Zee, the Marquesssa of Gaming

Ada McQueen had little time for life, preferring to lose herself in her beloved video games. Then she died.  The aneurism struck her in the midst of an epic, record-breaking gaming marathon.  As her body slowly cooled before the glow of her CRT, to the chiptune music blaring from her speakers, a yawning void opened behind her and Azrael, angel of Death herself stepped forth.

“Be thou not afraid” spoke the Angel with a voice that shook the earth itself “I am come to escort you to your final resting place.”

Zee suddenly sat bolt upright “Wait,” she said with furrowed brow “Don’t I get to challenge you to a game for my soul?”

And the angel did roll her eyes in a most exasperated manner and gestured dismissively with her bony hands and did say “Choose thy game, Mortal.”

Zee grinned and said: “Tekken Fighter Instinct Ultra: Hyper-Tournament Omega Edition – Limited.”
Only one copy existed.  With flashing fingers, Zee promptly defeated Azrael, who dashed her controller to the ground, drew herself to its full, majestic height and with the voice of a roaring ocean, did say unto Zee “Only by the whims of fortune was thy victory earned.  Also, Mortal, thy father did lie with a whore to bear thee into this world.”

Zee nodded patiently and said “So, double or nothing?”

Thus did Zee claim the Estate of Games and became Azrael’s second power.

Her rise has not been without controversy.  Zee believes in rules, but only in the rules she chooses to accept, and she prefers to have fun than to perform her obligations.

She has set aside the old “boring” games of yesteryear, like Chess, Checkers, Parcheesi and Monopoly and, in fact, her rise to Power has come with an equal rise in status for video games (allowing them to “rise to art”), and a new phase of boardgame/RPG development divorced from its past, while the old form of games become “solved problems” to sufficiently complex computers, gnawing at what it means to be a game.  This has earned her the ire of the old guard of her Estate, including the Black Bishop, a bane of her own estate who conspires to remove Ada from power and return the Estate back to Azrael.

Meanwhile, Zee was the first true gamer girl.  With her rise to the very essence of what it means to game, every other girl who wanted to “be a gamer” had a saintess they could bend knee to, and many did.  A cult grows up around her while the Inquisitors of the Old School, or the “Grognards” as some call them, serve the Black Bishop and make quiet war against one another.

They are not the only, for Zee’s reign has been tumultuous, marked by wars of consoles and even wars of fandom. For Zee is not only the Goddess of Gaming, she’s also a fan of gaming.  When she accepted her Estate, when Azrael introduced her to the other Imperators, Kirin bestowed a fragment of the shattered estates of Fashion, something new and unseen before: the Estate of Cosplay, and Zee enthusiastically embraced.  It forms a core element of her power now, giving her the ability to change into any video game character (though, for some reason, she only changes into a female-version of male video game characters).

Zee's flowers are the Star of Bethlehem (the Key to Something Changed Forever) and the Wild Rose (the Key to Something Different).  She follows the Song of the Wild.  Her Anchors are the Cult of the Gamer Girl, and the Gaming Underworld is her Sanctum (and the source of her opposition, the Black Bishop).

Estate of Cosplay

-Cosplay is the most beautiful form of fandom (3)
-Cosplay is totally impractical (1)
-Cosplay tries to bring fiction into the real world (2)

-Cosplay is just a fad; it cannot last (1)

Rewriting Combat: The Cheat Sheet

It is my opinion and experience that if you're going to modify the combat system, and you want players to take advantage of that system, then you need to provide them with a solid understanding of the new rules you have included. Ideally, this should be a single A4 piece of paper with a distillation of all your roles in one place.  It doesn't have to exhaustive, but it should be enough that all the players' options are clear, and you have a master document available at your finger tips.

It is the nature of such documents that they necessarily summarize a lot of published GURPS rules..  I don't believe that the cheat sheet I have produced is sufficient to play GURPS without GURPS, so I feel that it's fair-use, but it's not my intent to pirate SJGames material, to make it available without you paying, or to claim that I created them (I have compiled this list and it does include some house rules, but the bulk of it repeats work that is not mine).  If SJGames disagrees, I will happily remove the document.

As I worked ahead on this topic, it came up that Tactical Shooting had a few rules that I found interesting as well, which I've included in this document but have not discussed previously.  It'll come up soon enough, though, I promise.

You can read it here.

The point is to offer you, dear reader, an example of what such a sheet might look like, and to give those of you who want to play Psi-Wars, a quick-glance summary of what you can and cannot do.

Rewriting Combat: Optional Rules

Martial Arts brims with optional rules, some of which we already have, but we also have plenty of new ones to tangle with.  I've gone through the book and examined each in turn, and selected the following based on advice from the Campaigns section of the book, my experience with Cherry Blossom Rain, and the results of the research over the past 3 weeks.

Rewriting Combat: Advantages, Skills and Techniques

Character traits serve as the basis for everything we do in GURPS.  If we're going to look at the new options from Martial Arts, it's a good idea to start by looking at the new traits it gives us, and re-examine the old traits we already had.

Rewriting Combat: The Intent

GURPS is a toolbox.  It brims with alternate rules that could work, depending on what you want out of your game.  Some games need to be ruthlessly realistic, or depressingly gory, or heroically cinematic.  The point of the research over the past 3 weeks has been in service of understanding what we want out of Psi-Wars combat.

Now that we have that, it's time to look through my favorite chapter of Martial Arts, Combat, and pick out what rules we want, and what rules we don't.  We know how combat should look (the first week), how GURPS tends to work by default (the second week), and how Psi-Wars works (the third week), so we should now be able to adjust everything to create a decent framework for Psi-Wars.

