Understanding Feudalism

I've been tinkering with simplified political systems for awhile (complicated enough that players can fuss with them, not so complicated that they overwhelm the campaign), and I've been tinkering with simplistic kingdoms and my research has lead me deep into feudalism, which ties surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) well into the Status system.

Knights

GURPS Fantasy discusses "Manoralism." The idea is that a manor is a noble's estate near a village. The village does the farming, and the noble in the manor collects a cut of the taxes and acts as a defensive force if they are attacked. A typical village has about 500 people, though you end up with a 2/5 split between the people of the manor and the people of the village.

If I pop over to Matt Riggsby's Lord of the Manner in Pyramid 3-52: Low-Tech 2 and we look at what a typical CR 4 TL 3 nobleman with about 500 villagers under him (that's about 100 households) earns in taxes, we come to about $15,000 a month. This is more than enough to support Status 3 "Landed Knight" which costs $12,000 a month. In fact, if we look at typical jobs, we find that a Very Wealthy TL 3 person makes about $14,000, which is also in lock-step with "Status 3."

Elsewhere on Wikipedia, I discovered the Knight's Fee, which is "the equivalent to a manor." It's between 1,000 and 5,000 acres, though much of it will be "waste" and not properly civilized (forests and hills and such). This is seen as the land necessary to support the knight. And if we go and look at the amount of land necessary to support 100 households, we come to about 1,200 acres, which matches nicely with this Knight's fee.

It also matches with a subdivision of the Anglo-Saxon shire, which is "the Hundred," which is literally "100 house holds."

So that's literally what a Knight is: Someone who has been given the right to tax one "Hundred" as his personal manor, which grants him Status 3 and Very Wealthy. He's able to swing about $1000 a month, which according to Pulling Rank, is not enough to consider him a true Patron. He's a nice Ally, though.

Barons, Earls and Counts and Marquess
The next step up from a village is a town, according to Fantasy. It's about 1000-5000 people, and interacts with lots of smaller villages. This is 2-to-10 times as large as a village, and presumably the ruler of a town has a similar jump in power.

Status 4 requires $60,000. If we look at the number of households necessary to support that, we find that 500 households will net us about $75,000 a month. Similarly, a Filthy Rich person at TL 7 brings in about $70,000 a month, which keeps us in lock-step with our expectations. Such a character would be a 10 point patron, able to swing $10,000 a month.

We find that if a hundred (that is, 100 households) is a Shire, then unsurprisingly, a Shire would be our next step up in organizational unit. And indeed, according to wikipedia, Anglo-Saxon Shires tended to have fortified towns at their center. But the Anglo-Saxons lost to the Normans, and they brought the name "County" with them. The ruler of a County on the continent was a "Count," unsurprisingly. The ruler of a Shire was an "Earl" and that name stuck in England. Thus, Status 4 nets us a title of Earl or Count.

But what about a Baron or a Viscount? Well, from what I can find, "Viscount" just means "Deputy Count," so he's someone in the service of the Count, or the Earl, and thus one rank below. He might also be Status 3, but with a Courtesy Title (a perk: Viscount) that lets him lord it over the other Status 3 people in court, like those poor Baronets/Knights.

But what about the Baron? This one is confusing: A Barony seems to be a grant of land to a Baron that contains multiple Knight's Fees, that is, Manors within it. So far, so good: That means we're definitely up one level from the Status 3 person, putting us solidly at Status 4. Only the British peerage system places a Baron beneath a Viscount, suggesting that he's status 3. Moreover, baronies seemed to be quite different than counties: they could be sliced up and located in several counties, and they seemed to entail some kind of unique obligation. They could also be huge: 20+ knightly fees in one barony entitled one to special privileges, and 20+ fees is vastly more powerful than just "Filthy Rich."

Or, reading more deeply, perhaps that's all a bunch of nonsense:

Quote:

Initially those who held land directly from the king by military service, from earls downwards, all bore alike the title of baron, which was thus the factor uniting all members of the ancient baronage as peers one of another. Under King Henry II, the Dialogus de Scaccario already distinguished between greater barons, who held per baroniam by knight's service, and lesser barons, who held manors. Technically, Lords of Manors are barons, or freemen, however they are not entitled to be styled as such.

So Earls and Counts are Barons, or they were. Now Baron seems to denote "A Lord of the Manor," making him... a landed knight. I suppose, then, that a "Knight" would be Status 2, and a Baronet would be a Status 2 person with a cool Courtesy Title, and a Baron, if we follow the modern peerage system, would be Status 3, a fancy name for the Landed Knight.

