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?

Gunslinger Survivability

Toadkiller Dog often talks about "holes" in defense, points of vulnerability, and how certain builds work.  Let's examine the tactics of how ranged characters tend to focus on survival.

Defense in Depth

It's been a trend for RPGs to move away from strict ranges, one which GURPS has buckled to only slightly, and there's a reason for this: a lot of GURPS is built around that hex map.  I had a fascinating battle in Cherry Blossom Rain where we had a cavalry charge against a Mitsurugi pikeman unit, and the players were amazed to see how many attacks the pikeman got before the horsemen could actually, finally, get close enough. You get layer after layer of attacks several yards away from the pikeman and once you finally reach them, true to classic pikeman formations, you have to deal with an expert swordsman once you get through.  My players found it an illustrative experience and mused at what would happen if you put archers behind those pikemen, or better, musketmen.

A lot of GURPS fights benefit from "range as defense." This is doubly true with ranged attackers. The reason melee is dead in RAW Ultra-Tech is you can't reasonably reach your opponent. If he can hit you at a mile off with his radar lock, Acc +12, scope and targeting computer, then unless you're a super-speeder, you have no hope of hitting him with your space sword, because even if he misses, he'll have _minutes_ of time to hit you again and again and again before you can hit him.

A lot of Psi-Wars has been to cut down on that. I focus on smaller maps, I reduced accuracy, I raised recoil and I gave Space Knights access to a load of high mobility tricks, such as Flying Leap, Tumbling and charging attacks.

The response to improve Gunslinger survivability here is to also give them mobility.  The Space Knight chases the Gunslinger, who rapidly retreats and fires back. I think this is a fair approach and Action supports it: such fights turn from fights and into chase scenes. Our Gunslinger rolls Running vs the Space Knight's Running, who might use Flying Leap to make Mobility Chase maneuvers and the Gunslinger makes Move and Attack rolls to run and shoot at the same time (note that if he's an actual Gunslinger, he can just attack during a normal Move!) while using Acrobatics or Jump or something to try to make Mobility Escapes. It can work and Action supports it.

The only real problem here is that not a lot of people think this way, so it might help to have a gunslinger style that focuses on it, the Gunslinger equivalent to the Graceful Form or the Furious Form.  It also means you don't have that cool "blaster ballet" fight, even if it's a legitimate way of having the Gunslinger make it an interesting fight with the Space Knight.

Dodge

If the Gunslinger can't avoid the Space Knight, then they have to actually evade the Space Knight's attacks.  Dodge is their best defense in this case: it can avoid the force sword with no real drawbacks, and the Gunslinger can benefit from a retreat, not just in the sense of gaining a +3 to defense, but it doesn't really penalize his ability to counter attack: he can always use more range, more "defense in depth" against the Space Knight.

The problem with Dodge is that it's expensive and Space Knights are built around handling extremely high defenses.  A Space Knight expects you to have a defense of 13+, because that's what she typically has, but a typical Gunslinger will have a Dodge of 10, maybe 11.  So when she reaches you and uses her Force Sword-18 to make a Deceptive Attack at -3, she would have dropped an enemy space knight to ~10 in Parry, who could retreat and draw on a bunch of tricks to bring it back to 13, which means such a deceptive attack is merely an opening salvo in a duel.  For the Gunslinger, even with a Retreat, he's still looking at a defense of 10 or 11.  Spending some fatigue on extra effort would help bring him up to a reasonable defense value, but this is casually easy for her.  She can make these deceptive attacks all day.  The Gunslinger is toast.

This gets worse when we bring Feint into the picture.  If our Space Knight is a Simple Form user, she has access to the Formless Strike, which gives her a Feint of 24. If she makes such a feint against our Gunslinger, he needs to defend with his best melee skill, oh wait, he doesn't have a Melee skill.  You can make the case for DX, but then you're looking at Feint-24 vs skill 12, so an average of -12! Even with a retreat and extra effort, this character is toast.  Now, some of this is that unbounded values have problems and I've been musing with capping the results of Feint: it seems weird to me that Feinting can make it so much harder to defend than being stunned or fighting an invisible opponent. But even with a cap, the Gunslinger has some problems here, because Dodge is so low and gives you no reasonable defense against a Feint.  We can get around that somewhat by giving them an Unarmed skill, but the whole point of a Gunslinger is to focus on ranged, rather than melee, attacks.