When we're finished, we should have a very specific and unique version of the combat rules, which I'll unveil on Thursday.

I should note that I won't be looking through Gun-Fu because most of its rules have already been folded into GURPS Action, which we'll be taking with us more-or-less as is.  In fact, before we begin, let's take a look at the legacy Action 2 and 3 leaves us with before we move on to actually making changes.

Deadwood, Marquis of Death

Walter "Deadwood" Fitch was a good-fer-nuthin' low-life, good at poker and bad with whiskey until he met a good christian woman who refused to back down when faced with his nonsense, so naturally he did the only thing he could and married her. He enjoyed his quiet life on a ranch, living a reasonable life until the Devil came, and took his bride away from him. So naturally, Walter did the only thing he could and went to rescue her. Faced with the power of Bhaal and his minions, Walter was soundly defeated, but not before stealing a precious treasure from the Devil, which he traded to Samuel Colt in exchange for crafting a revolver that could kill anything. So armed, Walter Fitch killed the Devil, but it was too late. His wife had been dragged to hell.

Lord Entropy arrested Walter Fitch and dragged him in chains before his court, for Deadwood had violated the law “Be as I would have you be,” and mortals should not, as a rule, be killing Imperators. But Azrael beheld Walter Fitch and his deeds and proclaimed “Lo, he follows a higher law!” and when asked what higher law he followed, she replied “Mine,” and took him as her Power. Thus, he fell under the Chestnut Law, and the death of Bhaal was no more than seven times worse than the kidnapping and enslavement of a wife but, frustrated at being overruled, Lord Entropy declared that if Fitch freed his wife, then he would be in violation of the Chestnut law. To serve the Imperators of Earth, Walter would have to give up his mortal life and accept his role as Death.

Deadwood has three anchors: the Colt, the Nameless Horse, and Persephone Cross (his ex-wife, separated by Death).  His flowers are Vervain, the Key of Something Powerful, and Mimulus, the Key of Something Restless.  Deadwood, particularly beloved by one or two of our players, has his own playlist.

Tactical Analysis: Monstrous Conflict

The previous two tactical analyses shouldn't read like anything new if you've ever run an Action game.  They only differ in the technologies offered, and even then, those have obvious parallels to real-world weapons.  But Psi-Wars offers us a unique opportunity in that allows us to fight inhuman opponents, such as robots and space monsters.

I have limited time and space to discuss these, so I'll bundle them up into a single place.  I'll do that because they have a single consistent thing: They will not fight like people do.  I don't actually have any space monsters, though we can easily derive some rough examples.  I do have robots, of course, and you can read up on them here.

Space Monster Tactics

by BrighterSuns

Space monsters vary greatly, and could be nearly anything, but we can grab a few "typical" GURPS examples.  Given that most space monsters seem to be giant beasts, we could use the Tyrannosaurus (from GURPS: Lands Out Of Time) as our basis for creatures like the Rancor, and the Insectoid out of GURPS Monster Hunters 5: Xenology for the creepy-crawly sort.  Later, in Iteration 5, I'd like to deal with this concept in more detail, but this will work for now.

Both the Tyrannosaurus and the Insectoid have enormous strength (thought the T-Rex isn't quite as high as you might expect) and built-in melee weapons, like claws, teeth and tails.  Despite this, neither does very much damage against armored opponents.  The insectoid deals an average of 11 cutting damage with an armor divisor of 2, which will barely penetrate a battle-weave long coat, while the T-Rex deals 3d+2 impaling or 3d+4 crushing with its tail, neither of which are very impressive compared to TL 11 armor.

Neither has very much armor.  The T-Rex has a DR of 2, and the Insectoid has a DR of 15.  Neither will slow down a blaster very much.

For both, instinct rules the day: Both have a low IQ but high Perception, and unique sensory abilities.  Both have a high move and a decent DX. I would expect "clever" but pre-defined tactics. Once you've figured out how an alien tiger hunts, you know how almost all alien tigers hunt.  Giant aliens like the Rancor will just try to use brute force, etc.  We'd also expect alien monsters to be very adept at using the environment they're adapted for (chameleon, sure-footed, night vision, etc).

Robotic Tactics

"My Robot Army" by daonovski11

In case you missed the link before, here it is again.

Robot armies tend to be broken down into battle bots as the main, brute-force line of infantry, and specialist robots used sparingly, as scalpels.  We expect them to march forward, unwaveringly, and open fire on the enemy when they see them.  They're BAD 10, so not a major threat, but they have considerable HP (13-20) and DR (25), though they're not quite as survivable as troopers.

The Heavy Battle-Bot combines the DR of an Assault Trooper with the firepower of a Heavy Trooper, with superior skill and vastly superior ST.  Like battle bots, he'll simply march forward, shrugging off return fire and blasting away, unless he can reach you, in which case he'll throttle or pummel you to death.

Warbots take all of this a step forward, between the "Heavy Infantry" of the Heavy Battle Bot, and a tank.  He sports even greater HP, up to 275 DR, loads of weapons, an extra attack, high speed and excellent senses. Its only real weakness is its unimaginative tactics.

Finally, we have the assassin-bot, which has low DR, superior HP (20), superior senses, superior stealth, and superior senses.  Unlike the other robots, he can engage in imaginative tactics, studying its prey, learning from them, and then ambushing them with its dangerous claws.

A typical robot army will likely send assassin-bots into the population, use them to infiltrate enemy ranks, or simply use them as recon/ambush parties.  Once actual battle is joined, they'll simply march lines of battle bots, with the occasional heavy bot and war-bot as additional support.