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 Current State of Affairs
We can do some hard analysis of the current state of combat in Psi-wars, as we have a lot of stats, numbers and default values at this point. We have the following weapons available:
- fists (1d-1 cr if you're an expert),
- super-fine weapons (a super fine knife will deal about 1d-1(2) imp),
- heavy crushing weapons (a mace does1d+2 cr),
- vibro weapons (a vibro blade will deal about 2d+3(5) cut),
- neurolash weapons (1d+2 (5) fat sur aff damage),
- force swords (8d(5) burn),
- blaster pistols (3d (5) pi inc)
- blaster rifles (6d(5) pi inc).
- the ubiquitous Battleweave (DR 20),
- light armor such as a Battleweave Tacsuit (DR 45),
- heavier armor, such as typical Imperial armor (DR 60)
- the heaviest armor (DR 100).
If we start with the lighest armor, battleweave, this is essentially "free armor" that we can expect just a bout anyone to wear.
- Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
- Super Fine Knife: no damage
- Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
- Vibro axe: 9 injury
- Neurolash: 1-2 fatigue and HT+0 to -1 to resist Stunning or Pain
- Force Sword: 24 damage
- Blaster Pistol: 6 damage
- Blaster Rifle: 14 damage
So for the most part, the ranged attacks still do something, and the character is going to suffer, but they'll greatly reduce the damage they suffer. Still, upon analysis, this seems like excessive armor for something that should be a relatively minor armor. It feels like it barely does anything against attacks we want it to protect against (blaster rifles) and doesn't do enough against the weapons we might expect to carve through it, such as a knife or a punch.
With Light Armor, we get:
- Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
- Super Fine Knife: no damage
- Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
- Vibro axe: 1-2 injury
- Neurolash: no damage
- Force Sword: 19 damage
- Blaster Pistol: 1-2 damage
- Blaster Rifle: 11 damage
Light armor, like a tac suit, does its job, which is protecting you against blaster pistols. It also effectively stops everything else, except for the force sword and the blaster rifle. Thus, you can't use an axe to chop a guy in thick battleweave.
With Medium Armor, we get:
- Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
- Super Fine Knife: no damage
- Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
- Vibro axe: no damage
- Neurolash: 4 fatigue and HT-2 to resist stun
- Force Sword: 13 damage
- Blaster Pistol: no damage
- Blaster Rifle: 5 damage
The point of medium armor, of course, is to slow down blaster fire. You're not immune to a rifle, but you'll survive. You'll shrug off everything else too. Neurolash is the weird one out, as it is surging and this sort of armor is typically metallic.
With Heavy Armor, we get:
- Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
- Super Fine Knife: no damage
- Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
- Vibro axe: no damage
- Neurolash: 4 fatigue and HT-2 to resist stun
- Force Sword: 8 damage
- Blaster Pistol: no damage
- Blaster Rifle: no damage
The point of the heaviest armor is to be "blaster proof," though there are some heavier weapons, such as the force sword. Of course, semi-portable weapons begin to inflict force sword scales of damage, so it is possible to take someone with this armor out at a range.
This analysis should prove my point, though. Fists and neurolash weapons have special rules that keep them relevant against even the strongest armor, but no other melee weapon other than a force sword means squat against anyone in anything heavier than battleweave.
Why is this? Well, it's realistic. TL 11^ material science is tough stuff, and if you're in a full, diamondoid hardsuit, capable of shrugging off blasts from a particle accelerator, what the hell is a baseball bat or a knife going to do to you? But should it be realistic? If we want melee weapons to matter, what can we do?
Arbitrarily Raise Melee Damage and Armor Divisor
With fists and other crushing weapons, I made it so they always inflicted at least 1 point of damage for every 5 rolled, and the net effect is that your fists will always do something. The Arc Surge rules for Neurolash is a similar construction. Why not rewrite the rules for vibro weapons so they deal more damage and have a higher armor divisor, say +2d(10) instead of +1d(5)?
