A 2022 Psi-Wars Retrospective

Happy New Year! I’ve spend my entire Christmas holiday with the entire family sick, but we’re slowly recovering, and it’s really slowed down my posting. So apologies if I’ve been unable to get to some topics or post timely responses to things.

I thought I’d stop and do a retrospective of everything I posted on the wiki over the past year.

A Zero-Template Retrospective

 And that’s it for my Zero-Template Challenge.  I hope you liked it, but judging from the comments and the responses on my discord, you did.

Let’s touch on the specific races.

Karkadann

They seem good, a nice addition, and people were impressed by how much you could do with just a few features.  I think they highlight the core benefit of this challenge: it forces you to think about what makes your race different rather than pre-spending points somewhere (a DX +2 race with Combat Reflexes is probably much less interesting to a player than the Karkadann).  Someone also expressed surprise at the amount of lore; that’s a lot easier to do when you have a lot of lore to draw on (world-building tends to snowball after awhile).

So they’re in.  I’ll work out some additional details.  I don’t think they’ll remain as a zero-template race, but most of the changes will be to either exaggerate particular elements or to give them a little more obvious physiology.

Vithani

Uh, these were passionately received.  It resulted in a lot of very heated commentary, not against them, not against one another, just the sort of commentary I often see when passions run high.  People really liked this race a lot.  It got comments, it got people planning characters, it got deep discussions about their proper place in the universe, what symbolism they needed to be a part of, etc.

They’re definitely going in, and like the Karkadann, they’ll get some adjustment… though less than I initially thought!  I will probably price things more fairly (Low Pressure Lungs should give points back, given how rarely it will benefit them, unless they also get some sort of extremely short-term vacuum support, which they might get, I don’t know).  I’m rather inclined to at least keep Night-Adapted Vision; I might keep Ultravision too; people weren’t too bothered by it, but I feel like it’s the sort of thing a GM or PC would forget.  There might be some ways to tone it down, though.

Aura is popular, so we’ll keep it.  I may reword their destiny, and give them back Dreamer.

I think the big lesson of the Vithani, other than sexy aliens with good art are popular, is that you can probably get a lot more mileage out of Power-Ups 9 than you think.  If the attributes are reworked for one specific race, it can create a very different sort of experience for that race.  I don’t think I’d use it that much in Psi-Wars unless it’s for a race that has a very different mode of existence, but it would be fascinating to approach a truly alien species in a more “hard sci-fi” game, especially a race that, say, has a very different form of intelligence. If you’re looking for crazy inspiration for how to make a race play in a different way, consider looking though PU9.

The Herne

They got a more positive response than I thought, with a lot of discussion around the feasibility of the seasonal traits. Based on that discussion, I don’t think I’ll bring the Herne into the game.

First, a sapient race on Arcadius is already iffy.  I want that world to be a bit fey-touched, so people tell stories and they may experience things, but there’s little actual concrete evidence of a race, and it might be something like sapient psychic deer or something causing all the commotion. Introducing the Herne would break that.  That’s not necessarily a problem, we can discard this idea of a strange world and just replace it with a strange race (and anyway, the Labyrinth is already rather like this), but when you combine it with the second, it becomes clear this is more trouble than it’s worth.

The bigger problem is obviously the seasonality.  But why? It’s parasitic design, and my choices for fixing it generally amount to removing it, which suggests its a bad idea.  Let me explain.

Someone pointed out that one reason you’d want to play this race is to have a shifting toolbox, which I definitely agree with and was one of the comments that made me go “Aha!”  You want, as a Herne player, to be forced between multiple different modes; like if you have a social or combat mode, and you’re in social mode and partaking in a heist, then you want to try to talk your way through. If you suddenly find yourself in combat mode, you’ll shift to fighting instead.  An external force controls how you interact, and this is interesting.  But it can be troublesome, and so you might want to have some measure of control, but if you can control it, it ceases to function like a shifting toolbox: if you’re in social mode but would rather fight, you just change back to combat mode and fight.  Then the interesting element is removed as just a small, weird speed bump to doing what you want.  If you want to have some player agency in their mode, some ability to influence it, but you don’t want them to just flip between two modes, you might give them a variety of modes and let them shift between one or two, but most of their modes are locked out a time.  That gives them the flexibility to shift a little without losing the strange, mercurial nature of the character.

But it gets a lot more complex. The player needs to know a bunch of rules, the GM needs to know a bunch of rules, I need to write a bunch of rules, and what benefit is all of this complexity? The player is constantly bugging the GM to tell him about a season on a remote world and then sighing and telling the players that he cannot do the thing because it’s the wrong season.  The rest of the players have no connection to this, and the only reason the GM knows this at all is because ONE SINGLE PLAYER decided to play as the Herne.  I do believe this is that the kids these days call Parasitic Design. So the solution is either to remove it as irrelevant or make it relevant to everyone.

One of my rules at work is “if it hurts, do it more.” I think this applies, in a sense, to gameplay.  If it matters at all, then everyone should have an opportunity to interface with it. It should affect everyone’s gameplay. It might not affect them directly, and it might not be something they even know about, but they should be able to capitalize on knowledge of it, if they want, without a major investment.  A good example of this is the Deep Engine: it’s a secret that only certain sorcerers can directly access.  That said, even if you’re not a sorcerer who is in the know, it’s also a great source of bad guys, monsters, dungeons, etc.  You can run across Deep Engine Sites, for example, so its existence and knowledge is useful to the GM for more than just that once sorcerer.

So what if the Herne were influenced not by the season of Arcadius, but by the galactic season? In the Great Book of Destiny, I refer to these as Hours, and they would tie into Fortune-Telling, what sort of Destinies people could get, and might be something that other people could hang sorceries or other powers on. The Herne, then, would be tied to something that’s useful for the GM to know for reasons other than just the Herne.  

Of course, this also sounds more like something the Vithani should be associated with than a race on Arcadius, and I wanted the third “Master” race of the Umbral Rim to have something akin to this, as this is a great thing to hang an “occulted system” on, if certain modifiers or available spells change based on a mysterious arrangement of stars or other things and you have to learn to read those and see how they interact with other elements of the game.  This third “Master” race was also set at the fringe of the Umbral Rim, which is where the Vithani are, and so we start to see some connections.  I’m not saying the Vithani are the third master race, but they might come from the same region, and a picture starts to emerge of a particular region of the Umbral Rim and its history and relationship with the early Ranathim Tyranny. 

Such a system becomes something integrated into the rest of the game, and greater complexity is much less of a problem, because knowing that complexity is rewarding to more than just the Herne player. But it also ceases to be something I’d associate with the Herne and Arcadius.  We could change it instead to be something more a reaction to the ambient temperature of the world, which starts to borrow on ideas form World-Walking, which is your available options depend on the nature of the world you’re on, which is interesting for a world-hopping campaign, but then again the Herne lose their unusual connection to an unusual world.

So either way I see it, while this mechanic might be perfectly fine, I feel like the Herne are the wrong place to put it.  So we’ll park it, park the race and see if we can cannibalize the ideas for a different race or set of systems.

The Rejects

The Blue-Skinned Arctic Monkeys saw some positive responses.  Infravision, blue skin and being naturally accustomed to colder weather is interesting enough to make someone stand out.  They’re not especially interesting to play, but they’re also not just a reorientation of points.  Humans aren’t especially interesting to play, and this race is about that interesting. I’ll think about this one. Psi-Wars doesn’t have a lot of arctic content, but we can also borrow ideas from here for a “hot-blooded” race too.

The Gasping Maga-Pillars had more interest than I expected, but mostly discussions of alternate forms. I think there are some interesting ideas here, but few of them have anything to do with the actual design here and more the ideas they inspire. The Sylvan Spiral Needs Races Badly, but this one isn’t it.

The Deep-Song Triton-Men got a laugh.  This one felt more like vented frustration with the challenge than a genuinely interesting race.

The Void-Dancers got more interest than I expected.  I think we can afford to have a vacuum-native race somewhere, but it feels more like a background element unless they have means by which they can interact with the rest of the part in a more face-to-face manner without always being in armor.

That said, always being in armor is actually an interesting racial concept. The Arkhaians sort of do this already, but there’s room for more, something like the Breen, the Vorlon or one of the earlier conceptions of the Mandalorians.  As I commented before, I’m trying hard to get people out of their armor, but a race that is always in its armor is distinct, depending on what the armor is like.  It’s not something I really touched on much, but a race native to a very different gas mixture might have something like that. I still wouldn’t call it a feature, though, but a disadvantage.

The Challenge

I had fun.  It generated a lot of discussion and seemed to inspire a lot.  It also told me there’s a lot of hunger for minor races, regardless of their point cost.  A proposed variation on the challenge is a race worth no more than +/- 5 points, with no more than an absolute value of 10 points in traits, advantages, disadvantages etc.  I will note that I often found features to be more sweeping than perks or 5 point traits so you’ll still find it a fairly limiting challenge.

It did get me thinking about how much of my racial templates are largely cosmetic features, things like “Horns and fangs and teeth and tails.” I wonder if it would be worth a sidebar discussion about removing those traits, or ignoring them, for greater simplicity. It’s a rather fine-grained accounting to worry about minor levels of night vision of +1 crushing damage from a headbutt, even though these are certainly advantages.

Blog Roadmap: November 2019

Happy Halloween!

We had a very good month here on Mailanka’s musing.  I’ve managed to beat all previous months for posts except for a very weird June (which I don’t count) and the unbeatable cliff of May 2017.  So it’s been a good month for views.

What did you read? Mostly the following:

1. Doubtlessly spurred on by the provocative title, the Psi-Wars Fallacy was the most read blogpost.
2. I should have done a second one, but alas, time.  Still, the Martial Arts Retrospective came in second. Don’t neglect the other four martial arts, though!
3. A surprising number 3, given that I just posted it, was Robots Revisited.  You guys are going to like November, I can tell you.
4. Surprising only in that it didn’t come in higher was the template a lot of you had been waiting for for a long time (and several of you seem to already have characters for): the Space Knight Template.
5. And the winner of “Which martial art do you guys want to read up on the most” is clearly Knightly Force Swordsmanship, though, man, all the styles were popular (the next three were the Simple, Swift and Destructive forms)

We added no new Patrons and we lost no Patrons, thus a steady month. EDIT: That’s not true, we had one new patron; he just came on really early.  Welcome, Kevin!

Looking Forward

Normally around now I would announce the results of the poll, but I’ve put that on pause for a few reasons.  First, I promised a Communion revision, and I have it.  It’s sitting right here in a great stack of glorious, digital paper, but I need to get it out.  Expect that over the next couple of weeks.

Second, I really need to finish the military technological framework of Psi-Wars, and that includes the oft-forgotten, but extremely important, robots.  They sit in your fighters, they polish your armor, they tend to your wounds.  And people want to play as them, so I need to get them done.

And lastly, I’ve been putting off a playtest of all these rules for awhile, mostly out of fear that I’ll be unable to make the time commitment necessary, but I think I can make it happen.  Disciple Mavrick, and creator of the Orochi Belt, have been quietly working behind the scenes to lay some ground work for additional setting material for the Orochi Belt, and then I’ll try to get some story material done.  In December, I’ve got 4 weeks of vaction (yes, four, not a typo), so I should be able to get some stuff, done, but I need to really focus on this. More details will be forthcoming.

Thank you, as always, for reading the blog, leaving your comments here or on the discord server, and for being a patron!  Hopefully I can get some nice things out for you this month. 

Robot Design Revisited

Psi-Wars needs robots.  Star Wars has its droids, and cute sidekick robots and ominous kill-bots clutter up Pulp Space Opera.  They tell you that you’re in a sci-fi world, and they occupy an interesting niche between tool and character, especially in pulp space opera.  They let us waive the complex technobabble by having a robot do it (“Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” becomes “No, shut them ALL down!”).

We have a few things that we need Psi-Wars robots to do.  They need, of course, to be trusted allies, someone our fighter ace counts on to keep his starfighter in tip-top shape, or someone our noble trusts with his agenda.  People will also want to play as one, because they’ve already been asking.  In both cases, we need to know the point totals involved.  Finally, people will want to buy robots, like picking up a hireling.  Sure, you can have that trusted Tech-bot fixing your starfighter, but if you don’t care about your starfighter all that much and you don’t need to be on a first name basis with your robot, won’t any robot off the market do? In which case, how much money do you spend on your robot? So, we need to know a price for our robots.  If we’re honest, we also need to know the weight and power-consumption of our robots too, at least in broad terms.

