GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: Action 8 Twists

 I've not been feeling well, and I'm not actually all that excited about the GURPS 2021 challenge, if I'm honest.  I said it before and I'll say it again: this is a better model for Pyramid articles than for GURPS supplements, and you'll doubtless hear that over and over again: I would be happier for half as many books with twice the length.

The art is nice, though.

So we can break out GURPS Action 8: Twists into three sections

• Part of Something Bigger: Higher wealth, status, and social adventures in Action. This is the reason I wanted the supplement.
• Things Just Got Weird: Genre-bending Action. This one is bad, a false promise.
• No-Tech Thriller: Removing all that sweet tech from GURPS Action. Surprisingly good!

It's a decent work, but each of these sections needed to be three times their size. Worth your money.

Part of Something Bigger

If I'm honest, this one section is the reason I backed the kickstarter in the first place, so I was quite excited to see it.  What popped out didn't live up to my expectations, but it's better than what we had before.  It discusses higher levels of Rank (Psi-Wars would max out at 5, if I followed this logic).  It also gets into improved paygrades and wealth, which I may study and use to update the wealth rules of Psi-Wars, though I would have appreciated a discussion of poverty, which wasn't there. Then it briefly discusses Status, but it doesn't really say all that much about it. Presumably, you just use it for reaction modifiers like normal.  Finally, it calls out some books you can use for more social organizations, which is a handy little reference guide that doesn't forget that pyramid exists (which is important, as Pyramid often has the most bang for your buck, but the scattered nature of it makes it hard to find what you're looking for).

Is this stuff useful? Yup.  I could have used a lot more of it, actually.  What specifically are the benefits of status? How do you balance reduced wealth against the free budgets that you get from your organization? Rather than call out Social Engineering, could we do a walk through of it the way Action 2: Exploits walks through GURPS Basic and breaks down how to handle all the bits we need with greater ease? That would take you a page, maybe two.  But we don't get it.

This section isn't bad. It's good! But it's two pages long, and we clearly could have done with a lot more discussion here.

Things Just Got Weird

This section is a disappointment, and I'll highlight exactly why:

[This work] assumes a standard Action campaign that turns weird temporarily

In essence, this section is a list of references to things, like if you want Ancient Secrets, hey, use GURPS Horror, GURPS Magic, GURPS Thaumatology or maybe even GURPS Martial Arts! If you didn't know those books existed, that might be useful, but I suspect if you're reading this section it's because you have GURPS Horror, and you want to have some advice on how to integrate it. 

Then it largely goes through a familiar story structure: the heroes do their normal thing ("the ordinary world") and then weirdness happens ("the call to adventure"), then they need someone to help them understand what's going on ("meeting the mentor") so they can operate in this strange new understanding of reality ("crossing the threshold") and then face the monster on its own terms.  The terms I use aren't in the book, just how I've seen it referenced in other works.  That's not to say that it's bad, just that I was already familiar with the structure. Perhaps you weren't.

Then it does briefly tackle how you more-or-less run a Monster Hunter scenario but with Action rules, like how BAD interacts with your research.  It suggests things like not insta-killing PCs who are almost certainly not prepared for this.  And when we're back to this crap:

The heroes have defeated the weird enemy and saved the world, or at least themselves. Does the campaign stay weird?

No.

...In effect, “it was all just a dream,” or like the Halloween episode of a TV show. Afterward, it’s back to regular action. The weirdness is never mentioned again – well, not until the GM tosses in another twist! If the players really want to continue down that road, transition to “The X-Terminators” (in Pyramid #3/5) or Monster Hunters.

Allow me to cleanse my palette with a small digression. I promise I'm going somewhere with this. Okay, so my wife was watching an old Aussie show called "Round the Twist" where the big bad banker is going to buy up the nice old ladies house and do something dreadful with it, and his excuse is that she can't pay her mortgage, and she can't pay it because she's being kept in the hospital because she keeps claiming she saw a dragon. In the end, our heroes find the dragon, bring back an egg, which hatches in front of the mean ol' nurse and the banker, and the dragon bites the nurse who freaks out. Everyone laughs, the day is saved, because dragons are real. Roll credits.

I bring this up because I kept expecting that the twist to be that the banker had set up some sort of fake dragon.  I realized I had been set up to think this by years of watching Scooby Doo.  And the great thing about Scooby Doo was, because you knew the monster couldn't be real, it set up a mystery: how did they actually do it?  This works because in Scooby Doo, it's never actually a monster.  I would draw as a contrast a series like Fringe or the X-Files, where you always know that it's actually monsters, and the trick is figuring out how the monsters work and convincing people of their existence and the danger they pose to the world.  Revealing their nature changes the nature of the world.

