Are Battlesuits Fair?

 

A perennial question about Ultra-Tech gaming in GURPS is the fairness of demanding a point cost for things people can just have cheaply.  Why buy nightvision when you can have nightvision contact lenses? Why buy DR when you can just have a nanoweave T-shirt?  Yes, there are advantages to having these traits as "innate," but there's quite some assumptions baked into that statement, such as people aren't going to buy them with Gadget-based limitations, and that the costs aren't exorbitant.  After all, the equivalent of a nanoweave T-shirt clocks in at more than 40 points!  

And you can't just sidestep this issue either, because a lot of Ultra-Tech is built around the notion of buying advantages to simulate powers, namely the entire Cybernetics section! Nanoweave subdermal armor is literally a nanoweave T-shirt that's been put under your skin, for 42 points. In fact, a major theme of SF and Space Opera is that advanced technology makes "super-heroes" possible, that future humans will be as "as far beyond us as you are beyond apes."  Thus, we expect to see space opera and SF characters clocking at 200-500 points full of innate advantages like laser eyes and armored skin. But what if those things are more cheaply acquired as gear?

This is a question that often comes up in Psi-Wars (and all of my various ventures in to sci-fi and space opera in GURPS), and I think Psi-Wars has helped me articulate the answer to this question for the most part. That is this: what you're establishing with tech is your baseline. Advantages represent what you have above and beyond your baseline.  To use a modern example: is it valuable for a TL 8 character to have an innate DR of 5? It's expensive at 25 points, but it lets you shrug off most knifes, fists and baseball bats, and it reduces the damage of a pistol from a devastating 10 damage to 5 damage. Why not just wear kevlar?  Well, we can!  A concealable vest is DR 12/5 at TL 8, but it only protects your torso and it layers with our natural DR, so a normal person has as much DR as we do "naked" against baseball bats and fists, and if we wear it, we have DR 17 against bullets and knives (making is effectively immune to pistols and shrugging off most rifle shots with light injury) and DR 10 against everything else.  You can make a similar case with UT armor and gadgets: if anyone can pick up a nanoweave T-shirt, the fact that you have the equivalent DR to a nanoweave T-shit above and beyond the t-shirt that anyone can wear offers quite an advantage.  

This works best when the technology is widely available and not particularly transformative.  A nanoweave T-shirt isn't fundamentally changing how you interact with the world, and anyone can buy it, and a lot of the setting is built around the assumption that people often wear one: if you have more DR than that, it offers quite a benefit because the pistols and rifles are tuned to the idea of someone having DR 18, not DR 36!  This falls apart when someone gets access to technology that is transformative and rare, making it relatively unique to them.  A TL 8 character can buy TL 11 Hyperspectral Contacts as Signature Gear for 1 point (they cost $9600, and 1 point of TL 8 signature gear is worth $10,000)! He likely needs some additional technological skills to maintain them, but Hyperspectral Vision normally costs about 25 points, and even with a few support skills, the character with the contacts effectively has a cool power for a mere fraction of the cost of Hyperspectral Vision.  Even if we pile on the disadvantages to Hyperspectral Vision (requires maintenance, gadget, can be stolen, unique) to bring it to -80%, we're still looking at a base cost of 5 points vs 1 point.  "Okay, so if it hurts, don't do it," as an old punchline goes.  So we shouldn't do something like that.  We should only allow broadly available and not particularly transformative technology; if we violate one of these, we should reconsider where and how we use points.

Battlesuits always violate this rule of thumb.  In my experience, any time you allow battlesuits in a game, they become a prize worth seeking.  Characters with them stand apart from those that don't, and they begin to verge into "super-hero" territory.  They are virtually bullet proof, super-humanly strong, and have a suit of other advantages. Yes, there are disadvantages associated with it, but it is an inherently transformative technology.  It's also not one generally available to everyone.  It fits the genre to have only some characters wearing it, and these characters often interact with other characters. Bob might be a cyborg, while Alice might wear power-armor. Normally, Bob might normally outclass Alice, but if Alice wears power-armor, she can compete.  See, for example, numerous fights between Lex or Batman and Superman, where "power-armor" is the excuse that allows for the slugfest to go down, despite the clear difference in power-level.  Super-man is a few thousand points, while Batman is a few hundred points, and the difference is made up with gear.  In the comics, this is one-time use, but in a game, it won't generally work that way, especially if the character invests points into the Battlesuit skill.

So, don't use battlesuits, right? Or don't try to combine battlesuits with cyborgs and super-heroes and expect it all to line up well.  But I find that in Psi-Wars, that's precisely what's happening.  It's reasonable for certain highly advanced factions to sport power-armor.   We might expect a Shinjurai Cyberninja to use some sort of cyberweave suit, or the Wyrmwerk's Cleaner to use bespoke Heavy Battlesuits tricked out with gadgetry.  At the same time, we have the Saruthim, who wear bio-tech power armor, and even "wear it on the inside," summoning it in times of need.  Are these fair? Is it okay to let them have their power armor on the argument that power-armor sort of blurs the line between vehicle and armor?  I mean, someone in a car is really cool too, but the car is a baseline.  Power-armor is like... wearing a car.  Isn't that alright?

This brings us to a third group, the Arkhaians, who are essentially space opera golems, ghosts permanently bound into highly advanced power-armor.  How should they be priced?  I could use the rule precendent created by the Saruthim, who use the Bio-Mecha rules from Pyramid: you buy the armor as an ally, and then take the possession advantage. That makes sense, and you can build the armor AS armor, with traits like "Cannot Wear Armor" and standardized advantages meant to mimic technology.  This brings the costs way down and emphasizes that the armor is something "worn" rather than the literal character. On the other hand, what about robots? If we follow the same logic, they're just digital minds wearing a chassis, but Psi-Wars doesn't accept that logic (it leads inevitably to people pointing out that humans are just blobs of neurological networks wearing a skinsuit).  So, if robots have to pay full price for being literal walking shells of armor, why wouldn't the Arkhaians?  And if the Arkhaians are paying full price, why are Saruthim not paying full price for what amounts to a fancy version of Alternate Form?  And if all of these people are paying full price for all of this... why do the guys in power-armor get away with their trait for so cheap?

That was a long-winded way of me getting to the meat of his post, which is "Hmmm, what are the actual costs of a battle suit?" If you play as a character with a battlesuit, how much does it actually cost you to do so, and is that price "fair?"

The Fourth Mithna: Mithna Temos

Last month, I released a poll for "the Fourth Mithna."  A "Mithna" is a Ranathim noble house and, in keeping with the themes of Lithian culture insisting on being as alien as possible, they must necessarily have and use weird names for everything.  When I released the Mithanna it was as part of the aristocratic lens, and I left a poll on what sort of nobles people wanted to see, and "Ranathim Nobility" topped the charts.  I was reluctant (I feel like the Ranathim get too much attention already, but they are one of the more popular races of the setting), but I released the Mithanna to positive reception.  However, in keeping with "not overdoing the Ranathim" I kept the specific Mithna to a minimum.  Each is just a few paragraphs long, as opposed to the pages that the human noble houses get. And I thought "three is enough."  

But last month, I was looking for things to poll and when I asked the community, a lot of people reacted very positively to the idea of a Mithna poll. It made sense: they were easy to make, and I typically release "three of my own, one for you."  So why not do the same for the Mithanna? 

What came out is Mithna Temos, which is interesting in that it more closely reflects my initial conception of the Mithanna before some readers complained about a lack of context.  Even the name "Temos" came from my initial set of three Mithna. This is not a house grounded to a world, but one that wanders. and lurks behind the scenes, manipulating other Mithna for their benefit.  So, here it is: the poll results for the Fourth Mithna.

(And if you're curious what the Mithanna even are, or what the Ranathim are, click the links.  If you're completely lost, check out the primer).

Hey Guys, Let's Plan a Heist!

 

Sorry I've been quiet for the past, what, two weeks?  I'm on vacation, which means a lot of time for the kids and, of course, Cyberpunk 2077 came out (No, I haven't experienced any bugs, yes, it's an amazing game.  I haven't had this much fun with a game in a long time), so I've been distracted.  But I knew I would be! That's why the next playtest is meant to be a heist, and also why the last few polls have focused on this particular element.  While I still have some bits from the last polls to finish, my main focus will be on the criminal world of Psi-Wars.

