The Smuggler Template Revisited

The New Smuggler Template (This will be its final home, so any new revisions will happen here)

Every month, my Patrons get to vote on a template to revisit and update to integrate them into the setting and any rule-changed I've made.  This month, they voted on the Frontier Marshal, of all things, until the Smuggler snuck in and snatched the win out from under him.  Seems about right, if you ask me.

Nonetheless, I find it interesting that the Frontier Marshal and the Smuggler both did so well (as did the Bounty Hunter) given that they're both Rim templates, after the Diplomat won so handily.  I suspect it's because seeing how the Diplomat integrated into the setting was an eye-opener for a lot of my patrons, and now they're curious how the Rim templates will work.

Alas, they won't be as tightly bound as the "Core" Templates.  The point of the "Core" templates is that they represent templates that work for a powerful organization in the setting.  They are the soldiers of the Empire, the diplomats of the Alliance, the spies of the Cybernetic Union.  The "Rim" templates, by contrast, represent the underbelly of the criminal underworld of the Galaxy.  As such, they are inherently more generic than "Core" templates.  Consider, for a moment, how different a human smuggler would be from a Ranathim smuggler.  Both of them have fast ships, loose morals, and an itchy trigger finger.  Thus, there's no real need to tie them to a specific entity.  There's no such thing as an "Imperial" smuggler who is different from an "Alliance" smuggler.

Or... is that so?  As I thought more about the Frontier Marshal, back when I thought he'd win, I found that I could come up with multiple different variants.  And then, when the smuggler won, I found I could come up with variants for that one too.  These variants need to represent "must have" guides for trying to build specific, weird examples, like Duty or Rank or some unusual  benefits from a particular odd race, as well as pointers to interesting ideas someone might not have had before, while still maintaining the option to "create your own."

It seems I had quite a bit to revise after all!

Space Combat Techniques for Action Vehicular Combat

The ship styles need another look given the action vehicular combat update.
-Christopher Almquist

In previous iterations of Psi-Wars, I had used the default GURPS Spaceships system. When it came to differentiating fighter aces, officers and smugglers more finely with techniques, I had only to to use the techniques defined in GURPS Spaceships 4, and perhaps add a couple of my own. With the switch to the Chase rules, this became more complicated, as I had to define my own techniques, as Patron Christoper Almquist has tirelessly pointed out.

But do I even need techniques? I asked myself that question every time Chris pointed out its absence. On the one hand, I strongly believe that a group should all be able to operate as the same template and “feel different,” or the template is too narrow. A classic way to do that with, for example, Fighter Aces is to add techniques, in the same way that adding techniques to Space Knights helps differentiate their force sword abilities.

On the other hand, space doesn’t come up that much. How much it comes up will depend on the campaign: one might make it the center of their campaign, but that’s far from a sure thing. On a more planet-focused campaign, a fighter ace will twiddle their thumbs most of the time, while a smuggler usually at least has their underworld connections and their natural deception going for them. The more I encourage players to invest in space, the more likely they are to feel sidelined if space doesn’t come up. They can get around this by not playing space-based characters, but Psi-Wars, like most Space Opera, tends to zig and zag through settings, so I expect most campaigns will have fighter-based characters that get a chance to fly and fight sometimes.

(Incidentally, I’m not the only one to have this concern about fighter aces. SalsatheGeek played a fighter ace in Tinker Titan Rebel Spy intentionally, not just to see how they handled in space, but also planetside, and Patron Nemoricus has routinely recommended Wraith Squadron to me, precisely because it’s a series about fighter aces who double as commandos and spies).

So I left the question to my Patrons in a snap poll, to get a feeling for what they want. They voted, 2 to 1, for elaborate and detailed techniques, with the other third voting for simpler techniques. Nobody voted against techniques, or even shrugged at the question. So clearly the people who invest in Psi-Wars want techniques, and they don’t mind them being highly detailed.

I find myself balking at Space Combat Styles, though. I’ve had them before, more as a guide for myself, a way of thinking about fighters, and I think, broadly speaking, there’s still room in my design space for thinking about how fighters approach space combat in terms of styles. Imperial Fighters tend to operate differently than Alliance fighters, who operate differently from pirates, and strike pilots tend to operate differently from dogfighters. That said, I hesitate to formalize them in the form of styles. Once a game has a style and numerous power-ups, certain players will be tempted to invest heavily. This is the intent behind styles. If Kung Fu exists in a game, then this sort of player will want to master it, and perhaps a few additional side-styles, and then compare and contrast their style with others. This fits into force swordsmanship wonderfully, but if we add it to fighter aces, then, once again, we have characters who want to dump all of their points in space, when we want to encourage fighter aces and smugglers to at least think about generalization a little.

