GURPS Action: How Balanced is BAD?

As an alternative to detailed modifiers, the GM can set a sin- gle difficulty – the Basic Abstract Difficulty (BAD) – that covers all aspects of a particular phase of the adventure. This is simply a penalty from 0 to -10 that replaces detailed situational modifiers. The only other modifiers that apply are those that the PCs bring into the picture: bonuses for equipment, penal- ties for disadvantages, etc. -- GURPS Action 2, page 4

At the GM’s option, henchmen without character sheets have an effective skill of 10 + absolute value of BAD: 11 at -1, 12 at -2, and so on. As with all BAD things, this is abstract. Actual skill, equipment quality, extra time, and anything else that might matter is all rolled into one handy number. -- GURPS Action 2, page 5

I have long taken these words as gospel and applied them to Psi-Wars verbatim.  Should I?  That might seem like an odd question, because the value of BAD, it's simplicity, seems obvious on its face.  You have a single difficulty and you apply to (almost) everything.  What's wrong with it?

Well, nothing specific, but I often find that what I think of as a reasonable bad per what GURPS Action tells me, the PCs will absolutely blow through.  That's not necessarily a problem.  Sometimes, the heroes really do blast past the issues they face like they're nothing. Action heroes are, after all, larger than life.  Even so, knowing you'll pass every check makes the game somewhat tedious and drains all the fun out of a scenario, especially if it happens unintentionally.  Sometimes I find it useful to meditate on these values and what they mean.

This goes double for mooks.  Should we just give mooks absolute BAD +10 for their stats? I will note that if you go to the back of Action 2 and look at the actual stats for Mooks, they don't explicitly follow this. What's a good, base value for a mook? And what sort of challenge levels are we looking for.

Setting a baseline

How often should heroes succeed? The most obvious answer is "Whatever is realistic."  GURPS has some base modifiers and some hard-and-fast rules that it applies, and you build your skill around that. But with BAD, we're doing something other than applying "realistic" modifiers.  For example, realistically, if you go into a highly secure military complex, you might expect it to be BAD 5, but complex locks usually cap out at -4 to skill, and the locks someone might have in a small, personal lockbox that just holds some odds and ends might be +0.  We are, instead, applying a blanket difficulty, so we always just roll -5, which means we're setting some assumptions about difficulty.  So, it behooves us to think about how often we might expect someone to fail.

When it comes to answering that question, I can find no useful answers in GURPS, as it mostly just assumes the above answer ("The difficulty is what it is"), so we're instead feeling things out.  So here are some thoughts I have.

Skill 15+: Characters with skill 15+ will fail only about 5% of the time, and willgenerally assume their skill will always work.  It can fail, of course, but they generally expect such a failure to be catastrophic.  For example, if someone with skill 15+ in lockpicking fails to pick a lock, they rather want it to be because there's something wildly unexpected, such as a recently revamped security system or a broken pick.  Thus, we almost want at this level for the characters to either succeed or critically fail.  At this level, Luck will result in success 99.99% of the time: virtually a certainty if the roll really matters. Skill 15 and 16 are usually more about improved crits than ensuring they don't fail.

Skill 14: Characters with skill 14 will fail only about 10% of the time; they'll likely consider this near certain, but find failure less shocking.  With luck, this succeeds 99.9% of the time, making the difference between 14, 15 and 16 almost a quibbling difference.

Skill 13: Characters with skill 13 will fail about 17% of the time.  At this level, I notice players tend to be surprised at how often they succeed, as they already consider this a rather low level, but not so surprised that they consider this especially risky. Luck skill gives ~99.% chance of success.

Skill 12: Characters with skill 12 will fail only about 25% of the time, and will succeed 98% of the time. I notice most players won't reduce their attack skill below this when making deceptive attacks, thus I think most players see this as risky, but "an acceptable risk." They're not surprised if they fail, but they expect to succeed most of the time.

Skill 11: Characters fail a bit more than a third of the time, and will fail around 5% of the time with Luck. Most players see this as a bit riskier than they like, but they expect success more than failure. Things get interesting at this level.

Skill 10: Players intuit this as a complete crapshoot.  Of course, it's a bit better than 50% chance, especially when Luck is brought into the equation, as they will only fail about 10% of the time.  This is a nail-biting roll, if it matters.

Skill 9: Players assume failure at this level, and they're right: they'll succeed only about a third of the time, but with luck, they'll succeed about 3/4 of the time, which will surprise them.

Skill 8: Players bemoan these numbers, as they'll fail 3/4 of the time, and with Luck, they'll still only succeed 60% of the time.

Skill 7: Players are completely correct that by this level, they are hopeless. They will succeed  only about 15% of the time, and even with luck will succeed less than half the time.  This level and lower is mostly about how badly you fail, rather than whether you succeed.