It seems with further research that the next step up the Peerage chain, the "Marquess" is just the lord of a March, which is like a County, but on the borders, thus super-special because he's a front-lines kinda guy and he gets a better seat at the table. Status 4, Courtesy Title, then.

Status 4 is an Earl or a Count, or a Baron in the much older system. Or, said differently, someone who rules a Barony is definitely Status 4.

Palatine Lords, Dukes, Marquis, Margraves, and more Barons

Status 5 requires us to earn $600,000 a month. IF we have 5000 households under our thumb, we can rake in about $700,000 a month, which is consistent with a TL 3 Multi-Millionaire, which is consistent with Status 5. So far so good. We can throw around $100,000 freely, so this level of character/organization is a 15-point patron.

Fantasy lists cities as at the center of lots of towns. 5000 households is a population of about 25,000, which puts us right in the middle of "City" territory.

I can't find any specific reference to what this level of power would be, but we do have the County Palatine, which is a unique County that has special privileges and autonomy from the throne. I note that the people who ruled these were also called Earls (thus some Earls might be Status 5) and would make their own baronies within their Counties (possibly explaining why Barons are inferior). Perhaps if a County contains a powerful city, the Earl of that County would be sufficiently independent and powerful to be Status 5. Similarly, most of your Holy Roman Imperial Provinces were ruled by similarly powerful rulers (Hertogs and Margraves) suggesting that those who rule over a major city are Status 5.

Another example of this would be a Duchy Palatinate. The Duchy of Lancaster comprises 46,000 acres. Divide that by 12 to see how many households it supports, and we clock in at about 4000 households... of the same order of magnitude as the 5000 noted above. A Duke is definitely Status 5.

I would note that their relative autonomy and their scope is similar to the size of the "Kingdoms" of the Heptarchy. I think you can make the case for the "King" of Wessex or Northumbria or even Mercia being Status 5, rather than 7. Lords of this stature and wealth might represent "small kingdoms," especially of a Ruritanian flavor.

Grand Duke, Archduke, Prince, Kings and Emperors

Status 6 is noted as "Royal Family." It requires $6 million a year, and a job as a Multi-Millionare 2 will net us $7 mil, leaving us with $1 mil to throw around, making us a 20 point patron. The number of households necessary to support this would be roughly 10x our previous number, giving us about a population of 250,000... which is Imperial City size.

This suggests the person rules over a complete country. He has 10 cities beneath him, effectively, drawing all of that power to him. The Prince of Wales, the Archduke of Austria, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, might all fall under this level of power.

Status 7, a king, is 10x more powerful, giving us a 25 point patron. This seems more an appropriate descriptor for the King of France or the King of England than the King of Mercia or Faroffia. A city like London or Paris is definitely on the "Imperial City" scale of power.

Status 8 would represent an Emperor and a 30 point patron. He would have approximately 10 kingdoms under his thumb, which fits what Roman or Chinese emperor could pull off.

A Meditation on GURPS Tech Level and the Scale of Damage

I've been tinkering a lot with Ultra-Tech, and since Pulver said he's finalizing some of his beam weapon damage tables for VE2, I thought now might be the time to discuss them.

A typical Low-Tech weapon deals between 1 and 10 damage (before applying bonuses), depending on the strength of the wielder.  Most LT armor also applies a DR of between 1 and 10.  Given that humans have 10 HP, this means there is an element of HP whittle: That is, you can be cut by a knife without instantly dying, or even falling unconscious.  They are inherently i-scale weapons.

Size matters, of course (I feel confident in assuming that a catapult will deal more than 10 damage without bothering to check my books), but when it comes to the "average man" wielding a weapon appropriate for his size and scale against another man, he tends to exist on an i-Scale (1-10).

A typical HT weapon, such as a pistol, starts close to an average of 10 damage.  Rifles typically deal 20.  DR remains relatively low, but by TL 8, you start to see some simple, light (as in "less than platemail") armor that is DR 10+.  By TL 6+, we're definitely getting into "d-scale" weapons.  This is why gun fights become so lethal: A single hit can wipe out all ten of your hitpoints, and easily toss you into requiring survival checks.  People survive thanks to cover, dodge checks, and armor, not on "sheer toughness," though it might be possible at this point to do so.

A typical UT weapon still deals 10-20 damage, but it's armor penetration starts to rapidly scale up: a TL 10 beam weapon will penetrate 20-60 points of armor, a TL 11 beam weapon will penetrate 50-100 DR,  and a TL 12 beam weapon will penetrate 100 to 200 DR (or vastly more).  Personal armor remains in the 10s (d-scale), but heavier armor (hardsuits, space armor, battlesuits) quickly reach into the hundreds, and man-portable weapons are expanded by battlesuits to easily get into the many tens of damage and even into the hundreds (a semi-portable fusion gun deals an average of 100 damage and will penetrate an average of 200 DR).  If HT weapons brush against the d-scale, UT weapons are solidly in it.