We can raise Dodge, of course, but we have to be cautious doing so.  Dodge is an unbounded defense that works against everything. You can dodge against as many attacks as you like and you can always make a Dodge, and they benefit from Acrobatics and Retreats (though in Psi-Wars, everything benefits from Acrobatics and Retreats, so that offers less value than in other games). Thus, Dodge is very expensive.  The base increase is 20 points per +1 vs the 8 points for a melee skill, and just buying an Enhanced Defense, but Enhanced Dodge is 15 points per level! Hardly something you'd expect everyone to invest into.  We might conceive of a "Melee Only" Enhanced Dodge for, say, 5 points, but a lot of the utility of Dodge is its ability to avoid ranged attacks, and smart gunslingers would prefer Defense in Depth to deal with melee opponents to having a highly specialized defense that "shouldn't come up anyway."

Thus, I would argue Gunslingers should be treating Dodge the way Space Knights do: as a secondary defense for dealing with ranged attacks or when you've run out of other defenses, rather than the defense you rely on in a close-up fight.

Parry

The primary defense that Space Knights use against melee attacks is, of course, their melee defense! It's much higher than their Dodge, and it's much cheaper.  And you don't even need Precognitive Defense to parry a force sword. So why not use it for a Gunslinger? Well, let's look at the sources.

The most obvious source is a Parry from a melee weapon.  The problem here is that this means the character has to invest in a melee weapon, and most melee weapons are just fodder against a force sword.  Thus, the best melee investment would be... Force Sword.  This isn't the craziest idea: I'm building one gunslinger style around the idea of a sword-and-blaster swashbuckler.  However, at some point, what you're building isn't a gunslinger, it's a space knight who has a gun in his off-hand.  Again, while not an invalid concept, it's not one we want to be the only solution.

The second source is an unarmed skill. Skills like Karate and Judo can defend against armed attacks with little risk and Psi-Wars has a technique that let's you use Judo or Karate parries against force weapons with no risk.  We could apply that!  This makes sense anyway: it gives us some modicum of defense against Feints (above) and it gives the Gunslinger an option in fights without his gun, and it allows him to exploit Unarmed Combat Etiquette, which means he can try to punch our Space Knight in the throat, and force her to use Dodge or her own unarmed skill to defend. So this isn't a bad approach in Psi-Wars, but the problem, again, is that we don't expect a deep investment in it from Gunslingers.  After all, they're Gunslingers, not Kung Fu fighters with guns.  Unarmed skills also have limited utility in a setting where people's underwear can have a DR of 10 to 20. Sure, it's reduced against crushing damage, but unless you're ST 20, in a lot of cases, you're better off not punching people.  Thus, Gunslingers who invest in Melee skills primarily do so to defend against Feints and for the Parry.

There's an interesting perk called Pistol-Fist which lets you use your gun skill as your unarmed skill. This even lets you parry! This is very interesting, because if we expect our Space Knight to have Force Sword-18, we expect our Gunslinger to have Beam Weapons (Pistol)-18 (or 20, as it's easier), which gives him a Parry of 13-14, which is on par with what the Space Knight has as a defense. The only problem here is that the Force Sword _destroys that which parries it_, so if the Gunslinger parries with his pistols, he can only do it once, and then he's disarmed.  This is actually really nasty in close range, because if the Gunslinger tries to attack, the Space Knight can parry the gun itself, and thus destroy it. I think, however, that this might be a good solution. It wouldn't be the only solution: learning Karate and Judo still have some value, and we'd have to use Technique Adaption to borrow ideas like Warding Parry for Beam Weapons (Pistol), but the utility of using your best skill for your parry and your resistance to Feint is very valuable.

Damage Resistance

The typical ranged characters in most settings are lightly armored: they rely on Dodge and mobility, which is negatively impacted by encumbrance. But in an Ultra-Tech setting, this is less true: armor is light enough that you can get quite some DR without huge levels of encumbrance, and some ultra-tech archetypes make use of battlesuits to improve their ST (and thus how much firepower they can carry) and thus often have more DR than other characters.  When they rely on cover and Defense-in-Depth, they can also get away with heavier encumbrance and thus wear more armor.  Furthermore, if we're strictly talking Space Knight v Gunslinger, then we should note that the Space Knight, who relies on mobility to reach the Gunslinger, has similar problems with DR.