But before I get to that, we need to know how to do a heist.  That is, we need our rules in place.  Of course, we have those rules and we've had them since Iteration 2: we just use GURPS Action Exploits, which is essentially the GURPS Heist Handbook, with some updates for our new setting.  The old Iteration 2 version mostly takes Action 2 wholesale, except for some advice on how to integrate psionic powers with the Exploit rules.  I think that's still a valid case, but I'm going to hold off on it a bit, because that might be better discussed in the pertinent psionic powers themselves (A non-psychic character doesn't need to know that a Telepath gets +4 to intimidation with a successful use of Instill Fear, but a Telepath sure needs to know that!).  However, as I go over all of these, I realize the extent to which technology plays a role in all of this, and how it raises some interesting questions.

The technology of Psi-Wars, of course, is inspired by pulpy space opera which are, themselves, just typical stories from the 1950s and earlier, reskinned as sci-fi.  Thus, they typically don't explore the more mind-bending aspects of sci-fi, and instead give us a familiar world: if we have clones, for example, it's to explain the faceless soldiers of the evil overlord, rather than to discuss the nature of genetics and identity. This makes the setting easier to handle, in that you don't really have to ask what weird technology is in place, you can just assume that they have familiar technology that's reskinned ("Do they have cell phones?" "No. They have comm devices that are holographic." "So... space cell-phones" "Yup!").  However, the more I dig into it, the more I see a need for a discussion.

First, as noted above, post Iteration 6, Psi-Wars has evolved into a distinct setting, which means there are some core assumptions that may differ from the "simple space opera" assumptions noted above.  Furthermore, however hard we try, there really are distinct technological differences that we have to account for because of the nature of our setting.  Psychic powers are real and well-known, many people armor up in vacc suits, and they travel through the space of an entire galaxy.  How do people defeat psychic powers? How do you handle zero-G? How do interstellar homing beacons work?

More than that, Action assumes deep interest on the parts of the players to cutting edge technology.  GURPS Action is more Burn Notice than pulp action from the 1950s. It goes far deeper into electronics and intrusion techniques than the average player knows or cares about.  I prefer to limit what people need to know or understand to jump in, and "detailed spy gear" is fairly low on that list when compared to signatures like martial arts, psychic powers, space battles and Communion.  So not only do we need to tackle our ultra-tech, but we need to simplify available spy-tech too.

Thus, one of the things I've been doing is going over Action 2 in detail and working out these differences, "translating" the document to Psi-Wars.  I still find Action 2 invaluable, and I don't think I can remove it entirely from the Psi-Wars canon (I also don't mind telling you to buy it to play Psi-Wars, because it's cheap, it's a great book, and it will help you run far more than just Psi-Wars), but I think there's more than enough differences that we can have quite a discussion, a lot of which is already on the wiki.  So that's what today's post is: a discussion of what I looked at and what changed.  This will be review and revision for those of you who have been following Psi-Wars from day one!

The Great Book of Destiny

 Two events collided in my life to give birth to this monster project. First, I played Cultist Simulator, which still haunts my dreams with secretive mechanics and the clockwork ticking of the passage of time. Second, I ran Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt, and began to ponder Destiny.

See, I like the Akashic Order, and I’m not alone in liking them, I think. The idea of veiled witches who whisper with one another while manipulating the world to create the fate and destiny they want seems like a great idea. But in practice, how does that actually work? The use their precognition and see things and then… arrange events, I guess. But why? It seems vague. They seem more built to be NPCs making prophecies than PCs manipulating the flow of time. And that’s a shame. Why not have some sort of detailed “magic system” that they could play with?

The more I thought about it, the more I liked it: the Keleni would tap into that too, via the blessings of Communion. The Cult of the Mystical Tyrant, too, would want some way to manipulate, or dodge, Destiny. In fact, Psi-Wars is the only game I’ve ever run or played in where Destiny actually came up! Several times, in fact. But the destiny chosen was often vagie, players casting about for some additional detail.

So, that’s what I have for you today: the Great Book of Destiny. It clocks in at 72 pages, and includes:

• A discussion of the Destiny Mechanic in GURPS and how you can mess with its cost
• A system for “Creating Destiny,” the sort of thing an Akashic Witch might do, and will allow you to create “fights” over Destiny where people try to outmaneuver one another to control the future. This includes “magical modifiers” and a new “Hours” system, and tie-ins with the Paths of Communion.
• 32 pre-defined Destiny templates, everything from Trivial to Greater Destinies, both advantageous and disadvantageous.

Woah, $1?

Chances are, if you’re one of my $1 Patrons, you’ve gone a long time without a special, and I think you deserve something. It’s also broadly useful. and my policy is to release the broadly useful ones to all of my patrons. Yes, I’ve written it from the perspective of Psi-Wars, but it’s pretty easy to scratch out those references and use it for your fantasy or modern campaign.

In the future, I might pull it down. I’d certainly like to give it some art and perhaps some cross-references. One of my original intentions was also to look at the details of the symbols and fortune-telling practices of the various groups and races of the Psi-Wars galaxy, but that had to be parked to get this done. If I get all of that, I might re-release a deluxe version at a higher “price point.” We’ll see. It depends on the sort of feedback I get.

In any case, as usual, I want to thank you for your support! And Merry Christmas! And I hope you enjoy the book! Let me know what you thought.

This special is available to all of my Dreamers ($1+).  If you're not a patron but interested, you can have it for $1 (and get access to all the other specials). If you want it, but don't want to subscribe, get in touch with me and we can work something out.  Just get in touch with me (mailanka (dot) musing (at) gmail (dot) com), or join my Discord Server.

• The Great Book of Destiny (Subscribestar)
• The Great Book of Destiny (Patreon)

Psi-Wars Wiki Update: Medicine in Psi-Wars and a new primer!

So, the big announcement is I've updated the landing page of the wiki in a big way.  I recently introduced some of my friends to Psi-Wars, and they found it a little difficult to navigate.  I wanted to create more of an essential starting point as the default entry, and here it is: the Psi-Wars Primer. Those more familiar with the Index will find it stripped down and still relatively easy to access. For those familiar with the wiki, you can navigate to both in the side-bar and the top-bar.  I've also updated some of the side-bar and top-bar elements, though not all the scaffolding for the wiki has been removed just yet. 

The other big announcement is the addition of Medicine for Psi-Wars. This took quite some time to get right, and I thought I would discuss some of the finer points of my choices here.

Backer Poll: The Fourth Mithanna

 Yes, even more polls.  You guys seem to like them (though if you need a break let me know) and with the Natives of Kronos (the Menhiri) poll finished and their templates and racial information making good progress, I thought it was a good time to clear the way for another poll I've had on the back of my mind: the Fourth Mithna.

I never really expected the Ranathim aristocracy to be such a hit.  I created three because that seemed like "enough."  But given the positive reaction I got, and the fact that people seem interested in creating their own, I created this poll to offer suggestions and insights into how might go about making your own.

This poll is, like most other polls, open to Companions ($5+) on both Subscribestar and Patreon.  As usual, I hope you enjoy it, and thank you for supporting Psi-Wars.

• The Subscriber Link
• The Patreon Link

Psi-Wars Diseases Part II: Psychic Diseases

 The prime impetus behind my exploration of medicine wasn't just to determine how technological medicine worked, but how it balanced with esoteric medicine in Psi-Wars.  If medicine could cure you of all ills in a day, what benefit could there be of going to a Keleni temple, or seeing a Ranathim Navare healer? Just check in at your local hospital.

Obviously Esoteric Medicine in Psi-Wars is vastly more capable than it is in the real world.  Psychic Healers can wipe away illness with a wave of their hands.  But that only really helps the Keleni. What about other healing traditions, such as that of the Ranathim, which don't have access to miraculous psychic cures? Well, the obvious niche for Esoteric Medicine (and exorcism) is in dealing with psychic diseases.  We've already established this as a thing in Psi-Wars. If ghosts and Broken Communion can afflict you with infectious diseases that only Esoteric Medicine can cure, then surely we have a niche for Esoteric Medicine!  But if that's going to work, we need to establish our psychic diseases in as much detail as we do our physical diseases.