This is why many people throw up their hands at UT combat, because 10 HP is nothing against, for example, a plasma battle rifle or a portable railgun, both of which inflicts an average of 50 damage, which is nearly an instant kill against an unarmored target.  Humans are effectively i-scale characters in a decidedly d-scale conflict.

When cosmic weapons like disintegrators are introduced, we hit the c-scale.  A disintegrator pistol deals an average of 120 damage, ignores physical DR, and penetrates 1200 points worth of force screens.  A semi-portable disruptor inflicts 800 damage (8000 vs force screens), which is the same amount of physical damage a high-end anti-matter bullet will deal.

At this point, we're absolutely in the c-scale and human-scale HP becomes a footnote.  Weapons at this scale can, if they are explosive, miss you and still instantly kill you (even to the point where you're just dust), even setting aside knock-on effects like radiation.  Surviving this sort of battlefield even goes beyond the scope of most armor (someone in a Warsuit is still instantly dead if struck by an antimatter bullet, though he'll survive a miss by one yard) and even most shields (a tactical conformal force screen only provides 150 DR.  A hypothetical cosmic shield that provides 1500 will at least hold off a disintegrator pistol for a little while).

Ever scaling DR is one solution for this, but it requires people to wear them, and it doesn't really deal with the binary nature of combat at this scale, as is visible with the warsuit (if you're struck by an anti-matter bullet, you'll take 800 damage, which leaves 400 damage unaccounted for after you apply your DR, which means you're dead.  If you manage to step to one side and take "only" 300 damage, then the armor will absorb all of it, meaning you're perfectly fine).

Another solution would be up-scaled HP.  Supers do this with injury tolerance: By dividing all damage by 10, they lift themselves up to the point where a pistol round becomes like a dart, and a grenade becomes like the blow from a mace and only a bazooka poses a serious (if survivable) risk.  Force Fields offer a similar solution, albeit a slightly strange one, thanks to the nature of how semi-ablative DR works (which is why I've seen several house rules that propose treating force fields like HP)

The taxonomy of spaceships

Just saving a quick link here for my own purposes

Breaking Down a Campaign Framework

I'm always creating page after page of RPG material, but I seldom follow through far enough to create something truly publishable.  I'm always getting requests for my notes, and I always have to demure because they're really little more than "What is necessary to run my specific game." In a few weeks, I hope to change that record and kick out the first bit of an actual GURPS campaign framework.

That pre-amble out of the way, allow me to make a few definitions.  What the hell is a GURPS campaign framework?  It's what I've decided to call books like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Action and GURPS Monster Hunters.  They provide everything you need to run a campaign except the specifics on plot, character and setting (but further provides guidelines on all three of those). Said differently, a campaign framework provides a distillation of the GURPS rules necessary for rapidly building characters, sessions and interesting gameplay for a particular genre.

This blog post will break-down what I think a campaign framework needs, but to do that, you must permit me one more definition, and to make that definition, I want to show you another definition: Philip K. Dick's definition of science fiction:

I will define science fiction, first, by saying what science fiction is not. It cannot be defined as 'a story set in the future,' [nor does it require] untra-advanced technology. It must have a fictitious world, a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society... that comes out of our world, the one we know:
This world must be different from the given one in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society…
There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition.


[In] good science fiction, the conceptual dislocation---the new idea, in other words---must be truly new and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader…[so] it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification, ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create…. The very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create---and enjoy doing it, [experiencing] the joy of discovery of newness.

So, to be clear, Philip K. Dick doesn't think Star Wars is science fiction!  Does that mean that Mr. Dick is a... jerk?  No, I don't think so.  It doesn't mean his definition is wrong either.  It's not prescriptive so much as descriptive of what he's trying to do.  He's not being a snob, he's outlining a model that explains what he's shooting for.  "All models are wrong, some models are useful," as the saying goes.

With that in mind, I want to offer a definition of a role-playing game, not because I feel anything that falls outside of it is "not really roleplaying," but because it defines what I'm trying to create: A role-playing game is a confluence between the tension created by interesting mechanical gameplay and interesting narrative choices.  To unpack that: When people say they enjoy "fluff," they mean they enjoy the inspiration and complex choices created by an interesting narrative.  When people say they enjoy "crunch" they're describing their enjoyment of the complex choices created by interesting gameplay mechanics.  These two sides often argue, but I think they miss the point that RPGs are designed as the wonderful peanut-butter-and-chocolate mixture of rich narrative mixed with complex gameplay.

