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.

How did Character Creation Go?

Without a hitch. Though I will note that three of the five characters wanted templates that either didn't exist, or didn't exist until recently.  We have a bounty hunter, a con-artist, a hacker, an assassin and a psion. The bounty hunter worked fine, and the player even praised the variety and options, and I regularly find that I'll ask for a skill vital for bounty hunting, he'll say he doesn't have it, double check, and then see that he does.  So the template did exactly what it was supposed to do, which was cushion someone who didn't have a great deal of knowledge of the game and guide them to where they needed to be.  The con-artist seems to be missing a few important skills: Holdout, which is not just about weapons, but also about hiding small things, and Diplomacy, which I likely left off deliberately because of the Diplomat template, but in retrospect, the skill that sets the Diplomat apart from the Con-Artist is Law (International) and their access to high levels of rank, patrons and diplomatic immunity, not their ability to talk circles around people.

The Assassin is an old template, but it's going through a lot of revisions, mostly in the form of martial arts.  I see the Assassin as the "space ninja" in contrast to the "space samurai" of the Space Knight. Their role is to kill quietly and with weird, exotic weapons, and this requires exploring a lot of weird, exotic weapons.  I've been slowly collecting them, and I think I have enough material to finally start posting these, but I always run into a sort of creative inertia, where when I start I have no ideas, and by the time I'm done I have too many. But the general build seems to be holding up so far.

The Hacker is an interesting experience.  In principle, this probably could have been the Spy template with a Criminal background, but the Spy comes with some broader baggage that assumes its tied to an international entity: criminal spies are closer to rogue agents than to criminal hackers.  So the player took the new Criminal mini-template and attached the Hacker Skillset to it. It seems to work fine, and it's a more relaxed approach to design, less strict about what you can do and perhaps better for more experienced players.  I wonder once the skillsets and mini-templates are finished, how often we'll see them used to recreate something that could possibly be an existing template?

The Psion is the trickiest, because he's not actually a psion: he's a mystic in drag.  The player clearly wants to be a zathare sorcerer, while Psions are designed to be closer to an X-men or a character from a psychic scifi film or movie series whose focus is on having weird powers, like the Psi from Monster Hunter.  You can stretch that to fit it onto an occult sorcerer, but it is a stretch.  He seems to be handling okay, and has even used his psychic powers (complete with Extra Effort and Techniques!) as well as tinkering with their occult elements.  So he seems to be happy, but clearly there's a lot of interest in the mystic template(s).

I had originally planned on giving no CP for the adventure to see if everyone could just handle the entire game with what they originally had, but they talked me into CP.  First, they're fun.  Second, watching where they put their CP will tell me what's missing and what people are interested in. Third, the plan is for this to be short (though one player predicted this would go longer than I thought, and he seems correct thus far, as after two sessions we haven't finished what I planned for one), so they shouldn't get that much additional power. So we'll see where things go. But so far, the templates seem to be robust and holding up well enough, even to some abuse.

Cut to the Chase

So we had a chase scene. It was light and low stakes; I often start sessions/campaigns with low stakes fights or action sequences, to feel out the system with the players.  I suspect it's part of the reason the session used up its allotted time so quickly, because resolving mechanical scenarios tend to eat up time.  But I don't think anyone was bored, or at least I didn't have that impression.

I personally have issues with how most chase scenes work, and GURPS Action is no exception: you roll until someone catches up, or someone pulls away. If we're talking a flat plane, then you know who is going to win after the first roll, or the first couple of rolls.  If I have Running 15 and you have Running 14, then I will win eventually.  What makes a chase scene work is dynamics.  I borrowed from the Thrill of the Chase from Pyramid and the "Chase flowchart" idea from Damnation City (a world of darkness supplement).  But I found Thrill of the Chase too generic, and Damnation City too specific, so I had to work out specific details myself. Not the end of the world: that's a bit like complaining that D&D doesn't design the encounters for you, it just gives you the pieces.  But I could use slightly more specific pieces than I've been given, and more worked examples.  I'm working on that now.  We'll see how far I get.

