How To Play LURPS, Lewis' Unified Role Playing System

Firebreathing Kittens

How to play LURPS

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for LURPS, Lewis’ Unified Roleplaying System. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own LURPS game.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. Classless point-buy d6 game

2. Target numbers

3. Critical successes and failures

4. How to use a skill

5. How to attack

6. Armor

7. Distances

8. How to cast magic

9. Flaws

10. How to build a character

LURPS is a classless point buy system that uses only normal six sided dice. Classless means any character can learn any skill. Contrast that with a game where only rogues can learn how to pickpocket, or only clerics can learn how to heal, or only fighters can wield swords. Any LURPS character can wield any weapon and learn any skill. Point buy means you spend character points to buy and learn new weapons and skills. The more points you spend, the better you are at that activity. And lastly, LURPS uses only six sided dice, which I will also call d6 going forward.

You will determine your success or failure in LURPS by rolling six sided dice and counting how many of them meet or beat the difficulty. The standard difficulty check, also called a DC, is four. For a DC of 4, each dice you roll that lands on a one, a two, or a three, is a failure. Each dice that lands on a four, a five, or a six, is a success. Every weapon, spell, and skill that you use will have a target number. The target is how many individually passing dice you need to overall succeed at the thing you’re trying to do. For example if your target number is two, then you need at least two of the dice you roll to be a four or higher. The more dice you roll, the more likely you are to hit your target number. If you only rolled one dice, it would be impossible to achieve a target of two. If you were rolling two dice, then it’s possible for both of them to be a four or higher, and for you to be successful, but the odds aren’t great. The higher the target number is, the more dice you need to roll. The probability math is pretty straightforward because each dice you roll has a 50/50 chance to hit a 1, 2, or 3, compared to a 4, 5, or 6. So for each one target number, you’ll want to roll two dice, in general. Of course, the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to hit your target number. It’s reasonable to expect to hit a target number of two rolling four dice. It’s even more likely if you roll six dice. There are some in-game ways to change the difficulty number, for example lock picking tools make the lock picking DC 3 instead of 4.

Rolling a six or a one on the dice are special occurrences. Ones are special because they cannot be rerolled. When you roll a six, you can choose to reroll a failed dice. If you reroll a four and it becomes a six, that’s another chance to re roll one of your other dice. It can get very exciting. The more sixes you have, the better because if you roll more sixes than the target number, that is a critical success. A critical success in combat means you deal full damage. Here is an example. Your target number is two. You are rolling four dice. You roll a one, a two, a three, and a six. The one is a bit of a bummer, it cannot be rerolled. The two and the three are failures, but with your six, you can reroll one of them. So you choose to reroll the three. The dice with a three on it, when rolled again, becomes a six! That’s awesome. Now you have two successes, you meet your target number of two, and you’re going to succeed. You currently have the same number of sixes as your target number, and one reroll left. There’s a chance that you will roll a critical success. That second six entitled you to rerolling one more failed dice. You reroll that dice that had a two on it. It’s also a six, oh my goodness! Now, with three sixes, you have more sixes than your target number of two, so you critically succeed on your hit and deal full damage. Every damage dice your weapon deals is a six of damage. Yaaay. Do always keep in mind: if half of any dice pool you roll are ones, that is a critical failure.

How to use a skill. There are thirty skills in the base free LURPS rule book. You can put character points into a skill to first initially gain access to the skill, and then to level it up. The maximum skill level is seven. To use a skill, roll as many dice as your level. That means the most dice you can roll for a skill is seven dice. Here is an example of rolling your skill level number of dice. If your skill in identifying spells and arcane items is four, then you would roll four dice. If your skill in sailing and vehicles is three, then you’d roll three dice. Each skill has a table that tells you how to interpret how many successes you got, ranging from one to four successes. Here is an example of consulting your skill table. You have five ranks in the barter and appraise skill, so you roll five d6 dice. If you get one success, the skill table says you get about a five percent discount. If two of your dice are successes, you get a ten percent discount and you would know the value of an item to within about twenty five percent of its actual price. If you roll three successful dice, you get a fifteen percent discount in the shop, and you know how rare an item is in this region. If you get four successful dice, you get a twenty percent discount, and you can persuade the merchant to deal with illegal goods. Each skill has its own interpretation table. When you put a point in a skill, add the skill’s table to your character sheet so you don’t have to dig through the rule book later.