GURPS itself provides neither.  There is no GURPS setting and there is precious little GURPS gameplay (Nothing stops me, rules-as-written, from taking telepathy and ruining all the mysteries in a police procedural).  Rather, it provides us with the tools, the "design language" to create our own settings and gameplay (Nothing stops you, rules-as-written, from creating interesting consequences to the use of telepathy, and littering the world with dangerous psychics, anti-psychics, technological mind-shields, or drug-induced nightmarish "mind-traps." BOOM!  Interesting gameplay for a police procedural involving telepathy).  Many GURPS veterans have created rich campaigns all on their own.  But a campaign framework does a lot of that work for you.  You don't need one, but you're effectively creating your own, so why not build it out enough that anyone can use it?

A GURPS campaign framework defines the "fluff" of its campaign mostly in broad strokes.  The specific setting doesn't matter as much.  Monster Hunters works as well in Los Angeles as Cairo as the hills of Kentucky. But a campaign framework does depend on some setting conceits: Monster Hunters exists in a world where magic and monsters are real, monsters and magic works in a particular (and specific) way, and things like genetically engineered super-soldiers are real (though rare or secret).  Likewise, the specifics of characters are left to players and GM, but the framework outlines the details lightly.  Dungeon Fantasy has wizards, and wizards tend to have problems like being excommunicated or feared, while Knights tend not to have any actual, defined status, and so on.  Similarly, it doesn't really define the specifics of a plot, but you can infer what sort of plot you might have.  What a campaign framework mostly does is set up the premise.  Once the premise is established, then we can build gameplay.

And building gameplay is the primary focus of a campaign framework.  When I see people discussing these frameworks and building their own, they always start with templates.  This is a mistake.  Before you can build templates, you must understand niches.  Before you can understand niches, you must understand the pulse of gameplay.  The first framework book to write is always the second released: Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons; Action 2: Exploits; Monster Hunters 2: the Mission.

"A game is a series of interesting choices"
-Sid Meier

To understand gameplay, you must pick a focus for that gameplay.  Said differently, when the dice come out, what are the players doing?  What sort of choices do the players make?  Good gameplay creates a series of interesting, interrelated choices that creates an emergent narrative that, ideally, emulates the sort of genre we're exploring.  A game meant to emulate a heroic shonen anime should have a variety of interesting tactical decisions that, when chosen in an optimal way, naturally result in explosive, emotion-laden power, tangled relationships and exceedingly dramatic and dynamic battles full of people flying around and blasting each other.  A game meant to emulate Game of Thrones should have interesting choices that result in betrayal and heroes bleeding out in gutters while cynical villains slip back into the shadows to win a morally-grey victory in an uncaring, medieval world.

The first step, then, is to focus on a mechanics mission statement.  What do the player characters do by default?  Kill monsters and take their stuff?  Conspire to hide magic from the world while advancing their own political and mystical power?  Seek out new life and new civilizations while boldly going where no man has gone before, followed by sleeping with new women and punching out new alien warlords?  Once you have that, the next step is to pull out additional detail in our gaming fractal.  Killing monsters and taking their stuff, obviously, involves at least two parts, the killing and the taking, and might infer a few more, like knowing which monsters to kill, or where to find the stuff.  After we pull out these elements, we can keep or discard as we please.  Taking a monster's stuff likely involves selling it, but most players don't associate mercantile skill or deep haggling mini-games as a serious element of Dungeon Fantasy, so we remove that.

Once we understand what our game is about, we can start building the actual nuts and bolts of gameplay.

Obstacles consist of four things: Dilemma, Choices, Consequences, and Rooting Interest.
-Robin Laws (Paraphrased)

Once we know where are gameplay is, we need to decide what it looks like.  Gameplay will generally consist of facing what Robin Laws, above, calls obstacles.  The most important elements are, to me, the last three, and starting with the last first: Rooting Interest means you must explain why the heroes care.  Dungeon Fantasy does this easily by pointing out, helpfully, that the monsters have stuff and you want stuff.  Moreover, the monsters are trying to kill you and most people are interested in not dying.  Games like GURPS Action have a harder time establishing rooting interest, and tend to require fluffier reasons for doing what they do.  Nonetheless, there should always be a benefit for success, or what some people in the biz call "Risk vs Reward."

