Quick Wiki Update: Imperial Marksmanship

 I've wanted to tinker with Imperial Marksmanship for awhile.  Mainly, I wanted to add the Samsara Drill, but I also wanted to streamline the style.  While it makes sense for them to teach both rifle and pistol, I think in the long run, most player characters would want to specialize, and if you allow someone to choose only one weapon with the second power-up package, you can collapse all of Expert and Elite into a single, 20-point upgrade.  This should make it a little more attractive for the inevitable Security Agent in the coming Heist game.

Quick Wiki Update: Blaster Ballet Updated

 The Martial Art formerly known as Undercity Noir has been renamed, cleaned up slightly, its formatting improved, and it's Power-Up set improved to 20 points/level (on par with the "Big" pistol-based styles), with the new version of how we handle assault blasters integrated.  So for those who you intent on playing a highly kinetic Asrathi blast-slinger, there you go.

I've had a question about the Rite of Luck, and how it was "constructed."  Originally, it was a highly limited version of Higher Purpose with Preparation Required, Limited Use, Requires IQ roll etc, but eventually I realized it was just a classic example of the extremely limited bonus used under race circumstances. It's sort of a deferred "Occultism or Religious as Complementary Roll" with enough limitations placed on it that I felt it was acceptable to increase the bonus to a +2. I originally liked the idea of adding the bonus after the roll, but I thought this might be too powerful.  However, on reflection, I've decided to give it a try: I've reduced it to a +1 bonus, but you're allowed to apply it after you've made a roll, but the ritual, whether you use the bonus or not, can only be used once per day, and it runs out after an hour.  I think this makes for more interesting play, as you'll "say your prayers" before a big event, and it might do nothing, as there may be no roll that would benefit from a +1 improvement in margin, but if there is, well, it helps you luck out.  We'll see how it plays.

Is Melee Viable in Psi-Wars (or any Ultra-Tech setting)?

As I continue my work on the Umbral Rim and the Heist, I find myself coming to an inevitable intersection where the Assassin is one of next templates I should do, and also, many of the aliens I'm working on, such as the dreaded Gerluthim, would probably focus a great deal on melee combat.  I expect to see spears, polearms and knives, but would any player actually choose them for any reason other than aesthetic.

Ultra-Tech settings pose a unique problem to melee weapons.  Even if we set aside the supremacy of ranged weapons in a UT setting, the ubiquity of sealed DR presents a real problem. In a fantasy setting, or a low tech setting, characters can and do completely cover up their bodies in armor, but they rarely have more than 4 to 6 DR, and most attacks will deal between 1d and 2 damage, which means there's always a chance you'll blast through the DR and, wizards aside, most ranged attacks don't do much more than 1d damage, which makes melee very important for cracking well armored targets.  Furthermore, realistic armor has gaps that a clever knife fighter can exploit to take down well-armored foes.  In a High Tech Setting, characters tend to wear armor heavy enough to defeat the best melee weapons, but it tends to be isolated to just their torso: this goes well beyond gaps as you can generally freely attack the neck or the arms or the legs, and you can still target gaps to hit the vitals.  Once we get to an Ultra-Tech setting, though, people will wear sealed armor to protect from space, and this automatically gives them defense against most gas attacks, acid splashes, and attacks against armor gaps that most other settings can use to exploit well armored targets.  A knife, even a vibro knife, is never going to get through a combat hardsuit.

The most realistic approach to take here is to accept that and to not bring a knife to a gun fight.  You don't see many characters in the Expanse attacking someone in a battlesuit with a knife for good reason!  But Psi-Wars isn't hard sci-fi, it's space opera.  We expect to see duels with foils, and alien natives with long spears and palace guards with imposing halberds. But why would they wield them if they do no good? It's fine for an NPC to stand around looking like a set-piece, but players will just reach for a blaster if this is the case.  So how do we fix it?

But Force Swords are Fine!

