Limits of the Human Form: HT

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.

Limits of the Human Form: IQ

IQ is probably only second to DX for popularity. I think you’re more likely to see IQ as a dump stat than DX, but only for extremely specific sorts of characters. IQ is probably the poster child for a relatively balanced stat, as it seems priced pretty fairly, and there’s rarely a player who minds giving it up when it suits their concept, but most characters tend to have at least a point or two of it if they can get away with it.

To me, IQ represents ones ability to understand the world. Many IQ skills have a more passive effect of understanding what needs to be done or how best to do something, rather than doing it. Skills like Intelligence Analysis, Criminology, Body Language or Psychology tells you something about what is going on around you; knowledge skills like Architecture or Area Knowledge help you explain what it is you see; skills like Tactics help you put this knowledge into action. Generally, only crafting skills, medicinal skills, social skills and esoteric skills allow your IQ to make a direct impact on the world, and even then, these generally do so by telling how how best to do something (knowing what words to say, knowing how best to connect wires, understanding the implications of certain incantations, etc). When IQ directly impacts the world, it tends to do so more abstractly.

This suggests a less impactful attribute than it really is. Humans value insight and understanding to an extraordinary degree and reflect this with our heroes, who defeat opponents with wit and cunning. A smaller and weaker (lower ST) character can defeat a bigger, stronger character through guile, which is to say, IQ. The ability to affect the world is often less important than knowing where or how best to affect the world. Strength will let you shatter a wall; DX will let you hit the wall in exactly the right spot; IQ will let you know what spot would best shatter it, and which wall to shatter to bring a fortress down.

I suspect this idea of “Understanding the world” is why it’s such a variable trait. We need all heroic characters to be heroic, but we don’t need them all to be smart. We can have a dumb bruisers and a charismatic-but-dim beauty, as long as you have at least one scholarly or clever adventurer who can figure out what’s actually going on. We only need one tactician, one connoisseur, one detective, one engineer, to resolve the mental challenge. Once the necessary knowledge or insight has been reached, this can be instantly communicated to the rest. Contrast this with DX and, for example, Stealth or combat skills, which you need when you need, and you can rarely borrow someone else’s. As a result, I usually see at least one intellectual character who helps carry the rest of the party, and when there is more than one, they have very different niches. I suppose, of course, this isn’t that different from how physical characters work, but it does mean your floor on IQ tends be lower: an IQ 8 character is more easily carried by an IQ 15 character than a DX 8 character is carried by an DX 15 character.

IQ is probably the most abstract of traits (though HT comes close). We can see if someone is strong or quick, and there are physical qualities to toughness and resilience as well, but extremely high IQ characters tend to be almost magical with subtle, indefinable qualities. Anyone who has worked with a highly knowledgeable individual knows that they really bring a lot of benefit to a project, but if asked to define exactly how, it’s difficult to say something other than “He has a lot of experience” or “She brings a lot of knowledge.” When we reflect this in a game, we tend to do it by granting nearly supernatural insights or predictive power to characters, or the ability to augment other character’s actions in some way. This makes the associated traits of IQ more important than most traits, as we tend to want to represent IQ as qualitative improvements in addition to quantitative improvements.

I privilege IQ in Psi-Wars. The rest of the traits are physical, while IQ is mental. Strict materialists will point out that the mind emerges from the brain, which is a physical phenomenon, and so we can modify the brain to modify IQ. I think this runs counter to the spirit of Psi-Wars, though. Psi-Wars is a highly “mentalist” setting, where psychic phenomenon suggest something about the reality of purely mental phenomenon like qualia. Space Opera and pulp adventures also tend to privilege the inherent wit and charm of a hero, and simply going to a chop shop to buy more IQ seems inappropriate. In a setting where IQ is also essential for the use of psionic powers, simply adding more to your IQ might cause a problem too. Of course, Psi-Wars does have attribute boosters, which can add a bonus to IQ, but note that IQ boosters generate the smallest bonus out of any booster.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. — Yoda

I also find IQ is a deeply personal trait. We may enjoy being strong or agile or healthy, or hate being weak, clumsy or sickly, but we understand these states as part of our body, which is separate from our mind, which we closely associate with our selves. Players accept physical traits as external to them, but mental traits are much more tightly bound to the player, and this creates discussions of whether a low IQ character who comes up with clever solutions is “playing their character right,” or how to play a character “whose IQ is higher than your own” which is never a question we ask about a character who is stronger than we are. As a result, I think most players find it more plausible that they can buy more ST, DX or HT than they can more IQ. It’s difficult to imagine what buying a character from IQ 8 to IQ 12 without reaching for a copy of Flowers for Algernon, and such a transformation would be more dramatic than a pivot from DX 8 to DX 12.

Limits of the Human Form: Strength

Of the four fundamental attributes, I feel like ST is the most divisive. Players either dedicate their characters to it, or they treat it as a dump stat. It’s the stat I think I see the most variety on, and it almost behaves like a cosmetic trait, especially if (like me) you want to represent the physicality of traits. Because of that physicality, it is, by far, my favorite trait. I don’t really know what DX 15 or IQ 9 represents in the real world, but I can tell you with quite fine precision what ST 15 or ST 9 looks like and, in fact, seeing those traits tells me a lot more about your character than what your DX or IQ tells me (those mostly just tell me in what direction you’ve tilted your character, and even then, primarily physical characters might have a relatively low DX if they have gone in a unique direction).

In GURPS, ST represents the physicality of a character. It determines your height and weight, how much they can lift, how far they can toss a character and how much armor they can carry and how strong a weapon they can wield. Most people dismiss the value of ST in an ultra-tech setting, as you can “buy” ST with power-armor, and guns largely replace muscle-powered weapons, but ST still determines the power scale of the weapons you can wield. High ST characters begin to ape power-armored troopers or light combat vehicles as they begin to veer into military grade weapons and armor. ST also represents how much impact you make on the world. There’s a reason so many super-heroes seem to have high ST as a basic, built-in trait. High ST covers the capacity to absorb damage, and thus is exaggerated by being bulletproof. It represents the ability to destroy things, and so high ST characters smash through walls and inflict collateral damage. They defeat opponents in battle, so they deal additional damage and knock foes around. Characters who are “larger than life” often have an elevated ST; when I run Wuxia, I like to slap a +5 or +10 on the ST of all martial arts characters to represent how in wuxia fiction, martial artists turn everything around them into a “world of cardboard.”

We certainly expect cyborgs to have elevated ST. GURPS doubles the ST of unliving things, like machines, given the same mass, so in the very least, we expect a humanoid robot that resembles an ST 10 person to have ST 20. This is what we see in GURPS Ultra-Tech: androids are ST 14/20, and combat androids are ST 20. But can we go for more? How high an ST can we possibly stuff into a cyborg? If we build an “Adam Smasher” what level can we take it to? Answering this question is the inspiration for this series.