Musings on Defenses in Psi-Wars

It’s wiki week and the Backers of spoken. It’s gonna be martial arts. Because all I do is martial arts. To be fair, though, they’re pretty popular, and they do a lot to highlight how the setting works, or how fighters might interact. Also, I keep thinking of new ones, a lot of which are mostly created for a single character, and then someone in a game asks to learn it, and I wonder if I should publish a finished version and then I dread the degree of writing it takes (I get why GURPS Martial Arts are originally written that way, because a list of stats is way easier to write than flavor and deep tactical discussion and structure, even if the latter is way more rewarding).

I offered a martial arts update on the wiki because there’s been a lot of discussion of a few specific martial arts and probably because I’ve hinted at my half-finished Combat Breakpoints article from ages ago. Mostly, I think the martial arts are fine as written, but there’s a few niggling things I’d like to fix (so if you’re reading this and you have a complaint or question about a martial art, now is the time to bring it up, because it will have my focus this week). But on top of rewriting some of Maelstrom Form and Fell Form, I’d also like to take this opportunity to start introducing a few concepts I’ve been toying with, and these are the point of today’s article.

Mighty of Thew 2: The Naked Barbarian

My last post was merely a personal musings on how to make ST more relevant in Psi-Wars. As usual, I made some mistakes (that’s why these posts are useful), and someone pointed out a core mistake in my thinking. I’m not actually worried about ST in Psi-Wars. I’m worried about something else.

It is that leveraging [ST] as GURPS expects you to doesn’t work well with its narrative niches… [GURPS] knows that encumbrance capacity is really valuable. The grounding in realism means that gear can accomplish a lot, especially in an ultratech game. And the looseness around wealth means that its not difficult to fully leverage that capacity without paying for other traits with things like “well, you picked up the sweet customized sniper blaster rifle from the enemy I sent to kill you. Of course you can keep it without paying for its Innate Attack Gadget equivalent cost or something, your character would simply be able to keep it”

This means that given gurps’s defensive approach to trait pricing it will demand that you pay for the benefit you could get from it. But when you imaging a swole character, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a scantily clad 1980s barbarian or something

Shinanoki

I knew this. As soon as he said it, I knew it. The Mug, the strange, draconic alien race from beyond the galaxy, is all about this. They are ST 20, and they leverage that ST to the hilt with extremely heavy armor and extremely powerful weapons. They’re lower tech, to keep them remotely balanced, but I’ve playtested one or two, and the sheer firepower they can leverage is frankly embarrassing. ST is valuable in an ultra-tech setting, especially if you remove power-armor (and even then, high ST characters still bump their maximum ST up quite a bit). That’s not the problem.

The problem is the naked barbarian, and the comic-book-super in an ultra-tech setting. ST 20 is absolutely worth its cost if you’ve got an industrial base geared towards it. It’s not worth building an ST 50 character who intends to walk around naked and use his fists and or use a special sword that’s just heavy enough so that the damage isn’t capped out at a lower value. The sort of feats supers pull off are very expensive, probably far too expensive for their value, especially in a Psi-Wars game.

I wanted to stop and ponder the specific question of the Naked Barbarian, as well as revisit a few other minor mistakes, and discuss one particular element that might level the playing field a bit between high ST and high DX characters.

Side Effect vs Affliction Part II: Should Psi-Wars make Afflictions Cheaper?

 So, my previous article on Side Effect provoked some interesting discussion.  There’s nuance that I missed, and people were kind enough not to call it out directly on the blog (though by all means!), but the broader point still stands: you can build Side-Effects into simple Innate Attacks for what often amounts to a cheaper and better Affliction than the Affliction advantage.  Malediction often does the same too: rather than take a bunch of levels of Affliction, you can take Malediction and take a bunch of levels of Talent or the controlling Attribute (Will, I believe) and get the equivalent to more Affliction.

So what? What am I going to do about it?  See, if we’re talking the broader context of GURPS, I’m mostly just tossing it in the general direction of the complaints box for if Kromm ever gets around to a 5th edition.  But with Psi-Wars, I’ve already adjusted costs.  Sure, I mutter about it and complain mightily about the complexity costs of adjusting everything, but I’ve done it.  So why not do it again?

The arguments for tend to go along these lines: Ultra-Tech weapons deal pretty hefty damage for cheap, which reduces the utility of buying that damage as an advantage, thus the cost should be lowered.  By the same token, Ultra-Tech weapons inflict afflictions for cheap, which reduces the utility of Afflictions, thus their cost should also be lowered. If you can inflict Agony on someone with a cheap neurolash baton, why should Agony still be full price as an affliction?

The counter-arguments tend to go like this: changing afflictions means people have to know the specifics of your new rules (but that’s already true for other elements); you’d have to reprice tons of traits in Psionic Powers (but we already to that!); and you lose compatibility with RAW (but at this point, Iteration 6+ Psi-Wars has the same relationship with GURPS that the DFRPG or other “powered by GURPS” works have, which is that they use those rules, but aren’t afraid to adjust them).  However, the most compelling argument against that I can think of is that there are weird edge cases where afflictions can do things that ultra-tech cannot, like resurrect people, give them cool powers, take psychic powers away, etc.  What do you do with those weirdly specific edge cases?  For example, Neutralize seems priced around Affliction, as a broadly capable Affliction that removes whatever power the target has.  If I reprice Affliction, should I reprice Neutralize? Where does it end?

I don’t really have a good answer there.  But I would like to explore what a fair price for Affliction would be if I followed the logic of repricing it.

An Affliction vs Side-Effect Baseline

One of the things I failed to notice is that Side-Effect “cannot be combined with other penetration modifiers” with one important exception, which struck me as odd at first, but I think I understand the logic.  The problem isn’t that Side Effects aren’t allowed to penetrate armor, it’s that most of the other penetration modifiers imitate what Side Effect is doing.  In a sense, Side Effect is a penetration modifier where you’re mode of penetration is SHEER DAMAGE.

The one exception is Armor Divisor.  It’s up in the air if it’s fair to allow Cosmic (Ignores DR), but I think it’s fair game, so we’re going to go with that.  But I want to contrast it with Malediction.  Malediction allows you to ignore DR, sure, but what you’re actually doing is replacing DR with a Will Contest.  Your opponent can still defend, they just do so differently.  If we made a Side-Effect malediction, you’d double up on that: you’d roll Will vs HT to defeat their defenses and inflict the damage on them, and then roll again to see if they resisted the Side Effect.  That doesn’t strike me as “unbalanced” but it’s pretty clunky.

Even so, we can work around this limitation in some ways.  This raises the price of Side-Effect, but that might help give us a sense of what a balanced version of this trait might look like.

Baseline 1: Neurolash Batons

This is a pretty straightforward one.  Psi-Wars uses Neurolash Batons, but has changed them in pretty much the same way I’d want to change most of my afflictions.  That is, I’ve made it so Neurolash Batons inflict some fatigue damage, and have the possibility of stunning or afflicting the struck target.  Thus, instead of it resulting in an all-or-nothing daze, numerous strikes with a neurolash baton becomes exhausing and potentially damaging (“Stop it!” she screamed “You’re killing him!”).  I wouldn’t mind if the Reaving Hand or Mental Blow worked the same way.