This turned out easier said than done.  I was surprised by the level of detail one can get into when delving into psychic diseases, from diseases that doctor's claim are normal medical conditions that are simply hard to cure, but that quakes claim are easy, to forms of possession and forms of madness. I cobbled them together here in a decent list.

One of the other things that popped out was Corruption itself.  See, Psi-Wars uses the Corruption mechanic of GURPS Horror with Broken Communion.  The idea is that you can slowly ruin yourself as you ruin the world, and the cost of Broken Communion is this Corruption.  But I find in practice players run screaming from even a single point of corruption because maybe it'll reduce their point costs.  That's an acceptable loss in a horror game, but not an action game.  It's also painfully slow.  To lose even a single point would take an average of 6-8 Minor Blessings from Broken Communion, never mind the means people have to cleanse them.  Which makes Corruption a trait to track, often for many, many sessions, and will likely have no dramatic payoff.  What if, instead, we allowed Psychic Diseases to stand-in for Corruption?  You cast some miracles of Broken Communion, go nuts for a session, and then it's done.  You get some cool drama and a consequence, but it's non-permanent.

This also forced me to look, again, at mutations.  I'm surprised how often mutation and transformation comes up in Psi-Wars.  It doesn't seem to be a thing you see as much in Star Wars as, say, 40k.  But then again, I suppose the dark side does "warp people" in Star Wars, just not as freakishly as it does in 40k.  Even so, I had to wrestle with Devouring Taint, whose whole mechanic is faster corruption.  I went with Uncontrollable Transformations into subtle(-ish) mutant racial templates.  Hopefully this seems plausible and fitting.

Without further ado:

The Natives of Kronos: Poll Results (and one last poll)

 

Over the last week, my Companions got to vote on what the natives of Kronos would be like.  They've made their voices heard, and the results are available for all Fellow Travelers ($3+) Patrons. I've also written several variant templates based on the poll results, and I'd like your opinion on which direction to go in, so there's one last poll for Fellow Travelers as well as Companions.

As always, thanks for your support, and be sure to leave comments here or in the Discord channel!

• Subscriber Link
• Patron Link

Psi-Wars Diseases Part 1: The Physical Diseases

 Alright, so here's a project I've wanted done for a long time.  This likely isn't complete, as there are several diseases I could include here, and when I rework the psychic diseases and finish up my medicine rules, some of these might change, but the final version will be on the wiki somewhere.

This is essentially a "worked version" of the rules I posted yesterday.  Those rules work fine for a modern world setting, where you can talk about "Cholera" and "the flu" but what about when you're in space? Well, then are we talking the Andromeda Strain or the Purple Polka Dotted Pox?  Some names to toss around might be nice, and how disease shapes the setting might be nice to know as well.

In particular, the Umbral Rim is famous for its diseases.  This comes from the fact that it has filthy aliens in it, but it also comes from the presence of the Gaunt, who often act as carriers, and even have a special trait for it. When I started working on them, I wanted a list of diseases to introduce, but that proved too much work.  Well, now I have it! They can give you anything from the Umbral Pestilence to the Centauri Sniffles!

I've also included "Terminal Illness." I like the idea of a Terminal Illness: there's a dramatic weight to a heroic character that is dying of cancer and knows it.  I do agree with critics of the disadvantage that point out that it hardly matters to  the player when the character dies, as they'll just make a new character and keep playing.  However, having cancer (or leprosy or tuberculosis or AIDS) might shape other things about your character, other disadvantages that you can explore. So the terminal illnesses here treat "time left to live" as a feature: Your character will die at some dramatically appropriate moment that you and the GM both agree to.  But in the meantime he'll have a persistent cough or he'll have open sores or he'll have moments of intense chest pain, etc.  These are just disadvantage bundles to give your character some in-setting disease or illness.

I did need to play with some disadvantages to make this work, though.  The first was Chronic Pain.  I like the idea of it, but I find it limited.  Mild pain is effectively the Moderate Pain affliction, Severe Pain is effectively the Severe Pain affliction, and Agonizing Pain is effectively the Terrible Pain affliction.  With some wiggling around, it seems reasonable to substitute other afflictions: what about a Chronic Cough? That's basically the same as Mild Pain, and so is worth -5 as a base.

The second was Cardiac Stress.  The idea here was that we could treat the limitation as a straight disadvantage.  However, Cardiac Stress assumes the character is using something.  What's he using if we give it to them as a raw disadvantage? Everything? So I said "if you're under stress" and took the limitation value and halved it as a disadvantage value.  It's a back of the envelope guess here.

Nobody Takes Resist Disease

 Quite some time ago, I worked on "Tech Infrastructure" posts for Psi-Wars, small things like how electricity worked or how computers worked. Most of it was in preparation for my stint in GURPS Vehicles.  One of the things that I wanted to work on, but never got around to, was medicine, and awhile back one of my Secret Council urged me to finish that up. With my work on Xen brought to the forefront by a Bounty Hunter poll, I started work on that. And then I ran into a problem.

Disease.

See, Psi-Wars sets at the nexus between sci-fi and fantasy.  On the one hand, it's the sort of setting where you expect to go into a med-lab, get bio-scanned and then sit in a regeneration chamber for an hour.  On the other hand, it's also the sort of setting where you might expect an attractive alien witch-doctor to tend to your wounds with an herbal poultice and by casting the demons out of you.  This meant I needed to explore both how Bio-Tech handles disease, and how the Heal advantage handles disease, whereupon I learned that they handle it in the roughest way possible: there's some penalty and some cost based on very vague guidelines (1 fatigue for "the sniffles" while -15 for "bone marrow cancer.").  In fact, in general, I found all the guidelines on disease to be wildly vague.  You can find about 5 or so defined diseases, and all the rest are left "up to the GM."

This isn't the first time I've wrestled with disease.  I had a backer who commissioned a treatise on disease, which ended up as a backer bonus for those who want a disease system.  But as I worked on handling disease in Psi-Wars, I noticed something:

Nobody Takes Resist Disease

Backer Poll: the Natives of Kronos

Long ago, the Eldoth conquered  the natives of Kronos and burned out their homeworld to create the  despair, death and tragedy necessary to fuel an installation of their  Deep Engine.  The world of Kronos became the center of their operations  in the galactic center, and the rest of the galaxy moved on.

But what were the inhabitants  of Kronos like? Were they dreadful and strange creatures, mysterious and  aloof that none missed? Or were they beloved sages or scholars whose  destruction shook the faith of the rest of the galaxy?  What legacy did  they leave? Why do we care what they were like today? Do tourists gawk  at their monuments? Do archaeologists seek to piece together their  secrets? Do the modern citizens of Kronos cower from their ghosts?

Our next playtest will probably take place on Kronos, in the galactic core.  I've created a poll where you, my dear Companions, can decide what the inhabitants of Kronos were like, and even if some still exist!  The poll is a Google Forms poll, and you can find the link on your appropriate backer site:

• Subscribestar Poll
• Patreon Poll

Thanks as always for backing me, and please, enjoy!

The Mogwai: the Techno-Monkeys of the Arkhaian Spiral

Back when I first laid out what sort of aliens I wanted in Psi-Wars, I set out the broader "diagram" of what niches races would fit.  The core races, the Eldoth, Keleni and Ranathim all illustrated some profoundly important aspect of the setting; you cannot really have Psi-Wars as a cohesive setting without them.  Other races matter less, but still fit important niches.

I wanted to have "comedic" races, silly races that made players laugh or helped relieve tension in the game; while not a wildly popular set of races in Psi-Wars, you can see their use in the form of the Ewoks, Jawas, the Gungans and the Ardennians/Lantero (who rally should be a single species).  These tend to be smaller, cuter races, so they're non-threatening and can afford to be "silly" in a way that the "serious" races cannot.