How to attack. There are six combat skills in LURPS that you can put skill points in just like any other skill. These are: slashing weapons, crushing weapons, piercing weapons, unarmed grappling, bows, and gunpowder. Like all the other skills, the maximum level for combat skills is also seven, meaning you can roll seven dice. There are tables of weapons starting on page 42. The table tells you the name of the weapon, the skill used to use the weapon, the weight of the weapon, how many hands it takes to use the weapon, how much damage the weapon deals, and a description of the weapon. The weight of the weapon determines its properties, so look at page 40 to understand your weapon. Light weapons need two successes in order to hit, and deal 1 d6 of damage. Medium weapons need three successful dice in order to hit, and deal 2 d6 of damage. Heavy weapons need four successful dice in order to hit, and deal 3 d6 of damage.

Here’s an example weapon attack. You have a dagger and five levels in the piercing skill. You stab your dagger at an enemy. Roll five dice because that’s your piercing skill’s number of dice. Because the dagger is light weight, you only need two successes. You roll a one, a two, a three, a four, and a five. The four and five are successes, so you hit your target number of two, and the dagger embeds into your enemy. Roll one d6 of damage. Great job.

Armor can protect you from physical damage types in LURPS. Armor has three stat numbers or letters separated by forward slashes. The first number is how much coverage the armor gives you, which can range between one and ten. Coverage is how many dice you roll. The second number is the difficulty check, which is the pass or fail number for each dice. The third stat is a letter and represents the type of armor, like it protects you from piercing damage would be a P. Here’s an example armor roll. You have two points of cover from your mythrul plate armor, with DC three, and it protects you from piercing damage. The enemy is attacking you for six slashing damage with their axe. Roll your coverage number of dice, which is two dice. Every dice that gets a three or higher will meet to beat the DC of three, reducing the incoming damage by one for each success. If that was piercing, each of your armor dice would be an automatic success.

Distances. There are five distances in LURPS: immediate, short, medium, long, and very far. Immediate means close enough to punch. Short distance is about how big a bedroom is. Medium distance is still close enough to hit with an arrow. Long means a few city blocks. Lastly there’s very far, which is like from here to that mountain on the horizon.

How to use magic. You can put your skill points in a specific school of magic if you want, just like a skill. There are ten schools of magic. Putting a single skill point into the school gains you access to the full list of spells in that school of magic, and you can cast the spells from that school. By the way, the maximum number of skill points you can have in any skill or school of magic is seven. Here is how you would cast a spell. First, declare the name of the spell and the level you’re casting it at. Then, spend the amount of mana needed to cast that level of a spell. Page 56 has a table that you will want to put on your character sheet if you’re a magic caster that tells you how much mana gets spent at each level. Next, roll the number of dice you have in the school of magic’s skill. The spell’s target number is the level you cast it at. If you have as many successful dice as your target number, the spell was cast successfully.

Here is an example of casting a spell. Your character has six skill dice in the school of healing and abjuration. You declare that you are casting the spell called Heal at third level. The table on page 56 says third level spells cost six mana, so you spend six mana, going down from 45 to 39 mana. You roll a one, a two, a three, a four, a five, and a six. The target number is the spell’s level. That’s a three here because you rolled a third level spell. The four, five and six all meet a standard difficulty DC of four. That’s three successful dice, meeting your target number of three. Excellent, you cast the spell. The person you’re casting heal on recovers three d6 of damage, so you roll three d6 and get a nine, so they recover nine hit points.