“Failure is boring – the credible threat of failure is very exciting.”
-Amanda Lang

Next, we need our series of interesting choices.  This ties in with consequences.  There must be multiple ways to achieve one's goal, and they must all be equally interesting (this is what game designers mean by "game balance"), but that doesn't mean they must all be the same.  Different tactics should involve different risks and different, long-term consequences.  Those consequences can be short-term or long-term or both, and the consequences needed necessarily be negative.  Much of chess's gameplay choices turns on positioning: to capture your piece, I must move my piece to the captured piece's spot.  This fundamentally changes the board, and might expose my piece to counter attack, or open up the field for further attack against you.  D&D 4e and Gumshoe use resources, which means you can expend a great deal of power to defeat a threat now, at the cost of being unable to defeat another threat later on.  Call of Cthulhu allows magic at the cost of sanity, which means the use of game-winning powers will likely result in a permanent reduction of your hero's power.

Ideally, our choices involve several of the above, allowing the heroes to way the risks against the rewards and the potential fallout of a course of action, and those consequences shape future choices (This is the "sequence" that Sid Meier refers to).  This creates our emergent play.  As my D&D fighter rushes forward and lays down an area attack on several foes, this has the consequence that I'm no longer near the other PCs, but all of those enemies have been effectively "pinned" near mine, which keeps them from attacking my allies, but means they're highly likely at attack me, which might be dangerous to myself.  I've made a choice, and gained both rewards and consequences that will affect the next turn (My position, my expenditure of a resource).  The enemy will react to my new position and my new vulnerabilities differently, which means I may be swamped by enemies, or might have them scatter.  Then, I have a new set of choices that didn't exist before, limited by the fact that I've already expended some of my power (a condition that didn't exist before).

Once we've defined those choices, we can determine which traits interact with them and what general paths our choices tend to guide us along.  A combat character who tends to focus on strategies of survival and focusing enemy attention on him is following a "tank" strategy.  That's his core toolkit, the set of choices he intends to maximize.  A combat character who intends to focus on removing his opponents before they can remove him is following a "striker" or "sniper" strategy. From these strategies, we can start to derive our niches, and from those niches, we can derive our templates.  And from our templates, we can write a template book.

This works because we have determined what makes each core game mechanic interesting, and how these templates interface with them, and what traits matter and why.  Monster Hunters, for example, has two major gameplay arenas: Finding the monster and killing it.  Each template has alternate strategies for finding the monster, and each template has means by which to kill it, and these overlap.  The Crusader has just enough skill to find the monster, and then has overwhelming lethality with which to destroy the monster in a full, frontal assault.  The sage, on the other hand, prefers to linger in the research phase, trying to determine what the monster's weakness might be and use that against him.  Both can team up to allow specialization and magnification of one another's strengths, but this too creates new vulnerabilities, and doesn't address additional issues and potential consequences (Remaining hidden from both the world and the monsters you hunt is a vital part of monster hunting, and requires a different strategy).

Once we've built our core gameplay, all that remains is to make sure it's attached to the rooting interest of the players themselves.  Base motivations can work, but tying everything into a deeper narrative is what makes RPGs far more compelling than mere Monopoly, Parcheesi or Stratego.  But that's an article for another time.

What I learned studying up on Captain-and-Crew Space Opera

After Combat Medic had his fightin' thread about why the Federation of Star Trek is a terrible place, I was inspired to watch DS9 again (which actually addresses many of the issues raised), which led to me exploring other, similar series, like Farscape, Blake's 7 and so on.  Not just [I]watching[/I] them, but tearing them apart, reading the director's notes, playing games related to them, studying up on the lore behind them, trying to understand what makes them tick.

It's just a thing I do.  I have ADHD, I get obsessed with things.

Here are some things that popped out.

1. Star Trek spaceship design actually makes sense

The idea behind the goofy pod-and-saucer design actually makes a sort of sense.  The idea is that your radioactive drives are connected to the saucer, in which your crew resides so that it can provide power and thrust, but it remains far enough away that it doesn't irradiate them.

Of course, Star Trek ruins this by having its engineers just hanging out not 10 feet from the warp core, but hey, what's a realistic depiction of radiation against the chance to see a totally cool warp drive in the background.

(Similarly, the DS9 wheel makes sense if you want to generate artificial gravity.  Just spin-up the station.  But, of course, they have artificial gravity and it's pointed in the wrong direction, because... I don't know why).

2. The scale of the ships makes sense too

These ships are HUGE.  The Galaxy class ships of Star Trek would be SM+15 or so, and Romulan Warbirds are even bigger.  Moira from Farscape is similarly gigantic, despite the fact that they only ever show like 10 people as the crew.

Of course, a simple thought experiment shows why.  The ships are often described containing simply titanic amounts of energy and slinging them back and forth.  The sort of masses and energies required to actually create something like an Alcubierre drive, assuming its even possible, are pretty big.  And having the kind of energies in your shields necessary to stop antimatter missiles from simply vaporizing you instantly are likewise pretty titanic.  Furthermore, most of these civilization seems to have advanced manufacturing means [I]and[/I] have a vast scale.  They have access to the resources of asteroids, massive populations on a variety of worlds.  They are many magnitudes of order more productive than our civilization is.  If they put a fraction of that into military production, the result is going to be fleets far larger than we can currently deploy, with ships far larger than we'd even think about.