In regards to damage, all of this assumes that someone is wearing enough armor that this matters. If we upgrade our melee weapon to 3d+3 cut damage against someone not in armor, a single swing will inflict an average of 19 damage, which is nearly an instant kill of a named NPC. In the name of beating armor, we're saying that vibro weapons are catastrophically dangerous. I'm okay with that to some extent. I can imagine a vibro knife gutting a man far faster than a mundane knife can, but I'm not sure I'm okay with it being an order of magnitude better. These aren't atomic knife-blasts.
An improved armor divisor is fine, in principle, and we can justify it by claiming the weapon has a monowire edge. A monowire knife would deal about 1-3 injury to someone in battleweave, and a monowire vibro axe would deal about 10-11 injury to someone in battleweave and 7-8 injury to someone in a tac suit and about 4-5 damage to someone in medium armor, which isn't too shabby. And it doesn't have an increased lethality when compared to an unarmored person. Neatly fixed, right?
Reduce the TL of Armor (and Blasters)
But I have to wonder: what are we doing? Why is the armor this high in the first place? It's because people use blasters and force swords, and for that reason we arbitrarily set everything to TL 11, when maybe that's the wrong answer. Maybe Psi-Wars is TL 10, melee weapons have an armor divisor of 5, ranged weapons have a 3, and armor is scaled down. We'd ditch battleweave for bioplas (or at least borrow its stats) and our scales of DR would be more like 15, 30, 45 and 60. Force swords would double in price, representing an advanced technology. Our knife still remains useless, but our vibro ax would deal ~9 damage vs our new battleweave, 4-5 against light armor, and would struggle to do 1-2 vs medium armor, which is at least an improvement.
A lot of things in Psi-Wars tend to be TL 10-ish; most of the drugs, as are the robots for the most part, but force screens, ultrascanners, med scanners and so on, so why not the armor? This, of course, would require me to rewrite all of the armor in the setting, and rethink some of the other elements, like do plasma weapons still exist? You can't have a plasma pistol at TL 10, and that should seem to be a shame.
Still, if we're going to rewrite armor, why not go a step further?
Space Opera Armor (and Weapons)
Let's stop for a moment and think about what we're doing here. What is technology? We've taken TL 11 because it simply happens to have most of the gear we knew we wanted anyway. But what does this tech level mean?
A blaster is a particle accelerator: it'll fire alpha particles or something similar that are both highly energetic and smaller than most atoms by quite a bit. They'll pass straight through matter unless it bounces off of atomic nuclei, like more aggressive forms of radiation (which is exactly what it is), requiring considerable shielding. You need a dense packing of nuclei to stop it from passing through and then denaturing a lot of your proteins and leaving you with serious radiation poisoning on the way through. A plasma weapon is a super-compressed and highly energetic chunk of plasma, like we reached into a stellar core, pulled out a piece and shot it at someone and then "let it go" once it hit them. The tiny, bullet-sized blast hits with the force of a full grenade. These are powerful weapons and require things like carbon nanomaterials made with the hardness of diamond but the resilience of buckyballs, or hyperdense "advanced matter" that achieves strengths beyond anything we could do. Realistically if a TL 11 army fought a TL 8 army, it would be a bloodbath. The particle weapons would zip through all of our armor (even have a good chance of punching through the lighter armor of a tank), and a plasma blast would devastate squads like a rapid fire, highly-accurate grenade launcher that fires its blasts at near C. In return, the armor would just shrug off all the bullets. Why would we expect swords to do squat against these guys?
There's a genre that one of my readers calls "Logistical Action" that really loves diving into these sorts of details and exploring the realities posed by these technologies. Space Opera is not that genre. People call Star Wars "Space Fantasy," but that's only partially right, because it's also "Space Westerns" and "Space Swashbuckling" and "Space Noir." It's a highly cinematic take on whatever genre you want, reskinned with space elements. If we were making a film, we just give our cast whatever items we have on hand, and do something to make it look a little more appropriate to space. The natives have spears, but the spears have little thingy-bobs on them, so they're space spears. Our hero has a revolver, but it's actually an atomic revolver, so it's fine. When he loses it, he fights the natives with a rapier, but it's a force sword rapier, so it's fine. In Space Opera, you don't care about the stats, you care about the aesthetic, having the beats of these stories and just playing at science fiction.
