{"id":1642,"date":"2015-08-19T15:29:50","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T22:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themook.net\/gamegeekery\/?p=1642"},"modified":"2016-10-26T13:17:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T20:17:49","slug":"your-first-melee-combat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themook.net\/gamegeekery\/your-first-melee-combat\/","title":{"rendered":"Your First Melee Combat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome back, GURPers (GURPies? No…), to another post for anyone “New to GURPS<\/a>.” This week, now that we’ve learned all about skills and how to use them, we look at one specific skills subset — combat<\/strong>, a bit of the old ultra-violence! Though, it won’t be too<\/em> ultra. I mean, this is the first combat post — we’re still in shallow waters. But I hope Rex<\/a>\u00a0has been keeping up his insurance premiums, ’cause things could get ugly as we take him step-by-step through a basic\u00a0melee combat.<\/p>\n

Hopefully you’ve already read pp. 24-31 of GURPS Lite <\/a>—\u00a0it outlines\u00a0the entire flow of combat (which is identical to what’s in the non-Lite GURPS Basic Set, just with fewer options… learning GURPS Lite is<\/em> learning “real” GURPS!)<\/p>\n

While the game is chugging along in “real time,” you can say things to the GM like, “Rex spends the day fishing and hunting, then camps out on the prairie a couple miles from town. In the morning, he goes to visit his friends at the Bar-L Ranch.” You can describe an hour, a day, a week.<\/p>\n

But when combat erupts — when events unfolding in the story have a very real possibility of injuring or even killing someone — time nearly freezes, ticking along second-by-second. During each of these one-second turns, every combatant involved in the fight chooses a particular maneuver (pp. 25-26). Once everyone has acted, the fastest character then gets his second turn, and so on.<\/p>\n

If you want to attack someone\/something, you…<\/p>\n