3. The writers don't really understand any of this

As I've already pointed out, it's like the writers glimpsed better sci-fi over the horizon, and ran around recreating a soap-opera set in a world that looks vaguely like the better sci-fi, and then added bits that they thought were fun, like wooshing ships and lasers that can disintegrate people, but never seem to disintegrate bulkheads.

4. Or maybe they do, but they don't think the audience will

The more I watch these, the more I see that they're about a few consistent themes.  The first is a sense of wonder.  We watch them to see the terrible, super-woofer trembling majesty of a black hole, or the awe-inspiring wonder of the rings of an alien world glittering through the rising sun.  We watch them to interact with strange aliens and stand in the cavernous maw of the ruins of a long-dead race.

At the same time, the second theme is humanity.  This allows us to relate to events going on.  The being that stands gaping up at those ancient ruins is a fellow much like you and me, not some robot, not some engineered being with an incomprehensible intellect, not some mobile sapient fungus.  But someone like you or me. Similarly, the aliens he meets look remarkably human not just because of a limited budget, but so we can fall in love with their men or their women, so we can punch their warlord in the jaw, so we can relate to their politics.  The point is to make a story that a 20th century (Captain-and-crew stuff seems very grounded in the 20th, rather than 21st century) person (especially an American.  Even Farscape, despite being Australian, seems primarily aimed at Americans) can easily relate to.  This goes further: Most of the drama of the story, when it isn't being driven by the Science Mystery Of The Week, is mostly a human drama.  It's people falling in love or falling in hate, or circling around one another in rivalry or misplaced distrust or what have you.

There's substantial tension between these two points.  The more realistically you depict the wonder, the more wondrous you make it, but the harder it is for the average person to understand that wonder.  But the more understandable you make it, the more mundane it becomes.  Balancing on this knife's edge is one of the things that creates many of the peculiarities of the genre, and when you slip off to one side or the other, that's where you lose audience members.  Seems an unforgiving genre.

4. It doesn't seem to have made a lasting cultural impact

If I dig through sci-fi art on Deviat Art or elsewhere, what I mostly find are lots of battlesuits, lots of power armor, lots of robots, lots of cyborgs, lots of skimpily dressed alien-chicks [I]or[/I] creepy bug-aliens.  I see lots of Star Wars, lots of 40k, lots of generic cyberpunk or military sci-fi.  I see lots of long, "rod"-style spaceships.  I see very little that seems inspired by Star Trek or other Captain-and-crew sci-fi. When people create something similar, it seems more retro "This is what I imagine sci-fi looked like in the 50s" rather than some re-imagined version of a captain-and-crew genre.

To be clear, for me, the defining tropes are: relatively mundane humans wearing jumpsuits with funny/simplistic designs, wielding rayguns, who explore worlds populated by humans-in-rubber-suit aliens, while their primary focus of tension is usually on controlling the ship itself.  That is, it would play like the Artemis Bridge Simulator or FTL, rather than like Mass Effect or Halo.

I can find some artwork inspired directly by star trek, but rarely do they depict new characters (unless, weirdly, they are furries). I almost never see "I'm trying to do something like star trek, only different," though I see tons of Deus Ex knock-offs, or Shadowrun knock-offs, or Starship Trooper knock-offs, or Aliens knock-offs.

It didn't used to be that way, I think.  Perhaps Captain-and-Crews cultural cachet has faded and we're drifting more towards planetary romance and space spy-and-mercenary action.  Star Trek is increasingly depicted in a "retro" fashion.  It's out of date.  Old fashioned.

5. Finding that balance and that cultural interest makes Captain-and-crew gaming hard

Players have a mind of their own.  They won't conveniently forget the Solution Of The Week when you have your back turned.  If you let them phaser through a solid wall one session, they'll demand to know why they can't phaser through all walls.

The solution seems to either run it as a genre-based game, or to get onto that knife's edge the same way the original writers did.  In the first case, you run it like a Supers game, or use a system like Marvel Heroic or Fate or Drama System, and the reason you can't use the Science Solution Of the Weak is that it's not an Aspect this week, or you don't have the drama points, or it's bad form.  This is about emulating the genre, then, about creating an accurate depiction of what writers do.

