I've been diving through a few books to see how best to handle encounters in GURPS, in particular the Campaign Framework books, which put the most effort to actually translating the GURPS rules into something you can use in a game, and thus actually have bad guys. Of course, all four handle opponents in very different ways, but I also find all four surprisingly lacking. If I could criticize GURPS for one thing, it would be its tendency to demand detail in areas that really don't matter, and to provide precious little detail in areas that do.
What do I mean by Mooks
...(M)ooks are defeated if injured at all – even a 1-HP gut punch will do. -- GURPS Action 2: Exploits
To clarify what I mean by a mook, I mean the inconsequential opponents that the PCs face, the speed bumps on their road to victory. On the one hand, these characters don't need stats: they're speed bumps, things that soak up the character's precious time while the bad guy gets away, and give a chance to the main characters to look good.
See, we know the heroes are awesome, and we want to see them being awesome, and the way you do that is providing them with opponents to showcase their great skill, typically by winning a fight with the odds stacked against them and so lots of games provide rules for one-hit opponents that immediately go down. Not providing these rules tends to turn every fight into a tedious grind, where you know your opponent has no hope of defeating you but you need to burn many minutes per opponent, grinding them down to zero HP, to defeat them. Thus, most games that I know that have this sort of wild disparity between hero and opponent include some way of speeding up the fight so we don't focus overly long on something that doesn't matter. But if they don't matter why bother with them at all?
You can answer this question a lot of ways, but I happen to think there are wrong ways to answer that question, and most of them boil down to "Because it's expected." If a fight doesn't matter, then it doesn't matter if the fight is slow or long, in all cases, it's tedious. If your fight consists of rolling to hit, and then always succeeding and always taking your opponent out, while never really being in danger, then you're just punching mannequins until the GM declares that you've met your mannequin-punching qouta and you can get to something that matters. This leaves us with a conundrum: mooks shouldn't matter, but if they don't matter, then we shouldn't have them in the game and yet people expect them, but if we only keep them "because it's expected," then we create tedious, pointless fights. So they answer has to be: mooks matter.
See, we know the heroes are awesome, and we want to see them being awesome, and the way you do that is providing them with opponents to showcase their great skill, typically by winning a fight with the odds stacked against them and so lots of games provide rules for one-hit opponents that immediately go down. Not providing these rules tends to turn every fight into a tedious grind, where you know your opponent has no hope of defeating you but you need to burn many minutes per opponent, grinding them down to zero HP, to defeat them. Thus, most games that I know that have this sort of wild disparity between hero and opponent include some way of speeding up the fight so we don't focus overly long on something that doesn't matter. But if they don't matter why bother with them at all?
You can answer this question a lot of ways, but I happen to think there are wrong ways to answer that question, and most of them boil down to "Because it's expected." If a fight doesn't matter, then it doesn't matter if the fight is slow or long, in all cases, it's tedious. If your fight consists of rolling to hit, and then always succeeding and always taking your opponent out, while never really being in danger, then you're just punching mannequins until the GM declares that you've met your mannequin-punching qouta and you can get to something that matters. This leaves us with a conundrum: mooks shouldn't matter, but if they don't matter, then we shouldn't have them in the game and yet people expect them, but if we only keep them "because it's expected," then we create tedious, pointless fights. So they answer has to be: mooks matter.
So, if mooks matter but are ultimately, individually, inconsequential,. then how do we make them matter? Well, I think with a moment's reflection, we can come up with some obvious reasons. First, mooks in sufficient number do pose a real risk. Go watch the fight in Moria in the Lord of the Rings (or really, any fight against Orcs) and you'll notice that while an individual orc is no threat, the orcs as a whole pose a real danger to the heroes. If you further look at most movies, the mooks might not pose a threat to the heroes, but they definitely pose a risk to "normals." This is typical of the super-hero genre, such as the Battle of New York in the Avengers: few of the Avengers were actually in real peril, but the everyday people definitely were, and many scenarios in the film are constructed around that premise: alien monsters threaten people, and the hero needs to defeat them. Finally, mooks tend to soak up resources, such as your fatigue (there's a great fight in Daredevil season 1 that showcases this), your bullets and your healing potions. They also take up time, which might be crucial in a certain scenarios (such as the bad guy getting away while throwing wave after wave of minions at you). A well-fought battle can allow you to save your resources for the final fight against the big bad, while burning those resources might let you get through them more quickly, in a time-sensitive match.