If you've followed Psi-Wars, you might be scratching your head a little.  After all, we've had space knights since Iteration 1, and they kick butt. The force sword is to the blaster rifle what the bastard sword is to the bow: a way of bringing about +50% damage and penetration to a target up close.  A blaster rifle will struggle to get through 100 DR, while a fore sword has no problem.  Moreover, the ability to parry blaster fire with a force sword, and the close quarters created by the tight confines of spaceships and planetary habitats tends to favor the skilled melee combatant.  So... we already have working melee in Psi-Wars.  What's the problem?

Well, the Force Sword papers over a lot of issues.  Yes, it's effective, but it's the only melee weapon that has this sort of damage output.  Furthermore, it destroys melee weapons, which means if you go into a melee fight with anything other than a force sword, you're a chump.  Your weapon won't penetrate your opponent's armor, and if they have a force sword, they'll parry once and it's game over.  There is only one effective melee option, and that's the force sword.  Anything we do to diminish that risks reducing the importance and power of the force sword, but if we leave it as the undisputed king, nobody will ever bother with any other weapon.  Axes, spears, vibro-blades, knives, staves and weaponized wrenches are a waste of time; just spring for a force sword.

This might just be what we have to accept, but I want to explore some options, so the game has room for more variety than blasters vs lightsabers.  

 

This post is mostly me going through my process of thinking aloud to my blog as I try to solve a problem, which is how I got my start on this blog, and people seem to appreciate this approach, so I'm going to go ahead and post it.  Feel free to read though it to see how I come to the conclusions I do, and why.

The Strength of Weak Magic

Slightly off-topic from things I normally discuss, but I had a lively debate, triggered by the Pyramid Kickstarter, on the problems with GURPS Magic.  Now, while I don't hate GURPS Magic (it offers some very interesting ideas, and I love RPGs that offer that wealth of non-combat-oriented, problem-solving spells), I think Sorcery is an objectively better system.  I think Magic is a symptom of one of the problems that plagues GURPS 4e (and 3e, really) which is point crock, this insistence on having secondary systems that can do what advantages do, but are, for whatever reason, cheaper.  So, instead of buying an innate fire attack, mages learn fireball, and instead of purchasing DR, mages learn shield spell. The result of this is to "hide the true costs" of the mage, and to let him sneak into higher power levels, especially when point totals start to get particularly high.

The discussion turned to why this is. Why unbalance the mage? The argument made by others is that the fiction fantasy emulates often pairs a powerful wizard with a grim and gritty mercenary; a Gandalf with a Boromir.  Players had an expectation that the wizard could perform some very powerful magic, but accepted that they might have a limitation on it, such as being able to only cast once or twice before being depleted. This emulates the fiction, where a wizard is a larger-than-life character, certainly more interesting and powerful than those without magic, but often doesn't use their godlike power (muttering about the position of the stars and the temptation of power) and allows the mere mortals to sort out their problem, until dramatically solving the crisis with a wave of their hand if they're strictly necessary.  GURPS Magic does this, and it works very well at the 100 to 150 point level common to older GURPS editions.

The fear, then, is that if we required people to use Sorcery, the magic user ceases to be "interesting" at the point totals where we tend to see grim-and-gritty mercenaries.  Now, there are some arguable assumptions leading to this conclusion, but I think while it's true that a genuinely priced wizard, as most people conceive of a wizard, is closer to a 500-point street super than he is to a 150-point gritty mercenary, but the assertion that the 150-point sorcerer would be boring rub me the wrong way. Some of my favorite stories are about "weak" sorcerers (such as "With a Single Spell"), and I think they have a lot to offer a group.

The point of this post is not to argue that GURPS Magic is a problem, or that Wizards, as written, are a problem, or even that Sorcery is superior, though I think all these things are, to some extent, true. Rather, it's to try to alleviate any fears someone might have about "weak sorcerers being boring," to show what they can do, and why low-powered magic-users can often be more interesting than high-powered magic-users!

