Psi-Wars Mounts

We had a recent discussion on the Discord about cuisine and culture, even getting down into how different circumstances result in different butchery methods (ie, why I can't get the same cuts of beef in the Netherlands that I can in the US).  Someone joked that an "article on Ranathim butchery incoming" which is almost certainly a reference to the fact that I sometimes post very interesting, but perhaps not entirely useful, things to Psi-Wars.

Well, here's another thing nobody asked for: Mounts for Psi-Wars!

As I work on the Frontier Marshal, people are obviously going to want details on what their space cowboys ride. The clear answer is "Repulsor-cycles, or a freaking repulsor-truck.  C'mon." We still have cowboys in the real world and most don't ride horses anymore.  They ride in SUVs.  I suspect Psi-Wars "cowboys" would, realistically, be much the same.

That said, we can't escape the mystique horses still hold for us, and we expect space cowboys to ride horses. After all, we see some sort of space horse in space opera all the time, even in Star Wars. And it makes sense, after a fashion. The creation of trucks and SUVs requires considerable industrial infrastructure that might not yet be in place on a world, but a horse can "live off the land," provided the land has the right climate and resources available.  Frontier Marshals regularly deal with the uncivilized wilds of the far rim, so might have to make do without any vehicles, and thus might have to endure with a mount of some kind.

Alright, well, that seems like sufficient justification. How to handle them?  Well, in practice, I see them working like robots: simple characters that have perhaps 1 minor disadvantage (Easily abstracted away into a -1 HAM clause once per session, if the mount is being difficult), and a quirk (to distinguish your mount from others).  Simple enough.  What sort of mounts should we have? Well!

 

Psi-Wars Space Battles Lite

 I've had a lot of complaints recently that my Action Vehicular Combat is "too complicated."  It "involves unfamiliar maneuvers" (that are right there, in GURPS Action) and "really big numbers."  I don't know what to say.  If you can handle applying a -10 Deceptive Attack Penalty to the Vitals (-3) in the dim torchlight (-2) while making an All-Out Attack (+4) and then apply 1.5x damage on a hit, I'm pretty sure you can handle rolling against  Piloting with a +20 bonus and determining the margin of victory.  This is GURPS, we deal with big numbers all of the time.  This isn't White Wolf, where you can count on your fingers.

"I can do the math; I'm an engineer. I just don't want to.  I'm here to play, not to work." 

--Nele van den Ende, PHD

Alright! Alright. I get it.  I see these complaints a lot, and they mean something.  The criticism of my action vehicular system is not that it's wrong, or that it's inaccurate, or that it doesn't scale.  It hits all of those notes just fine.  The complaint is that it's too much work to implement.  Yes, it's simpler than standard GURPS combat.  Yes, it's simpler and more cinematic than GURPS Spaceships combat, itself a simplification of standard GURPS combat. But it still involves quite some work and some experience to learn. Can it get any simpler than that? Sure! Of course. I mean, we're a long way off from GURPS Ultra-Lite, so I'm pretty sure there's plenty room in which we can put something that's simpler, but still tactically interesting.

But what do we mean by "simpler."  We probably don't want "whooshing sounds with crayons." I mean, if you want really simple, just have people roll Pilot and then make up what happens.  What's wrong with that idea? Well, it makes the Fighter Ace effectively pointless ("Did we defeat the Empire and save the carrier?" "Well, I rolled well, so yes.").  So we still want some complexity here, but then, how much complexity is too complex? Well, we have some fairly specific criticisms we can parse through, and my own gut feelings.

I think what people who are complaining about this want are:

• Familiar maneuvers: GURPS Action's Chase rules are fine, but you have to, you know, learn them.
• Finger-Counting: It sounds condescending, but it's true: humans are very intuitive with values ~5, which is why we often see modifiers that tend to be in the plus or minus 1 to 5 range.  Even if we have to do a lot of adding, it's easier to add 5 + 5 + 5 than it is to workout the margin of success from a roll of 13 vs a total of skill 17 with +19 in modifiers.
• Roll and Shout: While "Just roll Piloting and narrate the results" is probably too simple for what we're looking for, most people do just want to roll their skill with some "finger-counting" modifiers and then get a result out of it.  As much as possible, we should be rolling against familiar skills and familiar values. That is, we shouldn't be rolling against a -1 or a 50, if possible, but somewhere between 3 and 18.

Psi-Wars Gun Fu: the Way of the Rim and Westerly Marksmanship

I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart. --the Gunslinger, Stephen King

Here it is.  The whole reason I started this deep dive into Gun-Fu for Psi-Wars was for the coming update to the Frontier Marshal, and if a Frontier Marshal can't sling his blaster, then what are we even doing here?  Thus, the previous three styles were "practice" for this one.  In principle, I should do Shineido first, but I expect that one will be the most popular of the Psi-Wars Gun Fu styles, but I could be wrong. This one is certainly likely to see more use.

This post isn't about one style, but two closely related styles:

• The Way of the Rim
• Westerly Marksmanship

Cultural Familiarity in Psi-Wars

So, I've been struggling a bit with Cultural Familiarity in the established world of Psi-Wars. I've touched on this topic before in Iteration 5, but that iteration was for general topics.  It was for you, dear reader, creating your own setting. Now that I have actual names and cultures (Maradonians, the Shinjurai, the Westerly, Lithian culture, the Keleni), we need to decide which of these have Cultural Familiarity penalties and which don't. Is the difference between the Shinjurai and the Westerly like the difference between an American and a Frenchman, or the difference between an American and the Chinese?