Mooks also tend to change up the preferred tactics of a lot of characters. A lot of players focus on defeating toughened targets. A DF character might focus on tons of ST, armor divisors, high levels of Feint and the ability to target vulnerable locations so they can defeat a single, very tough target well, but if you instead put him up against a dozen goblins, most of those advantages go out the window compared to someone with extra attacks, dual weapons, AOE spells, or Whirlwind attacks. If mooks matter, and mooks fundamentally fight differently than big bosses, then players are forced to adapt to shifting sets of circumstances, based on who they fight.
How GURPS handles Mooks
Okay, clear, you get what a mook is, why he matters, how he matters, and what they can lend to a game. So what am I going on about? Well, as I look through GURPS material to explore mooks, I've noticed a tendency to treat them like characters and I have... mixed feelings about this. Most advantages and disadvantages are built from a player-character perspective. For example, the primary disadvantage of Callous is that it gives you a reaction penalty (-5 points for a -1 reaction penalty). This doesn't matter as much for NPCs, which is why you often hear people say "Don't worry about point totals for NPCs," because an opponent with Callous and Odious Personal Habits, Bully and Hidebound is worth less than a character that has none of those, but that fact just isn't relevant. On the other hand, some disadvantages, like Berserk, Bloodlust, Code of Honor and Cowardice do matter, a lot, and could completely reshape the fight. If we step back and look at a group as a group and accept that Mooks serve more purposes than just fighting, such as the patrolling guards while you're sneaking through a fortress, or the rabble of an opposing faction that your Bard/Diplomat is going to talk to, then these disadvantages might matter more. But I often find that when I'm presented with a Stat Block filled with advantages and disadvantages, I need to stop, parse, and write notes down, and I rather wish GURPS did a lot of that for me. Tell me how these guys are supposed to fight. Tell me how to use your mooks in my campaign.
I think D&D tends to do a pretty good job of this, especially my favorite iteration, which was 4e (yes, I know, I am a heretic), which pushed so far into heresy as to practically script your fights with each opponent. Monsters had pre-defined attacks, and a sudden change to how they fought once they became sufficiently wounded, which meant that fights tended to escalate once things got worse, and a lot of the game turned on getting a sense as to how the enemy fought and then trying to use your own tricks to your advantage. It didn't take a ton of parsing to work out: it was spelled out for you in black and white.
I'd like to stop and take a look at how various GURPS Campaign Frameworks handle mooks, to get a sense of what they do, and what I'd rather see. I'd also like to hear your thoughts, on how you handle these sorts of characters, if you do at all.
I think D&D tends to do a pretty good job of this, especially my favorite iteration, which was 4e (yes, I know, I am a heretic), which pushed so far into heresy as to practically script your fights with each opponent. Monsters had pre-defined attacks, and a sudden change to how they fought once they became sufficiently wounded, which meant that fights tended to escalate once things got worse, and a lot of the game turned on getting a sense as to how the enemy fought and then trying to use your own tricks to your advantage. It didn't take a ton of parsing to work out: it was spelled out for you in black and white.
I'd like to stop and take a look at how various GURPS Campaign Frameworks handle mooks, to get a sense of what they do, and what I'd rather see. I'd also like to hear your thoughts, on how you handle these sorts of characters, if you do at all.