The default version of the Neurolash Baton is an Affliction-5 with an armor divisor of 2.  If we bought this as an advantage, it could look like this:

• Affliction 6 (Stunning; Armor Divisor 2, +50%; Melee, 1 -25%;) [75]

That’s pretty steep, and it’s obviously going to be a problem. In Psi-Wars, it would look more like this (setting aside a little nuance for the sake of simplicity):

• Innate Attack 1d fatigue (Armor Divisor 2 +50%; Side Effect, Stunning +50%; Melee, 1 -25%) [18]

The latter is obviously much cheaper. But this might be an artifact of the absurd costs of multiple levels of Affliction. The sensible rule that everyone seems to agree is a good idea is 10 points for level 1, +3 per level thereafter.  In this model, the first power is:

• Affliction +5 (Stunning; Armor Divisor 2, +50%; Melee, 1 -25%;) [32]

That’s much less crazy, but it’s still twice as expensive as the the Innate Attack.  Is that fair? I’m not sure. Let’s carefully explore the differences between the two. The standard version applies a -5 to your HT, but DR will slow it down. With about 10+ DR, you’re pretty safe.  Against an HT 10 person, they will resist the effect (with no DR) 5% of the time. The Psi-Wars one inflicts 3-4 fatigue damage; about 8 DR would be enough to stop it on average. It’ll apply a -1 to -2 HT penalty, which means an HT 10 target with no DR will  resist the effect about 25% of the time. So, as an affliction, it’s about 5 times as effective at stunning the target, but the Psi-Wars one balances this out by dealing a few points of fatigue damage. I think you could make the argument that Affliction is still overpriced, but the 3/additional level is certainly fairer than the 10/level.

But this doesn’t actually solve our core problem which is is it fair in Psi-Wars, because Psi-Wars divides the cost of the innate attack by 3, to pay for a “free” armor divisor 5.  So our updated versions look like this:

• Affliction +5 (Stunning; Armor Divisor 5, +150%; Melee, 1 -25%;) [57]
• Innate Attack 1d fatigue (Armor Divisor 5 +150%; Side Effect, Stunning +50%; Melee, 1 -25%) [10]

So, the reduced cost the innate attack is really making a difference here.  If we divided the Affliction by 3, we’d be looking at about 19 points, which brings it back to the same ratio as with our default versions above.  This seems to indicate that, yes, Afflictions should get a reduced cost, at least in certain specific cases.

Baseline 2: Mental Blow vs Mental Stab

Neurolash batons aren’t especially pertinent, as characters won’t generally be using them directly as powers (though robots sometimes have them built that way, but I’m still not sure they’re not better off with a weapon mount).  But what about something like Mental Blow? That’s a pretty classic example of an Affliction a player would take as an advantage.  It also seems one that would be interesting to add a fatigue cost on, so that if someone resists repeated mental blow attacks, it might still exhaust them.  

The problem is, however, that mental blow is a malediction and that makes it much trickier to turn a side-effect into, since Malediction’s aren’t allowed as they’re a penetration modifier.  We can ignore that, but the logic seems more-or-less sound enough: don’t roll Will to work out if they’ve been hit with the fatigue damage, then HT to see if they’ve been hit with the side effect.  But on the other hand, I think you’ll see that it’s pretty easy to work around this, so I’m not sure why this is a rule.

So, if we make a simplified Mental Blow, it looks something like this:

• Affliction 1 (Malediction +100%) [20]

If we trim out the various elements that make mental blow “feel like” mental blow and focus on the pure mechanics of it, that’s it: a stunning malediction.  Note that it doesn’t use multiple levels of Affliction; nothing in Psionics does, and that’s the real legacy of the broken cost of Affliction: everyone uses workarounds.

So what are our options to build the same effect a different way?  Well, we could just try to blast the target with as much fatigue as possible. Now, I should note that you really need a lethal amount of fatigue to knock someone out, but 10 or so fatigue is enough to seriously weaken anyone.  So it might look something like this:

• Fatiguing Attack 3d (Malediction +100%) [60]

This is not how Mental Stab works, of course, but if we’re trying to figure out how best to simulate the effect on as few modifiers as possible, this is pretty close.  This deals an average of 10 fatigue damage in an attack, and it’s three times the cost of our Affliction.  If we use Psi-Wars pricing, they come to about the same. This might be a bad parallel though: this is guaranteed to knock you unconscious in two attacks, which will keep you out of the fight for minutes, not seconds, and once you recover, it’ll take you the order of hours to be fighting fit again.  So it’s legitimately more powerful than a basic affliction.  While it speaks to the power of the “Just hurt him, stop playing with him” approach that the high price of Afflictions seem to encourage, let’s see if we can create a side-effect to stun our target.

• Fatiguing Attack 1d (Based on Will +20%; Cosmic, ignores DR +300%; Short Range -10%; Side-Effect, Stunning +50%) [46]

This is a little more complicated.  First, it just bypasses DR, but you roll to hit with Will, and you suffer -1 per yard of distance, like with a normal Malediction.  You do not roll a contest (your opponent can, apparently, dodge). It’ll inflict 1-6 fatigue, and the target will have to roll Will (not HT) to resist stunning. It’s more than twice as expensive as Affliction, but only about 15-16 points with Psi-Wars pricing.  This does seem to imply that, if we strictly follow the rules, Afflictions aren’t crazy, but they could, perhaps, use a reduced price in a setting that discounts Innate Attacks, at least the attack-based afflictions.

Baseline 3: Reaving Hand

Christopher Rice devised a lovely advantage called the Reaving Hand which is, in essence, just an Mortal Affliction.  This is another good case study, though, because it brings us to a major crux of innate attack vs affliction: why not just kill the bastard?

A simplified version of the Reaving Hand:

• Affliction 1 (Heart Attack +300%; Malediction +100%; Melee, C -30%) [47]

That is, you have to touch your target, you roll a contest, and if you succeed, they die. But we could also, you know, just kill them.  That’s what Hand of Death does.

• Toxic Attack 6d (Malediction +100%; Melee, C -30%) [41]

If you succeed at your attack, the target will take ~20 damage, which is about enough to kill them.  Not always, of course.  The affliction version has some additional utility: it’ll kill a dragon as easily as a human, while the toxic attack won’t.  And neither has an advantage of the target resists: either they die or they’re fine, or the take the damage and then either die or don’t die, or they’re fine.  However, once again, we see that if I don’t discount Afflictions in the same ruleset that discounts innate attacks, it unfairly punished Afflictions.  If we drop the price of the Toxic Attack version to 14 points on the basis that armor and weapons have reduced its utility, we should probably reduce the price of the Affliction version to 16 points.