Pyramid Kickstarter!

 

In case you're unaware, the next GURPS kickstarter is up, this time for three new issues of Pyramid. Yes, I've backed it, and you should too.

I'll be honest, this kickstarter makes more sense to me than the last one.  Pyramid was always the ideal place for little "mini-supplements" like we got in the last Kickstarter.  A grab-bag of wild and woolly ideas that wouldn't quite fit into a full book is exactly what I look for in Pyramid, and it's what we'll be getting.  Given the material I cover on this blog, I'm naturally looking forward to the Sci-Fi pyramid (though I'm a little surprised nobody took the time to write up yet more ultra-tech!), but there's a lot of stuff in all of the pyramid issues.  There are several of the already-unlocked articles that I'm looking forward to.

Toxic Grimoire: I have some issues with GURPS Magic, but it's a good old standby, and it's often filled with neat ideas.  An expansion of it with additional spells is always fun.

The Secret Masters: Psi-Wars tends to focus on conspiratorial play even at the more modest Action levels, so having more support for that will be nice.

Reign of Action: Reign of Steel is one of those GURPS settings that I desperately want to love, but feels unplayable.  Combining it with Action already looks like a no brainer: rather than playing desperate survivors slowly and horrifically dying to genocidal robots, why not play cigar-chomping badasses that are slowly reclaiming earth? Sure, less realistic, but much more satisfying!  Roger Burton West already proved his skill with the excellent Read the Sky supplement, so this looks like a marriage made in heaven.  It will also likely prove a valuable resource for when I start to explore the Cybernetic Union.

Three Steampunk Monsters: Phil has been on a steampunk kick lately, and while I panned his Broken Clockwork World, there's a part of me hoping that at least some of these monsters are from his BCW, because the problem with that work was that it lacked crucial details necessary to make it playable.  A few monsters would fix that.  Of course, even if they're not, steampunk is definitely the sort of setting that could do with a few horrific creations.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes: It's always nice to see a Sean Punch article, but I salivate at the thought of this one.  I'm literally working on cultural elements for Psi-Wars right now, so the thing I want more than anything is stupid sports and games for space opera. Don't disappoint me!

The Demonic Temple of Felltower: Peter Dell'Orto writing for Pyramid instead of his blog? I'm game.

Into the Forbidden Zone: Shades of Places of Mystery, one of my favorite 3e supplements, as my well-worn copy can attest.

More Options for Metatronic Generators: Unsurprisingly, I'm happiest with Christopher Rice's work when he's writing stuff I'll use in Psi-Wars, as a lot of Psi-Wars comes from him.  I suspect I'm one of the few people to make regular use of psychotronics, which are one example of metatronic generators, so I have no doubt this will expand the technological repertoire of ancient Ranathim technology and frightening Eldothic toys.

While I backed the GURPS Challenge to the hilt, I think it's format hurt several of it's works, and there's only been a couple of those PDFs that I've actually, practically used.  This feels like a better format, if this is the direction they want to go, so I hope this is a success (and it looks like it will be), and that they do more like this, but I really miss Pyramid.  It released some of the best GURPS material to dat and the GURPS lost some of its luster when Pyramid closed its doors for the third time. So it's nice to see it come back for at least one more hurrah!

Psi-Wars Development Journal: it's just a Cultural Thing

 

I have a bad habit lately of not talking about what I'm doing with Psi-Wars.  This is partially because I'm busy with several different side-projects and I often get interrupted by kids and life in general, so I pick up a thing, make some progress on it, park it, and then come back to it later.  I also find that where Psi-Wars is right now, I benefit a lot from picking at small things, like little edits to a race (the Keleni, most recently) or adding some gear here and there. This doesn't make for the exciting, focused sort of discussion like I had back back in the more "iterative" phase of Psi-Wars, and maybe I should find the discipline to return back to that, but in the meantime, this is working, so I stick with it.