How to Build a Robot

The simplest thing we can do is just use the robots in Ultra-Tech.  They’re pretty flexible and you can add and subtract a few gadgets, and this more-or-less works.  For earlier iterations this was fine, and it’s how Iteration 3 worked, but if we’re going to customize everything, we can do better.

We can also build them as racial templates.  We just decide what robots look like, because they’re basically characters after all, and nobody demands we put every new racial template through a rigorous, secondary design process.  Even so, here we reach the crux of our problem: how do we go from point cost to dollar cost, weight and power-consumption?

Weight is easy to derive: divide their ST by 4, and then cube the quotient.  For power-consumption, we can make some guesses from the robots in Ultra-Tech.  We can do the same for cost too.  I carefully combed over all the robots in Ultra-Tech to get a sense of prices, and then created a system I called “Modular Robots.”  The premise here was that a robot of a given size tends to cost X, and the more features you give it, and the more you remove, the more the price changes, and they seem to follow rough tiers.  And this basically works, and I suspect it’s how a lot of robots were derived in GURPS Ultra-Tech, more or less, though I’m not convinced all of my results were correct.  For example, I rate the loss of speech pretty high when it comes to affecting the cost, but this is a guess because there aren’t any mute robots in Ultra-Tech, and it’s probably a wrong guess, because removing speakers and voice synthesis software at TL 10 probably amounts to saving a few buck, rather than halving the cost of the robot.

This was as far as I could go, though, because GURPS 4e is pretty fundamentally divorced from 3e about certain things.  For example, in 3e, ST was derived from the total power available to the robot, while in 4e, it comes from the mass of the robot. IQ and complexity have a totally new relationship, and how Ultra-Tech derives DX is a total mystery to me, but it’s not derived in anyway similar to how Robots derives things.  So I closed the book on it. This was enough.

But…!

Reader Mwnrc asked me how I designed robots, and I gave him the above spiel.  This set off an entirely unexpected firestorm.  A surprising number of people had no idea how you derive HP from mass, or that this was a thing in GURPS (you can find it on page B558, page 10 of Pyramid #3/120, and it’s in the very robot rules referenced by Mwnrc).  But then someone raised an interesting point:

“But Mailanka, the robot masses in UT vary.”

What he means is that if you look at androids, their mass varies from as low as 50lbs for a TL 12 android, to as high as 250 lbs for any robot.  The Combat Android does this too.  None of the other robots that I looked at do, though: the tech-bot, the medical robot, and the war-bot all have fixed weights.  Even so, this was interesting.  Could it be that these were created using the robot design system that clearly doesn’t work in 4e anymore?  Well, the least I could do is actually check.  So I ran some numbers. The following numbers look only at the Arm motors, the leg drivetrains, and fairly basic structure and with the computer brain added in.

		TL7	TL 8	TL 9	TL 10	TL 11	TL12
Arms		0.3	0.2	0.015	0.1	0.075	0.05
Legs		80	60	40	30	20	15
Structure		6	4	3	2	1.5	1
2 Arm motors ST 14	3	7.8	5.2	0.39	2.6	1.95	1.3
Body ST assuming 200 lbs	250	23	17.25	11.5	8.625	5.75	4.3125
SA for human	30	180	120	90	60	45	30
		210.8	142.45	101.89	71.225	52.7	35.6125
Computer		5	5	5	5	5	5
		215.8	147.45	106.89	76.225	57.7	40.6125

Let me break down these results a little more clearly for you

• In Ultra-Tech,  A TL 9 android is between 150 and 250 lbs; the above results show 107 lbs.
• In Ultra-Tech,  A TL 10 android is between 100 and 250 lbs; the above results show 76 lbs.
• In Ultra-Tech,  A TL 11 android is between 70 and 250 lbs; the above results show 58 lbs.
• In Ultra-Tech,  A TL 12 android is between 50 and 250 lbs; the above results show 40 lbs.

Now, the values don’t line up (though they do line up very nicely with the previous TL, ie a TL 11 robot is ~58 lbs in this while a TL 12 robot is down to 50 lbs), but we haven’t touched on armor, communication systems, sculpting, or whatever else we’d like.  This is basically a back-of-the-envelope calculation and it shows the same basic progression.  In short, if you take a naked robot from 3e and translate him to 4e, the numbers line up pretty close.

Hmmm.

So I did a little extra investigation.  It seems obvious to me that Ultra-Tech was heavily influenced by Transhuman Space and Reign of Steel, two of GURPS’ more successful settings.  Surely those had major updates to their dollar cost and weights.  I checked in 3e, and found that 3e had explicit dollar costs and weight values for both series (I found it quite surprising in Reign of Steel, which looks explicitly built using the Robots book, and you can find the price of an Overlord chassis down to the penny).  This isn’t relevant to us as economics fundamentally changed between editions except… the conversions don’t list new prices or new weights.  They list them for alternate versions unique to 4e, but if you’re using an Overlord or a Cyberdoll, then you’re using the original version, only with an updated character template.  This means that GURPS 4e accepts robots built using GURPS 3e’s robot design system as canon. Intersting.

Can you Convert Robots 3e to 4e?

A last experiment: let’s just build an android in 3e and see what pops out.  Keeping in mind that an Android in 4e for TL 10 (where I tend to center my robots in Psi-Wars) are 100-250 lbs and $50,000, I came to 144 lbs and $63,000. That’s… really not that far off.

Mwnrc had a system he was using which purports to convert robots from 3e to 4e.  You can get it here. When I ran those numbers, I cam eot a robot that weighed 101.75 and cost $45,370.  If you round that up, that’s almost precisely the weight and cost of a TL 10 android.  Wow!

For me, the android is sacred.  What I want out of my design system is to essentially get the robots, especially the android, from first principles.  This gives me pretty spot on.  I could try some others to be sure, but this definitely gives me some hope.

Robots 4e Deep Dive

Let’s take a closer look at this document, shall we?

Robot Brains: Personally, you should just use the computers from Ultra-Tech, as it clearly does, and that’s what I’ll be doing, but this more or less does the same.  The main difference is that it reduces weight of the computer at higher TLs, but I’m not sure why it does that.  It seems to be some sort of compromise between 3e and 4e.  I won’t be doing that.

Sensors and Communicators: These are a major sticking point for me for customizing the robots from Ultra-Tech.  How much does removing a voice box save you? What if we drop a robot down to a single camera eye? What are the savings?  This document seems to have derived some cost and some weight and I have no real way of telling if they’re right or wrong, except with the radios and such.  I will note that this document gives the radio range as 100 miles, while the robots in Ultra-Tech are priced at 10 miles, though I will also note that Psi-Wars communicators are much better than bog standard radios, so that might need to be something addressed.  In any case, this gives me basic sensors and voice boxes and his prices and weights are as good as anyone else’s, and given how accurate his prices ending up being, I’ll stick with it.

Arm Motors: Look to be derived directly from 3e, which looks fine.

Weapons and Accessories: The document seems to suggest you just take UT gadgets and slot them in.  This seems exactly right to me.  It’s what I’d do.

Body: We skip drive train and go straight to structure, sculpting and armor.  He does some weird things with volume and surface area, but it ultimately derives from size modifier, which is a good choice.  I originally objected to the fact that a sphere has way more surface area for the same size modifier as a human, but that’s because a person’s size modifier is very large for their surface area, rather than the other way around, so fair enough.  That said, I’d rather just use the volume-based rules of Vehicles, but it doesn’t matter: you just need to derive A surface area.

From there, the rest looks fine.  I think I’d substitute psi-wars armors in place of generic armor, but that’s to be expected.

Drivetrain: Finally we reach propulsion; interesting choice to put it at the end, but I understand the logic.  You need to know the final weight for this to work, and it can create a feedback loop if you do it too early, so it makes sense to wait until the end.  He does some fancy math that let’s you essentially just focus on your move and your weight and derive the weight and cost from it, and it seems to work.  My only objection is he asks you to first figure out the power requirements, but gives no instructions on how to do so.  I just assumed the same power requirements as an android and moved on.  Still, a red mark there.  In general, the power requirement rules are kind of strange, but I get it.  What can you do without a KW value?

The Stats
ST and HP work as expected, though it doesn’t actually give “correct” results as far as UT is concerned: my android ended up at Arm ST 14 and HP 20, but also body ST 20, which doesn’t line up with HT.  However, we can ignore the body ST idea and just say arm ST is ST if we want, while “body ST” represents HP.

The logic of GURPS Robots and this design sheet (and GURPS vehicles) is that if you can move X amount of lbs at Speed Y, then you have Z body strength, period.  You can’t really have a twenty ton robot with the ability to race around at sonic speeds with an ST of 1; it’s ST 135.  Ultra-Tech doesn’t seem to agree, so the choice is: who do you trust here? 

DX is also interesting.  This document follows GURPS Robots and gives DX as an aspect of computer complexity.  This creates a hard connection between DX and IQ, however.  If you’re IQ 10, you have a complexity of 8, which means you have a DX of 12, period.  There’s now way to have low DX on a high IQ robot or vice versa.  Ultra-Tech definitely seems to disagree with this.

There’s some interesting logic here too. What is DX? In one sense, it’s your ability to process the outside world and carefully calibrate your actions to create the effects that you want. This means accurately modeling the world, your position in it and what will happen when you do a thing: hitting someone with a bullet, for example, involves calculating trajectories extremely well; that we do it unconsciously and transfer that calculation accurately to our bodies is why we call it “DX” rather than “IQ,” but in this sense, the complexity of a computer as basis for DX makes sense: a smarter computer calculates trajectories better and is thus more accurate.

On the other hand, the chassis matters to.  DX also covers reaction time, balance, the ability to move one’s body with a great deal of precision and the flexibility to achieve the position you need to. If you have one of those weird, stiff robot arms with metallic grippers, it doesn’t matter how smart the machine is because it cannot translate those calculations to its body correctly, as it lacks the body to carry them out.  Reaction time seems to be mainly a complexity thing in Ultra-Tech too, at least if you want Enhanced Time Sense, but that’s not quite the same as Basic Speed: knowing you need to draw your sword instantly isn’t the same as being able to draw your sword instantly.  However, balance, flexibility and manual dexterity tend to be covered by advantages, and Ultra-Tech seems to use Advantages to cover them: I see a lot of Manual Dexterity in Ultra-Tech robots, for example.

So I suspect we need something like how GURPS Robots handles DX, but perhaps lower, perhaps (Complexity/2)+6 with an option of buying a “reflex booster” like they have in GURPS Robots.  Incidentally, if you want to see the hard relationship between IQ and DX in this work, see below:

Complexity	DX	IQ
1	8	NA
2	9	NA
3	9	0
4	10	2
5	10	4
6	11	6
7	11	8
8	12	10
9	12	12
10	13	14
11	13	16
12	14	18
13	14	20

You can see why I’m a little iffy on the DX 12; to have human level intellect, according to these rules, you must start to have high DX; only sub-human-average IQ robots have human average DX.

IQ is based on complexity, fitting Ultra-Tech.  That’s fine.

HT is based on a complex equation that amounts to: the heavier your frame and the lighter your robot, the better your ST.  I think I would replace this more with guidelines.  Stronger frames means more HT, and more system redundancy (like ruggedized electronics systems and hardened brains) give higher HT.  Interestingly, robots tend to be built out of various components which can be more rugged than other components.  What do you do when hit with a surging attack when you have a Hardened Computer, but a Cheap set of power-cells except your brain has a backup battery that’s also hardened? Do you roll one HT for consciousness and another for your electrical system? Do you roll a third system if your structure is made of average components to see if damage destroyed you?  I think in the end a sort of “Combine various elements together broadly.”  Focusing on structure isn’t too bad an idea, though: expensive structures probably have more resilient housing for its electronics and better interconnections, which matters: who cares if all your components are still working if they’re scattered to the wind because the balsa wood and bailing wire holding them together failed? On the other hand, the quality of those components matter too, so it’s a balancing act and I tend to favor more of “rough guidelines” than “hard values” for HT.

Do we need a Design System?