This suggests we should toss all of Ultra-Tech out on its ear and just play it like a narrative game, and frankly, that's probably the most honest way to run a Star Wars knockoff, or any Space Opera game, but we're playing GURPS, and GURPS isn't at its strongest doing that. But we could dismiss Ultra-Tech and replace it with more "Space Opera" appropriate technology, something less realistic, but that fits the genre better.
GURPS actually has that. It's called Tales of the Solar Patrol, an overlooked gem and a book I've often looked to for Psi-Wars. It reduces the DR of most space suits to DR 5, 10 and 15, and weapons inflict about 4d+3(3) for a pistol, or 7d(3) for a rifle. They don't talk about other weapons or armor, but presumably you can have a Martian Knight in just normal TL 3 armor wielding a normal weapon. Of course, DR 10 still puts them beyond the reach of most melee weapons, and the book is very quiet on what the stats of, say, a martian sword should be.
We could bring in vibro weapons and super-fine weapons, but this leaves us with a bigger conundrum: we're both rewriting the entire weapon/armor system from scratch, effectively, and we're suddenly picking and choosing our items. A blaster isn't good enough for us anymore, we need atomic pistols, but a force sword and a vibro axe is fine. We'll use Boarding Suits instead of Combat Hardsuits, but we'll still use Quickheal from UT. We could do just as well by making up numbers from scratch, defining them however we want based on whatever basis we want. That can work, but is it particularly satisfying?
Ultra-Technological Solutions
This brings us full circle. If we find the Space Opera solutions unsatisfying, then perhaps we need to accept that our weapons are legitimately awesome. If an opponent wields a stone-tipped spear, it'll shatter against imperial armor. If the Empire wages war against some primitive natives with mere bullets, they'll clean up.
There's a genre one of my readers calls "logistical action," the sort of story that geeks out about the specifics of guns, or tanks, or the stock market, or the nitty gritty details of how one goes to court. Sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi, loves to lavish this sort of detail on a setting. If it's going to have melee weapons, it's going to embrace the fact that they'll be on an entirely different level compared to inferior weapons. Does this mean the average space monster is so much mulch for a man with a force sword, and if you face a space monster that can stand up to a force sword, you're talking about a transcendent specimen capable of destroying an entire squad of mere TL 8 soldiers without batting an eye.
I think you can make the case that Psi-Wars is very much this sort of space opera, whether it wants to admit it or not. I've put a lot of thought into how the weaponry of the setting functions, and we have space ships with sufficient firepower to level a landmass if they want to, and I articulate this. We have nuclear weapons that fit into missiles or even cybernetically implanted grenades. Space knights wear armor built from a nanofabrication process to the exact specifications of their bodies so as to allow them to survive the sorts of attacks that we're throwing at them. Psi-Wars is a setting that knows it's advanced, and while it demures on some obvious advances, such as genetic engineering or total automation, it's this rich, detailed and nuanced setting and set in a distant future that feels both like a gothic fantasy and a wildly advanced setting, drawing inspirations from other "gothic space opera" similar to it, like Dune, the Metabarons, and 40k. Despite drawing inspiration from a lot of Space Opera, Psi-Wars is more like Rifts than it is like Tales of the Solar Patrol. These all tackle the problem of melee with hyperadvanced weaponry and characters that border on supers, rather than cinematic shorthand.
Okay, fine, but then what solutions can we offer?
Well, those vibro-monorwire weapons weren't the worst idea. Monowire is a TL 10 invention, so it can be plausibly applied to vibroweapons. GURPS doesn't technically allow that, but we've ignored that before. In fact, there's a weapon option, the Vibrowire weapon from Pyramid #3/51 that does allow an armor divisor of 10 if it's "superfine." The prices of some of these options are absurd, but we can plausibly halve them (or more) in a TL 11 setting. So options like:
- Monowire Weapons (Armor Divisor 10)
- Vibro Weapons (1d, Armor Divisor 10)
- Vibrowire Weapons (+2d, armor divisor 10)
- Rocket Strikers (+6 striking ST), perhaps with some variation applied
This means that a cybernetic character with ST 15 and a vibrowire polearm with an impulse striker system integrated for +6 ST is dealing 6d+6(10) cut damage, which means he's hammering the guy in the full, heavy DR 100 armor armor for 24 injury, which is nasty, and hitting a TL 8 soldier in a kevlar vest for 30+ damage, but that's actually pretty plausible. We're accepting that this is a highly advanced setting, with the space monsters we're fighting are crazy advanced things, typically the result of a wild darwinian process or highly advanced genetic engineering, because a "martian tiger" is just going to be meat. I'll have to work out the costs, though.