But I wanted to at least add something to this blog, so people don't get the sense that Psi-Wars is dead, so perhaps I should just do a journal whenever I run across something interesting, or I want to talk about what I'm working on.  For today, I wanted to bring up culture, especially day-to-day life.

Gaming Ballistics has a Patreon

If you read this blog, chances are you already read Gaming Ballistic, but if you don't, and you want to support some of the top-of-the-line GURPS content being produced on the web, you should check out the new Gaming Ballistic Patreon (no word on other backer options); if you like what you see, perhaps give him some support.

Are Battlesuits Fair? Part 3 -- Harsh Realism for Battlesuits

 So, I've been diving into how "fair" battlesuits are.  A problem I always run into when running sci-fi games in Ultra-Tech is that characters in battlesuits are always cooler than people not in battlesuits, and people who pay through the nose for additional ST and DR (for example, cyborgs) get left in the dust of a single character who just bought some power armor as, maybe, signature gear.  Can we fix that?

But you might not agree with that premise.  You might be running it differently.  After all, battlesuits come with a host of problems.  For example, your heavier suits can't easily take cover or sneak around (though cybersuits and such certainly can). You can't wear battlesuit to a party, while a cyborg with the right sort of biomorphics certainly can.  But there's other things that we might reasonably contemplate applying to the mechanical presentation of battlesuits that strike me as quite realistic and, with enough of them, we should "compensate" for the difference between a character with and without a battlesuit, to the point where we can bring such characters more-or-less in line with one another.  As we look at these and work out the "effective point cost penalty" we'll see how we can use it to "balance" my rough estimate of ~50 points.

This still won't fix robots, who struggle to keep up with just normal humans who invest in skills, but that'll be out-of-scope for this generic series, as fixing that involves a lot of fundamental changes to how GURPS prices things, and perhaps some unpleasant kludge.

Are Battle Suits Fair: Part 2 -- The Playtest

 Last time I asked: Are Battlesuits Fair?  Mostly, I approached this question from a theoretical standpoint, you know, how most of us gamers complain that something is unbalanced without actually experiencing it in the game.  Without running the numbers, it's hard to know what will pop out.  Of course, I've played games with battlesuits, and they feel overpowered, but I never really put them in circumstances that really highlighted the imbalance.  What happens if one player wants to play a combat robot and the other a guy in a battlesuit? How bad is the disparity really?

So let's run those numbers and actually break down how well a battlesuit fairs against a combat robot and a generic commando.

Keleni Revisited

 I've been tinkering a lot behind the scenes on my upcoming playtests and/or campaigns, with more of my focus on my Heist than the Monster Hunter game at the moment.  The Heist on Kronos seems an ideal moment to bring some focus to the Keleni, as they're absolutely one of the races that'll be on Kronos, and I think I have at least one player interested in trying one out.

I've found myself focusing more on aliens lately, especially on their templates, and with the extensive releases of the Menhiri (as a patreon special) and the Mogwai, it might be nice to give the "core races" a more thorough make-over, and this made me look more closely at the Keleni template. It's not bad, but I feel like their practical implementation, how I actually see them playing out has changed since they released.  I thought about rewriting it and just tossing the updated version on the Wiki, but I was pretty sure it would be controversial, and I toyed with the Discord as a means of starting a discussion, but why not just put it on the blog? I think all my readers hit the blog, and only some are active on the wiki or discord.  Plus this will give me a chance to revisit how I think about races with you, which might prove useful.

Four Years of Psi-Wars

 I began the blog as a way of driving myself to finish some of my setting material and to share my approaches with everyone else.  My intention with Psi-Wars was to finish in a year, and I did! But it proved sufficiently popular that I've continued plugging away since.  Where are we now?