I’ve been building robots for awhile already, and I found myself rather hostile to shifting to a design system, because it’s much easier to just put character traits together, and it covers 90% of what people actually care about.  With vehicles, I often found that when I designed a vehicle, I had to go through a lot of work to make certain values “line up,” and that would be a nightmare if I was trying to create vehicles-as-characters.

With Robots, as I explored it more carefully, I quickly found that I could probably just design the character and then find out what the cost and weight would be.  I have no good guidelines on power requirements, but I think people will just accept whatever values I use, as long as they feel close to right.  The other interesting thing about a design system is that interesting cost/benefits start to pop out, like surface sensors are stupidly expensive, especially on larger robots.  Does a robot tank really need surface sensors?  Going through a design system might make your robots feel “cohesive” and “logical” in the sense that the design makes sense, and thus it feels like a robot, rather than just another character with robot-like traits.

I think having seen both of these in action and worked with them a bit, I’m willing to work with a slightly updated version of the 4e design set. Most of the changes I’ll make will reflect Psi-Wars peculiarities or my own specific opinions on things, rather than failings of the 4e Robots Design system.

Martial Arts Power-Ups Retrospective

If you enjoyed my Martial Arts as power-ups series, and you’re just now joining us, you can see four more worked examples for Psi-Wars, my Space Opera setting:

• The Swift Form
• The Destructive Form
• The Graceful Form
• Knightly Force Swordsmanship (the Guardian Form)

Please note that Psi-Wars uses a “Technique Proliferation” optional rule: the costs of techniques are halved.

I wanted to take a moment and address some feedback and thoughts.  This turned into quite a retrospective, so I hope you don’t mind long posts.

Feedback!

My discord was absolutely hopping over the past couple of weeks.  Some of it involved corrections and critiques, but most of it involves speculation and and discussion of the styles themselves.  This discussion rather proved my point for why I wanted this sort of structure in the first place.  While I’ve added a few new abilities and concepts to these, most of the moves and abilities have been there for literally years now, but for many people, it’s like they see them again for the first time.  Having things laid out so plainly, as in “This is what your character will look like at this level,” really changes the dynamic of how one interacts with the martial art, I think, and it brings it alive. Yes, it’s quite some work, but a lot of the work I put into these helped me think about the martial art and how players would use them, which makes them more usable and the moves themselves help illustrate to the players how to use them.

Some common themes included:

Can I combine these styles??

Of course. The idea I had behind them was that one could advance in them in 25-point chunks, as that’s become the Psi-Wars standard for a “power-up.”  I also try to leave at lest 25 points in a template’s discretionary budget, so as a Space Knight if you just want to “advance to the next level,” you can do so.  But one of the reasons I’ve done a lot of the things I’ve done is because I quite like Wuxia and other martial arts games, which likes to go into the differences in philosophy and approach between different styles, but also likes to explore the merging of multiple styles.  This is why Psi-Wars has groups like the Threefold Order: to encourage people to learn multiple styles.

Anyway, one thing I quickly discovered when I was noodling with these concepts is that if you follow the student/adept/master route again and again, you end up with a ridiculous amount of redundancy.  A lot of training goes into getting you up to snuff with the force sword (I’ve tried to follow a schedule of Student=16, Adept=18, Master=20) and precognitive defense and a few other basics (like learning Armoury so you can make your own force sword), as well as teaching you the fundamentals of that particular style (Acrobatics for the Graceful Form, Brawl for the Destructive Form, etc).  Once you’ve already learned all these things, once you’ve mastered one style, there really isn’t much point in learning that stuff all over again.  A Master of Destructive and Swift is definitely going to be a better force swordsman than someone who’s just a master of two, but his armory isn’t going to be twice as good, nor his Precognitive Defense (at some point, that’s “enough” unless you’re using a style that really focuses on it).  So I came up with the “Secondary Style” concept, which is half price.  So not only can you combine them, you can do it on the cheap!

I don’t want to use (all) of your stupid power-ups.

At least one person took a look at everything and immediately began complaining that while he liked X, he didn’t like that it was tied to Y.  This is, IMO, inevitable.  It’s sort of like asking someone what they want for dinner and they shrug, and then when you ask them for specifics (“Do you want pizza? Do you want hamburgers?”) they begin to fixate on specific details they don’t like, which may be annoying, but it’s part of the process of narrowing down on what they do want.

A power-up system like this is very illustrative.  It can really show you want a martial art can do, but it also puts you on rails and says that you have to do it.  Some people, having been informed by the first aspect of these power-ups, rebel at being forced down those specifics.  Now that they can see what they can do, they want to do something else.

I think this is okay.  I think this is part of the reason you make these power-ups in the first place.  For me, they’re sort of like the Templates of DF or other games: they serve as a powerful inspiration and some people are going to be fine using them directly.  But if they’re not, that’s what the second chapter on “Traits” in all of those books are for: to help you customize and build to your specific desire.  This is one reason I have the “Martial Art as Style” section in each one, though be warned that those far pre-date the power-ups, and while I’ve tried to update them with the new elements and abilities, they’re not perfect matches.

How you and your GM feel about this depends on how you feel about Templates vs Free Choice. There are people on both sides of the argument, and you can see those argument play out in more detail in the discussion on how to handle power-ups below.  “Gating” can create interesting structures within a game, forcing players to make choices that they wouldn’t make without that gating.  I personally find that sort of thing compelling, but a lot of people joined the GURPS community precisely to get away from gating and to fully customize their characters.  If you find that you really don’t like any of the styles but want to make some sort of highly bespoke mishmash of styles, that suggests to me that there may well be a new niche you can explore in the form of an entirely new style and, hopefully, these styles provide some blueprints for you.

How should I use these Power-Ups In Play?

So, you’ve built a space knight.  Perhaps he’s a Student of the Swift Form. You look forward to a new Move, or reaching the level of Adept.  You play your first session and the GM hands you 3 shiny new character points.  What happens now?

Well, as with everything, this depends on the group, the GM and the philosophies behind them.  Let me offer three different ways to use the power-ups

Power-Ups as Strict Path

What happens is you bank those points until you have 25, then you advance.

This model assumes that players must buy the power-ups in blocks. You either have them or you don’t.  This means that a character spends might spend a whole adventure as a student and then, suddenly in the next session, become an Adept.  This might strike some people as jarring, but I find it no more jarring than a character “suddenly” leveling up in D&D.  I find that people who like this sort of thing tend to structure their campaigns in the same way a TV show might structure its seasons: the characters remain relatively static throughout an entire arc, and then the characters get “downtime” between arcs where there characters “level up,” so your student might be a student throughout the whole course of a rebellion, and then in the next arc, focused on aristocratic politicking, he’s clearly advanced to Adept and has some new tricks.

The downside to this sort of approach is that it really delays gratification and it can seem jarring, as noted above. The upside is that it’s probably the simplest to handle.

Power-Ups as Loose Inspiration

You spend your points on whatever you like.  Here’s some ideas!

This model works basically like GURPS already works: you get points and you spend points, assuming your GM allows what you’re trying to buy.  Your limits in this case are the “Martial Art as Style” not the “Martial Art as Power-Ups.”  That is, you can only buy what it lists in your style, but you can do so in any order.  So, you might buy force sword and then more force sword and then even more force sword and never improve your Precognitive Defense or get Armoury, and you might grab Power-Blow even though you have no “Moves” for it in your style, but it lists it in the style itself.  This is how GURPS already works, and in this case, the power-ups act as a sort of suggestion. You should consider increasing your Precognitive Defense; you should consider the following Trademark moves; when you achieve skill 20 in Force Sword, maybe you should consider getting Armoury and building your own force sword, etc.

The downside to this approach is that you get no consistency between characters.  The concepts of “adept” and “master” don’t really mean anything except overall capability and what people are willing to recognize (rather realistic, that). It also really softens the concept of a style into a general philosophy of war rather than a set of cool moves.  It has the upside of maximizing player flexibility, and if they have points, they can spend points.

Power-Ups as a Path

Pick your next move and/or exercise and/or level of advancement.  You can spend points on any traits within those.

If you want to retain the structure of the power-ups but you want people to spend immediately, let the players set “goals” for their next traits and then spend their points on them.  In this case, the Power-Ups have a lot more weight, especially in the form of prerequisites: if you want the First Strike perk, you need to have completed the Adept level of the Swift Form, and that requires you to have the listed traits.  That means anyone with the First Strike Perk is, effectively, an Adept as listed.  

I find approaching styles in this way helps illustrate how someone might teach a character. If you’re a student learning the adept level of the Swift Form, then suddenly you’re concerned with your Basic Speed (your reaction time) and with gaining more knowledge with your force sword and precognitive defense.  You can almost see a teacher pushing a character to move faster and faster, to react now now now, and in so doing, improve these specific traits piecemeal.  Perhaps you first learn +1 force sword, then you get +0.25 Basic Speed, and once you’ve achieved all the traits, your master looks at you with pride and pronounces you as an Adept… and then says you’re ready to begin your real training.

If I were to pick an approach, I would personally use this one.  I find it the best of both worlds.  I’ve tried to make the Master level of each form sufficiently compelling with some unique perk or ability that players will feel rewarded for fully following the path to the mastery of their form.  All that said, I think once you start breaking up the upgrades like this, some players will question why they must get some particular trait that really doesn’t suit their character, and if you give in, you find yourself back to the “Power-ups as Loose Inspiration,” but there’s a continuum of strictness there, and I don’t personally think it’s too bad if people have some variety within their forms.  Realistically we expect some regional variations and different practitioners will have mastered different aspects of the style; moves helps cover this, but it might not be enough for some players, and that’s okay.

Are Trademark Moves Worth It?

A particularly twinky fellow pointed out that you didn’t actually need to get Trademark Moves to be effective with this new system.  Now, a quick aside: a lot of designers hiss and spit at “twinks and munchkins,” but I’ve been in IT long enough to know a rigorous tester when I see one, so I always welcome the thorough fisking they give my systems, because they can show me breakpoints.  You don’t have to listen to them if you have good reasons for allowing them to stay, and trying to make a system “break proof” at the cost of other things (like your sense of fun) is usually a bad trade, but they still offer some good insights.

The first point is that you don’t “need” Trademark moves. Well, you never “needed” them, they were introduced as a way of speeding gameplay.  If you know Counter Attacks and hit locations and Committed Attacks down cold, then you can improvise a Committed Counter Attack to the Vitals without breaking a beat.  If you don’t, though, you either sift through a couple of books to find the modifiers and rules involved, assuming you know these are options anyway.  By thinking about them and writing them down, or having someone else think about them and write them down, gives you ideas you might not have had in the first place, and means you can speed up play by saying, for example, “I attack with Dog’s Defeat!” rather that “I All-Out Attack (Double) for a Feint and then thrust for the vitals (-3).”

But are they worth the price you pay for them?  Originally, Trademark Moves rather generously gave you +1 to everything in a move, even if it came from multiple skills.  So, for example, if you have a move that’s a rapid Grapple/Knife attack, you get +1 to both, while a technique or a skill would only give +1 to one aspect of it, and often be more expensive anyway (+1 to a targeted attack is 2 points for the first level, and for a whole skill is obviously 4).  Now, with halved technique costs, that cost savings becomes more dubious. Your +1 feint is 1 point for the first level and a half point after that, and your TA is the same.  Getting a +1 to both for one point is… about like buying them as a technique, and the technique is more broadly useful.  Of course, it applies to more than just a single skill or a single set of techniques, but a single skill and a single technique applies to more than just a single move, so it strikes me as a wash.  But the point of a Trademark move was to reward you for writing all those details down.  It was meant to encourage you to speed up play.  Is it enough encouragement when maybe you’re better off with techniques and skills?

We could lower the cost of trademark moves.  If a trademark move gave you +2, or one point bought you two trademark moves, then it becomes more worth it, and it also better addresses the fact that there’s a soft cap on how many useful trademark moves you can really buy, which might be an issue in a kung fu game.  But this also moves us deeper into “half-point land” which SJGames has been wisely trying to avoid.  I tip toe there to make skill nuance more palatable, but we can take it too far.

