Template Highlight: the Bounty Hunter

So, I had a poll running on Patreon about which template you guys would like me to wikify next, with a focus on "Rim" templates, though this highlighted to me just how few of the original Rim templates I have left to wikify!  In any case, you guys let me off the hook and chose Bounty Hunter, which was especially easy because it's already done.

What will follow will be a discussion of how the Bounty Hunter template has evolved and what I've added to it. This will kick off "the month of the Bounty Hunter," because one of the reasons I've been so quiet lately is I've been building up material on the Bounty Hunter.  It's still not completely done, but you go to campaign with the material you've written, so here we are!  I have plenty of material to show, so I think we'll be busy for awhile!  But if you'd like to skip all that and just look at the template, here it is:

The Bounty Hunter.

The GURPS PDF Kickstarter Completes Today

The GURPS PDF Challenge Kickstarter ends today. If you're at all interested in getting those 12 PDFs for $3 and you have not already pledged, this is your last chance to do so.

With that out of the way, especially given that a lot of you will see this after the fact, let's do what I enjoy most, and dive into the numbers!

On the "Erasing" of the Sequel Trilogy

I like to pay attention to corporate boardroom drama, because I find management successes and failures to be profoundly interesting, likely because I'm a computer programmer by trade, and "automating procedures" is what I do, and studying how companies fail or succeed at these things are interesting.  So one of my side hobbies has been tracking the management, and mismanagement, or Star Wars since Disney bought it.  I'm more interested in the tales of woe from behind the scenes (such as the stories behind why nearly every director for a Star Wars film has been fired before completion, leading to often expensive reshoots and reworks), and it's not just Star Wars that interests me, but studying up on the stories behind (for example) the Snyder Cut has been very interesting to me as well.

This means I sometimes delve into the rumor-monger parts of Youtube, as that's where you'll get these stories, as what comes out in official memoirs is always carefully sanitized.  My preferred channel here is Midnight's Edge, as they tend to be fairly professional and look into the parts I'm most interested in, which is the management stories themselves.  There are others, such as Doomcock above, who prefer to focus more on bashing on what they perceive as failures of the franchise, and condemning what they feel are bad narrative choices or "abusing the audience." To be clear, I think that's happened, and I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about the creator/audience interactions on platforms like twitter, and how they go sour, and how the platform itself interferes with those discussions, but that's not the core topic that interests me.

However, recently, something has happened that I find remarkable.  Doomcock, who reports rumors, that he claims to get from inside sources have suggested that Disney might be preparing to "erase the sequel trilogy from canon."  Midnight's edge hears similar rumblings, but they report it in a more nuanced way.  This is not remarkable, as rumor outlets like this are always reporting the demise of their hated foe, Kathleen Kennedy. What is remarkable is how much traction it's getting, when "mainstream" Star Wars commentators, like trades or Eckhart's Ladder, start responding to these rumors, and not to "their own sources" but effectively just to Doomcock's report.  That is, we're getting papers reporting on someone reporting on rumors.

So the first thing I want to say before I go further is to make sure it's clear what the state of this is: some guy who likes to talk crap about Disney's Star Wars discussed an unconfirmed rumor he heard from a source who may or may not be lying that Disney is considering erasing the Sequel trilogy, and people are talking about that guy.  There is nothing, nothing, confirmed about this.  I'll let you decide for yourself what this says about the state of modern journalism that it's getting picked up some widely.

Nonetheless, given that it's hip to talk about, and it touches on several themes important to why I do Psi-Wars, I thought I'd talk about it a bit myself, and what it says about audiences and how you can translate that to your own games.

Design Diary: the Akashic Form and Cosmic Kung Fu

Cosmic Kung Fu

When I wrote the Akashic Form, it was quite some time ago, near the beginning of the design of the Labyrinth, and it became obvious to me as I wrote it that it might change as a result of the designs of the Labyrinth, so I parked it while I worked on labyrinthine monsters. As the posts turned from days to months of writing I naturally lost track of my original thought process when writing them. I have some notes, but it seems I am missing the specific designs of the Labyrinthine Revelations techniques. Some people have asked for them, or expressed skepticism or concerns, and that’s fine (the reason to post these to a blog is to elicit feedback), but given how interesting they were to design, I thought it might be useful to you, dear reader, to see how it worked so you could do the same yourself, if you wanted (say, for a Wuxia campaign).