I also needed races for the Arkhaian Spiral, whose theme is "Technology."  I knew I wanted a race that practiced Ergokinesis, but I wanted a different take on Ergokinesis than what House Grimshaw had: rather than a dread race that shoots lightning, I wanted a technologically savvy race that used its power to gain an intuitive understanding of engineers.  I code named them "Techno-goblins," and imagined them occupying a similar niche to gnomes in most fantasy games.

With the need to expand Cronus Kronos, I wanted to add the races of the Arkhaian Spiral to Kronos so it didn't feel like Umbral-Rim-Lite.  The point of Kronos is to mash up the alien races of all the parts of the galaxy into one place, thus these "Techno-Goblins" needed to be detailed.

And now they are: the Mogwai of the Arkhaian Spiral, and with them, a new "rare" power, Machine Telepathy

Brainstorming Cronus

 I have an impending playtest wherein we will play a heist in Psi-Wars.  This is intended to shake out the civilian/criminal/law enforcement elements of the game, and while I'd like to run it in the next couple of months, it might turn out to be more work than that.

As usual, when I decide to run a session, I turn my eye towards the setting.  Grist got more detail with Tinker Titan Rebel Spy, and the Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt gave attention to the Orochi belt.  We have lots of places I could run a heist, so I ran a poll for the playtest group, and they tied between Samsara and Cronus, and it looks like we'll be doing Chronos Cronus.

I thought I'd be a little more public about my thought-processes for what Cronus would look like, rather than hiding all of my work, as the point of this blog is to watch my process.  And the first step when detailing a world is to stop and talk about "everything that you know" and figure out what questions you need to ask about it.

Everything that follows are just my musings as I noodle around as to what this world might look like in detail.  If you want to discuss it, to complain about it, to argue against it, or to advocate for particular elements, feel free!  This is a creative process, after all.

Psi-Wars Wiki Update: Welcome to the Wild Side Edition

• Planetary Peril 
• The Survivor Background
• The Frontier Marshal
  

When I last asked the community for what Template they wanted wikified, they chose the Frontier Marshal. I found that an interesting choice, given its intersection between law enforcement, gunslinging and wilderness adventure.  I spend most of last month (and the first half of this month) working on the gunslinging part.  The last half of this month has been on the wilderness part.

See, the Frontier Marshal is the ranger of Psi-Wars.  He's a skilled ranged combatant, but he applies that skill while out in the wilderness.  He rides his steed over the plains and the desert, but a grim man on a boat in a swamp with a rifle resting on his shoulder is as much a Frontier Marshal.  They represent the sort of character that understands the wilderness, and the people that live in it.  They share this a bit with the Bounty Hunter: they're a liminal class that walks the boundary of rim and core, but in their case, it is civilization and wilderness

This naturally meant I had to explore the wilderness rules.  I've actually had them sitting around, updated somewhat, since Iteration 5, and I had most of them written out already.  Thus, this turned into a review, especially as I referenced them for my updates to the Frontier Marshal.  Satisfied with them, the Planetary Peril rules now on the wiki.

Once I had those in hand, the next question I needed resolved is what sort of traits I wanted for survivors to have.  This turned into a natural review of the Survivor background.  In previous iterations, I included a few additional traits associated with a particular form of survival, and I intended to expand that further this time, but I found that overwrought and instead I turned into creating a set of advice for players.  I also experimented with a new concept: "Where am I from?" Before, the backgrounds could afford to be vague: you were an aristocrat from some lineage, or a survivor from some world. Now we have setting specifics, so you can be an aristocrat from this lineage, and now you can be a survivor from this world.  Let me know if you like the idea.  You can find the Survivor (and the Primitive, the more important aspect of the backround IMO) here.

At last, the Frontier Marshal.  I integrated a cut down set of survivor traits here, bundled in the "power-ups" from the previous iteration and integrated the gunslinger styles and offered some advice.  The biggest change, of course, is integration into the setting.  What is a frontier marshal and how do they differ from group to group?  I've included 4. The generic Frontier Marshal remains what he was: a generic lawman on a generic world answering to some higher authority (the Alliance or the Empire) to enforce the law on less sophisticated locals.  But for more specific marshals, we now have the Maradonian Reeve, the Shinjurai conservationist and the Westerly Rim-Walker.  The Reeve and the Conservationist focus more on preserving nature, and more closely resemble the modern, real-world ranger.  The Reeve protects the lands of his lord, while the conservationist protects regions set aside by interstellar law as nature preserves.  The Rim-Walker is shifts back to the more cowboy nature of the role, and changes the template into semi-legendary figure of Westerly lore: wandering gunslingers who make use of their powerful blaster fu to set the law right.  They're technically not Law Enforcement, but so many people treat them as law enforcement that they often get a pass from the governing powers.

There were three lenses I considered and discarded.  The Frontiersman would be a a generic "gunslinger from the wilderness," someone without any law enforcement or rank.  I still like the idea, but it starts to feel like excessive detail to discuss it (basically, just spend your 30 points for your lens on your advantages; done). I considered a Guide, or a Tribal Guide: someone who knows the wilderness and will agree to guide people on a safari, or join up with someone else. I still like this idea, but a generic guide doesn't have that much setting them apart, and a Tribal guide would be very different skill-wise, so perhaps best left until I'm farther along with such cultural groups.  Finally, I considered a Ranathim "Beast master" who would go into the nature preserves of world like Hekatomb or Sarai and find the great beasts there and capture them for use in the gladiatorial arenas.  An interesting concept, but a very different one when it came to combat and very focused on the Ranathim, so I parked it for now.  The four I've had feel like they cover enough ground to make the concept work without watering it down too much.

And with those three, we have a glimpse into the more wild parts of Psi-Wars.  I still have a lot of unfinished material (such as some rough drafts on some space monsters), but it's time to move onto the next expansion of Psi-Wars, particularly the criminal world.

Musings on the Psi-Wars Gun-Fu

 There's a rule I've noticed about the Psi-Wars Community: if you mess with martial arts, you will get feedback.  The community seems to love the martial arts, and investigates the details of the styles with a fine tooth comb, more than anything else except, possibly, Communion.

So I wasn't that surprised to see my inbox pop up with some thoughts and suggestions for more gun-fu and also more force sword forms.  So I thought I'd cobble together the feedback into a single place and discuss it.

Existing Gun Fu

Generally, the Gun Fu I've released has been well-received.

• Coda Resolute is surprisingly popular. I suspect it's the flavor and the low buy-in cost to be "cool."
• Undercity Noir is also quite popular. I think it, as well as the Graceful Form, need a bit more work, though.  Acrobatics is always a rather complex topic.
• Imperial Markmanship hit with a dud as "Fine." This is understandable.  It's meant to be an unglamorous workhorse style.  I originally intended for it to be like Coda Resolute, with only two "levels," but the price proved an insurmountable obstacle.  I think the fact that it raises both rifle and pistol at the same time also really slows progress, which is unfortunate.  I would like to give it a "Mozambique Drill" style trademark move, however, so this style will see a slight retouch.
  
• The Way of the Rim was accepted with less fanfare than I expected.  It fits, and it's suitable, and people like it, but I don't think it really surprised people much.  The schtick of aim-then-draw rather than the other way around was uncontroversial.  I think it'll see a lot of use, but not as much buzz as some of the others.
• Shineido was the big star, which didn't surprise me (that's why I released it last), but the level of feedback and love it got actually managed to exceed my expectations. In fact, a lot of the request from other styles came from Shineido.

I think it's worth unpacking why Shineido generated the excitement that it did.  Of course, everyone loves Gun Kata, and everyone loves the idea of inserting it into a setting with Jedi.  It's the sort of kitchen-sink crazy that every RPGer seems to yearn for.  But I think there's more going on here than that.

The Martial-Arts-As-Power-Ups, in my experience, tends to highlight what a martial art can do.  It's one thing to see a list of appropriate traits, and it's another to see a martial artist in action, especially when there are certain combinations that work especially well together. These Power-Up systems generate way more feedback than the previous martial arts I've done, even though they're based on the same martial arts I already did, precisely because they make what those styles can do more visible.