Another possibility is to make Trademark Moves free.  After all, the point is to reward someone for writing their moves down.  Some GMs give people a +1 for a cool description, why not a free +1 for speeding up play with your pre-written trademark move?  The downside to this is that once players realize they can get a +1 for all of their moves for free as long as they do the bookwork in advanced, it risks feeling required. Some players who will write up 20 trademark moves, and lavish in the free +1, and those who already find GURPS a little too bookish will be turned off by the required “homework” of writing out all their moves in detail.  A better option might be to give everyone a “free” number of trademark moves, say three, or one free trademark move and then whatever they get from the “moves” that they buy. (sort of like how GURPS suggest you allow 1 perk per X number of points spent in a martial art, you could create a similar equation for X free Trademark moves).

Someone also raised a point about Targeted Attacks and the bonus defense if someone uses them repeatedly.  I pointed out that this would probably be true of Trademark Moves as well.  I’d caution against using either rule, because their intent was to prevent people from buying one trick and then doing it over and over again (“I take TA (Rapier/Vitals) at -1, and then a Trademark move for attack to the vitals so it’s Rapier+0, and then I attack the vitals, I attack the vitals, I attack the vitals…”) and making the game boring.  The problem with this is that players invest points in these, points that are dubiously spent at best (those 4 points could have just been spent in Rapier for a +1 to everything, possibly including parry…), so I’m loathe to punish them. But, if you make Trademark Moves free, then it becomes easier to justify punishing a player who keeps doing the same move over and over again.

I think for now I’ll stick with the 1-point Trademark Move, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Spinning Attack and Feint

One correction someone issued to me was that you can’t combine spinning attack and deceptive attack.  I double checked the book and discovered they were right.  My first reaction was to scoff and decide that this was yet another example of how Martial Arts is a little too conservative with what it will allow you to do and not do, but then I started to think about it: why wouldn’t you allow these things to be combined?

To me, Spinning Attack is just a sort of combined Feint and Attack, and you can combine a Feint with a Deceptive Attack, no problem.  I think the idea here is that the Spinning Attack is, itself, a specific implementation of a Deceptive attack: that is, by spinning, you’re deceiving your opponent, but to me, a feint is also a form of a deceptive attack (a classic deceptive attack is a “fake out and then attack, which is best handled as a Rapid Feint then Attack).

The problem might be that Spinning Attack is potentially too powerful for allowing that sort of thing.  If I have skill 18 and you have skill 12, and I perform a spinning attack, the result is that you lose an average of -6 points from your defense and I lose nothing from my attack; if I also drop my attack to 12 to hit you, you’re at -9 to defense. With a rapid strike feint/attack combo, I’m at -6, so my feint is 12 and I can’t actually make a deceptive attack, unless I’m trained by a Master or I spend fatigue, in which case then it’s Feint 15 (average -3 to your defense) and I can make a deceptive attack of -1 or -2.  The downside to Spinning Attack is that it’s possible that I’ll screw my roll and you’ll actually get a bonus against my attack (which, presumably, you could turn into a Riposte). The net effect of this is to make Spinning Attack a preferred technique of people who vastly outclass their opponents, so they don’t risk suffering the penalty involved, and allowing deceptive attack on top of that would really double things up too much.  And, of course, the other counter argument to Spinning Attack is that the guy who Feints can do the same thing if he’s willing to just wait a turn.

This creates a weird sort of situation.  First, the point of deceptive attack is to eat up your excessive skill.  The reason you get skill-25 is so you can make absurd deceptive attacks.  If you have such a high skill, you’re basically wasting it on your Spinning Attack, so you burn it on hit locations, like you’ll do a Spinning Thrust for the Vitals, or a Spinning Kick for the Skull. It also feels like it’s trying to fix the wrong problem: if the problem is that someone can accrue too much skill penalty by using Spinning Attack, so they need to cap how much penalty you can apply, so you’re not hitting someone with a -9 to their defense so casually.  But then, shouldn’t you fix that by capping the skill penalty?

It seems that Spinning Attack is designed to be the most interesting when characters actually don’t have super-human levels of skill, and their skills aren’t actually that far apart.  If I have Karate-16 and you have Karate-14, I could make a -2 deceptive attack and reasonably hit you, or I could make a Spinning Attack and get a -2 and use that little bit of extra skill to hit a hard-to-hit hit location (such as your face).  At this point, I risk not only failing to get the bonus, but giving you a bonus.  That’s interesting, in a way that the Karate-20 vs Karate-12 isn’t.  You’ll actually want to know what your roll is, because it might determine who wins the fight, rather than whether you kill him this turn or next.  In this case, what we’re looking at is likely a maximum of +2 or -2 to defense, and this makes sense: if you really screw up your spin, you might expect to Telegraph your attack, in which case your opponent gains a +2 to defense.

So, let’s consider a different possibility: a spinning attack is a quick contest, if the attacker wins the contest, his opponent is at a -2 to defense; if the defender wins, he’s at a +2 defense; if they tie, no change.  You can even add a rule of 16 in here to keep it at least a little interesting (so if you roll a 17 while you’re at skill 20, your opponent might still see through your spinning attack).  Then you can add a deceptive attack on top of it, no problem, and you don’t have to worry about extreme cases like “Spinning Attack-25 vs skill 12”

If you’re worried about that, though, isn’t Feint a problem?  I often see people complain about Feint, especially as a technique, because for 5 points (in standard GURPS; 3 in Psi-Wars), if you’re willing to spend an action, you can give your opponent -4 to their defense, assuming all things are even, and if they’re not, hoo-boy.  Plus you can stack up a deceptive attack.  It’s a pretty common one-two punch: take my maxed out DX character, hit your opponent with feints until you land that -10 to defense, then make a deceptive attack to demolish them, rinse and repeat.  The only thing that really prevents it is that players get impatient, but I see it a lot in duels.  This is also why Evaluate exists: evaulate for three turns, then feint to get an average of -7 to defense against an evenly matched foe, then attack with as much deceptive attack as you can, and you win, especially in a game like Psi-Wars where you’re slinging around 8d damage during a duel.

One thing I did with Beats is to cap the penalty at -4.  My reasoning was at some point, if you’ve beat your opponent so badly, aren’t we really talking about some level of disarm instead? I mean, it’s one thing to knock an opponent’s weapon out of line, but it’s another to Beat your opponent when you have ST 25 and he has ST 10.  I mean, what does a -10 to defense even mean in a case like this?  It means he doesn’t have a weapon anymore, is what it means. It’s also weird that your weapon can be so far out of line, but you can attack just like normal, which is why my optional rules also penalize attacks with the weapon.  Once you hit 5+, your weapon becomes functionally unready (though I’ve changed it to “you can’t attack or parry with it until you ready it or the end of your next turn” to allow people to just wait it out, especially characters with a second weapon or second mode of attack, because requiring a ready is a hard missed turn).

So why not apply the same logic to feints?  If we cap a feint at -4 and offer some special benefit for extreme rolls (though I don’t know what that would be), it represents the maximum sort of benefit you can get from faking someone out.  That does cause problems in extreme games (Force Sword-30 vs Force Sword-30), but if the characters are close in skill, they won’t see much benefit from Feint anyway (usually no more than -4 if they maxed out the technique) and the characters will be slinging around pretty extreme deceptive attacks that eat up their extreme skills anyway (if both characters have Defense 19, but they’re using -18 deceptive attacks to apply -9 to active defenses, then a feint with -1 to -4 is plenty at even high levels of play).

Just something to consider.  I’ll let my discord chew on it before instituting it in Psi-Wars, but I think it might be a good idea.

Basic Move and Encumbrance

A reader finally explained their rabid distaste of any encumbrance at all to me, and I was shocked to realize I had been running it wrong ever since I got 4e.  See, back in 3e, you had a straight penalty from encumbrance: Light Encumbrance gave a -1 to Dodge and Move, Medium gave a -2, and so on.  With 4e, this was changed to -1 to Dodge and ×0.8 move and Medium was -2 and Move was ×0.6 and so on.  This worked out to be the same.  If you were Basic Speed 5, at no Encumbrance you had a Dodge of 8 and a Move of 5; at Light you had a Dodge of 7 and a Move of 4; at Medium, you had a Dodge of 6 and a Move of 3, and so on.  This is still true in 4e.

The problem is that you round down when it comes to fractions.  So, in 3e, once you hit move 6, one level of encumbrance in 3e dropped you to Basic Move 5 (+1 when compared to someone with Basic Move 5 and Light encumbrance), but in 4e, it drops you to Basic Move 4 (as though you never bought +1 Basic Move at all).  I personally find this repugnant.  I thought the rule was in place to handle extreme cases (like a character with Basic Move 10 and -5 from Extra Heavy Encumbrance dropping to a Move of 5 while also having a Step of 2), while operating more or less the same at more realistic levels (Basic Move 4 to 6); what it does instead is encourage pretty heavy investment in Basic Move: Basic Move 10 is actually a lot better than Basic Move 9, because it gets +1 step, and +1 Move at almost every level of encumbrance.

This seems so strange to me, so I did the math to see what the differences were.  I would expect that whatever system we use should more-or-less work at human normal values (Move 4-6) and then become more proportional the more extreme you become

		Light Encumbrance
Move	Step	3e	Round down	Round up
1	1	1	1	1
2	1	1	1	2
3	1	2	2	3
4	1	3	3	4
5	1	4	4	4
6	1	5	4	5
7	1	6	5	6
8	1	7	6	7
9	1	8	7	8
10	2	9	8	8

If we look, 4e’s “Round down” matches perfect at low values, but fails at a weird breakpoint at Move 6, which is the most likely to be encountered by a player.  Round up, by contrast, fails at Move 4, which is effectively “free points” if you know you’re going to be encumbered anyway.  So, you have to pick your poison: do you want to make players waste 5 points in Move 6, or get free points at Move? SJGames favors “no free points” so I can respect what they’re trying to do here. Furthermore, if you want to change it, where do you set the breakpoint? You can say “Well, Move 6 work differently,” okay, but then Move 7 breaks.  So, we say “Move 6 and 7 work differently” but then 8 breaks, and so on.  Where do you draw the line?

Move 10.  I draw the line at move 10.  Say Move 9 just gets a -1 to 8.  That means when you improve to Move 10, which is also 8, you gain no bonus… except you now have Step 2.  So that seems fair. Great!  Problem solved.  I’m a genius.

Except…

		Medium
Move	Step	3e	Round down	Round up
1	1	1	1	1
2	1	1	1	2
3	1	1	1	2
4	1	2	2	3
5	1	3	3	3
6	1	4	3	4
7	1	5	4	5
8	1	6	4	5
9	1	7	5	6
10	2	8	6	6
		Heavy
Move	Step	3e	Round down	Round up
1	1	1	1	1
2	1	1	1	1
3	1	1	1	2
4	1	1	1	2
5	1	2	2	2
6	1	3	2	3
7	1	4	2	3
8	1	5	3	4
9	1	6	3	4
10	2	7	4	4

		X-Heavy
Move	Step	3e	Round down	Round up
1	1	1	1	1
2	1	1	1	1
3	1	1	1	1
4	1	1	1	1
5	1	1	1	1
6	1	2	1	2
7	1	3	1	2
8	1	4	1	2
9	1	5	1	2
10	2	6	2	2

If we look at Medium encumbrance, we start to really diverge from the 3e and 4e point at Move 8, and for Heavy, our “you get nothing!” happens at move 7 already!  We also start to get “free points” pretty quickly.  By X-Heavy, it doesn’t matter what your move is, you’re floored at Move 1 until you hit Move 10 (unless we round up, in which case Move 6 is enough; it’s interesting that if you use the Round Down system, X-Heavy encumbrance means you can ONLY move ONE STEP until you hit Move 15).  You can also see that X-Heavy gets into some BS pretty quick in 3e.  Even if you accept that Move 2 is fine for someone with Move 6 and X-Heavy encumbrance, is Move 7 really 3 times as fast as Move five at X-heavy encumbrance? Hmmm.

So, I had a knee-jerk reaction against the idea of someone with Move 6 losing all extra movement that they purchased once they put on some leather armor, but when you explore the full implications, you begin to see why it is the way it is.  I still think you could probably find some middle ground between the easy 3e system and the much stricter 4e system, and Round Up offers some interesting possibilities but it also has some drawbacks that aren’t worth it.  The truth is, you’ll get breakpoints somewhere, and 4e is built to give you more bang for your buck as your points invested get higher.  So, yeah, if you want to move quicker in Light Encumbrance, get more ST (this makes ST more valuable anyway) or go up to Move 7. I bow to their wisdom.

