kdresser wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2017 12:28 am
Outside of the stances and called shots, it doesn't feel like the player is able to make many tactical choices in combat. [...] I'm learning the GURPS combat system to see if I can glean a few things or integrate it somehow without bogging it down too much.
Are you looking for tactics or details? GURPS is both.
The One Ring sacrifices detail for abstraction but remains tactical.
For example: called shots. In GURPS, you decide you're going to shoot an opponent in the eye because, although you'll be at −9 to hit, a hit will increase your wounding modifier to ×4, his knockdown rolls are at −10, and you only need to cause 2 hit points of injury against an opponent with average Health to blind him. So with your longbow you spend your first turn Aiming to add your accuracy bonus of 3, your second turn Aiming to add another +1, and your third turn Aiming to add another +5, for a total of −4. You check the range table; your opponent being 10 yards away garners a −4, taking you down to −8. On your fourth turn you take an All Out Attack (Determined) for a +1, making the total modifier −7; you fire and roll against your effective skill of 7. Lucky you! You rolled a 6, good enough to strike the eye. Now the opponent gets to try to Dodge your roll. Let's say he fails. Your basic damage in longbow is 1d+1 imp. You roll a basic damage of 4 points. You get the ×4 wounding modifier, so you do 16 points of injury. The target is blinded. The target also had only 11 hit points, putting him at a total of −5. A knockdown roll is forced upon him, but with a Health of 11 and a −10 penalty he can't succeed. He still rolls to see if he remains conscious, and fails by more than 5, so he's unconscious. He's not quite dead, but if you're using the bleeding rules, he will be soon.
The
The One Ring, you decide you're going to prepare a shot to try to take down an enemy with one blow. You spend your first turn preparing the shot. On your second turn you roll against your Bow skill of 3, succeeding with a 16. It's automatically a penetrating shot, so the enemy makes a Protection test against your bow's Injury of 14; he rolls his Armour of 2d and get a 10. The shot gets through and the enemy is Wounded. Being a Loremaster character, the NPC is down and out of the fight.
The two systems give you exactly the same tactical choice with exactly the same end result, but GURPS gives you way more control over the details of how you do it.
The One Ring abstracts most of it away. You can compare all sorts of subsystems between the two games and see the same thing happening. In
The One Ring, you choose a stance, which produces a target number that governs everything that happens. In GURPS you choose from a series of maneuvers that get much more detailed about exactly what you're doing from second to second.
Whether that breaks your "immersion" in the game depends on what you like. I like both systems for very different reasons. I like the detail of GURPS, and people who want to be able to manage their moment-to-moment actions do too. I like the abstraction of
The One Ring, which fits well with the epic style of Tolkien, who doesn't go into great detail about the motions of combat.
One thing I'll say about modifying TOR with rules from GURPS: be warned that GURPS is designed to be highly modular, but TOR is not. You can add or remove the various subsystems of GURPS as you like and the system will keep on chugging along just fine. You can't do that with TOR; its systems are tightly integrated with each other. Be wary of unintended side-effects if you introduce GURPS-level detail.
I also had a hard time narrating what was happening as the LM.
The roll-then-narrate meme of TOR is overstated. For tasks, it goes like this: First players narrate what they want to do ("I swim across the river.") Then the Loremaster tells them what they need to roll. The players roll. Finally, the players narrate success or the Loremaster narrates failure ("My character Trotter pulls himself out of the other side, dripping" or "Your character Trotter gets swept away by the current.")
Don't overdo the narration. As a player, I hate waiting for a referee to describe for me in excruciating detail the outcomes of every roll I make. I get it. I stabbed the orc and it died. I don't care about your amateur pulp fiction. Get on with the game.