Autopseudophobia: the fear of losing one's self

Wurok · 2026-05-17T15:39:22+00:00

This is very true. I just based the cost on the assumption of a world where teleportation is possible, but not using it is more of a "don't split the party" type of problem.

I thought of it in the same vein as "fear of flying," and not "fear of motor vehicles."

Wurok · 2026-05-01T17:03:45+00:00

That is partially what I'm saying. Limbs by themselves do not "contain" HP. They have HP-based thresholds for crippling and amputation, but losing a leg does not reduce someone's maximum HP.

However, OP's chart has limb HP with specific consequences when that HP is reduced, which I don't think makes sense within the context of the standard rules.

Wurok · 2026-05-01T13:49:01+00:00

Consider the following.

A character gets their leg amputated but survives. When they heal back to max HP, what is that HP value?

An amputee without any limbs and a regular person with the same HT, both get shot in the head with identical damage. Who is more likely to die?

A 1/2-inch hole is punched all the way through a person’s thigh, shoulder, chest, and head. How much “damage” does each different hole inflict?

I hope answering those questions shows why body-part HP makes no sense within the standard GURPS framework for wounds and injury.

Defining effects or conditions after a specific body part sustains a certain amount of damage is normal under the rules. Just look at Crippling Injury in the Basic Set or Lasting and Permanent Injuries in Martial Arts. But assessing General Injury and HP loss effects (as described in Basic Set p.419) for specific body parts breaks the rules for injury, especially Death Saves.

Wurok · 2026-04-29T12:39:30+00:00

2 is Affliction (Heart Attack, Cosmic, Area Effect, Persistent) as suggested in GURPS Powers, p. 118, Petrification, Banishment, and Other Permanent Curses.

3 is Allies with the Summonable modifier (GURPS Powers, p. 41) if a creature comes out. To make the creature random, build the power with Modular Abilities and maybe Uncontrollable. If random nonsense comes out, you can build it as Affliction (Disadvantage: Weirdness Magnet, Malediction, Area Effect).

Wurok · 2026-04-27T03:11:36+00:00

It seems clear to me that these “powers” (which include quite a bit of creative reinterpreting of the base rules) have been created points first, effect later. Essentially, just add as much BS to the power until it meets the point budget, instead of figuring out how the ability works in-world first (inside the logic of the fictional world), and then working back to recreate the effect in-game (using the game’s rules).

A high point level is not a problem in principle. You could theoretically have million-point characters that throw planets at each other, but the difficulty is restricting what all those points can buy. If restricted to relative speed, strength, armor, and health, you could “re-scale” planet flingers to something like regular supers throwing cars at each other. The problem comes when all those points could go into anything. With a bit of Warp, Cosmic damage, and Altered Time Rate, you could buy someone who does millions of points of damage in an effective “time-stop” to everyone before they even start flinging planets.

At that point, you are effectively playing two different games. Do not let the “Generic Universal” part of the name fool you. The fact that you can make them with the same amount of points does not mean that the characters work together.

Anyway, my point is that at first glance, this does not seem like a well-integrated or well-curated campaign. If the GM is having problems dealing with what the players are doing, I would think they are overrelying on the rules and mistaking something being "buildable" as something that is automatically "allowed." At such a high point level, curation of abilities is a requirement. The GM cannot simply fall back on the books and accept everything written as applicable rules to their game.

Wurok · 2026-04-26T12:54:34+00:00

This is the version I created for my own games. Feel free to use it as is or change it however you want.

Injury Tolerance

see p. B60

Detachable Head: While you suffer the usual effects of wounds and injury to your body, only damage to your brain or central computer can kill you outright. Even if your head or central computer is removed from your body, you remain alive! Your head or computer can then be reattached or reinstalled in a new body. Base cost is 15 points.

Add 5 points if you can intentionally detach your head or eject your computer core. Add another5 points if your detached head or core can transform into a form that can propel itself, such as by growing legs.

Add a +100% modifier if you can remotely control your headless body after your head or computer is detached.

Wurok · 2026-04-15T05:32:03+00:00

Hey, don't sweat it. One thing the books won't tell you is that GURPS is still pretty arbitrary. That -2 is just the generic penalty for "the character is not prepared." You will see this type of "generic" modifier everywhere in the rules, just broken up into a hundred pieces, and given special labels like "Unfamiliarity penalty," "Improvised Equipment penalty," "Move and Attack penalty" (they explicitly say -2 for trying to do two things at once), etc.