We can also handle “space combat styles” by building them into specific templates. Quick, what do you call a corvette pilot that emphasizes evasion, deception and speed over aggression and attack? That’s right, a smuggler. And the opposite? A pirate. This follows how GURPS Action 3: Furious Fists handles “styles,” by breaking up your martial artists into “Fast, Strong, Weapons and Ninja.” We still run into a problem with the Fighter Ace and the Officer, in that they legitimately have some unique approaches (the heroic, leadership-oriented Officer should feel different from the brutal, “nuke them all and let God sort it out” Officer) that can be broken up along sub-divisions, but this might be better handled by discussing lenses, rather than introducing complete styles.

Avoiding a deeper work into space combat styles also works well for a first revision. I need to come up with techniques for the new rules, and so twenty or so should be a good start (and I already have ideas for a few more). Given the appreciation my patrons have shown for more complex techniques, we can proliferate a bit past the five or so in the original Spaceships rules, and see how things go. This is not a “final decision,” nothing ever is when you take an iterative approach to game design, but I’ll definitely be watching this space to see if it can tolerate more complexity.

Psi-Wars: the Perils of Space

Back when I started Psi-Wars, I dismissed space as unnecessary to deal with, and I did this for a few reasons.  First, it adds a layer of complexity that I didn't think most people wanted to deal with; space is a very alien, very hostile environment not especially conducive to whizz-bang action unless you're deeply invested in it.  Second, most of my source material, which is primarily the "planetary romance" side of Space Opera, doesn't really deal with it.  Only once (The Last Jedi) have we seen a Star Wars character dealing with vacuum or microgravity in the context of a film while outside of a starship, and works like Barsoom or the Metabarons or Killjoys almost never puts their characters outside of a ship.  Action takes place on suspiciously earth-like planets.

But as the game has progressed, I've noticed that most of my readers assume space as part of the setting.  For them, space isn't necessarily just a means to get from one world to another, or a staging ground for dogfights.  It might be the site of adventure itself.  Characters might board a derelict space station to find evidence of a psychic experiment gone awry. Their dreadnought might suffer catastrophic destruction while in an asteroid belt.  And even when they spend all of their time bundled up in the confines of a ship, they still expect to see things like pulsars, asteroid belts, nebulae and black holes out there.

I had pondered this for awhile: how do I give the GM every thing he needs for a more space oriented campaign, and can I simplify the rules for handling space to the point where most characters aren't unduly punished for not spending a mint on handling "space" stuff, while still giving a "spacer" character an advantage over people who don't have it?

My Patrons voted for collation of the space rules.  I've already handled interstellar travel in several other posts, and I've collated it onto my wiki, but I also wanted to take the opportunity to discuss the rules for handling adventures in space itself, as well as unique terrain types you might encounter in space.  Please note that these are all deeply cinematic, suitable for ridiculous space opera, and not for realistic sci-fi.  I aim more for flavor and whiz-bang fun than for accurate astrophysics.

August Roadmap

Summer is almost finished. Here in the Netherlands, we just cracked some heat records in a mind-blowing heat-wave with temperatures I've not felt since a stint I spent in the Mojave Desert.  I managed to get a few things done, but I hadn't the time to really promote my blog or do much chatting, so if it seemed quiet, that's why.

If you missed it, I had promised to deliver:

• The Giant Action Vehicular Playtest
• Abstract Wealth for Psi-Wars
• The Diplomat Template

I delivered those and a disease design system for my Patrons.

Once again, I've had a vote, and it was... interesting!  For my general blogpost, my Patrons would like a look at the current state of my vehicles system.  Expect a patreon post (or two) and some additional discussion of GURPS Spaceships vs Vehicles and why some choices were made and what I would change.  GURPS Cabal Dust-Off came in a close second, so future polls my contain some occult options.  I've tried to keep away from those because I figure part of my appeal is that I'm one of the few GURPS blogs that doesn't talk about fantasy stuff and there's a lot of support for the occult and fantasy in GURPS right now and less support for sci-fi things, but man, I'm a devoted acolyte of Kenneth Hite and I've been building a library, so I could talk about it for quite a bit.