GURPS Action
Mooks don’t need complete character sheets -- GURPS Action 2: Exploits
You're darn right they don't. In one sense, I think GURPS Action handles Mooks the smartest of the four, because it says "Look, one hit will take them out; their stats/skills for anything that matters is either 10 or BAD+10, and give them a couple of guns or something." Easy. So if you're fighting some BAD 0 cops, then they shoot at you with basic 3d pistols and roll a 10 or less to hit you (before modifiers). If you're fighting some BAD 5 commandos, then they have Skill 15 when they shoot at you, might have some ballistic vests (DR 10 or 12, I think, at least against bullets) and are shooting some high ROF 6d assault rifles at you. Relatively simple.
Where I think Action falls down is providing some variety. There's no real, obvious difference between how these two guys fight. Action suggests that maybe some tough mooks would have High Pain Threshold (though how does that even work, if one hit takes them out?), or you might have some "pencil neck" mooks who present even less of a threat. Action largely consists of entirely human opponents, so this is somewhat forgivable, but I would expect facing a mess of fanatical, suicidal terrorists to be an entirely different affair than fighting Russian special ops or some corrupt cops, and not just because the BAD changes. Spec Ops would have tight tactics and combined arms; the corrupt cops would make stupid mistakes and be willing to negotiate (likely easily intimidated) while the terrorists might totally refuse to negotiate and when they start to lose, begin to take absurdly dangerous risks that could turn the fight suddenly at the cost of their lives (though they would also tend to make a lot of tactical mistakes). Thus, it seems reasonable to expect each scenario to be more diverse than just "Their skill levels differ" but there are no clear guidelines as to how.
GURPS After the End
...a game where four PCs can charge a 100-person raider camp head-on and expect not just to survive, but to prevail. --GURPS After the End 2The more I've read After the End in researching Psi-Wars, the more I've come to appreciate it. It's definitely not as influential as Action, but it's increasingly making an impact on my rules and my templates. When it comes to mooks, though, it's a bit of an awkward fit because After the End doesn't assume mooks the way Action does. If you're playing a heroic realism game with a default, 150-point scavenger, then a single Raider with a board with a nail in it is not just a speed bump, but potentially a serious problem, worthy of a detailed fight! That said, we can definitely see that some opponents have inferior capabilities, and After the End has some suggestions as to how to turn up the high octane action: when you're 250 point Hardy, Experienced Scavenger faces a Raider in a Cinematic game with the Cannon Fodder rules turned on, then that raider turns into a mook. So, I have to give After the End a little credit even if I don't find their approach totally useful, because I'm looking at this through the lens of "Is this useful for my Psi-Wars game?" rather than is it useful for my After the End game.
Unfortunately, the PDF preview has no one I would consider a mook that I can discuss (though it does have some monsters), so I'm just going to discuss the Raider on page 17 of After the End 2, and if you have the book, you can follow along, but if you don't, you'll have to take my word for it. Here, we have quite some detail: for example, they have IQ 9 but Per 11; they have skills at differing values (though typically harder skills at a penalty: for example, they have Axe/Mace (an Average skill) at 12, but Kusari (a Hard skill) at 11). And they have specific traits: Callous and Improvised Weapons. So, unlike with GURPS Action, where you can just improvise off the top of your head, you need to have memorized this NPC stat block, or have it in front of you. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. It also doesn't tell you much about how they fight. Not here at least.
See, if you page back to page 15, the "Raider" stat block is the culmination of a section on gangs titled "Gangs." It discusses how many there tend to be, what their bases look like and what sorts of variation they might have. This last is key: we have five "attitudes," and two Lenses, either motorized gangs (think Mad Max) or "Masters of the Land." They also have some brief discussion of slavers or "hostile townies." So, in a sense, this actually does what we want to: one entry provides us some considerable variety. A Mad Max style gang might be Motorized and Debauched while some other gang might be Masters of the Land and Cultish. The first gains disadvantages (like Bad Temper (6)) and skills like Driving at DX+1 (11 in this case), while the latter is amenable to a good Diplomacy check but react badly if people refuse to join up and typically tend to be stealthy in some way and integrated well into the local terrain. Nice.