This is where I’d really like to use Side Effect, however.  I’d prefer something like: always inflict at least 1d toxic, but maybe inflict death.  This is not allowed: you can’t use Side Effect for mortal afflictions.  So, your best bet then is a Toxic Attack with low damage with a follow up resistable toxic attack that does high damage: either you resist and take 1d, or you fail and take 6d.

Should We Discount Affliction?

Probably.  As I mentioned in the previous post, Affliction is overloaded.  I don’t think I’d reduce the cost of any “bestowment” afflictions.  If bestowing DR or Innate Attack should be cheaper, it’s because the underlying attribute should be cheaper, not because giving people advantages has less utility in a UT setting.  The real reason to reduce the cost of Innate Attack is not just because blasters are everywhere, but because high levels of DR are everywhere.  The price to inflict harm on someone in a battlesuit is prohibitive when compared to just getting a rocket launcher, thus a discount is necessary.  By the same token, if we want to knock someone out with an affliction, we need to drop that cost too, otherwise players are better off with armor penetrating fatigue attacks and the like.

A lot of this is hidden by the Malediction modifier, as it ignores armor.  But the problem is, here too, malediction is a penetration modifier.  We need it to bypass that 100+ DR, and it’s effectively “Cosmic, ignore DR” with a pile of built in limitations (short range, resistible, etc); I’m not sure Malediction remains fair in Psi-Wars, but you can apply it to Innate Attacks too, so saying that Malediction balances Affliction is nonsense.

But is it too much work? Well, I can only actually find a couple of uses of Affliction in my Communion rules, so that’s not particularly hard to change.  I’ll have to alter some basic Psionic Powers, but there’s actually not that many:

• Confuse (Not used in Psi-Wars)
• Flash (Rarely comes up, but I believe House Grimshaw has it)
• Curse (Rare Power, but Witchcats use it)
• Disease Shield (Actually a “Bestow” and so not affected by the change)
• Sleep
• Drain Attribute
• Mind Wipe
• Mental Blow

So only 4 are critical to change, and another 2 make good sense. That’s not a huge change.

Is Melee Viable in Psi-Wars (or any Ultra-Tech setting)?

As I continue my work on the Umbral Rim and the Heist, I find myself coming to an inevitable intersection where the Assassin is one of next templates I should do, and also, many of the aliens I’m working on, such as the dreaded Gerluthim, would probably focus a great deal on melee combat.  I expect to see spears, polearms and knives, but would any player actually choose them for any reason other than aesthetic.

Ultra-Tech settings pose a unique problem to melee weapons.  Even if we set aside the supremacy of ranged weapons in a UT setting, the ubiquity of sealed DR presents a real problem. In a fantasy setting, or a low tech setting, characters can and do completely cover up their bodies in armor, but they rarely have more than 4 to 6 DR, and most attacks will deal between 1d and 2 damage, which means there’s always a chance you’ll blast through the DR and, wizards aside, most ranged attacks don’t do much more than 1d damage, which makes melee very important for cracking well armored targets.  Furthermore, realistic armor has gaps that a clever knife fighter can exploit to take down well-armored foes.  In a High Tech Setting, characters tend to wear armor heavy enough to defeat the best melee weapons, but it tends to be isolated to just their torso: this goes well beyond gaps as you can generally freely attack the neck or the arms or the legs, and you can still target gaps to hit the vitals.  Once we get to an Ultra-Tech setting, though, people will wear sealed armor to protect from space, and this automatically gives them defense against most gas attacks, acid splashes, and attacks against armor gaps that most other settings can use to exploit well armored targets.  A knife, even a vibro knife, is never going to get through a combat hardsuit.

The most realistic approach to take here is to accept that and to not bring a knife to a gun fight.  You don’t see many characters in the Expanse attacking someone in a battlesuit with a knife for good reason!  But Psi-Wars isn’t hard sci-fi, it’s space opera.  We expect to see duels with foils, and alien natives with long spears and palace guards with imposing halberds. But why would they wield them if they do no good? It’s fine for an NPC to stand around looking like a set-piece, but players will just reach for a blaster if this is the case.  So how do we fix it?

But Force Swords are Fine!

If you’ve followed Psi-Wars, you might be scratching your head a little.  After all, we’ve had space knights since Iteration 1, and they kick butt. The force sword is to the blaster rifle what the bastard sword is to the bow: a way of bringing about +50% damage and penetration to a target up close.  A blaster rifle will struggle to get through 100 DR, while a fore sword has no problem.  Moreover, the ability to parry blaster fire with a force sword, and the close quarters created by the tight confines of spaceships and planetary habitats tends to favor the skilled melee combatant.  So… we already have working melee in Psi-Wars.  What’s the problem?

Well, the Force Sword papers over a lot of issues.  Yes, it’s effective, but it’s the only melee weapon that has this sort of damage output.  Furthermore, it destroys melee weapons, which means if you go into a melee fight with anything other than a force sword, you’re a chump.  Your weapon won’t penetrate your opponent’s armor, and if they have a force sword, they’ll parry once and it’s game over.  There is only one effective melee option, and that’s the force sword.  Anything we do to diminish that risks reducing the importance and power of the force sword, but if we leave it as the undisputed king, nobody will ever bother with any other weapon.  Axes, spears, vibro-blades, knives, staves and weaponized wrenches are a waste of time; just spring for a force sword.

This might just be what we have to accept, but I want to explore some options, so the game has room for more variety than blasters vs lightsabers.  

 

This post is mostly me going through my process of thinking aloud to my blog as I try to solve a problem, which is how I got my start on this blog, and people seem to appreciate this approach, so I’m going to go ahead and post it.  Feel free to read though it to see how I come to the conclusions I do, and why.

The Current State of Affairs

We can do some hard analysis of the current state of combat in Psi-wars, as we have a lot of stats, numbers and default values at this point. We have the following weapons available: 

• fists (1d-1 cr if you’re an expert), 
• super-fine weapons (a super fine knife will deal about 1d-1(2) imp), 
• heavy crushing weapons (a mace does1d+2 cr), 
• vibro weapons (a vibro blade will deal about 2d+3(5) cut), 
• neurolash weapons (1d+2 (5) fat sur aff damage), 
• force swords (8d(5) burn), 
• blaster pistols (3d (5) pi inc) 
• blaster rifles (6d(5) pi inc).  

We could toss plasma and grenades on the pile, but let’s leave it here.  I want to include blaster pistols because they face a similar problem, as we’ll soon see.  For armor, we have 

• the ubiquitous Battleweave (DR 20), 
• light armor such as a Battleweave Tacsuit (DR 45), 
• heavier armor, such as typical Imperial armor (DR 60)
• the heaviest armor (DR 100).  

If we start with the lighest armor, battleweave, this is essentially “free armor” that we can expect just a bout anyone to wear. 

• Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
• Super Fine Knife: no damage
• Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
• Vibro axe: 9 injury
• Neurolash: 1-2 fatigue and HT+0 to -1 to resist Stunning or Pain
• Force Sword: 24 damage
• Blaster Pistol: 6 damage
• Blaster Rifle: 14 damage

So for the most part, the ranged attacks still do something, and the character is going to suffer, but they’ll greatly reduce the damage they suffer. Still, upon analysis, this seems like excessive armor for something that should be a relatively minor armor.  It feels like it barely does anything against attacks we want it to protect against (blaster rifles) and doesn’t do enough against the weapons we might expect to carve through it, such as a knife or a punch.

With Light Armor, we get:

• Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
• Super Fine Knife: no damage
• Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
• Vibro axe: 1-2 injury
• Neurolash: no damage
• Force Sword: 19 damage
• Blaster Pistol: 1-2 damage
• Blaster Rifle: 11 damage

Light armor, like a tac suit, does its job, which is protecting you against blaster pistols.  It also effectively stops everything else, except for the force sword and the blaster rifle.  Thus, you can’t use an axe to chop a guy in thick battleweave.

With Medium Armor, we get:

• Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
• Super Fine Knife: no damage
• Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
• Vibro axe: no damage
• Neurolash: 4 fatigue and HT-2 to resist stun
• Force Sword: 13 damage
• Blaster Pistol: no damage
• Blaster Rifle: 5 damage

The point of medium armor, of course, is to slow down blaster fire.  You’re not immune to a rifle, but you’ll survive.  You’ll shrug off everything else too.  Neurolash is the weird one out, as it is surging and this sort of armor is typically metallic.

With Heavy Armor, we get:

• Fists: might do 1 point of damage, thanks to special rules
• Super Fine Knife: no damage
• Mace: will do at least 1 point of damage
• Vibro axe: no damage
• Neurolash: 4 fatigue and HT-2 to resist stun
• Force Sword: 8 damage
• Blaster Pistol: no damage
• Blaster Rifle: no damage

The point of the heaviest armor is to be “blaster proof,” though there are some heavier weapons, such as the force sword.  Of course, semi-portable weapons begin to inflict force sword scales of damage, so it is possible to take someone with this armor out at a range.

This analysis should prove my point, though.  Fists and neurolash weapons have special rules that keep them relevant against even the strongest armor, but no other melee weapon other than a force sword means squat against anyone in anything heavier than battleweave.

Why is this?  Well, it’s realistic.  TL 11^ material science is tough stuff, and if you’re in a full, diamondoid hardsuit, capable of shrugging off blasts from a particle accelerator, what the hell is a baseball bat or a knife going to do to you?  But should it be realistic? If we want melee weapons to matter, what can we do?

Arbitrarily Raise Melee Damage and Armor Divisor

With fists and other crushing weapons, I made it so they always inflicted at least 1 point of damage for every 5 rolled, and the net effect is that your fists will always do something. The Arc Surge rules for Neurolash is a similar construction. Why not rewrite the rules for vibro weapons so they deal more damage and have a higher armor divisor, say +2d(10) instead of +1d(5)?

In regards to damage, all of this assumes that someone is wearing enough armor that this matters.  If we upgrade our melee weapon to 3d+3 cut damage against someone not in armor, a single swing will inflict an average of 19 damage, which is nearly an instant kill of a named NPC.  In the name of beating armor, we’re saying that vibro weapons are catastrophically dangerous.  I’m okay with that to some extent.  I can imagine a vibro knife gutting a man far faster than a mundane knife can, but I’m not sure I’m okay with it being an order of magnitude better. These aren’t atomic knife-blasts.

An improved armor divisor is fine, in principle, and we can justify it by claiming the weapon has a monowire edge. A monowire knife would deal about 1-3 injury to someone in battleweave, and a monowire vibro axe would deal about 10-11 injury to someone in battleweave and 7-8 injury to someone in a tac suit and about 4-5 damage to someone in medium armor, which isn’t too shabby.  And it doesn’t have an increased lethality when compared to an unarmored person.  Neatly fixed, right?

Reduce the TL of Armor (and Blasters)

But I have to wonder: what are we doing?  Why is the armor this high in the first place? It’s because people use blasters and force swords, and for that reason we arbitrarily set everything to TL 11, when maybe that’s the wrong answer.  Maybe Psi-Wars is TL 10, melee weapons have an armor divisor of 5, ranged weapons have a 3, and armor is scaled down.  We’d ditch battleweave for bioplas (or at least borrow its stats) and our scales of DR would be more like 15, 30, 45 and 60.  Force swords would double in price, representing an advanced technology. Our knife still remains useless, but our vibro ax would deal ~9 damage vs our new battleweave, 4-5 against light armor, and would struggle to do 1-2 vs medium armor, which is at least an improvement.

A lot of things in Psi-Wars tend to be TL 10-ish; most of the drugs, as are the robots for the most part, but force screens, ultrascanners, med scanners and so on, so why not the armor?  This, of course, would require me to rewrite all of the armor in the setting, and rethink some of the other elements, like do plasma weapons still exist? You can’t have a plasma pistol at TL 10, and that should seem to be a shame.

Still, if we’re going to rewrite armor, why not go a step further?

Space Opera Armor (and Weapons)

Let’s stop for a moment and think about what we’re doing here.  What is technology? We’ve taken TL 11 because it simply happens to have most of the gear we knew we wanted anyway.  But what does this tech level mean?

A blaster is a particle accelerator: it’ll fire alpha particles or something similar that are both highly energetic and smaller than most atoms by quite a bit.  They’ll pass straight through matter unless it bounces off of atomic nuclei, like more aggressive forms of radiation (which is exactly what it is), requiring considerable shielding.  You need a dense packing of nuclei to stop it from passing through and then denaturing a lot of your proteins and leaving you with serious radiation poisoning on the way through.  A plasma weapon is a super-compressed and highly energetic chunk of plasma, like we reached into a stellar core, pulled out a piece and shot it at someone and then “let it go” once it hit them.  The tiny, bullet-sized blast hits with the force of a full grenade.  These are powerful weapons and require things like carbon nanomaterials made with the hardness of diamond but the resilience of buckyballs, or hyperdense “advanced matter” that achieves strengths beyond anything we could do. Realistically if a TL 11 army fought a TL 8 army, it would be a bloodbath.  The particle weapons would zip through all of our armor (even have a good chance of punching through the lighter armor of a tank), and a plasma blast would devastate squads like a rapid fire, highly-accurate grenade launcher that fires its blasts at near C.  In return, the armor would just shrug off all the bullets.  Why would we expect swords to do squat against these guys?

There’s a genre that one of my readers calls “Logistical Action” that really loves diving into these sorts of details and exploring the realities posed by these technologies.  Space Opera is not that genre.  People call Star Wars “Space Fantasy,” but that’s only partially right, because it’s also “Space Westerns” and “Space Swashbuckling” and “Space Noir.”  It’s a highly cinematic take on whatever genre you want, reskinned with space elements.  If we were making a film, we just give our cast whatever items we have on hand, and do something to make it look a little more appropriate to space.  The natives have spears, but the spears have little thingy-bobs on them, so they’re space spears.  Our hero has a revolver, but it’s actually an atomic revolver, so it’s fine.  When he loses it, he fights the natives with a rapier, but it’s a force sword rapier, so it’s fine.  In Space Opera, you don’t care about the stats, you care about the aesthetic, having the beats of these stories and just playing at science fiction.