This is all an exercise in Modifying Existing Damage, from GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements, staring on page 9. I think most people are familiar with the idea of modifying unarmed damage, but you can modify armed damage too. The caveat here is that it only modifies the damage of one weapon, but it allows you to swap it out if you change primary weapon. I think the intention here isn’t to prevent people from using their modifiers with a variety of armed weapons, but to prevent the overhead of working out the specifics of a ton of weapons. That is, if you apply a modifier to a broadsword, you shouldn’t also apply it to a greatsword or a staff, because the point value would be different and, ugh, it’d be a whole thing. However, with force swords, we don’t have that problem. We know how much damage they do: 8d(5) burn. That’s it! We could make the argument, then, that characters who use these modifiers can’t deal more damage than 8d(5): no weapon master bonus, no extra effort, no power blow. But we can safely allow them to apply it across all such weapons, especially given how we’ll limit it.

So, now we need to calculate the damage: 8d (5) burn is 60 points, ignoring the melee modifiers, which Power-Ups tells us to do. All we’re worried about is the base damage. Now we can work with our modifiers.

Okay, so can we apply cosmic modifiers? Yes we can! We’re not allowed to apply “penetration modifiers” other than (among others) Cosmic. Thus, we’re allowed to buy Cosmic Modifiers. And this makes sense. In the previous section on Cosmic modifiers, they talk about indefensible attacks vs cosmic defenses! I can buy an indefensible, innate attack that ignores DR. Why could I not do the same with the weapon I wield?

So, given that, we can look at the modifiers. We apply our particular modifiers to the cost of the weapon and take the value that comes out and apply it as our advantage cost. We can also apply limitations, but if the intention is to only apply to the enhancement, then we apply it to the enhancement only. If we did something like “Cosmic +50%; Limited Uses Once per day -40%”, then you need to follow the rules on page 10 of GURPS Power-Ups 4: technically, the limitation should be divided by 5 and applies to all attacks. That is, if you take this, then you can only attack ever with a force sword once per session. What we want instead is this idea of a mode, attacking in a particular way. Thus, what we actually want is a limitation to an enhancement: Cosmic (Limited Uses Once per day -40%) +30%.”

Labyrinthine Revelation of Crowns

So, here we have a fairly straightforward version of the +300% version of cosmic, making an attack indefensible. It requires an All-Out Attack (-25%) and it has a limited impact against non-Maradonian styles (We’ll call this a nuisance effect at -10%; this is somewhat arbitrary but we could argue that this only works against maradonian styles and apply an Aspect at -20%, and in this case, we halve it because you can sort of use it against non-Maradonian styles). This gives us a -35% to the +300%, which gives us a total of (about) +200%. 200% of 60 is 180, but we ignore the original 60, and it drops to 120. We should further note that innate attacks in Psi-Wars are 1/3 the cost, so this drops to 40, and then we make it cost an impulse point, which drops it to 8.

We can make further arguments to lower it further. Technically the advantage we’re buying is a “permanent” one. It’s like buying flight or invisibility: “my attacks always enjoy this bonus,” is what we’re saying, which means we need to limit the maximum duration, which will be -75% to -80%, which drops us down to a minimum -80%, and means all additional modifiers are pointless, which is less fun and it’ll disrupt some mechanical parallels I’d like to draw. It also drops the advantage cost to 2.5 points. If you didn’t like 8 points, you really won’t like 2.5. If you go above and beyond the -80% to make sure they can “be different,” you’re looking at a perk.

So what value is fair? Should it be 1 point? 3 points? 8 points? These all feel low, especially given the cosmic defenses we’ll see in a bit. I think offense should cost more than defense. So I think I originally doubled it in price, but perhaps 10 points is fairer.

Labyrinthine Revelation of Swords

This is the same as the above, except we’re changing the 150% armor modifier to a 300% armor modifier for a net increase of +150%. We’ll add a +50% to allow it to bypass limitations like Unkillable, and we’re at +200%. That means it costs the same as Labyrinthine Revelation of Crowns, which makes it conveneint.

Labyrinthine Revelation of Staves

This one is different. Here’s we’re looking at Cosmic Active Defenses. This is intend for parrying with the force sword or blocking with the shield. This naturally varies based on the skill of the user, but we can pick a “sufficiently high” value, such as skill 20. This makes the base cost of block 25 points, and the base cost of parry 25 points. We’re adding a +50% modifier, so +50% to both comes out to 25 points; if we divide that by 5, we get 5 points.

Is that fair? It seems to be. Characters could go higher, but they’re not going to double that value. We’re quibbling over a value that will be between 4 and 8 (at the extreme high end of skill 30 in both). So I think 5 is probably a nice, pentaphilic value. We could go with 10, but that’s definitely overcharging.