State of the Blog: The October Roadmap

It’s that time again!

September Retrospective

Last month was, to my surprise given the volume of posts, a mediocre month for views. The big posts for this month were:

• The Conditional Injury Deep Dive
• Redjack Military Doctrine
• And my post answering Lord Buss’s questions.

Of the vehicles, the Switchback seems the most popular, but the Nomad isn’t far behind, and the Ranathim Mithanna get a special mention, likely because people like that picture.

I lost a Disciple Patron, which always hurts, but a I gained a new Companion patron, so overall Patreon is a wash.  I had a “drive-by” patron; some people really hate that, but I don’t mind. I find most patrons stay for the long haul and join in with the community.  That said, I’ve seen a surge in comments and discord use, so I’m rather pleased with the direction of the Psi-Wars community.

The big wiki-updates this month have been:

• Psionic Powers
• The Aristocrat Background Lens (Which, as of this post, is still in progress).

An October Perspective

As always, I have a vote for what topics you guys would like me to cover.  The winners this month are:

For Rules Collation: Communion.  That’ll be a big one.

For Template Collation: The Space Knight (with the Wanderer Background Lens in second place)

For General Topic: A tie between “What is magic, really?” and “Modular Robots Revisited.”

Communion

Communion has been popular since I released it back in Iteration 3, and it’s been largely uchanged since then except for Broken Communion, which keeps getting weirder.  We now have ghosts, and quite a treatise on them, and things like psychic diseases and loads of other problems that Broken Communion can cause.  I might also change how it’s priced, as it seems increasingly reasonable to have True Communion miracles to break or override Broken Communion miracles (ie, you can use True Communion to purge Broken Communion sanctity) and perhaps you should be able to protect yourself from Broken Communion the same way you can protect yourself from ghosts.

The biggest change to Communion was introduced with the Divine Masks: occult communion and a greater role for Paths.  I had originally conceived of Paths as a way of specializing one’s form of Communion, but I’ve been increasingly seeing it as a “road to Communion.”  That is, a Templar or a Mystical Tyrant might command Communion, but most people who interact with it do so unwittingly by embodying archetypes.  This needs to be codified, and that means Paths need to be expanded, because normal communion gives you access to all of Communion, while a path gives you only a limited subset of Communion.

Finally, I’ve decided we need more paths.  I find three paths per form of communion a little constraining.  I’d like to add one more path per form of Communion, to better refine the concepts of the Paths, which means some things will get shifted around.  All names subject to change.

True Communion gets the Wounded Healer, who moves some of the gentle, self-sacrificing things from the Bound Princess, who becomes more of a self-sacrificing authority figure.  Domen Venalina (the Ranathim Sin Eaters) will shift from the Bound Princess to the Wounded Healer.

Dark Communion gets the Devourer, or the Hungry Beast.  This will focus on the “vice” of greed and gluttony, on self-preservation via base, animal means.  It’ll have a strong resonance with wild animals and wild places, and take some of the bestial aspects of the Rebellious Beast and the hungry aspects of the Beautiful Fool for itself, making the Rebellious Beast more about thoughtless destruction and rage, and the Beautiful Fool more about lust and laziness.

Broken Communion gets the Void.  This will focus on thoughts of nothing of nothingness and emptiness, the inability to grasp both the infinite and the truly empty.  It’ll touch on cosmic themes and, obviously, travel powers and higher dimensional powers.

The Space Knight

The Space Knight is a tricky one, easily on par with (or more difficult than) the Aristocrat.  It’s not so much that we need a ton of setting information, because we have most of that.  We need to dive into force swordsmanship using my new approach, and I still need to work out a couple of styles.  Fortunately, you already know what “Martial Arts as Power-Ups” looks like, so that shouldn’t be too bad.

The biggest problem with space knights is tackling their sheer variety.  One of my goals with Psi-Wars was to open up the “Jedi” template to a much broader range, and I think I’ve succeeded.  Templars feel like Jedi and the Tyrants like Sith, but Maradonian Space Knights feel like, well, knights, and the Satemo of the Umbral Rim feel more like vengeful ronin, and we have room for “Street Knights,” like Dun Beltain.  We need to not only integrate all of these different cultural elements, but also their martial arts and their psionic powers or, in the case of House Kain, how one can be a space knight without psionic powers.

If that doesn’t work, we’ll shift to the Wanderer, which I suspect did as well as it did thanks to curiosity about Redjack, which seemed to be popular with the Discord community, and what sort of people might fly those ships.

Modular Robots? Magic?

Last but not least, we had quiet a discussion about robots recently, which led to some people criticizing my approach to ST.  I think it’s well-founded… but it turns out there’s an interesting counter-case to be made, which could lead to some different designs.  Using this approach could lead to new problems, and it might be worth discussing what works well with my old Modular Robots approach and how, possibly, we might be able to keep it.

If that doesn’t pan out, I can rant about magic for a good 10k words.

Is that all?

If this isn’t enough to keep me busy for the month, in theory the last part of the military doctrines series are robots.  We need to get stats on the robots that fill the tech-bot slot on most fighters, and we need to talk about the robots that tend to your wounds, or that Redjack pirates use to scout (or patrol) outposts.  This makes a revisit of Modular Robots quite timely.

It also means creating an entirely new set of rules to govern how they work as allies, how you can quickly design your allies, and how PC robots might interact with the system. This is a project on par with the Sidekicks supplement for Monster Hunters or Henchmen for Dungeon Fantasy, and so it might take a lot of work (though, compared to the ships, thus far, it’s been pretty quick!).  With Communion and Space Knights on my plate, these might have to wait but, on the other hand, I have a week of vacation, some of which I might even be able to use to write.

If I find I still have time, I’d like to do a Patreon poll series wherein we build our own military doctrine and associated materiel.

Well, that’s what I’d like to tackle for October, we’ll see how it goes.  I’m glad to have you still with me and thanks, as always, for your patronage and your clicks.

The State of (My) GURPS Vehicles

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, you know that I have a vehicles systems that’s an update of 3e Vehicles with 4e values and rules, where I can find them. My patrons have asked me to give an update on that system, and you can find the latest rules here (Available to any $1+ patron).

I also wanted to talk about my experience working with Vehicles throughout the past year to build the gear for Psi-Wars, what I think works, what I think doesn’t, and my feelings in general on the Vehicles vs Spaceships debate.

Was it worth it? Yes!

So, the first question is “Has all of my work been worth it?” The answer is complicated, but the first half is “Definitely, yes.”

I work as a programmer, and one thing that a lot of fellow coders like to comment on is misusing X to do Y, when you should just build Y to do Y, and I think that sort of thinking has helped Psi-Wars immensely.  Previously, I had used GURPS Spacehips to “fake” the space combat of Psi-Wars, but when you accept that what it really is are (space) ships fighitng (space) fighters, and build a system around that, everything falls into place nicely.  The Action Vehicular Combat system has, for me, been a godsend.  I find everything makes much more sense, and works pretty much the way someone would expect.

Of course, I’m here to talk about Vehicles, but that’s key to this.  The problem with GURPS Spacehips is that it’s built to deal with spaceships, and it turns out that beyond atmospheres, you should be measuring speeds in miles per second and distances in AU, and Star Wars and Space Opera just don’t work like that.  They work more at “ground speeds and distances,” and those require a ground based system and Spaceships is, at best, wonky when it comes to that.

The new vehicles system has allowed me to get very precise when I need to, to put guns that are “too big” on a vehicle, or guns that are “too small,” and to fiddle with electronics or room design in very specific ways that Spaceships would never allow.

It’s also not nearly as difficult as you might think. Sure, you need spreadsheets to make heads or tails of it, but you’re here, right now, reading this on a computer, and chances are, you work with office software all the time. You can put together a basic spreadsheet.  Some stuff I have do is complicated, sure, but you can find ways around that and just do it by hand.  In the end, I really noticed I was using more and more complex rules to properly model my vehicles and sort of reverse engineering values out of various pyramid articles, so this system has acted to collate all of those little notes into one consistent place.

Was it worth it? No, not really.

On the other hand, I often feel a twinge of regret for leaving the Spaceships system.  The biggest revelation is that most of the stuff I do doesn’t really matter.  For example, I often put a Link between multiple guns that are designed to fire together.  The guns, often huge blasters, will be $1,000,000 credits each, and the link itself will be $50.  When the complete vehicle is done, it’ll be something like $498,001,155 or whatever, and I’ll just round it up to $500,000,000 and whether I had noted a link or not literally doesn’t matter.

I find this “doesn’t really matter” applies to a lot of things, especially the larger vehicle.  Does it really matter exactly how many cabins or bunks a Dreadnought has?  Does it really matter the exact speed?  Speed is actually really interesting because, based on the Action rules, you have a logarithmic scale of speed, which means you need more and more of it to make a difference, so at the very high end, the difference between a vehicle that goes 1000 yards per second and a vehicle that goes 1500 yards per second is a difference of +/-1 on your rolls!  That’s a feature, rather than a bug, for me, but it often means I shrug at minor differences in speed.

I find, in fact, that I begin to arbitrarily use values: a +1 Handling or HT here, a -1 Stability there.  Increasingly, I use my Vehicles system as a more “order of magnitude estimation” of what’s possible and what’s complete nonsense, and then set my stats based on that. I don’t mean to say I make no use of the stats, or that the vehicles aren’t close to the final designs; I am saying I fudge, and if you’re going to fudge, why not use the Spaceships system?

I will note that Spaceships does modularity a lot better than Vehicles does.  One of the things I came across pretty early on in my vehicles design was the revelation that some players will want to “mod” their spaceships.  They don’t want an X-wing, they want a special, unique version with a boosted force screens and a dodgy energy system that their Astromech has to pay constant attention to, which means you need to be able to remove some parts and replace them with others. Spaceships does this very well, because they’re all just slots.  With GURPS Vehicles, though, it’s a nightmare, so I’ve been experimenting with RedJack ships and modularity.  The hardest part is handling the speed: if you can keep all the weights and volume the same and not mess with motive thrust, then you can slot things in and out pretty much interchangeably.  But when you start leaving parts off, though, or adding more engines, you start needing a spreadsheet to recalculate everything, which is a hassle.

Also, since I designed my Vehicles system, a new Pyramid issue has come out that details how to convert handling and stability.  It’s actually a great issue overall for creating your own vehicles, so if you want to ditch my system and just build your own, this is actually pretty good: “Describing Vehicles” in Pyramid #3/120.  I’ve not yet used it for my vehicle calculations, in part because some bits I disagree with, and others I just have’t looked at in sufficient detail, and it would require revisiting a lot of other vehicles to make sure they were correct, but I may.  The main things I disagree with are how he assigns Handling and SR.  He’s not wrong, mind you: eyeballing it is basically the way to go, but I chose to go with a more detailed system that I felt defensible for what I wanted (and it’s also all over the map if you look at actual vehicles and their actual handling), so I’ve not bothered with it.  That’s not to say you couldn’t use it, though.

GURPS Vehicles vs Spaceships

So, should you use Spaceships or Vehicles?  I think it depends on what you’re trying to do, but I would broadly say: Spaceships is a decent estimation tool, but it has some pretty glaring flaws.

The first is how it handles mass vs volume and how it scales. I’ve wanted to do a cross-post series with Worlds Beyond Earth who takes a deeper look into the flaws of Spaceships, but my numbers keep disagreeing with his, I don’t want to start a blog fight, and I’m pretty sure if we sat down and worked out the numbers between us, the differences (and who was making the mistake) would emerge and both of our numbers would improve as a result, but I don’t have the time for it right now; nonetheless, I do recommend you look at his series.

When it comes the mass/volume of things like super-science devices (which could be anything, so its guess is as good as yours), rooms, cargo space, hangars, and large-scale industrial equipment, it looks pretty spot on.  It also looks pretty good for large vehicles: my dreadnoughts look really close to Spaceship’s dreadnoughts.

Energy usage is off, and I’m not sure why.  Spaceships seems to argue that, say, Fusion is about 2× as good as Fission, while Vehicles (and Ultra-Tech and most physics I’ve seen) suggests you’re looking at more like 10×.