The other would be to find some way to allow enough wonder and consistency into the game without it destroying the player's ability to relate.  You still have to introduce some arbitrary elements (what Ultra-tech calls "Safe tech,") like, "We have robots, but they're dumb, and you don't have Power Armor" and "Only the cyborg race has cybernetics.  Nobody else does because reasons" and so on.  If can't really play down the destructiveness of the weaponry without giving the heroes a consistent reason they're not being instantly blown away (like "You all have modulate force fields, here's how they work).

Fortunately, these arbitrary decisions do allow for the building of some interesting gameplay.  Players need to be willing to buy into space elves and bumpy-forehead aliens who all, amazingly, speak English (and laugh at jokes in English because, apparently, translator microbes are [I]that good[/I]) and ships that swoosh through space rather than float silently through an endless void.  But I expect anyone who gets into such a game knows what they're getting into.  Decrying the inaccuracy of the xenobiology while x-beams are scattering off your conformal force screen and you're using a dermal regenerator on your fallen buddy seems... misplaced.

GURPS Cabal: How Mailanka Designs a Campaign: Part 2b: the Rules Continued

As I discussed in the previous post, when I tackle a campaign, I tackle it in the GURPS Action model, which involves thinking about my rules, what I want my game to be about, how I want it to play, and then I use that to design my templates.

So what do I want my GURPS Cabal to be about?

Well, let's imagine what a typical GURPS Cabal game might be about.  First, something happens.  Perhaps a creepy mummy slips out of its coffin at a museum and kills a dude and steals some artifacts, or perhaps someone inherits a creepy reality-shard journal that speaks of things that never happened but will, or perhaps your passer dies.  Something happens, and being an occult game, you need to investigate what happened.

We already have a game that makes heavy use of investigation: GURPS Monster Hunters.  Of course, the premise of GURPS Monster Hunters is that  you're out to kill the monster while in GURPS Cabal you are the monster... but on the other hand, is it really so different?  What's the difference between a group of Black Ops soldiers hunting down that mummy to put a stop to his rampage, and a Cabalist hunting down that mummy to ask it a few questions and/or gain access to its dark secrets?  Or perhaps to put a stop to its rampage because it's growing inconvenient.  So we simply rip those rules wholesale from Monster Hunters.

 Once our Cabalists have uncovered the truth to the mystery, the conspiracy begins.  We need to marshal Cabal resources to do something about it.  We need to hide it from the prying eyes of the public.  We need to manipulate those black ops soldiers to slow their progress and let us get to that mummy first, and we need to convince that mummy to join our side.  At its heart, once you get past all the dry bookishness of the cabalists, they're spectacularly social people; they have to be, they secretly rule the world.

So where do we get the rules for that?  Well, conspiracy comes in three, distinct elements.  The first is about understanding power structures, their interconnectedness, and how a conspiracy needs to play out.  Our go-to resource for that would be GURPS Illuminati, but that doesn't help us too much.  Mostly it just offers GM advice and setting suggestions.  Conspiracy is a mode and it discusses that for us.  Otherwise, Action offers some suggestions regarding convincing organizations to do things for you ("Pulling Rank"), and we just toss in some rules about Administration and Politics.

 Next, we need to persuade others to help us.  GURPS Illuminati has some suggestions on what that will look like: You might manipulate people directly, but generally you're going to get someone, an agent, and he's going to do the manipulating for you.  You manipulate one guy, and leverage him to manipulate someone else.  For example, if we want to convince the Black Ops soldiers to back off, we could ask them nicely.  Some Diplomacy or Intimidation checks might do it, but they're going to be really tough and they have an entire organization backing them.  A better strategy might involve getting the organization itself to pull support for their mission.  If we can control someone in their organization, that's much more powerful than confronting the soldiers themselves.

To do this, we turn to GURPS Social Engineering, which discusses dealing with organizations (surprisingly irrelevant, though could be useful for running a lodge), manipulating people (alright), recruiting people (there we go), blackmailing them (bingo!) and brainwashing (Do tell!).  When I was finished researching this bit, I think that was the first time I really began to be afraid of the cabal.

Finally, we need to hide evidence of the supernatural.  Deception.  Remember how that mummy murdered someone?  What if it got caught on camera? What if the police begin to investigate the murder?  This could expose more of Cabalistic influence than we would like, thus we need to dispose of the body, alter the camera evidence and send the police off in some other direction.  Monster Hunters has a sparse discussion of this, to my surprise, but Action 2: Exploits, always my hero, rides to my rescue.  It has an entire section on "cleaning," hiding evidence, faking evidence, making up cover stories, disposing of bodies and etc. I could probably go into more detail, but this will do.