This suggests we should toss all of Ultra-Tech out on its ear and just play it like a narrative game, and frankly, that’s probably the most honest way to run a Star Wars knockoff, or any Space Opera game, but we’re playing GURPS, and GURPS isn’t at its strongest doing that.  But we could dismiss Ultra-Tech and replace it with more “Space Opera” appropriate technology, something less realistic, but that fits the genre better.

GURPS actually has that.  It’s called Tales of the Solar Patrol, an overlooked gem and a book I’ve often looked to for Psi-Wars.  It reduces the DR of most space suits to DR 5, 10 and 15, and weapons inflict about 4d+3(3) for a pistol, or 7d(3) for a rifle.  They don’t talk about other weapons or armor, but presumably you can have a Martian Knight in just normal TL 3 armor wielding a normal weapon.  Of course, DR 10 still puts them beyond the reach of most melee weapons, and the book is very quiet on what the stats of, say, a martian sword should be.  

 

We could bring in vibro weapons and super-fine weapons, but this leaves us with a bigger conundrum: we’re both rewriting the entire weapon/armor system from scratch, effectively, and we’re suddenly picking and choosing our items.  A blaster isn’t good enough for us anymore, we need atomic pistols, but a force sword and a vibro axe is fine.  We’ll use Boarding Suits instead of Combat Hardsuits, but we’ll still use Quickheal from UT.  We could do just as well by making up numbers from scratch, defining them however we want based on whatever basis we want.  That can work, but is it particularly satisfying?

Ultra-Technological Solutions

This brings us full circle. If we find the Space Opera solutions unsatisfying, then perhaps we need to accept that our weapons are legitimately awesome.  If an opponent wields a stone-tipped spear, it’ll shatter against imperial armor.  If the Empire wages war against some primitive natives with mere bullets, they’ll clean up.

There’s a genre one of my readers calls “logistical action,” the sort of story that geeks out about the specifics of guns, or tanks, or the stock market, or the nitty gritty details of how one goes to court.  Sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi, loves to lavish this sort of detail on a setting.  If it’s going to have melee weapons, it’s going to embrace the fact that they’ll be on an entirely different level compared to inferior weapons.  Does this mean the average space monster is so much mulch for a man with a force sword, and if you face a space monster that can stand up to a force sword, you’re talking about a transcendent specimen capable of destroying an entire squad of mere TL 8 soldiers without batting an eye.

I think you can make the case that Psi-Wars is very much this sort of space opera, whether it wants to admit it or not. I’ve put a lot of thought into how the weaponry of the setting functions, and we have space ships with sufficient firepower to level a landmass if they want to, and I articulate this.  We have nuclear weapons that fit into missiles or even cybernetically implanted grenades.  Space knights wear armor built from a nanofabrication process to the exact specifications of their bodies so as to allow them to survive the sorts of attacks that we’re throwing at them.  Psi-Wars is a setting that knows it’s advanced, and while it demures on some obvious advances, such as genetic engineering or total automation, it’s this rich, detailed and nuanced setting and set in a distant future that feels both like a gothic fantasy and a wildly advanced setting, drawing inspirations from other “gothic space opera” similar to it, like Dune, the Metabarons, and 40k. Despite drawing inspiration from a lot of Space Opera, Psi-Wars is more like Rifts than it is like Tales of the Solar Patrol. These all tackle the problem of melee with hyperadvanced weaponry and characters that border on supers, rather than cinematic shorthand.

Okay, fine, but then what solutions can we offer?

Well, those vibro-monorwire weapons weren’t the worst idea.  Monowire is a TL 10 invention, so it can be plausibly applied to vibroweapons.  GURPS doesn’t technically allow that, but we’ve ignored that before.  In fact, there’s a weapon option, the Vibrowire weapon from Pyramid #3/51 that does allow an armor divisor of 10 if it’s “superfine.”  The prices of some of these options are absurd, but we can plausibly halve them (or more) in a TL 11 setting.  So options like:

• Monowire Weapons (Armor Divisor 10)
• Vibro Weapons (1d, Armor Divisor 10)
• Vibrowire Weapons (+2d, armor divisor 10)
• Rocket Strikers (+6 striking ST), perhaps with some variation applied

 Could do a lot to even the score.  Yes, these are spectacularly lethal weapons, “order of magnitude stronger” sorts of weapons, but we’re accepting that this is the sort of setting we’re in.  This means if you’re an effective fist fighter in the setting, you plausibly need some sort of advanced combat technique, like the Mental Blow power, or some sort of secret “armor weakpoint strike” technique to keep up, but “advanced combat techniques and psychic powers” is par for the course in the setting.

This means that a cybernetic character with ST 15 and a vibrowire polearm with an impulse striker system integrated for +6 ST  is dealing 6d+6(10) cut damage, which means he’s hammering the guy in the full, heavy DR 100 armor armor for 24 injury, which is nasty, and hitting a TL 8 soldier in a kevlar vest for 30+ damage, but that’s actually pretty plausible.  We’re accepting that this is a highly advanced setting, with the space monsters we’re fighting are crazy advanced things, typically the result of a wild darwinian process or highly advanced genetic engineering, because a “martian tiger” is just going to be meat.  I’ll have to work out the costs, though.

Of course, the point of hyperdense weaponry was to get access to that Armor Divisor 10 with a vibro weapon.  Of course, hyperdense weapons are also TL 11, so we can justify it (and arguably, when we say “monowire edge,” we really mean a hyperdense edge, because giving a knife an edge a single molecule thick is easy: basically every razor has that.  The problem is keeping that edge and forcing it through an ultra-tech material without deforming, and a you need a super-material, like hyperdense material, to do that). I had thought about keeping that available for the Mug, as a signature of theirs, but perhaps if I want to introduce multiple races wielding viable melee weapons, I shouldn’t limit their options.

But how do I keep these weapons viable against force swords?  Partially, I need to reduce their cost somehow, but we might introduce rules for “rapid retraction,” because a parry is more than just a weapon contacting another weapon, it’s also making voids.  If I attack you with my vibro axe, it might be me really looking for an opening, and if you parry with a force sword, it might be that I couldn’t find that opening, so didn’t swing.  I’m not sure how we’d handle that, but we could treat it as a variation of a Defensive Attack where instead of getting your defensive bonus, you prevent your opponent from contacting your weapon with a parry (it likely also means that you don’t unbalance an unbalanced weapon on an attack unless you actually hit, but we might have to look into that).

We could also introduce some weapons, like hyperdense construction that prevents weapons from being instantly destroyed.  Perhaps instead of instant destruction, we could use some variation of the weapon breakage rules: when using these tougher materials, you need to roll for breakage after parrying their weapon, but your weapon is safe when it is parried.