So the result was a fairly dynamic chase involving a lot of choices and opportunities for shortcuts and making use of movement skills.  The two characters involved in the chase were delighted to find that movement skills mattered.  And that's my experience with this: the guy who has Running 15 feels like a chump, because in most games (ie DF) Basic Move matters and Running is a cute background skill. In Action, though, being able to parkour over the scene really matters a lot, and that hit the players viscerally.  This won't be isolated either, because Action is rife with opportunities for chases and parkour.

But still, making those fun, dynamic chases is work. There were two chase scenes, actually, one that was thoroughly prepped and the other was improved, and I have no doubt that the players could tell you which was which.  Better resources offering better support would make the improved one better, or make it so I could more easily plan both.

So, good result, needs more support.

Abstract Wealth

"Hey wait, didn't you pay for stuff last session?"

In the second session, I remembered that the Bounty Hunter had paid docking fees for his ship, bought some casino chips and, in this session, needed to pay for lodging.  So, we should be using our Abstract Wealth System, right? How did it go?

Well, it went okay. The first thing I notice that a selling point of Abstract Wealth is to not have book keeping, but there's book keeping.  Instead of tracking how much you spend, you track how many modifiers you get.  He's currently at -2 or so, and will be for the rest of the adventure. So we have to note that somewhere.  

Abstract Wealth, once you have it in mind, though, puts a lot of things in context. For example, how much should medical services cost? How much should a movie ticket cost? How much is "too expensive" and how much is "cheap?" Because you can find the price of medical services from Bio-Tech, you can extract berthing fees from Spaceships 2, and you can work out how much a restaurant costs from GURPS Basic, and then you can start to see what the average person can afford and what they can't.  So I could just list these all out in the costs and equipment section, like D&D does, but then I find I also need to do "two tiers", where I explain that something has a cost ("A restaurant meal costs $60") and then what its Abstract Wealth value is ("This is trivial for characters with Average wealth"). 

I also notice the players don't interface much with it.  It's useful for explaining what costs a lot and what doesn't cost much, but when a player got a Deep Coin (a particular currency), I didn't see any questions about how that interfaced with the Abstract Wealth system, he just knew it was about $1000. Likewise, the Bounty Hunter never once asked to use the Abstract Wealth system.  He just paid what was asked and didn't think about it.

I think the idea of a proper abstract wealth system is to wave your hands and say "Don't worry about that, it's handled." But in practice, I feel like I'm putting a layer of abstraction over the standard wealth system that seems to create more work than it resolves.  I think in practice players will just add or subtract some money from their till on their sheet.  Especially with modern, computerized sheets, you can just add or subtract much more easily than with pencil and paper, and Abstract Wealth helps a bit more when tracking with pencil and paper.  But we'll see how it plays out. It isn't natural, quick or especially intuitive.

As an aside, I saw a lot of questions about starting wealth.  Is it 100% or 20%?  Action says 100%, but it's also going with a "budget." The premise behind Action is that your commandos and street racers all meet up in the secret compound, and the boss unveils a veritable warehouse of materiel, and the players go and pick out half a million GURPS $s in gear and go "Mwahaha" as they nerd out about it. This doesn't match the Space Opera aesthetic of a run-down universe like we see in Star Wars (or Firefly or Killjoys or even Dune).  In those settings, characters just have things, like a house and a speeder and clothes, but they also have one special blaster, or one cool piece of armor. That implies the 80/20 split.  But there are also characters who live their entire lives out of their ship, such as a Bounty Hunter.  Would they also have the 80/20 split? Maybe.  They have their clothes in a wardrobe on their ship and they have their space car, and maybe they have a flop on some space station somewhere.  So I'd need to think about it, and perhaps work out what you get "for free" with your 80/20 split, because I tend to lean in the direction of that being a thing: it makes the cheaper weapons more viable, and higher levels of wealth more powerful, but I think there needs to be room for the Poor Bounty Hunter who is homeless yet has a decent gun because that's where all of his spare money went (Though perhaps that's Signature Gear)