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
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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!

• You can find it on Subscribestar here
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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.

Psi-Wars Gun Fu: the Coda Resolute

So, if you couldn't tell, in keeping with the exploration of the Frontier Marshal, I've been exploring Gun Fu in Psi-Wars.  This isn't a new topic: I touched on it back in Iteration 4, but now we have a setting to tie these ideas to, and I have a new system for writing up martial arts.  So, I wanted to explore some.

The first I want to reveal is the Coda Resolute, the Maradonian "Gun-Fu."  This isn't the first I've designed, nor did it exist back in Iteration 4, and I don't expect it to be wildly popular, which is why I'm starting with it, because it's better to have a minor style torn apart by my readers than a major style.  The others will be more detailed and more powerful: Maradonians are all about the Force Sword, and so would look on most forms of Gun Fu as a secondary concern at best.

When I created the Resolution-pattern blaster, the idea, even the name, was with an eye towards the dueling pistol or the flint-lock pistol common among swashbuckling pirates. Thus, it has a low Rate of Fire, little ammunition, and deals a lot of damage at once.  I envisioned it as a side-arm for a space knight who wanted to blow a hole in a well-armored target who was too far for him to cut down with his force sword. I could also see it being used in duels, though it would have been in a different era than the present. 

The Coda Resolute brings the Resolution into focus and emphasizes its role as a dueling weapon.  Naturally, like many things Maradonian, it's a style that's more about style than substance: this is a style that teaches a false sort of accuracy, the sort that's best on the firing range or when showing off, rather than under the pressure of battle.  Thus, I created a new technique called "Plinking," which improves your accuracy when there's no pressure on, when the shot is about showing off, rather than hitting an enemy.  It's a style that also has a lot real accuracy: the weapon is high in accuracy anyway, and Dead-Eye (modified in Psi-Wars to simply give you additional turns of aiming, rather than complex rules with Precision Aiming which are too detailed for a space opera kung fu action game) that allows them to take their time and aim.

Those who are willing to invest more deeply gain access to even greater real accuracy and get to play with some of the neater tricks of the Resolution.  I wanted to explore the idea of the "Cult of the Gun," so I created a cinematic option perk for the Resolution that makes it more lethal post DR, and makes the hot-shotted versions are less prone to failure ("It's the superior cladding; they made them tougher back in the day.").  I wanted to make the style monomaniacal about the gun: like all things Maradonian, they think their stuff is better than everyone else's, and this sort of makes it true.  It does make me want to explore more variations (a multi-barrel version, perhaps?).

As a dueling style, it's more of a curiosity, but if we have space-flint-locks, we should be using them to buckle some swashes.  In 7th Sea, the most common things I saw players do was wield a pistol while they also had a sword, and this classic pose is covered in Ray-Gun Gothic. It allows the character to "dual wield," but the primary focus isn't actually dual weapon attack: I mean, sure, you can shoot while you swing, but most people will either shoot or swing, and the style reflects that.  The other thing I saw a lot of people do is ask how many they could carry.  The "coat full of pistols" was a common "twink" approach to 7th Sea.  So why not embrace the crazy and give our Maradonian pirate-swashbucklers cloaks full of blasters? It's the sort of over-the-top expenditure that I could totally see a Maradonian doing.

It's alright offensively.  Defensively, it obeys two rules from my post on Gunslinger survivability.  First, it uses an actual melee weapon for defense, in this case a force sword.  That makes it a secondary weapon and a secondary concern, but the style accepts that and is cheap as a result.  The second rule is luck, as manifested in the Duelist's Courage trick. I struggled for awhile to find a way to make aspected Impulse Buy points work for me and I've finally given up and focused on Serendipity instead, which is probably what I should have used since the beginning: a single use of luck to do something specific.  In this case, they get a last ditch "lucky" roll to not get hit, or a single use "This doesn't count as combat" moment, allowing them to use their full accuracy for some very cool shot even in combat.

The result is a noteworthy style that suits Maradonian culture and puts a nice lampshade on a weapon that I think not a lot of people notice. I doubt it'll be a must-have for many, but I've been surprised by the popularity of the Maradonian aesthetic before.  But I think keeping this as a "minor" style is still important, given the secondary role of the blaster in Maradonian society.

Coda Resolute can be found here

Musings on Gunslinger Survivability in Psi-Wars

The broader discussions on gunslinging in Psi-Wars has spawned some interesting questions, and one I hadn't really considered is what happens when the Space Knight gets in touch with the Gunslinger.  A lot of my work has been to allow the Space Knight to reach out and touch the Gunslinger, but once that happens, should that really be the end of the fight? A player might envision this frenetic conflict with the Space Knight slashing at the retreating Gunslinger who is dodging, rolling, firing shots that will bounce and hit the Space Knight in this wild "Blaster Ballet" kung fu fight.  But in practice, that doesn't really happen. Why not? And what can we do to solve it?

"Is Predictive Shooting a thing in Psi-Wars?"

I have a great community on my Discord (you can find the link in the Psi-Wars Index!) that often asks interesting questions, sometimes in itemized lists (which is very convenient).  These often lead to all sorts of interesting improvements in Psi-Wars, but one was posed to me recently that's both the sort of question I dread to answer, and one that I've been thinking on for awhile: "Is predictive shooting a thing in Psi-Wars?"

It's also a question I've been thinking on a lot.  Whenever I give my Backers the option to pick which template the focus on next, the Frontier Marshal usually does very well, and last time, it won! I keep pondering why my Backers like the Frontier Marshal so much: it's the "ranger" and "survivalist" of the setting, which doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that Psi-Wars fans would be crazy about, but "space sheriff" is something, like the Maradonian Space Knight, that Psi-Wars has and Star Wars doesn't. But I also think it's because they'd very much like to see "Gun Fu," so I've been working on that behind the scenes for a bit. And you can't really look at Gun Fu without thinking about "Predictive Shooting" and "Ranged Feints."

What is Predictive Shooting?

While I think Predictive Shooting comes up in a few places, my preferred reference for Psi-Wars is Gun Fu, because with a few exceptions, most Psi-Wars shootists aren't much bothered by realism.  Here, the rules can be found on page 11... and 12.

Essentially, Predictive Shooting is a Deceptive Attack with a gun, and it only reduces Dodge.

There's another interesting rule: Ranged Feint.  The idea here is that you "fake-out" your opponent and then make a Feint with a Gun roll; this penalizes all defenses, just like any feint.