We could also expand on the idea of the Neurolash Field Parry, that idea that certain fields make it harder to actually contact the weapon.  One possibility would be a weapon that’s partially “sheathed” with a force screen, like a 40k Power Sword. It would operate off of similar principles to a force sword, but greatly reduced, say +4d(5) atop an existing weapon, and it’s incompatible with options like vibro or monowire. As long as the weapon parries with its screens on, it’s effectively a weaker force sword. I’m not sure how valuable that idea would be, though.

We can also reduce the effectiveness of armor. UT was the first book with armor and it just assumes DR is total and absolute.  We don’t have to treat it that way, and later books don’t.

First, Battleweave is based ultimately on a downgraded form of Energy Cloth, but that’s like miracle armor, and we don’t have to treat it that way.  We could instead say it’s some variation of upgraded Reflec and Bioplas: it only protects fully against burning and piercing attacks, and it has greatly reduced protection against.  I originally dropped it to 20/7, but I could make it an even heavier drop than that, such as 20/4, which is more on par with what ablative armor looks like, and would someone in battleweave underwear still vulnerable to a basic knife attack or even shrapnel!

We could also introduce Armor Gap rules from Low Tech, which are frankly realistic.  Armor never covers the entire character: no matter how good your hardsuit, those aren’t plates on the back of your knees, under your armpit or on your palm.  The only problem of course, is that a sealed suit should provide some protection.  But we can argue that all sealed armor has the equivalent to Battleweave in their gaps.  That is, I stab you with a force sword in DR 100 armor, only 8 damage will get through, but if stab you through the palm or cut through the elbow,  you’ll still have 20 DR, but not 0 and not 50, and I’ll deal 24 damage.  If we apply the battleweave rules above, then even a superfine knife has a good chance of doing something: stab the armpit and deal 3-9 damage with a vitals hit.  That’s nasty, and could potentially defeat a well-armored soldier. It also makes inherent DR much more valuable, though I still don’t think I need to raise its costs (but I might need to think about it).

The armor gaps would help people with pistols.  Elite shineidoka gun-fu fighters with totally sweet pistols are useless against DR 100 guys, but if they can also attack the armor gaps, then they have a decent chance of landing _some_ sort of damage!

Taken together, this would require a rehaul (or, really, additions to) the melee weapon table, and a bunch of new “little” rules and a revision to Battleweave, but these seem like a more viable solution than those discussed above.

"Is Predictive Shooting a thing in Psi-Wars?"

I have a great community on my Discord (you can find the link in the Psi-Wars Index!) that often asks interesting questions, sometimes in itemized lists (which is very convenient).  These often lead to all sorts of interesting improvements in Psi-Wars, but one was posed to me recently that’s both the sort of question I dread to answer, and one that I’ve been thinking on for awhile: “Is predictive shooting a thing in Psi-Wars?”

It’s also a question I’ve been thinking on a lot.  Whenever I give my Backers the option to pick which template the focus on next, the Frontier Marshal usually does very well, and last time, it won! I keep pondering why my Backers like the Frontier Marshal so much: it’s the “ranger” and “survivalist” of the setting, which doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing that Psi-Wars fans would be crazy about, but “space sheriff” is something, like the Maradonian Space Knight, that Psi-Wars has and Star Wars doesn’t. But I also think it’s because they’d very much like to see “Gun Fu,” so I’ve been working on that behind the scenes for a bit. And you can’t really look at Gun Fu without thinking about “Predictive Shooting” and “Ranged Feints.”

What is Predictive Shooting?

While I think Predictive Shooting comes up in a few places, my preferred reference for Psi-Wars is Gun Fu, because with a few exceptions, most Psi-Wars shootists aren’t much bothered by realism.  Here, the rules can be found on page 11… and 12.

Essentially, Predictive Shooting is a Deceptive Attack with a gun, and it only reduces Dodge.

There’s another interesting rule: Ranged Feint.  The idea here is that you “fake-out” your opponent and then make a Feint with a Gun roll; this penalizes all defenses, just like any feint.

So What’s the Problem?

Seems simple enough, and there’s a valid use case here. If space knights have absurd defenses against ranged attacks, shouldn’t elite shootists have a way around those defenses? That would seem to be the point of playing an elite shootist.  Plus, ranged attacks have so many penalties anyway, how often will it come up?

The problem is this: we’re running an ultra-tech game that’s meant to feature a lot of melee. We want, as much as possible, to keep combatants on the “Same stage.”  We want to avoid the “Sniper kills the Jedi from a mile away” problem, because if combat is effective at extreme distances, then melee doesn’t happen and the “Jedi” archetype is useless.  The more advantages we give to ranged fighters, the more that diminishes the role of melee.  Thus, we have to be cautious.

Let me lay out what I mean.

The Generic TL 11 Commando vs the Generic TL 11 Space Knight

To outline where this is a problem, let me step away from Psi-Wars for a second and explore generic GURPS rules.  If we presume that the Space Knight has Precognitive Parry-16 and Force Sword-18, a Basic Speed of 6.0 and Combat Reflexes, we’re looking at a parry of 13 and a Dodge of 10.  For our Commando, let’s assume a Beam Weapons (Rifle)-18.

We’ll set the fight 100 yards apart, “too far” for a proper “on the same stage” encounter: it would take the Space Knight ~15 turns of sprinting to reach the Commando.  We’ll give the Space Knight their vaunted force sword, and we’ll give the Commando a Blaster Rifle.  We’ll make it even worse: he’ll get a targeting computer and we’ll use the sight it comes with.  Assuming the Space Knight is standing still, the Commando has a -10 to hit him; if the Space Knight is running full speed at the Commando (sprinting 7 yards per second), then the Space Knight still has -10 to hit him for about 5 seconds; if the Space Knight is tumbling, then the Commando has an additional -2 (per Action) or -3 (per Martial Arts).  So the worst the commando can expect to see is -13.

The Commando aims for 1 turn: this grants him a +10.  He already has a +2 from the targeting computer. He can take two more turns to aim further giving him a +4 (+2 from additional aiming, +2 from the scope). We could add +3 if we had a radar system that target locked the space knight, but we’ll skip that, I only mention it to point out that “it gets worse.” Thus, our final modifier is +3: we have a +10 from acc, +4 from aiming with a scope, +2 from a targeting computer, and -10 for range and -3 for speed. Thus, we’ll hit on a 21 or less. We can reduce that to a 13 or less with Predictive Shooting to apply a -4 to the Space Knight’s Dodge.  Thus, we’ll hit ~84% of the time (a D20 equivalent of a 17 or less) and our Space Knight will dodge ~10% of the time. 

On average, we’ll actually hit with all 3 shots; remember, you defend against as many attacks as your margin of victory with your dodge roll +1 (that is, one attack on an exact success), which means to Dodge all three shots, the Space Knight must roll a 4 or less; a critical success.  Because of the multiple shots, even his parry is reduced: he needs to roll an 11 or less to defend against all 3 shots.