This brings me back to my fundamental critique of this approach: if the players, in an Action game, learn that someone is using ghosts to kill their opponent, their first assumption is going to be that it's Scooby Doo and they're actually using advanced gadgetry or clever manipulation to fake ghosts to scare their opponents.  When they realize it's actual ghosts, the entire dynamics of the world change.  Those government projects where people stare at goats? Not a joke anymore, but a real threat.  Death cults become a real threat, and antiquarians valuable contacts. You've opened an entirely new world to them. Then you say "Naw, it was only a dream." You do a genre bait-and-switch, and then you shout "Psych!" and revert the bait-and-switch? Why?

Look, I get it.  Call of Duty: Zombies was a fun game, but I don't need advice for that. Your players just go "Let's fight zombies for a session." I had a session of Cherry Blossom Rain like that.  But I didn't need two and a half pages to explain how to do that: I just ran a combat with zombies.  This is a deliberate bait-and-switch-then-back of Action-to-Monster-Hunters-to-Action.  Why?

Well, I think the real reason is people want to run Nights Black Agents.  But the advice for that is just to shrug and say "Then use the X-terminators article or Monster Hunters." Okay, but Monster Hunters operates on some pretty different assumptions, such as the ubiquity of Wildcard Skills.  There's a whole book, Sidekicks, on converting Action characters into Monster Hunters, which tells me there's real hunger for this.  Instead of wasting white space telling me not to do this, why not give me a deeper discussion of how to integrate Action-style rules (BAD, big budgets, chase scenes, etc) into stories with supernatural opponents?  The answer probably boils down to "We didn't have enough space!"  Then why are you writing it at all? Because there's that hunger for it, obviously.  But if you're going to acknowledge a real desire for this sort of story, why not fully acknowledge it, instead of trying to shoo people away with terrible advice.

No-Tech Thriller

I initially thought this was a joke, since Kromm is always joking about a "No-Tech Book" and I suppose the name itself is, but this actually tackles a very real scenario that happens a lot in Action: what happens when characters get stranded without their gear? If they escape from a prison camp, or they crash in the jungle, or their lost in Pripyat, how do they scavenge and build gear to defeat the bad guy?  It touches on such a short term complication, explaining how to handle character's advantages (like how do you keep it No-Tech when someone has Gizmo without invalidating Gizmo?).  It expands on the existing mechanics from Action 2 and shows how to use them in a scenario with no Tech. It dives more deeply into "Wilderness adventures" and survival.

This was a wonderful surprise.  It made me want to run such a scenario. Of course, like with the Weirdness chapter, it recommends this be temporary, and it might be odd for me to praise this one and condemn the previous one, but the previous one involves a cosmological shift, where you shake the metaphysical foundations of the players and break the social contract, and then pretend it never happened.  This challenges the players to think outside of the box and use their characters in new ways, which I think is the foundation of a good action game: first, they fight, then they socialize, then they try to survive the jungle, etc. Action characters can do anything and you have to hammer home to your players that overspecialization is a bad idea in Action, while also allowing the various specializations within Action to each shine in their own way.  It's a wonderful section!

So it's all sunshine and rainbows here? Well, again, I'm left wanting more.  I'd love a Wilderness Adventures for Action.  You can sort of piece one together, of course, and there are pieces to one here, especially if you use Dungeon Fantasy's Wilderness Adventures.  From me, this is a nitpick: I have more than enough material to run this sort of story, even if it's a little scattered (Mercenaries has some, Dictionary of Danger has some, this has some, Wilderness Adventures etc), and I don't need it to have the words "GURPS Action" on it, but I think for the mundane GURPS user who's just getting started, a collation might be nice. But lacking a particular "Nice to Have" is no reason to condemn the work.

Conclusion

Action 8: Twists is, all together, a decent work that suffers from the fact that it really could be three entire supplements all jammed into one book.  I think if you had made each of these their own 10-page supplement, I would offer a glowing review of each.  I especially think the advice I complain about from the second would be less of an issue when it's a single column of a ten-page supplement than if it's a 2.5 page supplement.  So, while I suspect that a lot of these reviews are going to come down to "This should have been a full supplement" but these were all actually decent topics for 10-page supplements, it's just mind boggling that Sean Punch looked at these topics and said "Yeah, we should jam them all together into one already too-short supplement." If you're going to do that, make these three different articles in a pyramid, or give them three full 10-page supplements.  Don't give me a mini-pyramid in a book that's ostensibly a "real supplement" or whatever these are supposed to be.

Is it worth your money? Yeah, sure. But it's not a slam dunk, and I think it'll leave you frustrated and wanting more. But I'll definitely use this material, and it might be the most useful of the books to come out of the 2021 PDF Challenge.