The problem with high DR in a Space Knight v Gunslinger situation is that a Space Knight is wielding what amounts to a heavy weapon, and I've built a lot of my DR around the idea of always allowing a force sword to defeat it.  A force sword will typically carve through up to 140 DR, though more than 100-120 DR isn't really practical (a force sword will deal an average of 8 damage to someone in 100 DR), and most blaster rifles only deal 6d(5) damage, which means at 100 DR, you're almost immune to blaster fire, but someone with a force sword is still carving through you. And this ignores the presence of Weapon Masters with Force Swords who will typically average ~44 damage, and thus will deal 24+ damage to someone in DR 100, or 4 points to someone in DR 200, and no human scale character in the setting has DR 200!

Luck and Impulse Buys

This might sound like an odd thing to add into the mix, but it shouldn't be ignored: a gunslinger can use Luck to turn a marginal defense into a successful one, or Impulse Buys to turn a lethal force sword wound into an ugly scratch.  The obvious problems with these "defenses" is that they're are resources that the Gunslinger expends, which means he can only use them once or twice against the Space Knight before she's burned through them and the Gunslinger is dead.  But the Gunslinger might only need one or two defenses before he can turn the fight around.  A real fight isn't two people in a boxing ring with one person always attacking and the other always defending: it's dynamic, it flows, and sometimes the Gunslinger only needs to buy himself time to get that shot off, or to make his escape.  You shouldn't underestimate the value of a single-use defense when a fight suddenly gets hairy, especially if the character has a variety of defenses at their disposal. And note that even in a fight where the character relies on more consistent defenses, that's also just a matter of resources: you only have so many successful defense rolls until you die; the difference between an Impulse Buy and Dodge is that with an Impulse Buy, you know how many points you have left, while with Dodge, you don't know how many successful defenses you have until you fail; you can only guess at that.

Layered Armor

The real truth is that a Gunslinger, like any fighter, needs a variety of defenses to deal with a variety of situations.  This is true of Space Knights too, and everyone else.  The good gunslinger layers defenses over one another and relies on several of them, rather than a single defense.

• Mobility is always useful, because a Gunslinger should never be "tied down" to one area.  He needs to avoid the Space Knight, and against other Gunslingers, he needs to be able to outflank them or to move rapidly to cover.
• Damage Resistance is always useful, but it's more limited than mobility, and has a negative relationship with mobility.  Any gunslinger can afford ~20 DR from Battleweave, which will dull a blaster shot but won't do much to save you from a force sword unless you have very high HP. Heavier armor is possible, even up to DR 100, which will certainly keep you alive after a force sword hit and shrug off most blaster fire, but you need to accept the compromises made to mobility and dodge.  DR is less a defense to rely on, and more of a defense that kicks in when others have failed.
• Dodge is always useful, but tends to be a marginal defense, one used when the others fail. It has a negative correlation with DR, but a high correlation with Mobility, and thus they work well together.
• Parry is alright, but requires a heavy investment in a non-combat skill. It has no utility in gun battles, reducing its usefulness to a Gunslinger, though it is valuable for Gunslingers that expect to need to use non-lethal force or be unable to carry their guns everywhere.
• Pistol-Fist is great, as it's cheap and leverages their best skill for defense, but it needs to some investment to make it valuable in a fight with a space knight, and has little utility outside of that.
• Luck and Impulse Buys are mostly useful for turning marginal defenses, like Dodge, into potent defenses and in providing useful opportunities in a Chase (thus improving mobility); they shouldn't be counted on by themselves, but they can add some utility to the above defenses, "buying the character time."

I think a character with all of these together in the right mixture could represent a serious threat to a Space Knight, even if she managed to get close. I don't actually mind that a Space Knight represents a lethal threat to a Gunslinger; that is, after all, the intention of a lot of rules, but it would be nice if it was less "binary," in that the Gunslinger still had a chance once the Space Knight reached him, or a way to keep the fight interesting and dynamic at that point.  This also represents a useful exercise for me, because I'm building gunslinger martial-arts-as-power-ups, and those always prove instructive to people as to how to build a character to survive attacks, or how to get around difficult defenses.  The same should certainly be true of Gunslingers. If I build a layer of defenses into their styles, new players will be intuitively instructed in how to keep their Gunslinger alive when the inevitable happens and a Space Knight closes on them.