Let’s talk about miscasting in LURPS. Miscasting is when you roll the number of dice that you have in the skill and not only do you not get at least as many successful dice as the level of the spell, but also, half or more of your dice pool consisted of ones. Is half rounded down, like one out of three dice, or rounded up, like two out of three dice? I wasn’t sure from reading the rule book, so for this explanation I’m going with the more exciting answer of rounding down, one out of three dice is half. For example let’s say you have six skill dice in the school of healing and abjuration. You declare that you’re casting a level four heal spell. The target number is the spell’s level, four. Oops, you rolled a one, a one, a three, a four, a five, and a six. The four, five and six all succeed. Hopefully that six, which lets you reroll any failed dice that wasn’t a one, gets you a fourth success. You reroll the three, but get another one. Uh oh, you didn’t meet the spell’s target number. And even worse, three of your six dice are ones, so you critically fail and miscast. Consult the miscast table on page 79 to see what happens to you. If you’re a magic user, I suggest putting this miscast table on your character sheet so you don’t have to dig through the rule book mid session. So let’s consult this table. The difference between the number of successes and your target was one dice, so that’s a level one miscast. If it had been two dice, that would have been a level two miscast. There are six possible outcomes for each miscast level. Roll a d6 and see what happens instead of you casting your spell. Miscast outcomes range from minor, like the spell hitting a different target of your choice, to concerning, such as collapsing asleep for one hour per spell level which can totally take you out of a fight, to downright lethal, such as taking five times the mana cost of the spell as lethal force damage. A level five miscast might even instantly slay your character and replace them with a greater demon who has 250 hit points and a good chance of killing your entire party. It’s very unlikely that this will happen, but if it does, it’s quite the story.

Resisting magic. You can cast lots of different types of magic in LURPS. You can blow thick smoke to obscure vision, you can firmly slap a piece of iron, steel, cobalt, or nickel to magnetize it, you can spray a geyser of flammable slippery oil. Not every spell prompts a resistance roll from its target. But if there is one, it means the person you’re trying to hex gets to roll a single dice in their own defense. There is a table on page 56 that has a column labeled resist. Or you can remember that the resistance number is one higher than the spell level number. Or you can use the table. For example, at level three, the target rolling to resist succeeds if they roll a 4. This means that any four, five or six on their single resistance dice will succeed. If they resist successfully, the spell will clarify what happens to them. For example they don’t go blind or don’t become stunned or don’t fall asleep. When a trap calls for you to resist it, it’s the same thing, a single dice will determine if you resisted or not.

Magic damage. There’s a sentence in this LURPS rule book that I will read for you. Quote, “Only Air & Lightning, Fire & Light and Necromancy & Enchantment spell schools deal magic damage.” End quote. Those are the only three schools that can deal magic damage. The other schools of magic have other effects, and lots of them. But let’s spend this moment talking about those three schools, the magic damage ones. When you buy even one skill point in a magic school, you have full access to its entire spell list. It’s your choice what level you choose to cast each spell at. Casting a spell at higher level deals more damage. There’s a table on page 56 that you’ll be wanting to put on your character sheet if you use one of those three schools of magic. The table has the spell level, the mana cost, the damage dealt, and the resist difficulty. Here is an example of casting a spell from one of the three magic damage schools. Your character has five dice in the skill for the school of fire and light magic. You have access to fully all of the spells on that spell list, and can choose which level to cast them at. The target number of successes you need to roll to cast it, is equal to the spell’s level. To cast a level three spell, you would roll your five skill dice and hope that at least three of them are a 4, a 5, or a 6. If not, it’s a failure. If half of your dice pool consists of ones, that’s a critical failure, which when rolling to cast a spell means a miscast. But let’s say you succeed. You rolled your five dice and three of the dice show a four or higher, meeting your target number. The table shows that casting a level three spell from the fire and light school of magic will cost you six mana and will deal 3 d6 of damage. You can roll three d6 dice now and that’s how much damage the target is about to take. That’s a lot of damage, by the way.

Flaws. Flaws are fun roleplaying opportunities. You can invoke a flaw during game play to gain inspiration. Describe how your flaw makes the situation worse in a real way, not just a convenient way, to gain an inspiration. Later, spend your inspiration to turn any check into a DC 2, meaning the number you have to roll on the dice to succeed is a two instead of the standard four. Only rolling a one fails when you have inspiration. Here is an example: Your flaw is that you are a clean freak. Instead of getting ready for your friend to come over your house being a difficulty of four, for you, the clean freak, you spend two extra hours cleaning everything. This impacts the story because it means you didn’t spend those two hours doing your homework, and now you’ll have to face the consequences of that not being done. Your game master awards you an inspiration, which you can spend later to make any roll a difficulty check of two instead of the standard four. The only dice roll that will fail on a DC of two is if you roll a one. Later, you’re in class and you got a zero on your homework because you quickly scribbled nonsense on it. The teacher snarks at you in front of everyone. After class, you make a skill check, a diplomacy and persuasion skill roll, on your crush, asking them to tutor you in the library later to help you raise your grade. Your diplomacy and persuasion skill is not high, only a three. A three in the diplomacy and persuasion skill means you only have three dice to roll. Normally with a standard difficulty check of four, meaning only fours on the dice succeed, it’s risky to hope to hit the target number of two you’d need to persuade this absolute stranger who you think is cute to spend their valuable time tutoring you. Are you cute enough yourself? The skill is how you find out. You spend your inspiration, changing that DC from 4 to 2, and as a result all three of your diplomacy dice succeed. You hit that target number of two, and you two cute people review the course material together and learn a bit more about each other. That’s nice. To summarize this example, invoking a flaw has to have a real consequence on the story, genuinely creating trouble for yourself. If you do really make life harder for yourself, your game master might grant you inspiration, which can be spent later on a future roll to make sure you succeed when it really matters to you.