So if I can note some interesting breakpoints: Skill 14+ is generally an assumed success, Skill 12 is "an acceptable risk," skill 10 is "very chancy" and skill 8 is as low as players would be willing to risk most things, and even then, only in desperate circumstances.  At skill 8 and 10, I would expect to see a lot of impulse buys, and players trying to push their skill back to 12.  So, Skill 10 and 8 are where the excitement happens, but perhaps a bit too much excitement.  Skill 11 to 12 is a reasonable level for "challenge the players" while occasionally dipping into worse difficulties.

How Good are the Characters

If we look at the primary skills of typical Action character we can see a trend.  Extremely specialized characters have skill 18 to 20: the Assassin has Stealth 20, the Infiltrator has Climbing-18, the Hacker has Computer Hacking 18, the Wheelman has Driving 18 and the Medic has Physician 20.   Other less specialized characters have Skill 16 at their peak skills, and often the option to purchase traits (talents) that will push them to 18 to 20.  The Face has social skills at 16 (and can buy two more levels of Smooth Operator) and the Infiltrator has Stealth 16 (and can buy up to 4 levels of Craftiness). Most of the Investigator's Primary Skills are 15 to 16.

When it comes to Secondary and Background Skills, characters tend to be all over the map.  The average seems to aim at their base stats (DX or IQ), but I find 13-15 is typical for things they expect to be good at, and 11-13 for things they don't expect to be good at.  For anything else, we expect to see Defaults, which will generally push around Attribute-5, so typically 8 or so.

So we might break the competencies of an Action character down thus:

Primary Competence for Specialist: Skill 18 to 20.

Primary Competence for Generalists: Skill 16

Minor Competence:Skill 14

Trained: Skill 12

Default: Skill 8

Breaking down BAD

Alright, so given these basic assumptions what might we expect at a few choice levels of BAD

BAD 0: At this level of BAD, nobody will expect to fail at anything other than their Defaults, and given that most groups of players will try to cover all their bases, someone may take Wild Talent, and players will generally try to avoid using defaults unless forced to, I would generally say BAD 0 is no challenge at all.  Hardly a surprise.

BAD 2: This is usually my go-to, but how scary is it?  Well, at -2, no primary competence will fail more than 5% of the time.  Minor competence (dedicated secondary skills) will fail only about 1/4 of the time.  Minor background skills become chancy and defaults hopeless.  So it looks like BAD 2 is no challenge if players are smart about it. They'll need to work together a bit to makes sure all their bases are covered, but provided that, they should be fine.

BAD 5: I tend to see this as a challenging difficulty, but is it?  At BAD 5, specialists will almost always succeed (though guys with 18 are getting a little nervous).  Skill 16 doesn't cut it anymore, and the generalists need to push a bit and look for positive modifiers, but they'll still tend to succeed more than they fail.  Your Minor Competence becomes risky, though.  Skill 9 isn't too bad (it's still doable) but all the rest of your skills will start to fail regularly, and being "Trained" just doesn't cut it. This sort of scenario pushes for the specialists to handle everything that they can; the generalists can still pull their weight, but they'll make a lot of use of Luck and Impulse Buys.

BAD 8: I tend to assume this level is "very hard" and only really suitable for advanced characters, and it's not hard to see why.  Here, only the most dedicated specialists will succeed regularly, and even generalists will fail more than they succeed.  I think default Action characters start to drown at this level.

BAD 10: Yeah, it's not happening.  Even the dedicated specialist needs to lean on Luck to have more successes than failures.

So what we can see here is that the sweet spot is around BAD 5.  Bad 2 is almost not worth your time, and BAD 8 is too hard.  But we run into a problem if "every scenario is BAD 5." I think, based on this and my own experience, I would suggest throwing away the idea of a strict BAD and use a floating scale of BAD.  So instead of saying "All rolls -2" use -2 as a base, and sometimes apply -1 or -3.  This lets you scale things slightly, depending on the tension of the moment.

So a better breakdown for a typical game might be:

BAD 0: This is only okay for "comedy" scenarios, such as the Action heroes breaking out of a county jail or for trashing some street punks who threaten a granny. These are scenarios where the heroes get to shine fully.

BAD 2: These can be "Easy" scenarios, but use -2 as the base and push them up to a -3 and -4 as the scenario gets more intense.

BAD 5: This can still be the "medium difficulty," but I would "center" it at -5, and push it down to -4 and up to -6 as the scenario dictates.

BAD 8: This can be the "hard mode" but I would cap it at -8: the scenario might base at -6, and then ramp up to -7 and -8 for the truly tense moments.

We can push them into harder scenarios as they gain more skill. I tend to notice players, with some notable exceptions, don't go above 20 in much other than combat skills, and tend to broaden out, rather than go deep on most non-combat skills, so what happens as the players get more experienced is not so much that they need BAD 12 and BAD 15 as they will start to need less cooperation as a single character can handle more and more.

So, in a sense, your real difficulties should be floating values between BAD 2 and BAD 8, with a preferred center around BAD 5.