 Shineido highlighted two things.  First: the power of math!  Thus far, the setting has focused almost exclusively on psychic abilities (and, by extension, Communion).  We have cybernetics and, eventually, bio-mods, but by-and-large, if you wanted to be "cool" you had psychic powers. Neo-Rationalism, instead, focuses on the power of pure genius and cinematic logic to create nigh-supernatural effects, which is an exciting idea, especially as a foil for the "superstitious" psychic powers.  It creates a nice tension. It's always been there, but Shineido makes it more obvious.

Shineido is also an explicity anti-space-knight style.  You use it not just to cool cool in combat, but to duel with a space knight.  The imagery of that is nice, but the idea of creating someone who can defeat a space knight, (The "Psi-Hunters" concept are we referred to them in Iteration 3) is an interesting one people seem interested in exploring further.

New Gun Fu

Are there are any plans for a gun fu style that utilizes psionics similar to psionic force swordsmanship? -KZRK

I haven't seen as many calls for new Gun Fu as I have for force sword forms, but there are definitely some calls. In particular, there's a request for a Psionic Gun-Fu style.

Now, I'm not shy about my love of the film Push, which is definitely a huge inspiration on Psi-Wars, and the moment he suggested it, I immediately thought of the TK Gun Fight from Push.  I think it would do a lot to cement how different Psi-Wars can be from Star-Wars. There are, however, a couple of problems that need to be overcome.

The first problem is that Psionic styles are a nightmare.  Psionic Force Swordsmanship needs another pass, and it was already one of the most difficult ones to design. You have to make a lot of assumptions about what characters are capable of.  For example, if you take EK then while Psionic Force Swordsmanship still has some value for you, but a lot of its moves are locked away.  What psychic power would Psionic Gun Fu use? TK? That's cool for the guns and moving them around, but it won't help you deflect blaster shots.  EK? That'll let you deflect blaster shots and maybe super-power your gun, but it won't let you wave your blaster around in the air in a cool way.  What about something else entirely, like an ESP or Telepathic Gun Fu style?  See, it opens up a can of works, and whatever choice we pick, the psychic power creates a hurdle to overcome: if you don't have one of the powers associated with Psionic Force Swordmanship, the style is blocked off to you; but anyone can learn one of the other styles.  Thus, this is inherently a niche style that most people won't care about and it takes more than the usual amount of work.

The second problem is where do you put it? We haven't hard "Free floating" styles since Iteration 4.  Our styles have been grounded in the cultures that created them: Shineido is associated with Denjuku and the Shinjurai Royal Family.  The Furious Form is associated with the Satemo of the Umbral Rim.  Who would use this psionic gun-fu? It probably wouldn't be the maradonians, as they see the force sword as a badge of honor.  You might see some psychic additions to the Coda Resolute, but aristocrats generally didn't settle their differences with that style.  What about aliens?  Well, we don't really associate the Ranathim or the Keleni with blasters. We might see a "temple maiden" concept for the Keleni, but they'll be closer to commandos than to gunslingers (though it must be said that telepathically linked commandos might be scarier than Combat Geometrics). The Asrathi are associated with Probability Manipulation, and that's worth touching on a bit more in Undercity Noir, but I don't think that's what KZRK had in mind. We have no PK- or EK-using aliens.  So who gets this?

One concept I do want to touch on at some point are non-space-knight, non-sage psychics.  I see Psi-Wars as a bit like Rifts in how it handles psychic powers: sure, there are mystics and knights out there, but there are also "mind melters," rare and unexpected talent erupting somewhere like an X-men, with the Empire trying to register and/or imprison them, and space knights trying to recruit, but powerful "rogue" psychics who lack force sword training or who don't live in temples or don't pretend to be witches should definitely be a part of the setting, and this style might suit them well.  But other than these vague ideas, I'm not sure how to solidify it yet.

New Force Sword Forms

(H)ow about a force swordsmanship style that takes a more scientific approach similar to Shineido or Combat Geometrics? -KZRK

I think it speaks volumes for the popularity of force sword forms that when I introduce gun-fu, people use it as a platform to ask for more force sword forms. But there's more meat here than just "I want more force sword forms."  As we noted above, Shineido highlights that you can gain "cool powers" from math, science and logic in Psi-Wars, and given that people use "cool powers" to upgrade their force sword fighting.

Using math to be a better fencer is definitely not the craziest idea. In fact, we already have a style that does it: La Verdadera Destreza on GURPS Martial Arts page 158.  Of course, the math does nothing, but we could try to introduce some elements.  We could borrow some of the elements from La Verdadera Destreza and mix them with the essential kendo that underlies all force sword forms and toss on some of the Math tricks of Shineido.

But where would we put it in the setting?  The Shinjurai wouldn't use a force sword, and a Maradonian wouldn't use Neo-Rationalism? Where would we find such a character?

Maybe a branch of the imperial knights would work for the scientific force swordsmanship, since the empire is governed by the same philosophies that gave rise to combat geometrics -KZRK

There are actually several factions that would meld force swordsmanship and Neo-Rationalism.  KZRK is correct in pointing out that Imperial Knights might do it.  Another faction that might use it would be House Tan-Shai.  After all, they are neo-rationalist to their core, and lack psychic powers (being anti-psi themselves), but need to be able to win force sword duels, as they've been tangled up in Maradonian culture.

This brings up another concept such a style would likely seek to explore: the Stance Breaker Form. A core element of Shineido is defeating space knights.  This style might do the same, and wuxia is full of stories of a style that's built around defeating the elements of a particular style (or "all styles,"), a "Stance Breaker Form." Those who created this style would have wanted to beat space knights on their own ground, and would have had the data to do it. They would have analyzed all their styles incessantly and sought the weaknesses of each.  This would make the style a bit like the Simple Form in that it seeks to understand all forms, though it would likely focus on Maradonian styles.  I had a similar concept with the Skairosian styles, and I could borrow some of those ideas and use them here, but with more of a mathematical twist.

This puts the style into an interesting niche as a "Dark Mirror" style, which I always like: it's the style you would give to characters who are designed to defeat or mirror the PCs. If you are a Maradonian Space Knight (one of the most popular concepts), then a Tan-Shai space knight is your "Dark mirror" able to exploit the weaknesses of your style and shut down your psychic powers. Imperial Knights would also represent a good "Dark mirror" to the style.

And we even had a good idea what it would look like: the aggressive flexibility of the Simple Form, the anti-Maradonian techniques of the Skairosian forms, the mathematic schtick of Shineido, and echoes of La Verdada Destreza.  I think it could work.

Psi-Wars Gun Fu: the Ten-Thousand Battle Kata: Combat Geometrics and Shineido

Back when I started working on the Frontier Marshal's update, I realized I needed to work on the Way of the Rim, and if I was going to work on the Way of the Rim, I needed to work on the other Blaster styles in conjunction, so I could define some niches.  And no blaster style attracts more interest from the community than Gun Kata Shineido, the blaster art of the royal guard of the Shinjurai Royal family.  Thus, I had to take my time with it and get it right.  And so, it will complete our exploration of Gun Fu in Psi-Wars, at least for now.

You can find them here

• Combat Geometrics
• Shineido

Why your RPG Campaign is a Joke

 

I tend to follow GURPS blogs, which means I mostly read my own stuff and Toadkiller Dog's blog, because we seem to be the most active ones in my reading list (we've diminished a lot from the heady days of the surge of GURPS blogs back when this blog started).  And, of course, reading up on Dungeon Fantasy, especially the "Rogue-like" approach he seems to favor, got me to thinking about randomness.  We tend to associate that sort of gameplay with very grimdark games, but my experience is that they often lead to hilarity and a lot of jokes.  Of course, most campaigns do, and I think I've made the connection between why, and why so many RPG campaigns "devolve" into comedy, and it is this:

Anytime you introduce randomness into a story, you create the opportunity for the unexpected subversion of expectations, typically in a hilarious way. Also, players need a release valve for tension.

Psi-Wars Mounts

We had a recent discussion on the Discord about cuisine and culture, even getting down into how different circumstances result in different butchery methods (ie, why I can't get the same cuts of beef in the Netherlands that I can in the US).  Someone joked that an "article on Ranathim butchery incoming" which is almost certainly a reference to the fact that I sometimes post very interesting, but perhaps not entirely useful, things to Psi-Wars.

Well, here's another thing nobody asked for: Mounts for Psi-Wars!

