"Hey, I didn't know I needed that!"

 So, I finished the third session of Undercity Noir a week early, as one of the players couldn't make it on the normal day.  We finally met the client and his girlfriend, and the introduction is finally finished, and the players have been released into the world.  But an interesting thing happened during the negotiation: "I didn't know (X) was such an important skill!"

GURPS has this at the best of times: because it has so many skills, people can easily overlook them. However, these characters were built from templates, and I checked, and all the traits they were asking for were present. And one of the characters had all of them, because he followed his template closely and so he just had them without realizing they would be so useful, and the result was a rather amusing moment where the Bounty Hunter sighed and started to explain to the Con-Artist how to do her job. But in a sense, it fit.  So this felt more like players realizing certain skills had more value than they realized, not that they didn't realize they were options.

Will

I think they realized this was important, given how many successfully resisted the Keleni Telepathy of the femme fatale, but I just want to point out to anyone poking at Psi-Wars that Will is very useful in a psionic game.  I know, seems obvious, but I've had it come up in previous playtests.  I'm not saying you should jack your Will up to 20 on every character, but I am saying you'd get your points worth if you did.

Psychology

So this was the core trait that surprised people.  I had set up meeting the contact as a mini-action scenario (as I like to run the first few sessions as sort of a preparation of how the game will actually play out) and so when it came time to collect all the clues and plan how best to negotiate with the target, I noted that Psychology was one of the skills they could use for this, which I thought made sense, and also caused quite a scramble. Which surprised me, because Psychology is one of the most popular skills in my games, but I sense most players come at this from a different context.

I tend to build my games as very NPC heavy, with layers and layers of intrigue and mystery.  I do this for several reasons, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that I cut my narrative teeth on anime, romances and dramas.  I just like large casts of colorful NPCs with detailed and nuanced motivations.  And in particular, in a Heist, there's a major clash of personalities.  It's not just "the cops" that are coming after you, but a specific detective; there are rival gangs, and they have specific leaders; there's always some new guy added to the crew after the fact, and you need to assess if a good fit; there's the target of the heist, who has a specific personality and blindspots.  Having psychology allows you to construct a profile, to learn the context of why people do what they do. If you combine it with Empathy or Body Language, you know what they are feeling and why. So with players familiar with my games, it seems to come up a lot. I'm not saying it's a must have, just that people knew to my games seem surprised at how useful it is.

Holdout

This might actually be missing from some templates, but this came up very quickly, and it makes sense. A lot of previous playtests have been about soldiers or space knights who walk around in full armor, but this is in a city with lots of Imperial Security, lots of camera, lots of angry gangsters.  Carrying a holdout blaster or a force sword into a club carries a lot more risks, and rewards, than it does in most games.  So this has been quite a schooling for me in how holdout works.

Observation

I see some people complain about Observation.  When do you use it? When don't you? For some of them, it feels redundant if you have Perception.  But to me, Observation is about picking out details discretely. It's also about picking out pertinent elements of something, such as when you "case a joint." It's also cheaper than Perception, so to me it's always been a no-brainer, but I'm surprised by the number of people who don't have it in my group.

Running, Climbing and Jumping

It didn't come up in this session, but like with Psychology, I think a lot of players skip these.  After all, your ability to run really comes down to your Basic Move, Climbing seems pretty niche, and Jumping can default to DX if strictly necessary, so in the intense prioritizing that most PCs will do, while Acrobatics gets a vigorous nod, these parkour skills get less of one.  When is it going to come up, after all?

In Action, they come up all the time.  Action is about chase scenes, and chase scenes use these skills. Sure you can drive too, but there's always a point when you'll want to run.  This didn't actually come up this session, but the previous session and I think I already mentioned it in my thoughts on that session, as this pleased the player who took them, and they really made a difference: the Bounty Hunter who had minimal investment couldn't keep up, but the Assassin with maximum parkour not only caught up to the target, despite having a very late start, he managed to cut her off before the Bounty Hunter arrived. That tickled him pink.  I mention this more because if you're a budding Action player, be aware of the value of parkour skills!

I think if I finish my Cinematic Chase Framework, that'll help people more intuitively integrate chase scenes, as there's a lot of details in chase scenes that can get lost in the "Look just roll Running until it's obvious who will win." Getting a little help in creating the sort of dynamic chase scenes we see in action movies will make the utility of Climbing, Jumping and Acrobatics in chase scenes more obvious.