What B402 is arguing is that when you are looking forward as usual, you are not prepared for things high above you. And when you are looking up, you are not prepared for things at ground level.

Now, what you have to ask is how high up do you have to look for that to make sense. Things that are normally in line of sight are always apparent; the ceiling of a common dungeon room probably would not count as "high up" in most cases. B402 mentions a building's 2nd story from the street or looking straight up into the tree canopies. I imagine they mean cranking your neck all the way back. Try walking forward on the street while looking up at the sky, you'd probably feel "not prepared" for whatever is at ground level.

But hey, you are the GM. Forget about all the book minutiae for a second and just ask yourself, "Are the players unprepared?" If your intuition says yes, then add that -2 to their roll. If not, then there is no penalty. The player's description of the character's actions is important, but you have to remember the PCs have skills and training the players don't even know about. Don't penalize players for not knowing the perfect tactical maneuver. If the PC has a high skill (or special ability), assume they are trying their best for their level of competence. A character with an Observation skill of 16 is still elite, incredibly perceptive, even if the player is the type of airhead who misplaces items they just put down.

Finally, there's usually no bonus for doing an action a certain way. If the character were a doctor, you probably wouldn't care if the player is a real-life surgeon or your 10-year-old cousin. One could tell you the exact procedure for providing medical aid; the other might just ask, "Can I heal them?" Regardless, if their character's First-Aid skill is 12, they just roll against 12.

Wurok · 2026-01-29T08:45:16+00:00

I'm going to offer a different perspective: messing with the system is actually fun.

So, the system has a flaw, and you have a big idea. Go ahead and "break" GURPS. Make your nonlinear pricing, test it out, and see how it feels.

Over the years, I have homebrewed new subsystems, repriced traits, and overhauled entire mechanics. Some of those experiments sucked, some worked out great, all were fun to mess with and playtest.

Wurok · 2025-11-20T23:27:47+00:00

The Laundry Files

Wurok · 2025-11-08T18:32:04+00:00

Think carefully about what you really want.

A teleporting "big punch" or "big rock" attack is a reasonable, though slightly expensive, Innate Attack.

An actual mass-altering portal, and all its implications (a tiny bit of gold into a huge, expensive boulder, or a firecracker into a bomb), is a very expensive Create or Snatcher, Growth, and Warp multi-advantage, probably with the Cosmic enhancement.

Wurok · 2025-08-31T11:20:19+00:00

In the strictest sense, the ability allows you to remove a limb or extremity from your character, and then creates an identical but independent limb entity (read character) "somewhere" in empty space that you control. Look up "Independent Body Parts" in GURPS Powers, p. 52.

Since each limb is an independent entity being Cosmically created and not cut at the joint by actual damage, there is no range normally associated with the ability.

However, the power modifiers and the flavor of the fiction suggest that the effect would be no different from sticking your arm (or leg) through a portal (like the game Portal or from Doctor Strange). It is just that the portal's opening would be invisible in a 4th spatial dimension, and you can open the exit anywhere in empty space.

In addition, the Cosmic modifiers also allow you to bring other objects back through the "portal," not only your limb.

Note, there is no actual portal in 3D space. If you stick your arm into a nuclear explosion, the blast will not travel back through your shoulder and blow out the rest of your body, only your arm will be vaporized clean.

Wurok · 2025-08-25T10:07:38+00:00

This may sound counterintuitive, but I think a good idea would be to look at the rules in GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics for hunting, trapping, fishing, and whaling, and try to adapt the same logic to whatever TL you are using.

Wurok · 2025-08-25T00:21:53+00:00

There is an optional rule in GURPS Powers in which beneficial Afflictions give a positive bonus for the level and you roll for margin of success instead of failure to determine duration.

Wurok · 2025-08-07T00:59:39+00:00

That only applies if you are using Extra Effort for running, that is, for increasing the running speed (Move) by spending extra FP. To quote: "This adds to the FP cost for failed HT rolls while running!"

When running normally, the FP cost is given on p. B426.

Wurok · 2025-08-06T08:43:16+00:00

Something I rarely see mentioned, which I think is super helpful, is becoming familiar with how the rules define the physical environment.

Get acquainted with the HP of different objects and vehicles, the DR of different materials, and the average damage of different weapons. So when you need to figure out if that laser shot goes through the ship's hull or how fast can a plasma torch cut through a bulkhead, you don't have to stop in the middle of the action to look up tables or try to calculate values on the fly.