As I work on the Frontier Marshal, people are obviously going to want details on what their space cowboys ride. The clear answer is "Repulsor-cycles, or a freaking repulsor-truck.  C'mon." We still have cowboys in the real world and most don't ride horses anymore.  They ride in SUVs.  I suspect Psi-Wars "cowboys" would, realistically, be much the same.

That said, we can't escape the mystique horses still hold for us, and we expect space cowboys to ride horses. After all, we see some sort of space horse in space opera all the time, even in Star Wars. And it makes sense, after a fashion. The creation of trucks and SUVs requires considerable industrial infrastructure that might not yet be in place on a world, but a horse can "live off the land," provided the land has the right climate and resources available.  Frontier Marshals regularly deal with the uncivilized wilds of the far rim, so might have to make do without any vehicles, and thus might have to endure with a mount of some kind.

Alright, well, that seems like sufficient justification. How to handle them?  Well, in practice, I see them working like robots: simple characters that have perhaps 1 minor disadvantage (Easily abstracted away into a -1 HAM clause once per session, if the mount is being difficult), and a quirk (to distinguish your mount from others).  Simple enough.  What sort of mounts should we have? Well!

 

Psi-Wars Space Battles Lite

 I've had a lot of complaints recently that my Action Vehicular Combat is "too complicated."  It "involves unfamiliar maneuvers" (that are right there, in GURPS Action) and "really big numbers."  I don't know what to say.  If you can handle applying a -10 Deceptive Attack Penalty to the Vitals (-3) in the dim torchlight (-2) while making an All-Out Attack (+4) and then apply 1.5x damage on a hit, I'm pretty sure you can handle rolling against  Piloting with a +20 bonus and determining the margin of victory.  This is GURPS, we deal with big numbers all of the time.  This isn't White Wolf, where you can count on your fingers.

"I can do the math; I'm an engineer. I just don't want to.  I'm here to play, not to work." 

--Nele van den Ende, PHD

Alright! Alright. I get it.  I see these complaints a lot, and they mean something.  The criticism of my action vehicular system is not that it's wrong, or that it's inaccurate, or that it doesn't scale.  It hits all of those notes just fine.  The complaint is that it's too much work to implement.  Yes, it's simpler than standard GURPS combat.  Yes, it's simpler and more cinematic than GURPS Spaceships combat, itself a simplification of standard GURPS combat. But it still involves quite some work and some experience to learn. Can it get any simpler than that? Sure! Of course. I mean, we're a long way off from GURPS Ultra-Lite, so I'm pretty sure there's plenty room in which we can put something that's simpler, but still tactically interesting.

But what do we mean by "simpler."  We probably don't want "whooshing sounds with crayons." I mean, if you want really simple, just have people roll Pilot and then make up what happens.  What's wrong with that idea? Well, it makes the Fighter Ace effectively pointless ("Did we defeat the Empire and save the carrier?" "Well, I rolled well, so yes.").  So we still want some complexity here, but then, how much complexity is too complex? Well, we have some fairly specific criticisms we can parse through, and my own gut feelings.

I think what people who are complaining about this want are:

• Familiar maneuvers: GURPS Action's Chase rules are fine, but you have to, you know, learn them.
• Finger-Counting: It sounds condescending, but it's true: humans are very intuitive with values ~5, which is why we often see modifiers that tend to be in the plus or minus 1 to 5 range.  Even if we have to do a lot of adding, it's easier to add 5 + 5 + 5 than it is to workout the margin of success from a roll of 13 vs a total of skill 17 with +19 in modifiers.
• Roll and Shout: While "Just roll Piloting and narrate the results" is probably too simple for what we're looking for, most people do just want to roll their skill with some "finger-counting" modifiers and then get a result out of it.  As much as possible, we should be rolling against familiar skills and familiar values. That is, we shouldn't be rolling against a -1 or a 50, if possible, but somewhere between 3 and 18.

Psi-Wars Gun Fu: the Way of the Rim and Westerly Marksmanship

I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart. --the Gunslinger, Stephen King

Here it is.  The whole reason I started this deep dive into Gun-Fu for Psi-Wars was for the coming update to the Frontier Marshal, and if a Frontier Marshal can't sling his blaster, then what are we even doing here?  Thus, the previous three styles were "practice" for this one.  In principle, I should do Shineido first, but I expect that one will be the most popular of the Psi-Wars Gun Fu styles, but I could be wrong. This one is certainly likely to see more use.

This post isn't about one style, but two closely related styles:

• The Way of the Rim
• Westerly Marksmanship

Cultural Familiarity in Psi-Wars

So, I've been struggling a bit with Cultural Familiarity in the established world of Psi-Wars. I've touched on this topic before in Iteration 5, but that iteration was for general topics.  It was for you, dear reader, creating your own setting. Now that I have actual names and cultures (Maradonians, the Shinjurai, the Westerly, Lithian culture, the Keleni), we need to decide which of these have Cultural Familiarity penalties and which don't. Is the difference between the Shinjurai and the Westerly like the difference between an American and a Frenchman, or the difference between an American and the Chinese?

Backer Post: House Apex Preview

 I've wanted to explore the world of Xen with its genetic engineering and its cloned nobility for a long time.  It's the sort of world that feels very at home in a baroque space opera setting like Psi-Wars. I've had the idea for the House since I started writing houses: I saw them as a bio-tech counterpoint to the cybernetic House Kain, and they would be the two "hypermacho" houses often butting heads. I also knew they would be unusual: instead of a set of eugenic packages layered over an existing template, they would be a template that you would layer some training over.

As I began working on the Manticore initiative, I took a stab at it, and I managed to work out the template despite my fears of it being too expensive. It barely fits into 250 points, but most people play 300 points anyway.  It's a long post, as it's a combination of a house description and a complete, new template, and it's not helped by a rather extensive set of "memories" that the player can select from when defining his character. But I'm curious what my backers think of it, before I let it hit the central wiki.

If you're a Fellow Traveler ($3+), the post is available to you

• On SubscribeStar
• On Patreon

As always, thanks for being a backer, and I hope you enjoy it.  Be sure to give me some feedback on it, either on the discord or in the comments!

Psi-Wars Gun-Fu: Imperial Marksman Academy Training

Alright, let's draw this out a little longer.  This is another style that came late, mostly as I was working on Undercity Noir and I realized two things: first,  Ultimate Shootist was cool, and second, I needed a contrast between what a rogue Imperial Security Agent who comes from the Undercity might use, and what his "by the book" partner might use.

You can find the style here.

I know that "Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy" is a joke (thus, I had to use a variation of it as a name), but if there was any faction in Psi-Wars that would use highly professional, tacticool style that is becoming increasingly frequent among "agent" characters in our films and TV shows, with the crouching run, the two-handed grip, and "not a movement wasted," it would be the Empire.

What results will no doubt inspire quite some complaints about the GURPS prerequisite system.  There's no practical way to build up two different skills at the same time when they default to one another.  Beam Weapons are both a little more reasonable in this regard (as the -4 is a pretty big gulf), but at the same time, I suspect that several people will complain that -4 is "too much" and that we should use the -2 from Guns.  I look forward to that debate.  I often find that Psi-Wars inspires a lot of debate around GURPS, I think because it confronts the reader with the reality of certain GURPS rules.  It's a debate I definitely want to have, because it's completely reasonable to want to have characters who are well-trained in a variety of weapons, even if those weapons default to one another.  That's what Imperial Marksmanship does, because its agents, fighter aces and commandos are equally at home with any Imperial weapon (and, frankly, any weapon they can get their hands on). It'll also come up with other styles, especially Combat Geometrics, so it's best to get the discussion out of the way now, with a style that people care less about.

In contrast to other styles, there's very little cinematic here.  I do argue in favor of Infinite Ammunition, but more because at some point, the character is "fast-enough" with reloads that it becomes irrelevant to track their loading, and unlike Undercity Noir, imperial marksmen don't use reloading as a moment to impress a girl.  Beyond that, though, this is not a Gunslinger style, but a hard-headed style about the "realities" of blaster combat.  This, paired with its breadth, makes it an expensive style, which ironically makes you, point for point, a worse marksman than other styles have (perhaps better said, it's a more realistic level of marksmanship).