Thoughts on Campaign Framework Skills

I'll leave you with one last observation I've had with people interfacing with campaign frameworks in general.  In my experience, most GURPS players learn to tune out the garbage and focus on what matters. GURPS itself encourages this, because you can't even use Beam Weapons in a fantasy game, or Magery in a "Hard" Sci-Fi game.  Thus learning to filter the useful from the useless is a very important skill in a veteran GURPS player.

But part of the process of creating a Campaign Framework is pre-filtering the skills that exist, and adding additional utility to the skills that remain. Once this happens, another element of GURPS starts to rear its head: its emphasis of subtle utility. GURPS has a tendency to narrow down and focus on all the possible things a skill (or advantage) can do, and then emphasize those.  For example, in a typical White Wolf game, Brawl is the skill you use to punch people, and Medicine is the skill you use to heal people.  GURPS, by contrast, introduces a ton of nitty gritty techniques for Brawl and differentiates it into three different skills to determine exactly how you fight; Medicine breaks out into Diagnosis, Physician, Surgery, etc, and one begins to realize the power of knowing exactly what's gone wrong with someone's health, how to prescribe exactly the right dose, and how and when to use surgery to fix issues.  GURPS brings these nuanced details into view a lot better than other games, which can take some people by surprise, as they tend to dismiss a lot of GURPS skills as one-note or niche when it turns out, especially in a Campaign Framework, they can have a lot of value. This is not meant as a defense of the GURPS skill system (it can be exhausting to work with sometimes), just as an observation of what I notice happens with players when they interact with the details of a Campaign Framework.

More Kronos Musings: Geography

Now that we know something of its history, what does it look like today? I generally don't like "island worlds" though on some level it's unavoidable. Most games can't handle one fully detailed world (Earth) and even your most far ranging fantasy games rarely escape a single continent. Still, we can add a few more details than just "one city." Nonetheless, let's start with one city.

More Kronos Musings: History

 So, quite some time ago, I announced a playtest, a heist; we did a poll, and Kronos won out.  I expect it did so because it's an interesting, alien world set in the midst of an otherwise human dominated part of space, and that's pretty much all we knew about it at the time.  I believe I've made some musings on it before, but let's do another iterative cycle on it, where I simply walk through some basic logic, and what I need to make it an interesting heist location.

I was originally going to post the whole thing at once, but it turned out to be way too big for me to handle, so here it is in the first chunk.

What is Kronos? Why is Kronos?

So, let's start with why Kronos even ended up in the Psi-Wars atlas.  One of the things that irritates me about a lot of space history is the timelessness of it.  Star Wars is the worst, of course, with Coruscant being a big, urban capital world for basically all of galactic history, at least as far back as the Old Republic.  This would be like deciding that Rome was the capital of the world for all time, when it wasn't even the capital of Rome for the entire history of the Roman empire! Things move, they change, and they get left behind.  I wanted to express that, and to acknowledge the slow shift in power from the alien empires that made up the early history of the Psi-Wars galaxy.  Once upon a time, the power of the galaxy lay centered more towards the "eastern" half of the galactic core, around Kronos, between the Umbral Rim of the Ranathim, and the Arkhaian Spiral of the Eldoth.  Then came the Alexian Crusades and the conquest of the galaxy by humanity, and the center of power shifted to the "West" of the galactic core, closer to the Glorian Rim of humanity, and Sovereign.  This makes Kronos "the old capital."

So, in a sense, Kronos has always been a historical world.  It's had a few name changes, from Chronos (time) to Cronus (the titan, the king of the bygone age) to Kronos (an aptly confusing blend of the two), all meant to represent this notion of Kronos as a world deeply embedded in the history of the setting.  Thus, it's most distinguishing feature is that it featured strongly in, and retains features of, previous eras, making it something of a time capsule world.

But I don't want to go too far in that direction.  We often freeze locations in history based on a preferred narrative perspective.  I think Egypt suffers the most from it: when we discuss Egypt, most people immediately think of the pyramids, mummies, great monuments to bygone eras, the nile, palm trees, etc.  But this was _but one moment in time_ and from a very long time ago, once that was trumpeted wildly in the early 20th century, a moment in time that has set a lot of the tone of pop culture. But Egypt has been many, many things since, from a seat of Greek power to the breadbasket of the Roman empire, to one of the most important regions for Christianity to a seat of power of the Muslim world, home to Saladin and the Ismaili sect that later spawned the Hashashin, to the home of the Mamluks, and I could go on and on. I wanted Kronos to feel like that: it was not some world frozen in a single era, but one that had accumulated history, like layers of dust, over the eons, and you could see all of them every day, such as being in Egypt, with the pyramids at your back, a coptic church before you, and hearing the Islamic call to prayer.