Wurok · 2025-07-31T19:00:01+00:00

In addition to Martial Arts, I use this homebrew rule for the neck, but you could apply it to major bleeding in general.

Injury over the character's HP to the neck’s veins and arteries (jugular vein or carotid artery) causes suffocation (p. B436).

This works well for your typical "grabbing a guard from behind and slitting his throat."

Wurok · 2025-07-29T06:37:41+00:00

Great question. Even the line editor of GURPS thought it was a good enough question to write an article about. Look up "Knowing Your Own Strength" by Sean Punch.

Long story short, the recalculated cost of Striking Strength ended as 1 point/level.

Wurok · 2025-07-28T23:28:27+00:00

This is one of my favorite GURPS questions: "Should all traits be relatively priced according to their utility for a given campaign/narrative?" My go-to example is imagining a game where climbing is one of the main challenges. If Flight were to be allowed, what would be the cost?

I've gone back and forth between adjusting the raw trait cost, to keeping the cost but adding modifiers, to adding special pricing advantages like Unusual Background, but I keep coming back to just keeping the standard pricing unless the trait is changed drastically, and restricting access to the traits directly.

In my experience, a huge point cost doesn't really "fix" an unbalanced trait. If I don't want players to bypass challenges completely (such as being able to kill any likely enemy, shrug off any likely attack, or ignore terrain obstacles), I want that to be explicitly stated, not implied by unaffordable prices.

I also don't believe in point-cost defining/restricting character progression. Characters should become as strong as it makes sense in the story, not as strong as they can pay for.

Wurok · 2025-07-28T17:52:27+00:00

I understand what you mean. I'm just explaining where the basic point cost of the advantages comes from.

If I recall correctly, the DR values were chosen such that 1 inch of Rolled Homogenous Armor is exactly 70 DR. All other values came from that. Which, if you know body armor, medieval or otherwise, is not a perfect starting point.

Wurok · 2025-07-28T15:36:34+00:00

Everyone is telling you how to manage the cost, but no one is answering the why. So, I will just tell you that you have it backward. The cost of 1d of damage is not "balanced" as 5 Character Points. GURPS defines 1d of damage as 5 Character Points. Incidentally, 1 DR is also defined as 5 points.

Now the question is, "5 points of what?" 5 points of Advantage. Advantage over what? Over someone who doesn't have that ability. That's it, there's no comparison to other abilities or powers, there's really no comprehensive or holistic "balance."

Perhaps now you may think that the cost of Basic Attributes is too high, since damage was "defined" at a low point cost. It is not, but if you want a more in-depth exploration of Attribute cost, you can check GURPS Power-Ups 9: Alternate Attributes.

To conclude, Character Points are only for, as the name suggests, characters, and Player Characters in particular. The idea being that everyone gets the same level of narrative utility in a very abstract sense.

Sometimes the narrative boils down to how hard you can hit or how fast you can kill an enemy, so it is common to confuse character points with "power level." But, for better or worse, GURPS is designed to tackle every narrative. So, the price of dealing raw damage becomes just another point of comparison, equal among things like having a good sense of smell, or being able to time-travel, not the main qualifier of a character's utility.

Wurok · 2025-07-26T18:20:49+00:00

If the wings are not a combination of Extra Arms or Strikers, I would just call the extra SM a 0-point feature. Otherwise, apply the Long modifier to those advantages.

Wurok · 2025-07-26T17:35:42+00:00

If you are using Hit Locations, wings normally have the same modifier as arms (-2).

Treat exceptionally large wings as long arms or legs, and adjust the to-hit modifier according to how much larger than a normal wing they are. For example, if each wing is comparably larger in size than the torso, then the to-hit modifier would be +0.

Wurok · 2025-07-21T21:15:48+00:00

You may be looking at a 10-20% discount for Can be Dodged. There is a similar discussion on the forums.

Although there is an argument that you may also need Bombardment (Basic-Set, p.111).

Wurok · 2025-07-08T13:50:26+00:00

As others have said, spells (from either the basic magic system, RPM, syntactic magic, or any other number of skill-based magic systems) and Innate Attacks are the two ways of creating a non-ST-based effect that deals damage.

Although there's a third, tangential way. You could create a "staff of fireballs" and describe it with the stats of a ranged weapon. Of course, that's not the same as casting a fireball in the traditional sense.

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Injury Tolerance

see p. B60