Armor is fine for mass (you can quibble about the values, especially what the material of each armor is made of, but my numbers say they look about right), but it’s totally off for volume.  There’s a fix for that, though; alternatively, you can skip the armor step, come up with the vehicle, and layer the armor atop it, but then you need to come up with your own mass vs thrust ratios to determine the final speed.

Electronics is totally off.  My experience again and again on equipment is that your sensors, ECM and computers take up basically no volume or mass budget of the vehicle, and they’re often very critical and specific.  Spaceships treats them as a big, broad thing, with a few little minor elements suitable for space, but you don’t get into the gritty details like you do in GURPS Vehicles and, as a result, I’ve been left pretty in the dark on quite a few gadgets and how to deal with them.  There is definitely no way that an ECM system would take up 3/20ths of a vehicle, or a sensor system unless you’re talking a really small vehicle with a giant ECM or sensor system meant to cover a huge area, and Spaceships doesn’t treat them like that. Cost is a much bigger deal. Frankly, when it comes to electronics, I think you’re better of grabbing ultra-tech, taking its electronics, and just slotting them into a cargo slot and saying they’re integrated with the rest of the vehicle, or just ignoring that altogether and adding the costs of those electronics to the vehicle.

Weapons are another element that I think are totally off.  I think they’re ultimately just given arbitrary values that feel “gameable.”  I did something similar with my Psi-Wars designs, and you end up in a similar situation of “photon torpedoes let fighters kill really big ships but have limited ammo, and blasters are only good against other fighters” but I have a lot more flexibility about the designs I put together.  This is double trouble, though, because we don’t have a decent ballistic design system (though we have some larger missiles in some of the older Pyramid issues) and we don’t have a decent energy conversion rate between Spaceships and the blaster design system; that said, I find I end up using power cells anyway and assume they recharge during down time, so you can just do the same for your Spaceships, skip the weapons from GURPS SS, design your own, and then add their mass to the ship.  You’ll need some help if you want them to have turrets and stabilizers, etc, but at that point, you’re better off with the full Vehicle design system anyway.  Honestly, weapons are where it goes wrong the most, especially on the very small scale.

So, would I do it all over again?  I think so, but I wouldn’t throw Spaceships out completely.  I wouldn’t mind seeing a revision that looked more carefully at power-requirements (and maybe provided some conversions, especially with power-cells), weapons (especially if we had a proper weapon design system), electronics (and some more details on how they worked, especially ECM) and armor, I think you’d have a perfect system, but I’m not sure how different that would look from a simpler vehicle design system anyway, so maybe we’re left waiting, hoping, for the release of the new Vehicles system!

Martial Arts as Power-Ups: Retrospective

So, over this week I discussed an alternate take, or really a more detailed way to organize them, for certain games.  I came up with the idea while working on my force swordsmanship styles for Psi-Wars, and I thought I’d pitch it to the community and see what they thought.  So, let’s see what you had to say.

This reminds me of how cool and detailed GURPS can be in its nitty-gritty combat. But in all my GURPS experience (with 5-6 players) you really have to skip over most of the details, making most enemies simple ‘mooks’ that go down in 1-2 hits. – Scott Mclean

This generated an entire conversation over on facebook about the ins and outs of handling martial arts detail.  If I can sum up for everyone here: 

If you want to run a good martial arts game, I find it best to focus pretty strictly on the detail you want and to make sure combat flows quickly.  Try to eliminate all rule-hunting mid-game, or long, complicated discussions about what the character wants to do. Instead, create cheat-sheets (trademark moves go a long way to helping with that) so all the complex work is done ahead of time and you just have to reference your trademark move.  As a GM, I also recommend what I call the “5 second” rule, which is if you don’t say what you’re going to do in 5 seconds of your turn, then you do nothing.

A lot of problems that I see with GURPS newbies is that they often come from games like D&D where a “turn” is conceived of as a unit of “work” rather than a unit of “time.”  A turn, in the D&D context, is enough time to do something meaningful.  For example, in D&D, the idea (as I understand it) is that you’re doing all kinds of things, but the action you actually take is the only meaningful thing that happens in your turn.  This means that ever turn, something should happen.

By contrast, GURPS is more about the flow of time, so you might stand around doing nothing for a second, or you might be drawing your gun, or you might be aiming. If you’re used to D&D-style turns, it feels like you’re wasting turns, and the idea that a fight might go on for 30 turns is just too horrible to contemplate (“That would take all day”).  However, if you understand that a GURPS turn is like reducing an action film to a slideshow, then it makes sense that there are seconds when not much happens.  But to make that work, you need to keep more-or-less everyone taking a minimum amount of real-world time, hence my advice on keeping turns flowing.  If one player can kill three NPCs in the time it takes you to draw your weapon, he’s really really fast, and probably paid a premium for the privilege.

I could probably talk all day about this topic, and I have, but I’ll pause here.  Nonetheless, I find it an interesting topic; given some of the responses, perhaps I should revisit a generic martial arts setting at some point and discuss how to build it.

All three of your posts are helping me tremendously with my martial arts game world that I am creating. -Andre Troch

A few people commented on how “eye-opening” or how much of a “game-changer” these articles were for them.  Great!  I had hoped the design ideas would assist people.  Incidentally, if you’d like to get more help or advice, I have a Discord here you can check out if you’d like to talk to me or the Psi-Wars community, who seem pretty helpful chaps.

Did you ever consider style talents as part of this article? -Wiggles

I did not.  In fact, I had to go hunting around to even figure out what that meant, and I couldn’t find a reference.  My best guess here is that Wiggles is referring to a custom talent that applies to a single style, similar to a Wildcard Skill for a style.  I actually have a few issues with these, and I think it can be boiled down to my shortlived time playing with Christopher Rice: I had taken a Wildcard Skill as a style, and he kept hedging on what it could do, because it was unclear and he was erring on the side of not letting it be too “overpowered,” while I tend to feel that Wildcard Skills tend to be pretty marginal anyway, so you should really give them the benefit of the doubt.  The point here is not who is right, but the fact that such things lend themselves to ambiguities like this.

A talent wouldn’t have to be the same.  Power-Ups 3: Talents actually has a side bar on defaults, which is that you handle the defaults without the talent, and then apply the bonus; that is, if you normally have a Karate of 14 and a Jeet Kun Do talent of +4, and you want to Elbow Strike someone (Karate -1), you work out the base level (13) and then add the talent (13+4 = 17).  It feels like a convoluted way of saying “Just apply the default normally, but the talent doesn’t give you some double-dipped benefit).  Okay, simple enough: a Style Talent would be a very small talent (5 points, I’m guessing) that adds to the skills of that Style and the techniques of that style only.  So, for example, if your Jeet Kun Do guy has Jeet Kun Do Talent +4, he gets a +4 to his Elbow Strike (which is a JKD technique) but not to Choke Hold (which is not a JKD technique).

I think such a talent would look a lot like “I’m good at X skills within a talent, but only with some of the techniques, making this worse than just being talented at Karate or Judo.”  It also tends to mean that you’re better off improving your talent rather than your techniques, which means your facility with a style becomes your level of talent.  It also leads to a proliferation of talents (every style you learn becomes a talent).

This is not necessarily a problem, though.  It doesn’t fit what I’m trying to do, but imagine a game with 20 styles that your character can learn, but you just buy them in talent blocks, like “I know JKD at +4, and Jujutsu at +1!” it might be a decent way to simplify the styles, though I don’t know how much it would simplify in practice, and if your players would appreciate the simplification.

 Don’t worry about “real practitioners complaining a fundamental piece of an art is missing.”  MA book already does that for at least a few. -Mao

I want to clarify my statement on this a little.  My intention is not to say “Those crabby martial artists are always complaining,” but to point out a problem with this approach and real-world martial arts.  This sort of approach tends to simplify a style down to a set of a handful of moves and forces you to approach the martial art in a particular way. This has the benefit of making the martial art really bold and distinct, but loses a lot of subtlety.

To use Smasha as an example, we had quite a discussion on the Clinch perk, with some people defending its inclusion.  One thing that struck me as I worked more with Smasha is that its strange construction makes more sense in the standard MA format if you see it as three interlocking styles: if you buy Boxing (A) DX+4 [16], Brawling (E) DX [1], Wrestling (A) DX-1 [1], then you’re really a brutal boxer and you’ll focus on the boxing techniques, and some people argued that Clinch makes sense in this context (I dunno, I feel like “Spend that point in Wrestling to get it up to DX and you’ll get way more bang for your buck).  You can do the same spread but with different skills (16 points in Brawling, one in the rest, 16 in Wrestling, one in the rest), and you have three different fighters who all use the same style, but use it in completely different ways and have different relationships with the style.  This is not wrong, and it’s the sort of thing that I suspect happens out in the martial art world (and, taken to extreme, explains sub-styles and how styles evolve over time; if Western orcs constantly focus on the Wrestling side, you may eventually get Western Smasha as some sort of Combat Wrestling variant that becomes its own distinct style).  I think it’s a real and legit expression of martial arts too, but it’s something that my approach doesn’t handle that well.  Thus, you gain something, but you lose something else.

I’ve had some people point this out, and what I’d recommend for people who prefer the old approach is to keep the original martial art around, sort of how DF has its templates, but also a discussion of appropriate traits, as the latter allows you to make your own character  your way.  If you have a Smasha player that wants to build his own move (say, a Trademark Punch to the Vitals, which has great synergy with Secrets of the Ripperjack), they can.

Should you allow that, though?  Well, that’s an answer I leave to you.  I would argue it’s the same sort of debate DF people have over whether or not templates should be strict. On the one hand, those templates force people to be sufficiently flexible while having necessary core traits, they protect niches, and they help the players explore the world that DF itself is setting out for them.  On the other hand, sometimes people want to do their own thing and they’re not hurting anything by it… most of the time.  I think there are reasons to go with either approach, and it depends on the sort of game you want.

Finally,

… – Peter Dell’Orto

Ultra-Tech Framework Post-Script and Comments

I wrote my Ultra-Tech Framework articles with a couple of readers/patrons in mind, who often had questions about how I put together my own technology frameworks in my campaigns, so I thought it might be nice to loosely document how I handled it.  It is, of course, more art than science, and I could do an entire series on game design elements, but I hoped it was useful.

Given that it might be useful to them, it might be useful to you as well, dear reader, so I thought it might be nice to make it generally available, and I was right!  It seems quite well received, and it generated quite some discussion.  I wanted to tackle, broadly, some of the comments and questions I received over the course of the series.  All the questions are paraphrased, because I received many of them on Discord, and I didn’t save them at the time, thus they are remembered, rather than directly quoted.  Apologies if this makes some inaccurate.

You say to start with the background tech and move on the big, setting-changing tech.  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

This is an interesting point.  First, I must say that I got this sort of question from the broken up articles, rather than the complete document, as seen on Patreon.  I imagine this is so because if you see that advice in isolation, you might become confused.

The first step in the ultra-tech creation process should be defining your concept and framework.  So, yes, you’re “starting” with what makes your setting distinct and different.  Once you know that, for example, you’re going to feature advanced AI in a campaign that focuses on murder mysteries, then you move on to detailing your technology.  Only once you have this worked out, I recommend starting with the simplest choices and moving on from there: pick your tech level, lay down the most basic tech and work out the tech at increasing complexity and concern.  This is the point where some people object: why not do this in reverse?  Hit the “most important part first.”

I recommend starting simple to establish a familiar, setting baseline.  The “trick” of coming up with the setting defining technology was handled in the concept phase.  Now, we’re working out things like setting implications.  But to understand the setting implications of a setting, we need to know the setting.  Thus, I recommend that as a foundation.  You might see the earlier steps as “getting the obvious stuff out of the way.”  In our AI-who-solves-crime example, we know the TL (say, 10), and we know the feel (more or less like modern procedural crimes, but with an AI).  So we know that we should mostly have familiar TL 10 tech, we can have a few convenience techs (we might make forensics a little easier so a single duo can do quite a lot of it on their own), and certainly some standard sci-fi tropes, like hover-cars and beam weapon side-arms.  Now that we have an idea of what our setting is like, it’s safer for us to go into what the AI is like, and how it impacts the setting.