An X-Ray laser is even more horrifying: it has an accuracy of 12, which buffs our Commando up to a base of 23 to hit, and has an ROF of 10, which buffs our attack to a further 25, which means we can reduce the dodge to 4 or less… but a better tactic would be to reduce our attack to a 19 or less (-3 to Dodge) and attack with full RoF 10. On average, this will hit all 10 times (rcl 1). To dodge all 10 shots, our space knight… needs a critical success (a roll of a 5 will only dodge 3 shots), and to parry all 10 shots requires… a critical success (a roll of 5 will parry only 9 shots).

This illustrates a few of the problems with default GURPS Ultra-Tech and predictive shooting.  First, the accuracy values on Ultra-Tech weapons are so through the roof that you’re gaining an enormous advantage over any melee opponent.  Second, rcl is so low that you’re better off not using Predictive Shooting.  A single predictive shot applies a -2 to your skill per -1 you apply to the enemy attack.  Just saturating them with rcl 1 fire, on the other hand, applies an effective -1 to defense for every effective -1 to attack. It doesn’t quite work out that way: firing multiple predictive shots reduces the ability to defend against all of the attacks, while just saturating your opponent with fire means they’ll probably defend against more of the attacks, but are less likely to defend against all, so there’s ultimately an idea “break point” that’s somewhere in the middle, typically reducing your attack to just the point where you’ll average as many hits as you can get, and thus maximizing both the number of hits and the defense penalty.

It also highlights something else: Predictive Shots only penalizes Dodge, and Space Knights defend with Parry (or possibly Block, if they’re using a particular Pyramid Article).  Thus, we quickly see that with “RAW GURPS” predictive shots is of marginal utility against a space knight.  In a sense, it actually increases the utility of the space knight, as a precognitive defense allows a solid, unpenalized defense against an tactic that primarily undermines Dodge.

But what about Ranged Feints? Well, to be honest, I’m not sure how this works, but a strict reading suggests that when you aim, you apply all the benefits of the aim, so our Commando is “Feinting” with a skill of 21 or less (this will average a -3 to the target’s defense); Presumably, the benefits of the aim are lost if you feint and then attack, but “Shoot ‘Em Up” on page 12 of Gun Fu suggests you can divide your ROF between the two, so we can make an All-Out Feint and fire one shot as a feint, and then the other two as an attack: thus, we feint at 21 (average -3 to the target’s defense) and then attack with a predictive shot.  Our opponent will parry on a 10 or less (though needs 8 or less to parry all the attacks). The laser is even worse.

It says the target has to be “aware” of the character for this to work, but how does that make sense? I mean, obviously, you have to see them, but if you see someone’s scope glinting on the horizon, is that really sufficient for them to fake you out? Of course, they suffer range penalties, so the farther away you are, the less effective your feint will be, but how does the scope and targeting computer help you feint, exactly?

A Psi-Wars Commando vs a Psi-Wars Space Knight

A lot of things I use above were already problems before we even began to talk about predictive shooting and ranged feints, and Psi-Wars has already greatly diminished the accuracy of weapons, increased their recoiled and removed (or at least greatly limited) things like targeting computers.  Thus, our commando in Psi-Wars would have only a +6 accuracy, +2 from their scope, and nothing else.  This would give them a +10 vs their -13 to hit (though -12 is more accuracy). Thus, on average they’ll hit on a 16 or less, and if they attack with Rcl 2, they need a margin of at least 4 to hit with all three shots. Psi-Wars doesn’t use rapid-fire lasers.

This greatly reduces the effectiveness of a Predictive Shot, but the increased Rcl makes the viability of a predictive shot much better: for every -2 you accept, your opponent suffers a -1 to dodge, but every 2 you beat your roll buy increases the margin of difficult to dodge all shots by 1. This creates a more interesting trade-off.  With high-rcl plasma, you’re definitely better off just making predictive shots, rather than relying on ROF, though we should probably disallow combining targeting an area and predictive shooting.

What about the ranged feint?  Well, we’re looking at an effective skill of 16, which will generally fail to penetrate the target’s defenses. So that also seems relatively harmless.

Under these circumstances, our Psi-Wars shootist would need to be much more effective to make solid use of these tactics, but they do provide value.  That’s not that surprising, though, because most of the Psi-Wars house rules on ranged weapons are to bring them in line with TL 7-8 weapons, which is the target audience of Gun Fu, while allowing the Space Knight to enjoy the full benefits of a TL 11 defense.  It should be noted that of the two, only Ranged Feints are reasonably useful against a Space Knight.

Conclusion

Yes, Predictive Shooting and Ranged Feints are acceptable in Psi-Wars.  The rest of the house rules eliminate what makes Ultra-Tech so brutally absurd when it comes to ranged combat, which means that we can allow Gun-Fu to push a skilled shootists talents up a bit.

I would like to propose some House Rules on Ranged Feints, both in an effort to “reduce the stage” on which the fight takes place, and to make it simpler and a little more reasonable:

• Ranged Feints use their Gun skill of the Shootist with the following modifiers: +3 if they aimed, and the RoF bonuses of the attack. Ignore range, Acc, scope, etc.
• Ranged Feints require the Shootist to be within 20 yards of the target.

This is a little arbitrary, but let me explain.  While we can definitely make the case for an All-Out (Feint) distracting a target by shooting the terrain and then the target and this would be treated like normal shooting, by rolling the unmodified Gun skill of the target, this becomes a pure contest of skill against skill, which is more in line with how melee weapons work.  The +3 for Aiming brings it in line with an Evaluate before the attack, and RoF gives a benefit to “leading the attack” and makes the All Out (Feint) a little more interesting in how you divide your RoF.

The 20-yards rule is one I’ve been using a lot in Psi-Wars: I’ve been cutting off a lot of Psi-Wars psychic effects and other ranged elements at around 20 yards. This has become my “standard encounter range,” the “stage” of combat.  A GM might allow a little bit more range than this, but in general, if you’re on a single battle mat and your character is “reasonably close” to the target, it’s rarely more than about 20 yards.  That also means that a springing speed 6 character can reach the target it about 3 rounds.  It feels more local.

Should I lower the cost of ST in Psi-Wars?

I don’t check Warehouse 23 every week like I used to, but I really should.  The stated reason for killing my beloved Pyramid was that the SJGames team could focus more attention on creating supplements and this has proven true.  I think I’m seeing a supplement a month again, sometimes more.  And not just Dungeon Fantasy stuff as I feared (I don’t mind Dungeon Fantasy, I just don’t want GURPS to fall away and have DFRPG replace it), but instead, we get all sorts of fun things.

This month, we got Alternate Attributes, which proved a meatier tome than I expected.  Without going into a full review (I just got it and I’ve only paged through it), the core of it is meditating on the costs of attributes, what they connect with, and how to re-arrange everything.  And I do mean everything.  They break the skills out by broad categories, they offer ideas on how to turn GURPS into a WoD knock-off with three sets of three traits (plus HP equivalents for each), they offer suggestions for raising, and lowering, the costs of all the attributes and various sub-elements.

