR: Session 4

GACKS AAR: Session 4

Due to health reasons, there were no sessions the next two weeks. However, the game world wasn’t standing still. Isn’t that wonderful? Here’s what happened during these two weeks, at least what is known to the public, because there was plenty of hidden actions. What follows is, basically, a compilation of SEEN posts. And then you can read what happened in today's session.

Wizardry: Shining South Spells II

Wizardry: Shining South Spells II

Land Womb is an interesting spell that lets you hide from detection spells underground for some time.

Lightning Fog is a powerful combination of Fog Cloud and Lightning Storm.

Mycontil's Last Resort explodes your body. It has a very expensive material component to avoid having armies of fanatical weak mages exploding themselves.

Rock Catch is a situational spell that lets you catch thrown rocks. Useful when fighting giants.

Sea Legs is a very situational spell that nonetheless could be very useful on a rocking boat.

Sparkles is a variant of Glitterdust that cannot blind, but has a longer outlining effect. This is mostly a spell for festivals with a side effect of revealing invisible creatures.

Stone Trap turns a block of stone invisible and suspends it in the air until somebody walks under it.

Stonefire is an expensive spell that burns through rock and creates hot smoke.

Suspend is a spell that suspends an object in midair for a couple of days. The enchantment rate was derived from Impulse Buys, assuming ST 10.

Wall of Pain is, well, a wall of pain.

Wizardry: Shining South Spells I

Wizardry: Shining South Spells I

It's been a while since I've converted any spells, so let's switch gears and do some spells from Shining South.

Arcane Sensitivity is a perk-level spellcaster detection spell.

Circlet of Enervation is basically the same as Enervation points-wise, but is more efficient in terms of FP usage. However, it balances that out by requiring an expensive focus and a rather rarely-used skill.

Coral Growth can be used to expand a piece of coral into a structure.

Daltim's Fiery Tentacles is a fiery variant of Evard's Black Tentacles.

Darsson's Chilling Chamber is similar to Cool, but has different range, duration, casting time, and area of effect shape. I think it is justified to be a separate spell.

Darsson's Fiery Furnace is the inverse of the previous spell.

Dispel Fog destroys natural and supernatural fog in an area.

Easy Trail is a spell appropriate to druids, clerics of nature deities, and wu jen. It allows moving unimpeded through undergrowth.

Mass Entropic Shield is a mass version of Entropic Shield.

Mass Jump is a mass version of Jump.

Fiery Vision is essentially a variant of Scorching Ray that uses a different skill to hit and requires no gestures.

Kyristan's Malevolent Tentacles is yet another variant of Evard's Black Tentacles.

GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

 GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

I've been running my BrOSR-style game for almost a month now, and the experience has prompted some introspection. Was GURPS the right choice? Why am I playing GURPS in the first place? What's missing? Why is GURPS like this? Eloquence isn't my forte, but I'll try to explain my thoughts.

GACKS AAR: Session 3

GACKS AAR: Session 3

Between session 2 and session 3, I recruited eight players to control the various factions in the game. I wrote up some order resolution and rumor-posting rules, such as GOSS and SEEN, and while diving headfirst into running this sort of game without proper preparation felt daunting, I think I'll be able to handle this. Let's see what happened in the world both faction- and PC-wise. I will avoid giving out any information that isn't public.

GACKS AAR: Session 2

GACKS AAR: Session 2

Between the sessions, I recruited a faction player to run the goblins. Certain events transpired that I will not elaborate much here to avoid revealing non-public information to the players. However, we had another session with the players, and it was a hilarious trainwreck.

Herb Gathering

Herb Gathering

One of my players wanted his character to use his Naturalist skill to find some valuable herbs to earn some money. This prompted me to investigate the rules and finding that there's no out-of-the-box solution to this somewhat simple request. As a temporary ruling, I ruled that this is similar to a job roll for the gatherer - this worked for that purpose, but what if the character wanted to find something more concrete? Let's see.

GACKS AAR: Session 1

GACKS AAR: Session 1

All right, now that the groundwork is all done, I began my in-person GURPS game that borrows a lot of ACKS procedures to see if GURPS can support a BrOSR-style game. It has been a long journey (that still isn't complete), and I've been very excited to give it all a try. I have five players whose only TTRPG experience is D&D 5e and one GURPS game that I ran for them to showcase the system. Despite this, they seem to have had zero problems understanding how 1:1 time works, and all the other BrOSR concepts as well. So, it's time to bring receipts!

BrOSR Game Preparations

BrOSR Game Preparations

I've been rambling about BrOSR for quite a while already, mostly about how such games could work in GURPS, and what is required to run one. At this point, between existing GURPS books, my own blogposts, and posts by the Addled Antillectual, there isn't that much left to do. Right now, I'm running a faction in a D&D 5e Braunstein game - the Shattered Skies (the sequel to Drakonheim) - and it's been a great experience. While I am enjoying the game, I'm also taking notes and studying the way Serious DM is running the game, because this is extremely important to me, as I'm planning to run something similar in the future, but on a lower scale (probably within 2 or 3 months from now). In the meantime, I found an in-person GURPS group in my backwater for whom I ran a short conventional game to familiarize the players with the system. And now we are preparing to play an in-person BrOSR-style GURPS game. This forced me to come down from the hypothetical scenarios that the system would need to cover and think about what I really need to at least start. Starting is the most important thing - I should be able to patch any holes as we go along. This is doubly important because aside from the aforementioned short conventional game I ran, I have no experience running GURPS in person. Thus, I decided to document my preparation process, because it might be helpful to others (yes, you) and to myself as well. It's very likely that I will get some things wrong, but I'll learn from my own mistakes.

Sorcerous Enchantment Gripes

Sorcerous Enchantment Gripes

Not that long ago, I wrote a huge post about enchanting. Now, it has become more relevant to me, as I've begun writing Enchanted Item Compendium. However, as soon as I started it, I immediately encountered problems, and I'd like to write another rambly post that, hopefully, will help me fix the situation.