Now that we've hidden our mummy from the world and pulled the black ops team off the trail, we can walk right up to the mummy, help him with whatever he's doing, and get him to join the cabal.  Easy.  As long as everything goes smoothly, we'll have a new ally to the cabal and no muss or fuss.  But when does anything ever go that smoothly?  No, at least one black ops soldier is still on our trail, the mummy isn't interested in cooperating, and somehow the mafia got involved.  What would a good game be without some pulse-pounding action? 

The mode of our action will vary.  We could treat this game as full-on horror, but I think if players are the monsters, they'll want something pulpier.  We could go full-on action heroics, but that strikes me as overkill.  Do we really imagine Cabalist assassins as charging a room full of enemy soldiers while firing round-after-slow-motion-round into their midst and back-flipping out of the way of bullets?  I don't.  They seem grimmer than that: Snipers, thieves, knives in the dark.  If it comes to a fair fight, it's bloody and terrifying, and the only things that can do ridiculously inhuman things are inherently inhuman: Super-fast vampires, super-strong werewolves, and so on.

I didn't turn to anything for this, though both Monster Hunters and Action have some good rules on combat.  I'll use more of Horror's rules, though, and I've been running combat-scenarios for awhile now, so this requires little investigation.

But those three parts together put together the core of how a game will play out, leaving only one last thing to worry about...

Magic.

GURPS Cabal: How Mailanka Designs a Campaign Part 2a: The Rules

The best supplement ever written for GURPS was GURPS Action 2: Exploits.  Technically, the Dungeon Fantasy series got the ball rolling, but Dungeon Fantasy is too self-contained (witness all the DF fans whining about how there needs to be a "serious" version of DF, or how they need "official" monsters).  GURPS Action 2: Exploits created a set of cohesive rules that could serve as a template for any similar campaign, and indeed, I think one of the reasons it isn't "better supported" is that generic support (like Gun-Fu or Martial Arts) work perfectly well with Action in a way that could suit a variety of campaigns.  I used it as the basis for G-verse, for example.  And it serves as an inspiration for how Cabal will work.

Let me take you aside and talk about how GURPS really works, for most people, and how Cabal was clearly designed, before I get to how I'm doing it and why.  Most people approach GURPS as a vast whole.  They grab the book, say "Like, make a character or something.  Oooh, here's a few ideas!" And off you go.  For example, GURPS Cabal lists the Scion template thus:

Scion

Within the Cabal, old blood will tell; families steeped in
occult knowledge and raised to fight the secret wars have
guided the Cabal for centuries. The scion of such a family
may be an eager blueblood or a once-carefree student who got
a big surprise on his 21st birthday. Either way, you can’t
resign from your family.

Advantages: Heir, Secret True Name, Status, Wealth;
your family may have (or be) a Patron or Ally Group; if your
childhood was really strange, you may be Unfazeable or possess
Racial Memory (at the 15-point level).

Disadvantages: Almost anything, from Laziness (“The
Black School has to take me, I’m a legacy.”) to a grim Sense
of Duty.

Skills: Leadership, Savoir-Faire; depending on the family
tradition, History, Occultism, or even Politics.

That's not a template, that's a suggestion.  Kenneth Hite clearly just thought you'd build "I dunno, something kinda magey." And then gave some additional suggestions: Build your mage with things like Heir, Secret True Name, Wealth, some Laziness, Savoir-Faire, and conjure up a back story of hoary, creepy old bloodline that has worked for the cabal for ages, like the Malfoys from Harry Potter or the Dresdens from the Dresden Files.

And that's fine, but it's not what I want.  The above creates situations where people might end up with skills and advantages that never get called upon (like what if Politics is never an issue in an exploration-happy game?) and frankly, that's how most campaigns work anyway, especially in GURPS (which tends to rely on players leveraging their talents rather than passively waiting for the GM to call for them).  But I prefer something tighter rather than a sprawling mess of "Sure, you can do that too." It works, but it's not for me.  I want Action.

So what makes GURPS Action work? Despite the fact that GURPS Action 1: Heroes came out before GURPS Action 2: Exploits, I think the second is what defines the first.  Sean Punch carefully skimmed over all the rules, skills and advantages, and pondered what sort of game he wanted to create, and then based on that game and the rules he devised for it, he created a list of appropriate skills, advantages and disadvantages, and from those, he derived his templates.  This means that every last character only has skills and traits directly useful to gameplay in a way that Sean Punch (and anyone who reads his books) understands.

I'm going to do the same for Cabal (just as I did it for G-verse and for Cherry Blossom Rain).  Is it overkill?  Perhaps.  I know plenty of people who run games the Hite way, and given my enormous respect for Hite, you'll never hear me criticizing that approach.  But my approach not only works well for me, but it generates material that lets it work well for others too.  My take on GURPS Cabal will let people hit the ground running.