For Psi-Wars, my patrons voted for a deeper discussion of space rules in general, and it wasn't close so expect that as well.  It'll be a wiki post, but I'll update you on the blog when it happens.  For templates, Smuggler just squeaked past the early favorite of the Frontier Marshal.  So, expect to see the Smuggler on the wiki this month, and a post discussing what I changed and why I wrote it the way I did.

I found the vote for the templates very interesting, as it was completely different from the first vote (1st Vote: Frontier Marshal 2, Scavenger 1. Second Vote: Frontier Marshal 6, Scavenger 4). I'm not sure what changed.  Whims might have something to do with it, or what people are thinking about playing, but I notice more support in general for Rim characters after the Diplomat, and I suspect that's because people are interested in seeing how I handle Rim characters differently from Core characters.

I lost a patron (My wife, who was rearranging our finances and decided it wasn't worth the surcharge from Patreon for the amusement of wrecking some of my polls), but gained a new disciple.  I always love it when someone slides in for $1, and after a month or two, realizes "What the heck!" and ups their pledge.  It tells me I'm creating interesting content.  Views were also high last month, and have been trending high in general, but I must admit I don't pay much attention to them after that surge of bots wrecked all of my stats (why am I still on blogger instead of Wordpress?).

To my patrons: Thank you!  I have another surprise in store for you this month as a thank you.  And for my readers, thanks for being here though this rough patch, and I hope you enjoy this month's posts.

Notes on Revisiting Templates: the Diplomat

In an effort to revise and distill my rules on the Wiki, I asked my patreons which template they'd like me to revisit and you'll never guess what they chose... or you wouldn't if you hadn't just read the title, but I sure was surprised to see the Diplomat top the chart!

I see the average player of Psi-Wars as seeking an action-oriented character: a space knight, a bounty hunter, a smuggler, a commando.  Yet they chose for the most political, least action-oriented character they could. Why?  A few patrons chimed in on why, and it seems to boil down to:

• It's the closest we'll get to a "princess" class and some people really like princesses
• It's the most culturally bound template, which means working on it will necessarily require me digging into the culture of Psi-Wars.

This last is key.  I don't really have a problem with the Templates as they stand, for the most part.  I'm sure I could nitpick at them.  However, the old, Iteration 5 templates were generic. They were "a" space knight and "a" diplomat, and you can still play that way.  But Iteration 6 and 7 seek to build up a detailed, specific setting.  We've gone from the generic templates of GURPS Action and Monster Hunters to the more specific templates of GURPS Cabal, Transhuman Space and Banestorm.  I want to maintain the idea of fairly generic templates (a diplomat is a diplomat), but I'd like to be able to ground them in a specific culture of concept native to Psi-Wars.

To do this, I needed to dive into the cultures of Psi-Wars, at least a bit.  I'd like, at some point, to write down these cultures in more detail, more akin to the level of detail I've posted about Aristocratic Culture and Imperial Culture, as well as the Patreon Special on the Traders.  These are, of course, subject to change, and will likely be revisited once I do settle down and dig into the cultures of these various groups.  Of course, the Diplomat would only tackle a specific subset of those cultures: the things he needs to know to survive those cultures (language, how to avoid dangers) and ways of collecting reaction modifiers with the right sorts of people (the right social skills, connoisseur, current affairs, etc).

I also needed to double check the template itself, to see if any of the various changes I've made impact the Template itself.  Of course, I find I lose track of some of the more specific changes, so this might require another revisit once all the rules get collated, but I doubt it'll be much.

You can find the current state of the Diplomat Template here on the wiki.

Patreon Content: The Plague Creation System

A second assignment for Orphans of the Stars was to create and integrate biotech into his setting.  One particular requirement was a "viral weaponry" system, and from this, the Plague Creation system was born.  This document uses three basic disease templates, expands them with a variety of special effects and a system of four symptom "themes" to guide you through the process of creating a novel new disease, whether as the GM creating something for his fantasy setting, or a viral genologist pondering how best to destroy the world.

By special request from Patron Jason Crowell, I've gone ahead and released this as a patreon special for all $1 patrons.  You can get it here.

The Ridiculously Huge Action Vehicular Playtest Part III - The Aftermath

This is the finale of the Three Part playtest of the Action Vehicular Combat series.  See yesterday's post for the bulk of the actual "battle," and the day prior for additional context.  This mostly consists of a retrospective on what worked, what I had to change, and what I missed out on playtesting.