Backer Post: House Apex Preview

 I've wanted to explore the world of Xen with its genetic engineering and its cloned nobility for a long time.  It's the sort of world that feels very at home in a baroque space opera setting like Psi-Wars. I've had the idea for the House since I started writing houses: I saw them as a bio-tech counterpoint to the cybernetic House Kain, and they would be the two "hypermacho" houses often butting heads. I also knew they would be unusual: instead of a set of eugenic packages layered over an existing template, they would be a template that you would layer some training over.

As I began working on the Manticore initiative, I took a stab at it, and I managed to work out the template despite my fears of it being too expensive. It barely fits into 250 points, but most people play 300 points anyway.  It's a long post, as it's a combination of a house description and a complete, new template, and it's not helped by a rather extensive set of "memories" that the player can select from when defining his character. But I'm curious what my backers think of it, before I let it hit the central wiki.

If you're a Fellow Traveler ($3+), the post is available to you

• On SubscribeStar
• On Patreon

As always, thanks for being a backer, and I hope you enjoy it.  Be sure to give me some feedback on it, either on the discord or in the comments!

Psi-Wars Gun-Fu: Imperial Marksman Academy Training

Alright, let's draw this out a little longer.  This is another style that came late, mostly as I was working on Undercity Noir and I realized two things: first,  Ultimate Shootist was cool, and second, I needed a contrast between what a rogue Imperial Security Agent who comes from the Undercity might use, and what his "by the book" partner might use.

You can find the style here.

I know that "Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy" is a joke (thus, I had to use a variation of it as a name), but if there was any faction in Psi-Wars that would use highly professional, tacticool style that is becoming increasingly frequent among "agent" characters in our films and TV shows, with the crouching run, the two-handed grip, and "not a movement wasted," it would be the Empire.

What results will no doubt inspire quite some complaints about the GURPS prerequisite system.  There's no practical way to build up two different skills at the same time when they default to one another.  Beam Weapons are both a little more reasonable in this regard (as the -4 is a pretty big gulf), but at the same time, I suspect that several people will complain that -4 is "too much" and that we should use the -2 from Guns.  I look forward to that debate.  I often find that Psi-Wars inspires a lot of debate around GURPS, I think because it confronts the reader with the reality of certain GURPS rules.  It's a debate I definitely want to have, because it's completely reasonable to want to have characters who are well-trained in a variety of weapons, even if those weapons default to one another.  That's what Imperial Marksmanship does, because its agents, fighter aces and commandos are equally at home with any Imperial weapon (and, frankly, any weapon they can get their hands on). It'll also come up with other styles, especially Combat Geometrics, so it's best to get the discussion out of the way now, with a style that people care less about.

In contrast to other styles, there's very little cinematic here.  I do argue in favor of Infinite Ammunition, but more because at some point, the character is "fast-enough" with reloads that it becomes irrelevant to track their loading, and unlike Undercity Noir, imperial marksmen don't use reloading as a moment to impress a girl.  Beyond that, though, this is not a Gunslinger style, but a hard-headed style about the "realities" of blaster combat.  This, paired with its breadth, makes it an expensive style, which ironically makes you, point for point, a worse marksman than other styles have (perhaps better said, it's a more realistic level of marksmanship).

I still feel it's justified as a style, though, because the students all train under a similar regimen and you can readily recognize the "signature" of such combatants, and how they contrast with other gunslingers in the setting.

Wherein I once again wax frustrated over buying earmarked Impulse Buy Points

 I'm sure by this point, if you're a regular reader, you're used to me complaining about this.  But let's go at it again, once more, for old time's sake.

I love Impulse Buys.  I think they were one of the great additions to GURPS for a variety of reasons, and not because they make the game "more narrative."  I play plenty of games where you have a resource and you bid on or buy successes. GURPS isn't one of those.  GURPS is a game about thinking through everything, coming up with a good battle plan and then seeing what happens. This randomness and uncertainty is important, and I'll discuss why I think so in a later post, but Impulse Buys act as a way of mitigating some of that randomness, exercising tight, focused little narrative tweaks to change the chaos of a storyline created via multiple players' input and the input of the random variable of the dice, and trying to push it back into a semblance of a satisfying narrative.  They allow you to add a bit more meaning than usual to the unbridled mayhem of a typical GURPS game.

Luck mechanics, like Impulse Buys, can also be tailored to give a character a theme.  For example, a swordmaster could be someone with very high sword skill.  I think everyone would buy that.  But if you also gave them the ability to turn one failed sword roll into a success, they begin to take on a mythic quality: not only are they highly skilled, but luck itself seems to guide their blade.  Monster Hunters has some of this with their Wildcard Impulse Buy points, which turn Sword! from something that is frankly overpriced into something that is awesome. We can think of other things like this: the character that can freely buy away one wound per session as a flesh wound, or a character who take turn his opponent's failures into critical failures once per session (some player, somewhere, is reading that and thinking "Wheeeee!"), etc.

But notice how often I say "Once per session."  I want to see these as earmarked (for a single, specific purpose) and used once per session (or maybe twice or maybe three times, but my experience with them is once you make something so limited in utility, it's very unlikely to come up multiple times per session, and they can become frustrating when they do: a character who can buy away five wounds per session begins to approach invulnerability for practical purposes; you can kill him, sure, but you need to start thinking of ways around that absurd luck the way one thinks his way past Superman's invulnerability).

So, we just use Aspected Impulse Buy Points, right?