Note that it talks about “enhancing Enhanced Defense advantages,” but this is only if you’re actually basing your numbers on your actual skill. If you pay close attention, the cost of the advantage is priced as though you bought it up from 3 using enhanced defense alone, so our values should be fine.
Given the lack of utility in 90% of cases with a cosmic parry, I’ve also tossed on a “halve defense penalties” benefit for free.

Labyrinthine Revelation of Hearts

This one is different. Here’s we’re looking at Cosmic Active Defenses. We’ll look at Dodge, and we need to determine the Dodge of the target, because that will determine the core cost. We don’t know what that is, of course, and we’re trying to create a static advantage, so it might be enough to take “a sufficiently high value.” If we want to price it like Staves above, for 5 points, we’re looking at a Basic Speed of ~6.5, which is a little on the high side for a starting character, but not much. If we went with a 10 point advantage, that would cover up to ~13.25, which is excessive. I can’t imagine someone going higher than a Basic Speed of 10, maybe 11. If we’re pentaphilic, 5 seems closer to right than 10, which is definitely overpriced. You’re getting a bit of a deal here at 5, but I think it’s fair and, more importantly, pentaphilic and similar in value to

Given the lack of utility in 90% of cases with a cosmic dodge, I’ve also tossed on a “halve defense penalties” benefit for free. Perhaps I should ditch that to bring its cost “more in line” but the utility of spending 5 character points for the privilege of spending 1 character point for the privilege of dodging the Revelation of Crowns seems excessive to me, so I’ll keep the bonus.

Disappeared Signature Moves

One question I got was "why did you remove the flavorful moves from the original?" One of the problems I face with these updates is that most of the signature moves from the previous iterations don't cost anything. They're just things people with the style often do.  I don't think that's a bad idea at all; it's a perfectly reasonable approach, but if you're shooting at players spending 5 points to get "a kung fu trick," you need to come up with something.

Accept Fate: This was functionally an "Evaluate while using Combat Sense," which we've folded into the new Accept Fate.  It didn't do anything except stand there and look at your foe before either.

Mirror Fate: This allowed you to turn the natural defensiveness of the technique into an attack. This is still a pretty valid approach, though this runs afoul of the fact that Ripostes don't cost anything.  We could create a new technique, of course, but then what are we buying off?  The point of this signature move was to collect a lot of defensive bonuses and then turn them into an offensive bonus.  However, the new version of Accept Fate does that anyway, making this redundant.

Challenge Fate: This was a Stop Hit, which is the signature trick of the Serene Form.  We could use it here too, but I see no reason to step on the toes of the Serene Form.

Open the Third Eye: So, in the original Akashic Form, I borrowed heavily from Third Eye Fighting, which introduced this variation of Combat-Sense-As-Enhanced-Time-Sense, and that's what this move handled.  However, once again, perfect reactions (which is what this gives) is the bailiwick of the Serene Form, and it already has a move that gives Enhanced Time Sense. It's also not really a "move" as you don't really do much.

So most of the Akashic Form moves either did nothing that players could spend their points on, or were already handled by the Serene Form.  We could ditch the Serene Form in favor of the Akashic Form, but I feel like the Serene Form fits the motiffs of the Templars better than the Akashics and the new model better suits the idea of the Akashic Knight as a super-Maradonian who listens closely to fate.

The Akashic Form

Ages ago, I finished transcribing all the Force Sword forms over to the Wiki. I dusted off my hands, patted myself on the back and announced I was done.  At which point, my Psi-Wars faithful said:

What about the Akashic Form?

Sigh.

Right, I had forgotten that one.  One especially faithful Psi-Wars faithful, calmquist, tried his own hand at it, creating his own updated power-ups.  They were not that great, though, and when I finally settled down to take a look at his version, and the original version, I quickly saw why: it's not a good martial art; there's just not much you can do with it.  Or, better, it's been made obsolete by the Serene Form.

The central concept of the Akashic Form (and Three-Eye Fighting, from which it draws many of its concepts) is the integration of precognition and Combat Sense into force swordsmanship. It's a nice concept, but that niche has been better filled by the Serene Form.

• Want to use your precognition to better defend? Serene form does that.
• Want to use your precognition to draw and attack the instant before your opponent does? Serene form does that.
• Want to fight blind, relying on your psychic sense? Serene form does that.

The result is necessarily that the Akashic Form as written looks like an inferior copy of the Serene Form that requires you to be psychic while Serene Form doesn't.