What caught my eye is that this book finally acknowledges that ST isn’t worth as much at higher TLs, which is a point I myself continue to struggle with as I do a lot of sci-fi gaming and often interact with high TLs.  Given that we have full “canon” support to do this now, I pose a question to you, dear reader and fellow fan of Psi-Wars: should we lower the cost of ST in Psi-Wars?

The Attributes of Psi-Wars

Broadly speaking, I’m pretty okay with the other three Attributes for Psi-Wars.  I see a lot of tension between more IQ and more DX as I build templates, about as much as you see in Action, so it doesn’t seem that IQ is “too cheap.”  I could make a case for raising its price or, especially, separating Will off into its own 10-point attribute, because Will is a lot more useful in a game full of Psychic Powers and Godlike Extra-Effort, but I lend a lot of punch to psychic powers in Psi-Wars by trading on that cheap Will and the advantages of Godlike Extra-Effort to off-set the high price of a lot of advantages in comparison to just having gear, so I’m not sure it’s necessary.  I think, barring any playtest feedback that says otherwise, that these are fine.  Psi-Wars rather mixes fantasy with action when it comes to how it handles these traits: sure, IQ is more useful in Psi-Wars than in Action, but no more so than it would be in a fantasy game, and the psychic powers fall pretty close in line with magical spells for point-and-fatigue-to-utility.

HT seems okay too, as does Fatigue. Psi-Wars puts a little more emphasis on disease and poison than Action does, about as much as Dungeon Fantasy does, and it’s always useful to be able to survive a death check.  The psychic powers of Psi-Wars turn on fatigue, so it remains quite useful.

Basic Speed, I think, remains useful at its cost (reaction times matter when you’re gunslinging), but Move is perhaps less valuable than it used to be with so many vehicles around.  On the other hand, the unstated assumption in Psi-Wars is that most fights happen in constrained spaces, which means you can’t really leverage vehicles or jetpacks all that often except in scenes meant specifically for them, and when you’ve got a force sword in a blaster fight, it pays to be able to cross distances quickly, so it seems like a wash.

This just leaves ST, and ST is definitely overpriced.  The ability to lift remains about as useful as before, though I find characters in an ultra-tech setting tend not to have nearly as much encumbrance as in Action or DF: characters don’t need to carry nearly so much ammo as in Action, and armor tends to be lighter than in DF.  HP also remains about as useful.  Yes, weapons are a lot more dangerous in DF, but most of that danger stems from weapons with high armor divisors.  A blaster rifle isn’t actually any more lethal than a TL 8 assault rifle and actually slightly less since tight-beam burning does less damage to vitals than piercing attacks do.  HP isn’t more valuable in Psi-Wars than it is in Action, and I think Action can tolerate 2-point HP.

It’s only really Striking ST that’s useless.  Battleweave is DR 20 for what amount to a T-shirt and Jeans made of the stuff, and that basically negates all punching damage. You need to be ST 55 (yes, fifty-five) before you get break-even against DR 20 with a punch.  Things like Karate and Power-Blow help, but you’re still looking at ST 30 characters using Power-Blow to bruise a guy with Battleweave, never mind someone with actual DR 80-100 armor.  

I’ve added some cinematic rules that help you get around this, such as treating all armor as flexible for the purposes of blunt trauma and I’ve reduced the DR of armor against crushing to help compensate (DR 20 Battleweave is actually DR 7 vs crushing, which means you can get away with punching through it at ST 20, or 10 with Power-Blow, but that’s still the minimal armor).  I’ve also created a rule where you can sort of force damage on someone if you knock them back and into something. But again, you need to deal about 7 damage before you’ve knocked someone off their feet, which means we need to be ST 20+ to inflict one point of damage this way.  Even with all this help, and a lot of it is there to fit the genre conventions rather than to strictly boost ST, and even with all of it, I’m not convinced that Striking ST is worth it.

ST and Genre Conventions

What rather makes the ST situation worse is that space opera brims with strong aliens.  Chewbacca is fantastically strong, and that’s basically his schtick.  He swings those great paws and storm troopers go flying.  He’s easily ST 20+. Psi-Wars follows the Ultra-Tech model of Robots, and while C3P0 isn’t a threat to anyone, a Psi-Wars Android could probably lift you off your feet while holding you by the shirt if it wanted. We have cyborgs, who tend to be strong, powerful aliens, who tend to be strong, and robots, who tend to be strong, and we follow comic-book conventions of powerful characters throwing characters through walls and such and using their mighty powers to really mess people up.  But all of this is dead in the water if ST is basically a waste of time.

Reduced ST makes certain aliens who focus on ST, like the Mug and, to a lesser extent, the Asrathi, non-viable. I have some plans to help make them a little more viable, but cheaper ST would go a long way.  I’m also in the midst of working on robots and the trait I have to hedge on the most, by far, is their ST, because realistically a 200 lb robot should strutting around with ST 20-25.  There are reasons to reduce that, but ST 10-15 is a hard sell for such a heavy robot.

Are Standard GURPS Conventions Even a Thing Anymore?

All of this has always been true, so why even bring it up now?  Well, I’ve wanted to be conservative with Psi-Wars.  The point isn’t actually to build a setting for people to play in, though I’m doing that and people are, but rather, to put GURPS through its paces while you watch, so you can get a better sense of how the game works.  The more I deviate from GURPS-as-written, the less value it has.

Now that we have a solid book I can point to as a guide for this, it’s less of a problem to make this adjustment, but it is an adjustment and it does change how Psi-Wars works compared to the average GURPS game.  That might be useful if you want to see how GURPS handles with different point costs and, I must note, I’ve already made this true for Innate Attacks (1/3rd cost) and DR (1/5th cost), so perhaps ST should be reduced as well, to complete the set.

The second problem is this requires me to reprice a lot of things.

• Every character template needs a second look
• The robots need to be rebuilt
• Cybernetics needs another look
• Racial templates need adjustment

Of course, in a lot of ways, this will be a boon: I can make cyborgs stronger, I can make aliens stronger, and I can re-align robots back to more realistic ST levels.  The downside is that this is a lot of work, but I will note that revisiting all of this is what we’re doing at the moment, so it might not be such a bad idea.

The Proposed ST Ruling 

Psi-Wars is technically an TL 11 game (though it fudges down to TL 10 in a lot of places, and pushes up to TL 12 in a few), which suggests a price of 3/level of ST per the book, but I favor 5/level because, first, it’s pentaphilic and I like that and, second, I think it lines up well with secondary characteristics.  HP remains about as valuable as before, and is thus worth 2/level.  Lifting ST still has a lot of utility and could be repriced to 2/level.  Striking ST is essentially cosmetic and falls the most to 1/level. If you disagree and think Lifting ST should never be worth more than Striking ST, then both become l/level and ST drops to 4, and if you think HP really is worth less, then we can go with the full 3/level price.

Proposed for your approval: 

ST is 5/level.  HP is 2/level. Lifting ST is 2/level. Striking ST is 1/level.

Please discuss and tell me your thoughts.  You can leave a comment, or chat at me on Discord.  Thanks!