This has several advantages.  First, I find it tends to “tame” the concept of the setting.  If you challenge a GM to come up with a TL 12 space opera, most will freeze, because there’s way too many choices available, most of which are crazy.  So we start by removing the crazy and adding the TL 12 we find most palatable, the “familiar” technology that helps us grasp how our setting will work.  Once we have that bedrock, once our setting is in our grasp, then we can bring in the crazy.  Miracle tech also tends to be labor intensive.  You need to consider where things go wrong, or how players might use or abuse your technology.  If you use up your energy and time working out the details on your miracle tech, you have no game or setting to run; if instead, you use up your time and energy on all the rest of the tech, you can at least run the baseline setting you created.  Our AI procedural is at least a TL 10 procedural if we don’t have AI.

This isn’t to say you can’t work that way.  If you don’t like a specific piece of advice in a recipe or an advice column, but the rest of it is good, use the rest of it.  I often instruct stumped writers to “write what they know.”  If you know your setting is going to have advanced AI and that’s where your focus is, write that.  If you don’t know what the rest is, you can “grab and go,” especially if you understand the concept of familiar tech, convenience tech and standard-issue sci-fi tech.  So, we know we’re going to have super-advanced AI, and we can work that out in detail.  What’s the rest like? Oh, TL 10, but with a modern feel.  So, you can use modern cars, only they hover; you can use modern guns, only they deal burning (2) damage, or whatever.  If it’s not important, you can “fill in the blanks” later.  This isn’t bad advice; it just pre-supposes you have a good handle on the concepts I outline in my series.

This seems really complicated. Why do you have to make things so complicated? Why do you overprep? Why can’t you just fudge it, like I do?

First, I want to say up front that there are many “right” ways to run an RPG.  I’ve got my style and approach and it works very well for me, and given my views and patronage, I have a sufficient audience that I can safely conclude that my approach has a sufficient audience to justify my continued blogging.  But that doesn’t mean that I expect my approach to have universal appeal.  If you don’t want detailed and richly complex works, then you’re probably in the wrong place.  I understand that my “start simple, get complex” approach can feel like a bait-and-switch, but this is how complexity is built: it emerges naturally from simplicity.

My mother told me to go to the store and buy a dozen eggs and that if they had milk, to buy two.  I returned with 24 eggs and no milk.  She asked me why I bought so many eggs, to which I replied “They had milk!”

That said, there’s an important principle that I want to highlight: humans tend to be good at hiding complexity.  We do ridiculously complicated things all of the time without being consciously aware of what we’re doing.  If asked a difficult math question, a student might respond, correctly, with the answer, without knowing how he arrived at that answer: he might remember it from when someone else answered it, or the answer might simply make sense to him.  Even so, most teachers will dock you points if you cannot “show your work,” which means to go through each step and explain how you came to those conclusions. The difference between logic and intuition is that the former is explicit while the latter is implicit, but both deal with complicated things.

The problem arises if someone doesn’t understand the process at all.  How do you teach someone about the complexities involved.  An intuitive person cannot; they can only show the person what they do and hope the other person gets it (this is similar to memorizing all the answers to a math test).  A logical person can explicitly explain each step.  This makes it a more powerful teaching tool: you can understand the principles behind handling complexities, and then apply them on your own.

People don’t always like facing complexities, but they are there whether you want to admit them or not.  My article is explaining what I’ve seen done in every successful ultra-tech game.  A simpler way of explaining it, the sort of advice I more often see is “Pick a concept, throw out all the tech you don’t need, and just keep it simple.  Oh, and be honest about the implications of the technology you do choose.”  Well, how do you pick out a concept?  What tech do I need and what don’t I need and how do I handle them?  What is “simple” and is it always advisable to keep it as simple as possible? If so, why do we have so many different types of guns? Wouldn’t it be simpler to have only a single gun type? And what about the realist/honesty of technological implications? If I introduce a technology am I stuck with all of the “implications?” Is there no good way to control those? Is there a good way to figure out what those are?

When I write, I’m trying to outline all the possible steps, cases and tools you might need.  Sometimes, I worry I’ll come across as patronizing in how much I try to simplify matters, and worry that I assume to much foreknowledge.  I find a lot of people who criticize me assume far, far more foreknowledge, usually either because they’re fairly experienced (but unconscious of that experience), or they simply dismiss the levels of details I offer (“There’s nothing wrong with having just one gun, or faking all the different guns by using a single stat-line and making up bonuses and maluses on the fly”), which is fine, but as an article that seeks to help as many people as possible, I need to assume less foreknowledge not more, and assume more interest in detail, not less.

It’s easier to ignore uninteresting details than it is to fill in blanks, thus more useful to people to be overly detailed rather than not detailed enough (though, naturally, this must be balanced for readability).

How can you say that increasingly complex computers aren’t transformative? I think having a server in hand is pretty transformative!

I didn’t say it wasn’t, I said it didn’t have to be.

This highlights a core and important principle: this series isn’t about what is, it’s about what you want.  It’s about building a setting to your specifications.  You need to pick and choose your technology to highlight the story elements you want, and the rest, where possible, should remain familiar.  Advanced computers are a good example of a technology that can believably stay familiar.

Let’s break down the specifics of that.  If you pull out  your mobile phone and look up a location on google maps, your phone doesn’t know where that location is.  It just has a link to an API that talks to a server that returns that information to you. This is called a thin client.  As mobile devices get better, they get thicker clients, but most of that “thickness” is in clever display tricks (like handling screen rotation) or caching information than it is in complex calculations.  Siri does not live on your phone, she lives in a server, but she can talk to your phone.

If you suddenly had a phone with the capacity of a server: suddenly, you could have Siri and Google Maps loaded directly into your phone and that’s… convenient, but not much more.  The capabilities of someone with a mobile device in such a setting aren’t dramatically different from the capabilities they would have in the present.  A good example of this would be desktop computers, which in the 1990s could engage in gaming, hacking, programming and surfing the internet and today, can engage in gaming, hacking, programming and surfing the internet.  The gaming looks better today, hacking uses different tricks and different exploits, and the internet is better and more useful than it was, but there’s no transformative change here.  If you asked someone in the 1990s to imagine the capabilities of the computers of the early 2020s and he imagined them like the present “only incrementally better,” he’d be pretty spot on.

This doesn’t mean that I believe computers cannot be transformative.  Our 1990s fellow would be dead wrong when it came to how mobile devices would revolutionize the world, as well as the impact of things like social media.  If we create new applications of our technology, that will have implications.  The mobile device turned the desktop into something you could carry around with you, which meant that the world became far more interconnected than before.  Imagine a TL 12 computer that fits in your skull and talks directly to your mind that is as powerful as a modern server, or imagine a TL 10 computer that fits in a pair of glasses and projects images directly in your field of view, layering a digital reality over the real one (“Augmented Reality”) and it has the power of a mobile device.  Imagine a desktop computer that contained programs that weren’t designed, but that were, instead, taught, and could be “taught” in seconds.  This could automate away almost any task in but moments, and would have major implications.  Any similar technologies introduced into a setting have the potential to be a transformative technology around which your story could be told.

The point of my article is not to dismiss the transformative power of computers, medicine, weapons, or any technology you want, but to help you tame that transformative power so you can highlight the transformations you want.  If you want to explore how future computers will change us (a typical theme of cyberpunk), then do that.  But if you don’t, then you shouldn’t.  Most sci-fi out there assumes future computers won’t completely transform how we live our lives, and that’s fair.

Speaking of which:

I think technology should be depicted as realistically as possible; ignoring the transformative nature of any technology is unrealistic, thus to be avoided.

Nobody actually said this, but it felt like an undercurrent of commentary from a few specific quarters.  I’ve seen this sort of commentary and themes before, especially when I get into discussions about “what sci-fi is.”  So I want to address these quickly; this will necessarily involve some definitions, which not everyone will agree with, but I offer them primarily to model how you can handle various forms of science fiction.

First, science fiction is, to me, any fiction that explores the implications of science and technology.  A lot of people like to use the terms “hard” and “soft” sci-fi to define a continuum of how “realistically” or “respectfully” you handle the science and technology vs how loose and fast you play with those rules, but traditionally “hard sci-fi” was fiction about the hard sciences, like chemistry or physics, while “soft sci-fi” was fiction about soft sciences like psychology or sociology.  The desire for intense realism in sci-fi, the other use of the term “hard” in sci-fi is associated with a subgenre that I would like to dub “futurism.” This is not a discussion about a scientific concept, rather an attempt to synthesize all the various advances going on in the present, and attempting to predict what the world will look like in the future, generally (but not necessarily) in narrative for,.  Fans of this genre want their fiction to be as realistic as possible and as authentic as possible.  They will dismiss blue-skinned space princesses as utterly unrealistic, and will concede that while terraforming Mars is possible, will argue that it will not happen on short time tables and might even question whether or not it would be practical given the feasibility of orbital colonies and so on.

I point out this genre not to suggest that it’s a “bad” genre, but to point out that it is not the only possible genre, or even desirable in your specific case.  Many fans of futurism seem to behave as though their genre is the best or most desirable.  I’m a big fan of Isaac Arthur, and in his world-building discussion, he’s as guilty as the rest of doing the same, while I’m quite sure that if you pointed it out, he would realize he finds perfectly unrealistic works quite entertaining. Isaac Asimov is famous for this.  For example, his Foundation series features atomic ray guns and force screens and interstellar civilizations spanning into the deep future, but also printed newspapers; his robots series depicts what is essentially the 1950s and 1960s, only with robots.  In neither case was his fiction “bad.”  It was just focused.  Asimov wanted to talk about the cycles of civilization and the idea of psychohistory (foundation) or the implications of robotics and AI programming (I, Robot).  Good sci-fi authors try to pick and choose what they want to talk about.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach.

My series is about how to minimize your workload and to focus down on the technologies you want for your setting.  This is not to say it cannot handle the “futurism” genre, but that there are more genres than that, and futurism is a remarkably unforgiving genre (it seems to exist primarily so smart people can criticize works in the genre, which is not meant to disparage it: by criticizing works of the genre, you sharpen your own knowledge, provided your criticisms are accurate).  Thus, I disagree with the assessment that “realism is always better.”  Targeted realism that helps you tell the story you want to tell is “always better.”  Unimportant realism represents excessive details threatens to get in the way of your storytelling unless handled very well. There are some genres were no amount of realism is “unimportant,” even if it derails the story you were trying to tell, because that means that the story you were trying to tell was the wrong one.  But this is not the approach every GM will take, nor should you feel compelled to follow it.

This is cool!  Let me tell you about my setting and the technology I used then!

I know the boorish gamer who goes on and on about his character, setting or campaign is a time-honored trope, but I personally never liked the idea of finding such people “boring” or “irritating.” I think if you don’t want to hear the stories of other players, you’re in the wrong hobby!  As a GM, I love it when my work inspired others, either to create their own works, to compare their works to yours, or just offer up their own.  It means my work spoke to them, and I like it when they speak back to me.

What I’m trying to do with my blog is encourage more people to build settings, to master the intricacies of GURPS and campaign design.  Worked examples, whether using my material directly or not, are always welcome. Always.

There have been several such works posted in comments.  You can go back and sift through my posts to find them, but if you post a link to a blog post or a google document here in the comments, or just send it to me, I’ll link it here.

State of the Patreon: May, and an Iteration 6 retrospective

I am behind, as usual. You’ll find this becomes relatively common in the next year or so, because my day has become traveling on a train for 3 hours a day, working 8 hours a day, and then putting my boy to bed and going to bed myself.  Paradoxically, this means I’m writing more than ever, as I purchased the dinkiest laptop ever (a Lenovo Miix 320) and I’ve been typing away, but having the time to really sit down, do proper research and editing, never mind posting, requires sitting behind my computer, and that’s going to be a rare thing.  So, fair warning!

So, what happened last month?  What are we doing this month?  And where do I see the blog going?

The State of the Blog

I didn’t have enough posts last month to really run a “top ten posts of the month,” so I’ll just tell you which Templar Chapter “won:” The Far Striders, which really surprised me.  I worried they would be the least interesting of the set, but I think  you guys really appreciated what I was trying to do with them.  I wanted a grounded faction, one easily accessible to your players, a group clearly inspired by the classic Star Wars vision of the Jedi, and from this group, you could access or visit any other group.  You guys seemed to have enjoyed it, and they’re the only group that I’ve seen with comments (left on the forum) praising them, so thanks for our feedback, guys!