Thus, I had to largely scrap most of the original concept and shift to a different focus, not on what the Akashic Form had been, but what it was evolving into. I noticed that it's original description had been about "layering over" Maradonian styles, and that became my central focus for design.  It became a utility style, a bit like the Simple Form, where its moves and exercises folded the religious practices and insights of the Akashic Order into whatever Maradonian form you already had.  This turned it into a "Super-form," a higher-level technique that characters might aspire to, rather than a basic style one might start the game with (though that's an option too).

As I designed the Labyrinth, I tried to add techniques and concepts for defeating creatures of the Labyrinth into the style.  I may revisit it to further update them, to make Akashic Knights into natural "Labyrinth Hunters" as that's their obvious domain.

Thoughts on Summons

"How do you handle summons without taking away player agency" --Shinanoki, paraphrased

A long, long time ago, while I was busy with other things, one of my patrons posed this question in my discord. It was so long ago, in fact, that I certainly forgot exactly what he asked, and I might even have the identity of the questioner wrong.  I think the idea was just to spitball some ideas with the community, but nonetheless it caught my eye and it was something I wanted to discuss, but I never had time... until now!

Is Kickstarter the Future of GURPS?

"The part that annoys me is that, given how successful this Kickstarter has been, they're probably going to use the same model for future projects." --A Patron

I promise, I'll get back to Psi-Wars soon. I've build quite a back-log of mostly-finished material, and I took next week off.  Just permit me more armchair-publisher analysis, as I enjoy it.

So when I first started talking about my excitement for this, I saw some pushback, some disgruntled complaining, and I think the comment above captures the fear of these Kickstarter-dissidents.  So I thought I'd talk about my thoughts as to whether or not we'll be seeing more of this sort of campaign and why.  Note that I'm not a publisher, I don't have any contacts in the market (I mean, sometimes Douglas Cole talks to me, but hell, he'll probably talk to you too), all I know is what I read from actual publishers, publicly available material that you can read too, and how I see the market moving, and I can only speculate as to why.  So that's all this is: me speculating.

Yeah, I think this sort of project is the future of GURPS.  If you don't like Kickstarter, you don't need to worry about it, though, other than the fact that you're going to get blasted with hype about twice a year, as that's the point of doing it this way.

Okay, so let's go back in time.  It's the 90s.  All the girls either wear grunge or look like Jennifer Anniston.  Starbucks isn't a thing yet.  Your FLGS is still up. You step in, the bell rings, the lady or the neckbeard behind the counter smiles at you, or glares at you like you interrupted his private meditation, whatever.  It smells of acryllic paints and old books.  Why are you here? To get your preorder.

Back in ye olde days,  we had the three tier model (comics still have it, but I predict COVID and the collapse of Diamond has probably killed it; it's certainly killed Diamond's monopoly on comic distribution). The publisher would write a book, get art, toss it all together, decide how many to print (1,000? 5,000? 10,000? 50,000?) and then send the results to the distributor, who would shop it around to stores, like your FLGS.  But there's a catch here, because the tax man will come for your inventory.  If you print 50,000 copies and send off 5,000 to the distributor, and you're sitting on 45,000 and you give them a price of $20, then you have $9,000,000 worth of inventory that you're sitting on.  It interests the tax man not at all that you didn't even sell the full 5,000 and those most of those books, perhaps even all of them, are worthless. You still have to pay taxes on them.  So, it's better to only print what you know will sell, and pulp any excesses (Yeah, that's terrible; I think it's a horrible law).

So, publishers have been looking for forever for a way to gauge how much interest there actually is.  So you announce your product in advance, perhaps at a convention. You see what the responses are. You have, perhaps, some prototypes to show off. Is your booth flooded? Or is there no interest?  But you can also work closely with retailers, or your distributor will, and get a sense of how many copies each shop thinks it can sell.  And one way to do that, after announcing it, is to suggest that shops could try to ask people if they want them to order them a copy in advance, to pre-order it.

We don't live in that era anymore.  You can't pulp PDFs, and if the tax man comes by and asks how many copies you have, you can say "Well, technically one." He can't even tax PODs that way.  So we've managed to escape the tyranny of the tax man here: we can effectively have an infinite number of copies of our product and pulp none of them, because we don't have to pay for what is not yet real.  We only pay at the moment of transaction (which, frankly, is how it should have always been). BUT the pre-order cycle did something else, something emergent: it drove sales.

By going to the convention and hawking your wares, by talking up your game, by getting stores to talk it up, people knew about it and decided for themselves if it interested them.  And the truth is, most of this stuff interests us.  There's more out there that we like than we can afford, so we only buy what we're focused on.  Pre-order hype focuses our attention and gets us to buy what we might have missed. You don't need pre-orders to know how many PODs or PDFs "to print," but you still need it to drive sales.