I still feel it's justified as a style, though, because the students all train under a similar regimen and you can readily recognize the "signature" of such combatants, and how they contrast with other gunslingers in the setting.

Wherein I once again wax frustrated over buying earmarked Impulse Buy Points

 I'm sure by this point, if you're a regular reader, you're used to me complaining about this.  But let's go at it again, once more, for old time's sake.

I love Impulse Buys.  I think they were one of the great additions to GURPS for a variety of reasons, and not because they make the game "more narrative."  I play plenty of games where you have a resource and you bid on or buy successes. GURPS isn't one of those.  GURPS is a game about thinking through everything, coming up with a good battle plan and then seeing what happens. This randomness and uncertainty is important, and I'll discuss why I think so in a later post, but Impulse Buys act as a way of mitigating some of that randomness, exercising tight, focused little narrative tweaks to change the chaos of a storyline created via multiple players' input and the input of the random variable of the dice, and trying to push it back into a semblance of a satisfying narrative.  They allow you to add a bit more meaning than usual to the unbridled mayhem of a typical GURPS game.

Luck mechanics, like Impulse Buys, can also be tailored to give a character a theme.  For example, a swordmaster could be someone with very high sword skill.  I think everyone would buy that.  But if you also gave them the ability to turn one failed sword roll into a success, they begin to take on a mythic quality: not only are they highly skilled, but luck itself seems to guide their blade.  Monster Hunters has some of this with their Wildcard Impulse Buy points, which turn Sword! from something that is frankly overpriced into something that is awesome. We can think of other things like this: the character that can freely buy away one wound per session as a flesh wound, or a character who take turn his opponent's failures into critical failures once per session (some player, somewhere, is reading that and thinking "Wheeeee!"), etc.

But notice how often I say "Once per session."  I want to see these as earmarked (for a single, specific purpose) and used once per session (or maybe twice or maybe three times, but my experience with them is once you make something so limited in utility, it's very unlikely to come up multiple times per session, and they can become frustrating when they do: a character who can buy away five wounds per session begins to approach invulnerability for practical purposes; you can kill him, sure, but you need to start thinking of ways around that absurd luck the way one thinks his way past Superman's invulnerability).

So, we just use Aspected Impulse Buy Points, right?

Blogosphere Roundup: Alternate Feints and Cover, Cover, Cover

 I've seen a couple of posts that I'd like to at least link to, for your reading pleasure, and to discuss.

• Gun-Fu Cover Power-Ups
• Fixed-Effect Feints

Cover Power-Ups

This is sort of a back-and-forth at this point, so I won't talk that much about these.  Chaotic GM was inspired by my discussions of gun fu, and thus posted this, and now I'm inspired, because I really wanted at least one of my styles to have a focus on taking proper cover, and this power-up structure fits very much with how I need to write things up for my martial-arts-as-power-ups.  I'd need to go over it all with a fine-tooth comb and the result would likely be too wordy for even one of my lengthy posts, but I just wanted to say "I intend to use this."  As such, you might find it useful too.

Fixed-Effect Feints

This is actually a few posts, which Dell'Orto links to in his post, but I thought I'd just hit up the other pertinent one real quick. It covers both fixed-effect deceptive attack and fixed-effect feints.

Fixed Effect Deceptive Attacks

I personally have less need for fixed-effect deceptive attacks.  I understand the logic, which is that if it's a fixed effect, it reduces your flexibility.  You're either making a deceptive attack or you're not, so you can't do things like perfectly tailor your attack to maximize your deceptive attack while maintaining your desired ability to hit.  It also makes it easier to create trademark moves, to create techniques, and encourages people to start mixing and matching their attack options as they increase in skill.  If Deceptive Attack is always -4 for -2 to defense, then what sets apart a skill 15 character from a skill 14 character is that they can make a deceptive attack and hit more than half the time; what sets a skill 18 character apart is that they can make a deceptive attack and also a rapid strike (with extra effort) and hit more than half the time. Or they can make a deceptive attack for the vitals and hit more than half the time, etc.

But for me, I tend to play at exceedingly high skill levels, as I run kung fu games where people expect to be able to pull off a wealth of complex moves. I have literally had readers and players complain if I hand them a character with less than skill-18 in their combat skill.  When skill 20-24 is not out of the question, something as small as a -4 becomes uninteresting (though, do note that Dell'Orto suggests a second tier to help with this). More importantly, though, I find that the standard way of handling Deceptive Attacks makes it similar to a contest of skills that always improves in grades.  A skill 22 character is always demonstrably better than a skill 20 because of that additional -1 they can layer onto their attacks if they want, and that strikes me as accurate: each additional increase in skill adds a subtle bit of nuance in this arms race of attack vs parry that gets abstracted away in the rules for deceptive attack.  Fixed Effect makes this less granular.

That's not to say that I'm not interested.  There are some interesting things it does with combat, namely that tendency to force players to think more about their options.  But I'm not 100% sold on it.

Fixed Effect Feints

Fixed-Effect Feints, on the other hand, are a great idea.  I've commented before on the problem with Feint and how unwieldy it can get. A lot of players dislike the Feint skill precisely for this: yes, you lose an attack, but every point you spend in it is a -1 to your opponent's defense; the only way to beat it is to raise your defenses (5/level) or to invest in Feint yourself, which makes it a must-have trait.  It also allows a more skilled opponent to absolutely destroy less skilled opponents.

For example, Alexa is skill 20 with the force sword, and Barlo is skill 18.  She has Parry 13, he has Parry 12.  In a 3e fight, they would just hit one another until someone screws up their parry roll, which eventually means Alexa should prevail, but Barlo could get lucky. In 4e, Deceptive Attacks speed this process up: Alexia is applying a -8 to her attacks to apply a -4 to his defense (Reducing Barlo to Parry 8) and he's applying a -6 to his attacks to reduce apply a -3 to her defenses (reducing Alexa to Parry 10). This means that Alexa is likely to beat Barlo in a few turns (he can keep himself going with retreats, for example, and extra effort), rather than a 10-20 turns. If she feints first, she'll beat Barlo by an average of 2 points, and then she can make a Deceptive Attack to drop his effective Parry to 6.  If Barlo feinted at Alexa, he would likely fail, and even if he succeeded, he's unlikely to apply more than -1 to her defense. So with a single feint and attack, Alexa will probably defeat Barlo in two turns, with only a 2 point difference in skill.

This gets far worse with a character who is mostly defenses.  Say Cain has a neurolash Staff with skill 14, but it has +2 parry, and he has Enhanced Parry.  He has an effective parry of 13, just like Alexa does.  But he can't reduce her defense by more than -1 without risking failure half the time, so she's effectively at Parry 12, and she can reduce his by -4, dropping him to a (reasonable) 9 or less. But her Feints will likely beat him by 6, which drops him to a 3 or less on parry.  The fool doesn't have any weapon skill, so she'll crush him like a bug, despite his impressive defenses.

If we go with a fixed effect feint, then it becomes a contest to see if you can get the -4. It's like stunning an opponent, but with skill rather than damage. In this version, Alexa can drop Barlo's defense more on average, making the move more valuable to her than under the normal rules, but Barlo has a chance of dropping Alexa.  If he gets lucky, he might beat her by a single point, which instantly translates into a -4 to her defense. Thus, he sees value in trying to do something other than frantically defend all the time, and there's a real chance he could beat her.  Cain likewise caps how much she can beat him.  Sure, she's still likely to win the feint contest, and she'll apply that full -4 to his defense, but that's not as bad as -6, and it only drops his defense down to 5 or less, which is a survivable value (it requires extra effort, retreats, all-out defense, etc, but Alexa is giving up a turn to make the feint, so the fact that you could survive it means she's more wearing you down with it than guaranteeing her victory).

This does something else: it prevents the Feint technique from being an effective bonus to defense.  When you get to the point where Feinting becomes so powerful, then players become highly incentivized to take it, not just to defeat their opponents with it, but to prefer their opponents from using it against them.

