Sorry about the nasty format of that post. Anyway, I had a couple of things to say about his reply. First, he's apparently checking up on the factual errors, which is a good thing. Now he replied to my complaint about GURPS costs reflecting Myth costs with:
: This is discussed in the sidebar on p. 68.
This is the sidebar which explains how Myth and GURPS value their characters differently, and how you should take account of this when converting. Problem is, this is exactly what Gene *didn't* do. He drew a direct correlation between Myth values and GURPS values.
Gene further says that:
: GURPS Myth Dwarves are no faster than Myth Dwarves in
: relation to other characters, though they may appear
: so because GURPS rounds movement rates much more than
: Myth does.
This seems to be simply incorrect, as far as I can tell. GURPS Dwarves run faster than GURPS Myrmidons, and about as fast as GURPS bre'Unor.
: They are ostensibly tough, but this design decision was
: based on playability-- not on point balance. As I'm
: sure you know, active defenses are the primary means
: of surviving a GURPS combat. Not only do Dwarves have
: pitiful active defenses, they deal (too carelessly) in
: explosives that would bypass
: them anyway. The bottom line is that GURPS Myth Dwarves
: will suffer roughly three attacks for every attack a
: GURPS Myth Warrior endures, whereas Myth Dwarves and
: Warriors, lacking active defenses, suffer them at a
: uniform rate.
This is also untrue. Myth warriors have an active defense, blocking with their shields; Dwarves don't. And Myth Dwarves have no melee attack, so making GURPS Myth Dwarves terrible at close combat would only boost the authenticity of the conversion.
: I couldn't imagine a Dwarf with HP in the 10-14 range
: surviving any major combat encounter in GURPS Myth,
: nor would they endure a nearby explosion from their
: own weapons, as they routinely do in Myth play. So I
: gave them the HP to do both. I believe in GURPS Myth
: play it makes them a bit more
: resilient than in Myth, but if they are to be good PC
: material they need to have some chance of routinely
: surviving frays.
Well, first off, Dwarves fighting solo *don't* survive any major combat encounters in the Myth computer game. If there's more than three melee units approaching (other than thrall), they're usually dead. And they certainly don't routinely *endure* nearby explosions; they routinely die from them. I understand Gene's statement that they need to be tougher to be good PCs, but maybe that's a sign that Dwarves *aren't* good PCs, or at least are no better than an ordinary warriors. And maybe the fact that Dwarves suck at close combat is a sign that the GURPS player should try to keep his character near to, and friendly with, the melee characters in the campaign.
So basically I have two objections to his answer. First, if valuable Myth units like Dwarves become poor PCs when faithfully converted to GURPS, why not just accept that and let the player decide to spend more points on a shield, or a dagger, or extra speed, or NPC warrior allies, or something? And second, if the alterations have been made for the sake of playability, why do they always seem to support the direct cost conversion scheme? It seems like preserving the relative unit costs is the real motivation here, not playability.
Now is it worthwhile for me, or the rest of the Asylumers, to keep bugging them about this? We're all using Wallace's eRPG anyway, and most likely any serious Myth fan playing GURPS would scrap the character templates and make his unit from scratch to reflect what he thinks is most faithful to the game. So would continued nagging benefit anyone?
--SiliconDream