This is how the industry works today.  The whole industry.  It's driven by cycles of Kickstarter boom and bust, and the long tail of its PDF distribution.

For example, I follow quite a few other RPGs: 7th Sea, Exalted, etc.  I only began to re-explore Exalted again rather recently, and you can just buy their PDFs or PODs on DTRPG, which is also true of 7th Sea.  And yet every book larger than a couple of pages is kickstarted.  Every one of them.  Now, ostensibly this is for printing, but given that you can buy PODs, this just isn't strictly necessary. What it does do is drive audience interest.  If there's an Exalted campaign, people go "OMG! Exalted is back?  Oh, it's the (splat)! I love the (splat)! I'll go fund for the ultra deluxe version, or eh, I'll just at least back it and track it."  They know it's alive.

Here's the problem with GURPS: GURPS has been alive for a long, long time, but I swear to you, outside of the SJGames forums and the Discord, most of the rest of the RPG world thought it was dead.  There was a lot of surprise about GURPS "coming back" in the form of Dungeon Fantasy.  They thought it was a new edition.  They thought it had been dead for a good 10 years.  The DFRPG was the first they had heard of it again for a long time.  Why? Because the rest of the market is on kickstarter, and GURPS is not.

Now GURPS is.

So here's what I predict, given the likely success of this project, for GURPS moving forward: I think we'll see more of a drive for this sort of kickstarter-hostage model.  I think we might also see some big GURPS books go on kickstarter too (frankly, Vehicles should be kickstarted.  I know SJGames is afraid of it, they think Vehicles is the most despised book they ever created, but it's also the most remembered book, a sort of exposure and market presence you can't pay for, and while the RPG market is pushing towards simpler and more streamlined, there's a counter-push for bigger and more complex.   Yes, it's got a more niche appeal, but marketed right as an aggressively complex work, SJGames can be both cheeky and appeal very strongly to the sort of people they appealed to in the first place).  But I think whatever comes out of these will end up on Warehouse 23 anyway.  They always do.  I highly doubt that if the Kickstarter fails to unlock Megadungeons that it'll never see the light of day: it exists. You'll just have to buy it on Warehouse 23 like all the rest of the peasants, instead of getting it "for free" with the glorious $3.

The point of these kickstarters are the hype and the campaign.  It's marketing.  They need to grab your attention to get you to buy them. If you're here, reading this, you probably already know GURPS, you don't need marketing.  I didn't.  But if GURPS is going to survive, it needs to grow.  You can't just introduce people to it in your FLGS because it doesn't exist anymore. With COVID, you can't even demo it at conventions.  You have to appear to be alive and vibrant and you have to get it in front of people, and you do that with a kickstarter.

Just go look at the numbers!  There's a level for getting the 12-ish PDFs and the basic set.  Just, explicitly, the basic set.  As of this writing, it has 44 backers.  That's forty four people who didn't own GURPS and now will, because of this kickstarter.  And I've seen comments asking if you can buy the basic set with the $99 level. So how many GURPS noobs are actually buying in at other levels?  The last I checked before the kickstarter launched it had ~500 followers.  It has 1500 backers now.  That means there were 500 die-hard "we check the Illuminator or the Facebook group and knew about this already" fans, the sort that would dutifully go to your shop and buy your new PDF when you mentioned it on those places.  This has three times as many backers, and isn't even done yet.  Kickstarter has vastly more reach than Warehouse 23 does.  So, yes, this will be the future of SJGames, I think.  Just like it's the future of just about every other RPG company, and increasingly indie comics and indie computer games.

"Oh no, I don't like that, I don't want to be involved in that." I think you're safe.  Like I said, I can't imagine they won't put these up for sale on Warehouse 23 when all is said and done.  And if you're doing it twice a year, that's 24 PDFs a year, which is more PDFs than we got from SJGames during the better years during the heyday of Warehouse 23 (back when it was e23. Oh, those were the days).  Of course, you're better off buying them via this $3 deal, because $6 for all the PDFs SJGames produces in a year is a steal and it helps people out, which means your wallet is better off following the boom and bust of Kickstarter, and I can see where that puts one in a bind, because if you just ignore the hoopla, you miss out on savings. I can't help you there.  I can understand the frustration.  The best I can suggest is drop $3 on the project and then go dark for the next couple of weeks, collect whatever pops out, and then buy the ones you actually wanted, if they didn't get kickstarted.  If you find that the ones you want regularly aren't getting reached (like if all you want is Megadungeons and it doesn't drop, and that seems to keep happening) then you can safely ignore the kickstarters.