Building a LURPS character uses its classless point buy system. Any character can use points to buy any skill. You’re not locked out of pick pocketing abilities because you’re a priest, or locked out of axe wielding abilities because you’re a slender elf. Buy what you want. You can spend your character points on stats, skills, or feats. The rulebook suggests spending one third of your character points on stats and the other two thirds on skills. Every one character point can be spent to gain either five stat points or one skill point. You are technically allowed to spend two character points to buy a feat, but it’s recommended that you do this alternative. The alternative is that you can gain two flaws to gain one feat. A character can have a maximum of four flaws and two feats gained this way, and you should, because flaws are fun roleplaying opportunities.

Stats. There are three stats. You can spend a character point to get five stat points. The first stat is hit points, abbreviated HTP. If you spend a character point, you get five hit points. If your hit points reach zero during combat, your character falls unconscious. If your HTP reaches negative half of the maximum, your character dies. For example: your character has twenty HTP. If you reach zero, you fall unconscious. If you reach negative ten, you would die. Pretty simple. The second stat is magical power, or mana, abbreviated MAN. If you spend a character point, you get five mana. You spend mana to cast spells. When mana reaches zero, you’re out of magical power and can’t cast any more spells. The more mana you have, the more spells you can cast before you get tired. Mana refreshes when your character sleeps for a full night’s rest. The third and last stat is speed, or special. It’s abbreviated SPE. If you spend a character point, you get five SPE. You can spend SPE to swing an extra attack on you turn, or to make sure you succeed by rolling extra dice, or to move further by gaining extra movement. There’s a table on how many SPE you spend to get an extra attack, extra dice, or extra movement on page 7, and honestly you’re gonna need a copy of that table in front of you to play LURPS. I recommend putting that SPE table from page 7 on your character sheet, so you know how much to spend, and what you can get.

Freebies. There are some character points that all player and nonplayer characters start with. Everyone starts with two character points in hit points, mana, and special. One character point becomes five stat points. That means everyone starts with 10 HTP, 10 MAN, and 10 SPE. Everyone also starts at rank two in two free skills: Unarmed, and an additional combat skill of your choice. That means whenever you make an unarmed attack, you roll two dice. These freebie starting character points aren’t subtracted from your total character points. It’s similar to starting at level one in another game.

Spending character points to gain skills when building your character can be simple or realistic. You have have a maximum of seven ranks in a skill. That means you can roll a maximum of seven dice. In the simple skill leveling system, improving from rank 1 to rank 2 costs one character point, and improving from rank 2 to rank 3 still costs one character point, every level increase costs one character point all the way up. In the realistic skill leveling system, it costs more character points to level up a rank six skill into a max rank seven skill. The realistic skill level up option is there for people who enjoy how in video games it’s easy to level up in the beginning, but then the level ups need more and more experience, and it takes quite a lot of experience points to reach max level. Both systems exist and the game master can pick the skill level up system they like best.

The players in my upcoming game will all be at maximum power level. For LURPS, I estimate that you can achieve maximum strength if you build a character using 60 character points. That’s probably max. It’s certainly very powerful. Use the simple skill cost guide. That means you spend one character point to increase a skill by one level, regardless of if that’s going from 1 to 2 skill dice, or going from 6 to 7 skill dice. Since we’re playing a oneshot and your character doesn’t have money, you can spend character points one for one for armor coverage points, equipment, and upgrading weapons materials.

Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing LURPS in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of LURPS in action. We encourage you to find the LURPS rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.