Translate

2015-10-14

GURPS Fallout Character Survey

For our next game we decided to play Fallout. Instead of the typical character creation session, I decided to give the players a "Character Interview" and then build the characters myself based on their results.

While I'm not 100% pleased with the final survey, it worked well enough for us to build characters. In the future I may revisit this survey and expand on it. Most of the questions come straight out of Basic Set, so I don't take full credit for this.

Below is the basic form, but I used Google Drive to host the form and record the responses. That can be seen HERE.

Generalized Utility Record and Personal Summery

Basic Information

Name:
Gender:
Age:

SPECIAL

How would your rate yourself? (Total should be around 40)
Strength (1-10)
Perception (1-10)
Endurance (1-10)
Charisma (1-10)
Intelligence (1-10)
Agility (1-10)
Luck (1-10)

Family

Father's Name:
Alive?
Father's Job Assignment:

Mother's Name:
Alive?
Mother's Job Assignment:

Describe your relationship with your parents.

Assignment History

What training have you received?

Do you have any self-taught skills?

What is your current job assignment?

What other job assignments have you held?

Relationships

Friends:

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers you could call friends:

Enemies:

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers you could call enemies:

Close Professional Associates::

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers who are your close professional associates:

Background and Interests

What were the most important moments of your life?

How would you describe your own code of morality?

What are you deep held beliefs?

Likes:

Dislikes:

Hobbies:

Other Interests:

What motivates you the most?

What are your plans for your life in the vault?





2015-10-07

GURPS Lost Mine of Phandelver

So, awhile back I decided to run the Lost Mine of Phandelver (the D&D 5th edition starter box adventure) using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. Why GURPS? I've covered that before. So, I just wanted to go over the general experience of running a 5e adventure with DF.



Since this adventure was for "first level" adventurers, I decided to use the Dungeon Fantasy on the Cheap with a slight modification. I gave the players 150 points for the 100-point templates than told them to ignore the Disadvantages. After they created these characters, they could then buy disadvantages that fit the character and use the extra points to improve other stats. I found taking this approach created characters with fewer and more interesting disadvantages.

Previously I had been a player in a group that ran the LMoP, and what impressed me the most was how much the actual play of the adventure went exactly the same. The first few sessions played out with only minor differences. The "combat balance" felt about the same, and the player dealt with the enemies at the same speed.

The player's choices did diverge quite a bit, especially as the game went on, but the play "felt" the same. In some cases, enemies were defeated much faster than in the 5e game due to GURPS's rules such as major wounds, and -HP.

Here might be a good time to mention that I found converting 5e monsters to GURPS very easy. I had difficulty in the past converting D&D 3.5 monsters, but not this time. I don't know why that was exactly, but it may have had more to do with the lower level of the monsters (and fewer special cases and abilities) than the edition. Still, I found converting Str directly to ST, and the other attributes' modifiers as straight add/subtraction from 10 for the corresponding GURPS stat, to be very quick in converting stats.

Things went very well and the game had some interesting actions by the players (they basically sold the Cragmaw Castle to the Dragon...). But as we neared the end, I knew that the difficulty was about to ramp up.

The adventure seems to have 3 level ranges it deals with: ~1 for the hideout and town, then ~2-3 most everything else, and level 5 for the mine. Even though the players did many of the optional side adventures, and gained a good amount of CP, I had a feeling that the final mine was going to be a bit much for them.

I was almost wrong. The players took the shortest path to the "end" and might have been able to take out the big bad, but after the jelly attacked their goblin pal, and a few bugbears fled into the darkness, they got worried about a flank attack. So, they backtracked to the beginning got a bit worn down by some minor pests, then found themselves in a big dark room filled with ghouls.

Paralytic Attacks = dead PCs.

I treated the paralyzing attack as a stun, and gave the players a HT roll to recover, but the attacks kept coming. The Orc bard held out the longest, but eventually fell.

Overall, the game went very well. While it didn't end "successful", I think it was a success. It played very well and was probably the most fun I had running DF. Maybe in the future I'll revisit some of the published adventures for 5e.

2015-10-05

Updates soon...

It's been awhile since I've posted anything, but I have several new post inbound. Here's a quick rundown of what I've been up to:

We tried a few different campaigns out, with a lot of false starts.

I ran the Lost Mine of Phandelver (the D&D 5th edition intro module) using GURPS DF. I'll probably write up my general impressions on how things went soon.

Then we had a few other false starts, before...

We decided to go back to Fallout! I'll be running my first session of that game this week.

There has been a lot of other stuff going on in my life that has made things a bit crazier than normal, but hopefully things have settled and the updates will resume.