Of course, the point of hyperdense weaponry was to get access to that Armor Divisor 10 with a vibro weapon. Of course, hyperdense weapons are also TL 11, so we can justify it (and arguably, when we say "monowire edge," we really mean a hyperdense edge, because giving a knife an edge a single molecule thick is easy: basically every razor has that. The problem is keeping that edge and forcing it through an ultra-tech material without deforming, and a you need a super-material, like hyperdense material, to do that). I had thought about keeping that available for the Mug, as a signature of theirs, but perhaps if I want to introduce multiple races wielding viable melee weapons, I shouldn't limit their options.
But how do I keep these weapons viable against force swords? Partially, I need to reduce their cost somehow, but we might introduce rules for "rapid retraction," because a parry is more than just a weapon contacting another weapon, it's also making voids. If I attack you with my vibro axe, it might be me really looking for an opening, and if you parry with a force sword, it might be that I couldn't find that opening, so didn't swing. I'm not sure how we'd handle that, but we could treat it as a variation of a Defensive Attack where instead of getting your defensive bonus, you prevent your opponent from contacting your weapon with a parry (it likely also means that you don't unbalance an unbalanced weapon on an attack unless you actually hit, but we might have to look into that).
We could also introduce some weapons, like hyperdense construction that prevents weapons from being instantly destroyed. Perhaps instead of instant destruction, we could use some variation of the weapon breakage rules: when using these tougher materials, you need to roll for breakage after parrying their weapon, but your weapon is safe when it is parried.
We could also expand on the idea of the Neurolash Field Parry, that idea that certain fields make it harder to actually contact the weapon. One possibility would be a weapon that's partially "sheathed" with a force screen, like a 40k Power Sword. It would operate off of similar principles to a force sword, but greatly reduced, say +4d(5) atop an existing weapon, and it's incompatible with options like vibro or monowire. As long as the weapon parries with its screens on, it's effectively a weaker force sword. I'm not sure how valuable that idea would be, though.
We can also reduce the effectiveness of armor. UT was the first book with armor and it just assumes DR is total and absolute. We don't have to treat it that way, and later books don't.
First, Battleweave is based ultimately on a downgraded form of Energy Cloth, but that's like miracle armor, and we don't have to treat it that way. We could instead say it's some variation of upgraded Reflec and Bioplas: it only protects fully against burning and piercing attacks, and it has greatly reduced protection against. I originally dropped it to 20/7, but I could make it an even heavier drop than that, such as 20/4, which is more on par with what ablative armor looks like, and would someone in battleweave underwear still vulnerable to a basic knife attack or even shrapnel!
We could also introduce Armor Gap rules from Low Tech, which are frankly realistic. Armor never covers the entire character: no matter how good your hardsuit, those aren't plates on the back of your knees, under your armpit or on your palm. The only problem of course, is that a sealed suit should provide some protection. But we can argue that all sealed armor has the equivalent to Battleweave in their gaps. That is, I stab you with a force sword in DR 100 armor, only 8 damage will get through, but if stab you through the palm or cut through the elbow, you'll still have 20 DR, but not 0 and not 50, and I'll deal 24 damage. If we apply the battleweave rules above, then even a superfine knife has a good chance of doing something: stab the armpit and deal 3-9 damage with a vitals hit. That's nasty, and could potentially defeat a well-armored soldier. It also makes inherent DR much more valuable, though I still don't think I need to raise its costs (but I might need to think about it).
The armor gaps would help people with pistols. Elite shineidoka gun-fu fighters with totally sweet pistols are useless against DR 100 guys, but if they can also attack the armor gaps, then they have a decent chance of landing _some_ sort of damage!
Taken together, this would require a rehaul (or, really, additions to) the melee weapon table, and a bunch of new "little" rules and a revision to Battleweave, but these seem like a more viable solution than those discussed above.
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