It's a good time to tell about my Asgard campaign. Not Marvel Asgard, but Norse Mythology Asgard.
The party arrived to Asgard by a spelljammer, and if anyone doesn't know, spelljammer is a magic ship that travels through space. They met Thor, and he asked their help in a delicate matter: to bring back his hammer Mjolnir that was stolen by Jotunns. So the party travelled to Jotunnheim only to find that the thief was not a Jotunn, but an Aesir. First time he got away, Second time they found the thief, he was wounded, and his companion Magni took Mjolnir. And if I say that his other companion was named Modi, you probably already guessed that the "thief" was Thor himself. This was part of the Loki's plot to create a distraction so he could get into Odin's vault and steal a powerful artifact Hand of Vecna.
So the party tried to steal back the Hand of Vecna... and completely failed. Don't look at me like that, I gave them two chances. As the result I decided to spin the things, so the next campaign will be from Loki's perspective. Loki's servants are going to search for other Vecna-related artifacts. I'm not going to elaborate on Loki's goals here yet on the off chance that someone from my party is reading this. Very unlikely, but still...
Ah, yes, grappling rules. IIRC, they're not just complicated in GURPS, but in D&D as well. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about them is that, once you stop and think about it, sooner or later you'll realize they kind of have to be complicated. Even those of us with just a few playground scraps under our belts, or more friendly horseplay, understand how effective it can truly be... but when the rules are too simple, grappling varies from woefully underpowered to grossly overpowered.
At least in GURPS, there are simpler rules for it, in addition to the catch all "The GM can eyeball the situation and rule accordingly." Another somewhat paradoxical aspect of grappling in GURPS is how combat takes place in one second turns. As such, a lot of the "bigger" grappling moves take time to setup: grapple with target, put them into a particular hold, then apply pressure or go for a throw to get some distance before they can break free. At least, I think that's how it works. The grapple can be important to roleplaying and not just roll-playing, so GURPS Martial arts was further supplemented by GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling.
Which brought up another unfortunate but more or less unavoidable aspect of GURPS: confusing terminology. This exists across GURPS, because an expansive, build-your-own-RPG-Toolkit is going to have terms that sound a lot like each other, have the same abbreviation, or just "sound" like they mean something else. In this case, CP and CP. Character Points (the original CP) is what you spend to build your character at the beginning of the game and what you earn from accomplishing objectives in the game, as well as good roleplaying. The other CP are "Control Points", and I... have a vague understanding of them. Basically, it is a metric/currency you use when following the advanced grappling rules presented in Technical Grappling. Much like GURPS being named GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System), I suspect Control Points were originally a placeholder term for which no more suitable replacement was found. XP
Anyway, generating, losing, and/or spending "Control Points" are all tied into your actions with these more advanced grappling rules, and when you need that epic struggle that goes into exacting detail... it looks good (from what little I know of it). The in comic equivalent is the perfect meat for a PvP sandwich. The players can feel that sense of accomplishment or loss without the accompanying HP loss (and the ramifications thereof).
Ah, the art of grappling. My current 5e character is a grappler, and grappling has been simplified in this edition. He is an especially good grappler since I maxed out his size category, and next ASI he’s going to count as a Huge creature at base and Gargantuan with his growth ability. At level 18 it reaches ludicrous when he counts as a Colossal creature at max ramp up. He’s more of a silly tank so my DM allows it, he finds it funny when I grapple dragons.
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