On Paper Men and Disposable Characters

I occasionally peruse Dell'Orto's Dungeon Fantastic; it's good stuff, and he gives me shoutouts and he's still blogging while a lot of my favorite blogs stopped, but a lot of what he discusses isn't that useful to me (and I suspect, a lot of the stuff I discuss isn't that useful to him). Part of it is our respective genres, but there's also a difference in philosophy between how he runs Felltower and how I generally run things, and I think it's typified by the paper man ethos, the amount of investment in your character that I would encourage and that he would discourage, and what that difference means for a lot of games.

Still, I'm fascinated by how other people run games.  I like to explore what other people are doing, because a change of perspective can show me things I never would have considered before.  Even if my style doesn't change, I can still incorporate some of what I learn, and I gain a better understanding of what I am doing.  And, of course, sometimes I find something very good, or I start to see a flaw in some thing I'm doing. So, I wanted to muse on what he seems to be doing and how I might approach a similar thing, or what I might suspect would work well in that genre.

I also want to note I wrote this post months ago. And then rewrote it.  And rewrote it.  So if it seems a little odd and scattered, that's because I've had to take a long time to sort out my thoughts on it.

Parabolic Hearing

 Parabolic Hearing is dumb.

Telescopic Vision is questionable in price to utility.  It costs 5 level, and it allows you ignore -1 in vision range penalties per level, and -2 if you "aim" first; each level also acts like a level of Acc.  Ignoring -1 in vision penalties isn't quite as good as +1 vision, which is worth 2 points, so the value of ignoring -1 or -2 after an Aim action is worth somewhere between 1 and 3 points per level, depending on how you feel about it. The accuracy bonus might vary in your estimation, but the book values it at 3/level (which is only one less than buying a full skill point, but that's not the craziest value).

But Parabolic Hearing is awful.  I went to ask this question recently, but apparently this isn't the first time I've been appalled to it, as someone found that I had asked it before.  Parabolic Hearing also allows you to ignore -1 per level to hearing rolls based on range, just as Telescopic Vision, but has no "Aim" bonus and obviously no value for accuracy.  So why is it 4/level?

I'm repricing it to 2/level, and giving those who use it the ability to "Concentrate" to double the bonus for one particular area ("focus" their hearing).  If I've already said this before, my apologies.

The 2021 GURPS PDF Challenge

 

Oh good, a thing I can blog about.  All the cool kids are doing it!

SJGames just unveiled their latest GURPS Kickstarter: the 2021 GURPS PDF Challenge. This looks to be a follow-up on the success of last year's PDF challenge.  If you're interested, you should definitely go support it!  Since people have been complaining about it on my discord, I thought I would offer my thoughts on it too.

Thoughs on the Undercity Noir Playtest after 2 sessions

I apologize for the lack of posting.  I've been a bit paralyzed by Undercity Noir's nature.  Whenever I run a playtest, I find it dominates my time, because I'm busy fixing the bits that the game is missing, but I can usually make that up by talking about the playtest.  Now, though, I can't do that, because I intend to run it twice, which means I would spoil things if I ran it twice.  So what can I talk about?  Well, I can talk about how particular systems worked and what my experience with them was. So let's hit a few high points.