The problem I have with these, from the perspective of building combat encounters, is that most of the material here is for constructing interesting broader interactions. These lenses and suggestions act as starting points for a total scenario. For example, Mad-Max style slavers might have hit a local town and dragged away some slaves to their camp, so we need to know things like what their encampment might be like, or that they have Bad Temper in case we want to piss them off into making a mistake. A Cultish group might rescue the heroes if they're in trouble, bring them back to their forest fortress and become increasingly unhinged and dangerous once it becomes clear that the PCs are not "one with the purpose." These are interesting, but not what I'm looking for.
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy
Some monsters are fodder, and just get squished. These aren’t necessarily trivial; numbers and effective offense can let them chip away at the party before being exterminated -- GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2Dungeon Fantasy explicitly talks about Fodder, which is what it calls "mooks," they even have the "take 1 HP and you die" rule ("And Stay down," page 27). In fact, the book largely talks about all the things I discuss above: that fodder should be meaningful opponents, but mostly by chipping away at the PCs or distracting them for the more dangerous monsters. This isn't all that surprising, because DF is very much built around combat encounters the way other campaign frameworks isn't. It might be okay in GURPS Action if all of the gun-toting mooks are terribly generic, but it's an unforgivable sin in a Dungeon Fantasy game if all the monsters have identical stats (a trait it shares with Monster Hunters, though Monster Hunters is more about solving the mystery of the monster than it is in numerous highly nuanced combat encounters).
If we look through the monsters, even the fodder, we still see a lot of variety. I couldn't find any good Fodder monsters in any PDF previews, so I'll discuss the Flesh Eating Ape as an example, even though it's probably more of a henchman. Notice that it has skill-14 in basically anything that matters, making it consistent and easy to remember. In both the Notes and the general description, we see repeated reference to their grappling ability, including a discussion of Neck Snap. This sort of detailed discussion of how the monster will fight helps set it apart, though we still need to parse some things (like the fact that it's a Brachiator and is Ham Fisted; how will these impact combat?).
As GURPS Dungeon Fantasy matured, it goes into even more detail. Check out the Demon of Old; again, not a mook, but note the sidebar extensively talking about how it would fight, and what sort of tactics you would need to defeat it. Pretty good stuff! There's still a lot of parse in the stat-block, though, such as their Lifebane, their Dread, the fact that they don't breath and are immune to metabolic hazards, etc. You do have to read it carefully, but not as carefully as you might with the older versions of these monsters.
I also want to turn your attention to the Monster Prefixes from DF Monsters 1, a similar approach to what I did in a DF Monsters thread once ages ago: we assign some sort of prefix to a monster and change its approach. We might have an Energy Draining Flesh Eating Ape that begins to inflict Fatigue Damage once it has you, or a Distorted Demon of Old with 8 arms and 3 mouths and is not vulnerable to strikes to the vitals nor does it Dread holy things, but is instead susceptible to magic. While not exactly built for mooks, it does begin to address the sort of thing I'd like to see: one or two specific twists to low-level opponents that fundamentally changes the fight.
These tend to be much too "broad" for my tastes, but they're meant to fit a fantasy game where you want to paint in broad strokes, rather than a more nuanced action game. I feel like if you could blend the combat-oriented nature of prefixes with the more down-to-earth lenses of After the End and the simplicity of GURPS Action mooks, I think you'd have a winner.
What is your Experience?
If you're in a medium that allows comments (my Discord server, for example; you can comment right here, but I tend to be slow to see them; google is terrible about notifying me), I'd love to hear your experience with mooks in GURPS, especially games with gunplay. Do you find the Action approach too generic, or do you find the more detailed approaches of other games, like After the End, too detailed? Are there tricks you use to spice up combat? How do you feel about stat-blocks vs quickly improvised opponents?
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