The wiki has been a big hit, and it occurred to me recently that I have all the "core rules" for running Psi-Wars up and on the wiki.  I have a few more thing to add, mostly investigations and "Epic Psi-Wars" stuff, such as monster hunting elements, but other than that, I have everything I need to run a game.

Similarly, technology is in a good place.  We have three major suppliers detailed, and while some material is in my notes rather than on the wiki, I have pretty much all military hardware in place.  What I still have left to do are:

• Civilian vehicles (cars, bulk transports, etc)
• Police vehicles
• A few remaining suppliers
• Syntech (slick, advanced super-spy stuff; vehicles and robots)
• Wyrmwerks (mad-science tech; likely just their robots)
• Startrodder (classic, ww2 inspired stuff; Vehicles and robots)

I also want to touch on more local, proprietary technology, such as the technologies of the Umbral Rim and the Arkhaian Spiral.

I'm also quite deep into templates at this point, though sometimes I think I make it more complicated than it needs to be.  The only templates I have remaining are:

• Commando
• Spy
• Security Agent
• Assassin
• The Philosopher/Mystic (which will be a doozy)

I find myself considering a few more new templates, but some of that spawned the Sidekicks rules, which patrons and backers have already had a chance to see.

What I find myself increasingly drawn towards now are aliens, philosophies and cultural elements.  Psi-Wars is getting to the point where people can readily play a "human standard" game and are becoming more interested in the more exotic parts of the setting, which means I find I field more and more questions about them.  Thus, it seems likely that this year will see more work on aliens.

What drives most of my material at this point are actual games or preparation for games.  I have three I want to aim at.

• The Heist!  This is the next playtest I run, and I have quite some notes, but it's not coming together quite as fast as I had hoped.  Still, I should have it up and running in a few months, with luck.  It drives me towards infiltration rules (up), common gear, currencies, Eldothic tech (because everyone loves the Eldoth), Zathare, and the sort of aliens one might find on Kronos (the Ranathim, the Keleni, Traders, the Mogwai and the Menhiri)
• An Umbral Monster-Hunter Game: I've been trying to rekindle connections with my friends in the US, and I offered to run them a game, and everyone agreed that just playing Psi-Wars would be easiest for me, as it allows me to continue to just focus on Psi-Wars writing.  Given the PC ideas and themes, this will tip-toe towards Epic Psi-Wars, which a lot of Psi-Wars fans won't object to
• A hypothetical Empire vs Alliance game: The secret council presses me for "hotspot details," ready-to-go campaign settings that outline flashpoints.  The most obvious such one is between the Empire and the Alliance, as that's the sort of game that's painfully obvious to any Psi-Wars newbie, and thus a good place to start.

I suspect most of this year will be geared towards getting those three things off the ground.  If I can get them done, then it'll be on to expanding other flashpoints or pushing into Epic Psi-Wars.  Given my pace of development, I sense that we're cresting.  Most of the "heavy lifting" work is done, and I find I'm spending a lot of time polishing elements, which suggests we're nearing the finish line.  Thus, I need to focus less on broad strokes and more on the practicality of actual campaigns, as it will show me where I'm missing material.

This has also been a great year for both my Patreon and SubscribeStar.  Between the two, I've hit record levels of donations from you, and this during a really rotten year, so thank you for that!  I'm trying to collate an art book as a thank you, but it'll take some time.  In the meantime, I'm working on:

• More discussion of Battlesuits in Psi-Wars
• A preview of the Arkhaians
• A preview of the Mug
• A poll for a servile race in the Umbral Rim
• A poll for a lordly race in the Umbral Rim

Chances are, I'll have these out this month.

On the IT front, I'm looking into setting up my own server and hosting my own wordpress and wiki.  Discord has also invited me to become a public server, but my moderator and I are hashing out the details on my rules for Discord.

Thank you, everyone, for another great year of Psi-Wars.  Thank you and welcome to everyone joining me this year.  Here's to another great year of Psi-Wars.