How to adapt/convert an ability?

How to adapt/convert an ability?

A person asked me to describe my way of thinking when adapting or converting an ability from another system/game/medium/whatever to GURPS. To me it seems intuitive, but I'll try to expand on my thought process here.

Sorcery Spells Overview: Enchantment

Sorcery Spells Overview: Enchantment

Let's go over the Enchantment college. Despite its name, there's actually a lot of useful stuff for characters who are not planning to enchant any items.

Monster/Racial Template: Forestfolk

Monster/Racial Template: Forestfolk

We all know that Wizards of the Coast is a very reasonable company that would never do something stupid like delete a huge collection of D&D articles from their own website and force people to rely on fans who archived all that stuff. Right? I believe that if you really like something, then you should download and archive it. (Despite that, some of my blog posts only exist on the blog.)

But jokes aside, one of the Fey Feature articles described an interesting fey creature - the forestfolk. These arboreal humanoid creatures have skin membranes that allow them to glide in the air, and can emit stunning sonic cries. They are even called sonic elementals in the description despite being fey. Their template is cheap enough to be used for PCs.

Powers: Innate Attack (Prismatic)

Powers: Innate Attack (Prismatic)

From my earliest exposure to GURPS I've been thinking on how one can accomplish random effects. For example, an attack that has a random damage type. GURPS has alternative abilities that combine abilities into a single one, but you still have to choose which one you use and take a maneuver to switch. I believe that I've seen an RPM spell that had an array of effects taken as alternative abilities; that one said that the effect being random compensates for the lack of need to "switch". That sounds fair. However, attack normally do not have such a requirement - you don't have to take a Ready maneuver to switch. This is why I suggest introducing something new - alternative random abilities. If all the abilities are attacks, then you divide the cost by 6, not by 5. If there is even a single non-attack ability, then keep the divisor at 5 as per normal alternative abilities. But why don't we come up with a new "damage type" as something of a shorthand using this framework?

Monsters: Crab People

Monsters: Crab People

There's several humanoid crab races in D&D and Pathfinder. Yurian (also known as aldani in the Forgotten Realms setting) from Fiend Folio seems to be an update of the crabman from 1e Fiend Folio, judging by the almost identical descriptions. Crucian is a more humanlike crabfolk species that appears in Sandstorm and Miniatures Handbook. Karkinoi is a brutish crab monster from Bestiary 4 for Pathfinder. Karkanaks are interesting crab people from the third-party Cerulean Seas setting for Pathfinder (that setting is great, I highly recommend checking it out - I'm going to steal a lot of content from it). And there's also Sartani from the Al-Qadim setting. Karkanaks and crucians can be used as expensive racial templates for PCs.

Sorcery: Wordcasting

Sorcery: Wordcasting

So, not that long ago I reworked my rune magic framework, making it more in line with the D&D lore. However, I had to abolish the Verb/Noun symbol system. But I do like verbs and nouns! I have decided to do something around that concept. I'll call it wordcasting after the variant spellcasting system from Pathfinder. This was quite the headscratcher for me. The end result looks interesting to me, but something in the back of my mind is telling me that I came up with garbage. I guess this will require some testing. Everything here is subject to change.

Martial Arts: Raiden Torpedo Technique

Martial Arts: Raiden Torpedo Technique

I love the Drop Kick technique in GURPS Martial Arts. But what if we "reverse" the drop kick? That's right, we will get Raiden's torpedo slam move. I'll try to utilize the technique-building system from GURPS Martial Arts to accomplish this. Also, this is not the same as the Human Missile technique from GURPS Supers.