Say Cain purchased Feint as a technique and then bought Technique Mastery. He has Feint-20 and Staff-14.  If Alexa tries to Feint him, she's unlikely, under the standard system, to apply more than a -1 or -2 to his defenses.  By purchasing feint and technique mastery (RAW that's 8 points, which would only raise his Staff skill to 16 and only give him a +1 to defense), he's effectively increased his defense rating against her by ~+4.  Thus, she cannot reduce his defense to more than about 7 or 8, which is much better than the 3 she was dropping it to before.  He has little incentive to use it against her, for the same reason Barlo has little reason: he's unlikely to get more than -1 or -2, which will not be enough to regularly land a hit on her.  But if we use the fixed effect version, his high level of Feint still acts to protect him, but it becomes all-or-nothing: if she feints, he's trying to prevent the feint from working.  If he succeeds, she gets nothing, but if he fails she drops his parry to 5 again.  At the same time, he has incentive to feint against her, because a successful feint will drop her parry to 8 if he pairs it with his deceptive attack, which would legitimately force her on the defensive.  And he can succeed at that 50% of the time.

The counter argument I hear is that this makes Feint less effective.  First, that's rather the point, as it's one of the more powerful techniques, more powerful than it really should be.  Second, as you can see with poor Cain there, it actually creates more value for it.  I've discussed "capping" feints, but someone points out that greatly reduces the utility of maximizing your feint.  I think this fixes that problem: being a feint expert now becomes about maximizing your chances at getting that -4 (as well as preventing others from getting that -4 on you) than it is about maximizing what penalty you can apply to your opponent. Yes, it's less useful against unskilled opponents, but you don't need much help against those.  It becomes more useful against skilled opponents, which makes it more interesting.

I'm less sold on the idea of a higher tier of a fixed feint, though.  Setting aside my total embrace of uncapped deceptive attacks, I think a penalty to defense of more than -4 really needs some justifications.  Being prone is a -3, being stunned is -4, being unable to see your opponent is -4, but somehow, a feint can be -8? How bad are your defenses that you're as bad off as if you were blind and stunned? What did he do?  It also, again, allows you to crush unskilled defenders even worse than before, but we already have deceptive attack for that.  That said, you might need something like that to deal with extreme opponents, but you're unlikely to succeed by 10+ against a similarly skilled opponent; this is only really useful against people with ridiculous defense values that don't have comparably high skill levels to match. So I'd have to think on it.  This might be better handled as a sort of perk or special technique that allows you to take a greater risk, or caps how low you can bring the target's defenses (it can apply a full -8, but not if your opponent is already "underwater" and so can't drop your opponent's defenses below, say, 10).

So I like this. I might introduce it, but given how passionate my readers are about martial arts in Psi-Wars, I'll doubtless hear quite some debate back and forth on the merits of it before I do it, hence this post.  I also wanted to highlight what I think is a great idea.

Backer Post: Psychometabolism and Perfected Biology

I've been tinkering a lot with House Apex and the Manticore Initiative lately, and that means diving pretty deeply into bio-tech and some ideas I've played with for awhile.

I've wanted to have Psychometabolism as a "rare power" for awhile, as it fits not only some of the bio-tech space opera elements we have, but the high-flying kung fu.  After all, characters should be able to meditate and heal their wounds, or focus on becoming very fast or very strong.  

The problem I ran into is that the "Psychometabolism" ability covers basically everything in the power, so what could I do to expand it into a full power-set? Well, Psychokinesis has the same problem: basically everything is just an extension of TK-Grab, and I've handled that by saying "Look, you can make it all techniques and alternative abilities if you want!"  The second problem I ran into is that most of these powers are static.  You either have more ST or DR or regeneration or you don't. If you wanted to "roll for it," you'd just use Psychometabolism and max out your skill there.

So I just embraced the supremacy of Psychometabolism.  All the rest of the abilities are static , permanent expressions of what the Psychometabolism ability can offer you.  They may cost fatigue, but they don't require a skill roll, and thus do not have a skill.  Psychometabolism becomes _the only skill_; you use if for clever tricks (techniques) or extra effort.  This reduces the utility of the Talent, so I buffed the talent to help with a ton of cinematic skills; arguably, this should make it cost more, but we've already allowed other psychic talents to improve a handful of cinematic skills, so when you account for that, the pricing is fair.

I've also wanted a super-science version of this for a long time. After all, this is just biology, and people can actually control quite a few "unconscious processes" with their biology. It's within the realm of super-science to say that extreme physical training and careful balancing of biology should maybe let you have similar abilities to what psychometabolism offers (after all, what is Chi but the extreme training of someone to make use of supposedly natural processes, and careful diet and exercise to balance those natural processes). So we could have artificially created kung-fu artists, at the hands of extreme physicians and bio-engineers.  The Shinei really could make flying leaps and punch through a wall, not because they have psychic powers, but because they have carefully honed what they can do and had very precise pharmaceuticals enhance their biology.  There are drawbacks to this, of course, but I've noted those as well.

This is available to everyone because, while this is written from the perspective of Psi-Wars, I'm pretty sure my treatment of psychometabolism should be useful to everyone.

With this, we have our first steps into the Sylvan Spiral and the culture around Xen.  If you have any feedback, leave it in the comments, or hop by my discord!

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Psi-Wars Gun Fu: Undercity Noir

For my second gun-fu style, like my first apparently, I went with something that I hadn't already done.  I've been busy at work on the Way of the Rim and Shineido, and in my research, looked more closely at Double Trouble, and thought "You know, there's actually a lot I can work with here." This resulted in Undercity Noir.

One reader pointed out that they couldn't tell the difference between Double Trouble and, basically, all the other dual-wield styles. This is a problem with all of the gun-fu styles, because Martial Arts in GURPS are written as a list of options, and if everyone takes the same options, regardless of their sources, they look the same ("I use Guns (Pistol) and Dual Weapon attack from Double Trouble.  You?" "I use Guns (Pistol) and Dual Weapon attack from Way of the West!" "Oh that's totally different").  But I find with my martial-arts-as-power-ups, I can greatly accentuate the differences and give the player a greater sense of what differentiates his style from another style, both by embedding the "fluff" of the move closer to the mechanics, and by presenting those mechanics in a context.  For example, both Coda Resolute and Undercity Noir make use of Off-Hand Weapon Training, but the former focuses on using the blaster as an accessory to their force blade, while the latter actually uses Dual Weapon attacks.

So the thematic hook I hung my Double Trouble on was the idea of extreme mobility. I think that's the core of Double Trouble anyway: slow motion leaps while blasting your guns.  There's also a strong mechanical benefit to high mobility, as noted in my discussion of gunslinger survivability: mobility gives you greater defense in depth, and lets you bypass other people's defenses. Another reader insists the best trick is to jump behind people and shoot them in the head from behind, where they can't dodge (or have a penalty).  Naturally, I had to fold this into the style.  I also wanted to give them Enhanced Dodge, but it turns out +1 Basic Move + Enhanced Dodge 1 is objectively inferior to +1.0 Basic Speed.  So I gave them Trained by a Master (Evasion) instead. It suits them.  I also continued on with making these 15-point power-ups, rather than 20 like force sword styles.  I think that might continue: gun styles just don't demand as many skills as the force sword or unarmed combat do!

But where does it fit into Psi-Wars? The whole point of Iteration 6 and 7 is to fold these things into a defined setting.  This was a high mobility style, and we already have a style for each "human ethnic group." So, an alien perhaps? I could give it to the Ranathim but, like, they get everything cool and alien.  Also, the Ranathim would really seem to prefer to get stuck into melee.  What other highly agile and flashy race do we have? Well, the Asrathi! They also fit well because they're, culturally, basically human.  So, I made it a style associated with Psi-Wars' cat-folk and tied it up with the criminal elements of the galactic core and, to keep it from being too dominated by a single, relatively minor race, I let the rest of the Galaxy start to pick up on it.  To justify it going to full Master status, I gave it a bit of legend and lore and some interesting characters for practitioners to moon over.

Then, uh, I had to give it a name. After much struggling, I came up with "Undercity Noir." I felt this captured the cinematic, criminal vibe of the style.  I think the result is very true to the core inspiration of John-Woo-in-Space.

You can find the Undercity Noir here.