Views were down this month, but not by much, and not the lowest level of views.  I’ve stabilized around 5000 views a month.

The State of the Patreon

Patron numbers are essentially flat, with one person who left, one person who joined (and then left at the beginning of May: he evidently showed up for the one work he wanted to get, and I can totally respect that!), while patron funding is up, mainly due to the new scheme I’ve offered.  We now have one secret councilor, and a full set of 12 disciples once more.

The polls, all of them, were a big hit, and this month I’ll announce the results, which will be a $5+ post as usual; if I get to working out the fourth chapter this month, it’ll be a $3+ post, as usual.  The $1+ post(s) will be about GURPS Vehicles, and that’s a topic that requires additional discussion, since we’re going to make something of a project of this.

An Iteration 6 retrospective

The right and proper thing to do after completing an iteration is to stop, look back on what you’ve done, and see what needs to be fixed and what can stay as is.  So this post should be a quick look back at everything, and then a discussion as to what to do next, but I already know what I need to do next, which is to look at everything, and there’s a lot of things to look at!  This is a natural part of  how I’m handling the creation: at each stage, I add to what came before, which means the complexity of everything continues to mount and mount.  Cycles of expansion (as I create more material) and contraction (as I shed the unnecessary material) are normal, and if you look at any of your favorite games that go through cycles of editions, you’ll see this is usually the case: after you release a new edition, you get expansion after expansion with more and more complexity until it becomes too much, then you release a new edition that eliminates the unnecessary cruft while keeping the good bits and then begin to release expansions, and so on.

(I use the word “Edition” which is what these iterations are beginning to turn into, but I’ll talk about that a bit more in a moment).

Iteration 6 got away from me a little, and I’ve seen a bit of a split in the community that follows it, not in the sense of arguments, but in the sense of reactions.  While I predicted iteration 6 would take a year (and it essentially did), I also predicted we’d have aliens and planets, and we really only have factions.  That said, what I set out to do was create a setting, and I’ve done that.  So I wouldn’t call it a failure.

Where iteration 1-5 was really a sort of designer diary, Iteration 6 turned into me simply churning out setting material, rather than discussing the mechanics of what I was doing.  I had said at the outset that you must follow a fractal approach, and while I did, it might not have been obvious what that fractal was.  So I’d like to tackle that here.

The Psi-Wars Setting Fractal

The main focus of my setting design in this iteration has been “high scale factions.”  That would be your starting point.  The next three points that came off of that would be: Empire, Rebellion and Philosophies (really, the Knights of Communion, but I want more philosophies than just True Communion, so Ideology became a driving element behind the last phase of Iteration 6).  This gives you your major conflict and the reasons behind it.  Beneath each of these, I wanted the sub-factions, so that a GM could run nothing but a game focusing on that faction and still have room to move, then beneath this, I had variation within each sub-faction meant to show different facets.  The end result looks something like this:

The Empire has the Chancellor and his ministries as their “mundane” faction; the Hand and Intelligence and Security, representing enforcement and control; and the Grand Admiral has the Navy and Black Ops and represents military power.

The Rebellion has the Alliance and general Insurgencies.  General Insurgencies have four variations (Freedom Fighters, Terrorists, Idealogues and Anarchists).  The Alliance has the commoners and the aristocracy and the aristocracy has four houses, representing different elements of what it means to be the Alliance: Sabine (representing nobility as Nobless Oblige), Grimshaw (representing the danger of handing your society over to elites), Elegans (representing the Alliance’s fall from grace and their changing role in the galaxy) and Kain (representing the threat the Houses still present to the Empire).

We had five philosophies, but these tied into existing factions: Neorationalism has its schisms and serves the Empire (as well as reflects the Shinjurai ethnicity); the Akashic Mysteries serve the Alliance (and reflects the Maradonian ethnicity) and has its different prophetesses and their agendas; the Divine Masks represents the aliens of the Galaxy and has its different cults; the Cult of the Mystical Tyrant represents the ultimate antithesis to the Knights of Communion (and has its four shcisms), and True Communion serves the Galaxy (and represents the Westerly ethnicity and a fusion of human and alien philosophy) and has its different chapters.

I probably could have talked more about the higher level view and how I moved up and down the “ladder of complexity,” and if you look back, it’s certainly implied, but I don’t think it was particularly obvious.  It’s also a very long iteration, so it’s hard to see where I started and how I got to where I was going.

A Very Long Iteration

I had mentioned a “split” between the community, and here’s what I mean.  I’ve seen numerous people who were once heavily involved fade away, and I’ve seen newcomers really struggle with what I was doing, while the “die hards,” the ones who have a deep investment, gained more and more of a voice in the design process.  Some of this I can chalk up to Patreon, but I don’t think that’s the driving force here.  Instead, I want to blame complexity.

See, there’s a cycle of creation that I mention above.  First, you must create loads and loads of material before you can boil it down and simplify it.  And I’ve been creating loads of material for a year now, and if you stagger in at the very end, you have very little context.  

“Wait, who are these Domen Sefelina people?  They’re a divine mask cult?  What’s that?  And who are the Ranathim? Wait, what’s this Communion stuff? I’m so lost!”

If you’re alreayd hip deep in it all, it’s fascinating to watch it evolve, but if you’re on the outside, or you stop watching for awhile and come back in, then it’s easy to be very lost, a bit like tuning into a soap opera after skipping a season.

This isn’t a mistake on my part; it’s a natural consequence of what I’ve been doing (though perhaps I could avoid it by keeping things even simpler, but I’m not sure how I would go about doing that).  But it is something I need to fix.

One of my more casual readers asked if I ever intended to put this into a book.  Another reader, interested in exploring Psi-Wars, asked where he could start and was pointed to the “Primer,” which he returned from complaining, correctly, that it was nothing but a list of links (it’s more of an index than a primer at this point).  You can follow Psi-Wars, but you have to do it the way you’d follow a web-comic, starting at the beginning and wending your way slowly forward.  But that’s not what people want from Psi-Wars anymore.

And this brings me to my retrospective of Psi-Wars itself

Psi-Wars: Not the Game It Used To Be

The premise behind Psi-Wars, as I mentioned above, was to be a diary of campaign design, and that’s precisely what it was.  I grabbed existing material and slapped it all together.  “See, if you take these Space Templates and this gear and tweak the space combat rules and sprinkle in some kung fu and psionic powers, look, you have something like Star Wars, but don’t worry about being exact.”

It was good, you guys loved it and by the end of that cycle, we saw games like Golko Wants You Dead, which is precisely the sort of thing I expected to see out of it.  I gave you the tools to go build something out of, and they did.

With Iteration 6, I began to create a more concerete setting.  Before, I assumed an Empire; now I gave you one.  Before, I assumed some force fighting the Empire; now it has a face, an aristocratic one with a specific ideology, history, culture and leading figures.  “Golko Wants You Dead” might work here, but now I see campaigns more like Heroes of the Rim, which draw on the setting material, making it less like generic D&D and more like Exalted where the game grounds itself in the setting rather than the premise.

Moreover, the setting material, because it’s defined, does not appeal to everyone.  For every reader who celebrates a detail on, say, the Akashic Mysteries, another expresses disappointment with the direction of the Divine Masks.  As it becomes less generic, it becomes more “A Game Mailanka Would Run,” which is not the same game everyone else would run.  I try to leave more, but the more specific I make it, the less generic (and thus flexible) it is.  At the same time, the specific resonates more with the community than the generic does, with a few exceptions.  The truly big hits out of Iteration 6 has been the aristocratic houses, Imperial Intelligence (like, seriously) and Insurgent Tactics (which is fairly generic).  I see people quoting names I mention in my material and speculating on them.  So, you want more specific material, but the more specific I get, the harder it is to get into.

Part of the difficulty of getting into the game is pushing past the reams and reams of redundant, irrelevant info.  I remember a gamer complaining about how inconsistent the rules of Werewolf: the Apocalypse were, but after he explained what he meant, I pointed out to him that he was trying to use rules from multiple different editions together in one game, which explained his problem.  I see a similar phenomenon, with players using outdated rules from iteration 4 and missing still relevant rules from Iteration 3.  I have “master copies” of what’s “current,” but you don’t.  That needs to change!

Finally, because iteration 6 has created such a specific game, I no longer need to rely on the generic any more. The people who play this no longer use it as a springboard for creating their own campaigns, they try to game in Psi-Wars, the same way one might try to game in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.  They expect it to be complete and whole, rather than just chucking in whatever they feel like from the rest of GURPS.  This leads to some weirdness, as I often use proprietary material, such as the Empire-Class Dreadnought or some social engineering styles from a pyramid article.  This makes sense, as when you build a campaign that’s what you should do, but the result is that you have a cross-reference hell that requires you to own half of the GURPS library to “play as written,” which can be a nightmare, even for the die-hards.

Psi-Wars, after Iteration 6, is now it’s own game and setting.  This is not to look down upon Iteration 5 and games like Golko Wants you Dead.  Far from it, but those tools already exist and if that campaign is still running, I suspect it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) draw much from Iteration 6 but inspiration (“Oh those Ranathim are cool!  But meh on the Akashic Mysteries”).  Moving forward, I need to treat Psi-Wars as its own thing.

A Consolidation Road Map

So here’s what we’re going to do.

The last year has shown me where the gaps are.  We’re going to go back over everything with a fine tooth comb and fix parts that don’t work as well as they should until the “engine” of Psi-Wars purrs.  As part of this, I’m going to try to revise material such that I make outside references as little as possible.  Ideally, you should be able to run this with only a few books, rather than a library of pyramid articles (if included, they should be optional).

As I revise and revisit the material, they should be consolidated in a single point for people to use, so they know what is “up to date.”  The natural outcome of this will be another set of documents, similar to the Iteration 5 documents.  But I also want to give you an up-to-date online resource: salsathegeek has been kind enough to donate a wiki to the cause, which you can find here. This will eventually contain the details necessary to run your game in a more approachable and authoritative manner.  And because, honestly, combing through a blog is no way to run your campaign!

I will devise a true primer on the setting; the old primer will adopt the role of index, a way of searching through my posts with greater ease. 

Finally, when I do return to the setting elements I have created, I will define more specifics for each (especially the Empire), so that GMs can have names and places to cite.  I will still avoid specific planets and more specific races at least for the time being.  The specific geography of the galaxy and local institutions will remain nebulous: this is still a top-down perspective, and we’ll fix that in the next iteration.

A More Specific Road Map

The first and most reasonable things would be to revisit templates and the “GURPS Action” elements that I’ve used, the sort of “Book 1 and 2 of Psi-Wars.”  However, as I’ve noted before, this is backwards: these depend on the rest of the setting and game work, so they’ll be built throughout the process and then revisited near the end.

Instead, I want to look at Technology first, as it’s the thing that dearly needs the most help.  I’ve skated on generalities and borrowed technology, but I think I’m more aware of the specifics now, based on the work I’ve already done.  This will break down into four parts.  First, I want to look at general technological concepts, the technologies we’ll use to build the rest of our technology.  Second, I want to look at spaceships and space combat, as that’s sorely lacking thus far.  Third, I want to look at human-level gear, including weapons and armor. Fourth, I want to look at robotics and cybernetics.  Finally, I want to revisit these three concepts through the lens of the Empire, and the Alliance and the Ideological Factions. In particular, I want to look at their tactics and how they’ll use these technologies and then create concrete technological examples for each (ie, what ships and gear they use).

Then I want to revisit powers; I don’t think much new material needs to be added here so much as a consolidation of existing concepts, but we’ll take a look, and this will include psionics and Communion.  I’d also like to do a “full pass” on the martial arts I’ve added to the game, where they might be simplified and I need to make sure each has their own unique niche.

Then I want to take another look at the factions.  In principle, nothing needs to change, but after we’ve looked at everything that’s come before, we can do some last tweaking, add some additional details, and bring everything into a cohesive whole.

Lastly, we’ll gather up all of our material and revisit the templates and the overall rules for the game.  This should include a few new templates (Pirates! Outlaws!), fixed templates that take advantage of new rules (Mystics! Space Knights!) and a new way to handle Power-Ups.

So that’s it!  Hopefully this iteration will be more interesting from a diary perspective, and by the time we’re done, those of you curious in the setting will have more tools at your disposal to actually play the game.