HT is probably the most boring, overlooked stats of the GURPS 4. Most characters I’ve seen hover between 11 or 12, rarely lower than 10 and rarely higher than 13. Sometimes, a player will ponder what they might be able to do with an HT-focused character, but such characters seldom go anywhere (though I had pretty good success with such characters in games that used The Last Gasp).
To me, HT is the capacity to carry on despite adversity, and also represents physical resource management and efficiency. The iconic image of a high HT hero is one bleeding from a dozen wounds while his enemies stand about him, panting in exhaustion. “I could do this all day,” the hero says. Wolverine might be the ultimate incarnation of a high HT hero: he fights tirelessly, and is often the last left standing after the X-men have been defeated. He can afford to simply outlast his opponents.
Given how cool that sounds, why doesn’t HT do better? The first reason is that HT is largely a reactive stat. I can explain the strategy of the other three stats. For example, in combat, a high ST character will rely on their sheer mass and power to slam through opponents, destroy their armor and withstand retaliation. A high DX character will strike rapidly and with precision, while deftly evading attacks. A high IQ character will understand the battlefield, intuit his enemy’s weaknesses (both physical and psychological), manipulate his foes, coordinate with allies, and make use of esoteric abilities. But a high HT character will outlast his opponents, I guess. We do need HT: it keeps us upright if we take damage, and if the GM pulls out something like disease or a power that affects the body, having at least a reasonable HT keeps us alive in the worst case. But why would one have an HT of 20? We can leverage extreme stats in other cases, but it’s rare we’ll need an HT of 20, or even notice it: most rolls that an HT 20 would succeed at, an HT 14 roll would succeed at too, and the higher we go, the rarer those circumstances become, and thus the less utility we get out of our points, and since we cannot leverage our HT to force a situation where our high HT is necessary, there’s little advantage to it.
Your heroes would die tired — Nerd Explains
The second problem is similar to the problem we see with DX. When we play our games of make believe, we imagine our fictional heroes as infallible. When we describe the intention of the character (“As the executioner swings his axe, I shoot it from his hands with my bow and arrow!”), we expect and want it to succeed. Any failed roll is, of course, unwelcome, but failed DX rolls seem especially frustrating, because while it’s easy to imagine someone being too weak to do something, or too ignorant to know something, the limits of physical precision and how those relate to our specific character seem difficult to conceptualize. HT layers another “reality check” limitation over the top of it: does your character even have the resources to perform this feat? When we describe our character deftly parrying and dodging attacks and then swinging their sword, do we ponder how tired each swing will make them? Do we want to bean count the total number of swings they have and husband them carefully? Many groups don’t. Even when I have the best of intentions, when I know all of this, I still forget to apply the FP costs for battle, and even when I do remember FP costs for things, I rarely remember to stack events in front of one another with sufficient alacrity to force my players to worry about their fatigue. The D&D trick of “take a long rest between each encounter” works in GURPS too.
So, we run into a problem where GMs often forget to impose the very problems HT was designed to resolve. DX and IQ are also, to some extent, reactive, but every game has people swinging swords at characters, or trying to intimidate one another, but things like disease and poison prove rarer, if we’re making HT checks to stay alive, we’re doing something very wrong, and if the GM never remembers to apply FP penalties for various things, then the value of HT evaporates. Even if the GM remembers these things, it’s rare that the character with HT 20 is gaining 80 points of benefit over the character with HT 12. That higher HT isn’t helping him win fights over or overcome other obstacles unless they are “Hike/run across long distances” or “Charge into a cloud of ultra-tech nerve gas” and most people can come up with other solutions to those problems (“I’ll take a car” or “I’ll wear a gasmask”), or since nobody else has the trait at that level, the character is slowed down to remain with the rest.
This is one of the reasons you’ll hear me sing the praises of the Last Gasp. It makes the bean counting of fatigue extremely present. Sure it “adds” bean counting, but that bean counting as always there, it just makes it easier to remember it because, like dodge rolls and damage rolls, it’s happening every turn of the fight. It also makes HT more directly relevant to fatigue over long battles. Taken together, it becomes much more obvious what an HT 20 character can do that an HT 12 character can do: not just last longer in the fight, but make better use of “less efficient” actions thanks to their abundant resources. A high ST character with lots of ST can afford to make risky actions without worrying as much about a failed defense roll, while a high DX character can make risky attacks with a high probability of success that other characters can’t, while a high HT character can make expensive, exhausting attacks for longer than other characters, pressing exhausted opponents and leveraging their exhaustion to defeat them, and because FP doesn’t come back nearly as fast as in default GURPS, players feel the long term costs of FP much more keenly.
Still, it leaves us in a pickle as what to do with HT for cyborgs in Psi-Wars. Unless/until Psi-Wars pivots to Mission X, I’m stuck with the standard fatigue system, even if I often implement the Last Gasp in my private games.
Continue reading “Limits of the Human Form: HT”
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