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 Chapter 6: Characters.5 This only barely qualifies as important enough for an update, but I did want to make a note of something I missed. The average human in GURPS has a budget of 100 points for character creation. In Interstellar Wars, the average template clocks in just short of that. While these templates do have enough features to make a pretty solid character, they leave very little room for personalization; maybe a few unusual skills, an advantage, a minor stat boost. You could take disadvantages to give yourself some wiggle room, but most templates have their own set that count towards the disadvantage limit the corebook advises all campaigns use. You get the impression the average PC is expected to clock in at 150 points at character creation, an amount suited to high powered campaigns. And that does make sense; you are supposed to be exceptional people. But it implies low-powered campaigns have no place in the setting, an issue for some GMs. The more expensive templates are even worse; the ones for members of the military cost from 130 to 140 and give you 30 points of disadvantages, the amount the corebook recommends you limit players to. You run the risk of cookie cutter characters at lower point budgets. I get the impression Interstellar Wars expects you to run campaigns with characters that start at 150 to 200 points; for context, that’s about as much as you’d expect for a character with minor supernatural powers or a serious reputation, and superheroes and heroic fantasy characters usually start at 250. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, and you definitely don’t have to use these template to make a character, but the book build the impression your PCs are powerful enough to be movers and shakers in their own right - and says they should all be crew members on a tramp freighter. But I’ll get into that later. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 18:25
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I think 250 is actually pretty low for "superheroes," though 150-200 is definitely the "you're going from Exceptional Normal to Cinematic Hero, especially if you don't have really absorbent powers of some kind."
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Aug 2, 2020 20:25
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Nessus posted:I think 250 is actually pretty low for "superheroes," though 150-200 is definitely the "you're going from Exceptional Normal to Cinematic Hero, especially if you don't have really absorbent powers of some kind." Upon double checking the core 250 is the bottom edge for superheroes, but that’s not what I wrote so I’ll edit the post.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:29
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Some GURPS templates assume they are going to use all of your points, leaving no customization beyond the choices you make in the template. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is pretty much that way. They don't expect you to have a lot of leftover points to buy other stuff with.
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Aug 2, 2020 23:21
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Chapter 7: Technology I already posted the intro fiction elsewhere in the thread, but to summarize: a Terran and Vilani navigator talk shop in a bar and solving a difficult mathematical equation comes up in the conversation. The Terran takes out her computer and quickly writes a program to solve it. The baffled Vilani asks how she did it, she describes programming as teaching computers to solve new problems, and he leans forward in fascination and asks her to tell him more.  First of all, a point on GURPS tech levels. Since the system is supposed to do everything for everyone (and our current TL is 8), TL9 and higher contain standard cyberpunk stuff; implants, cybernetics, even primitive artificial intelligences. But Traveller borrows from the conventions of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, a literary movement that assumed human bodies would remain unchanged even as science changed lives in societies around them. No transhumanism here. Even Terrans, by far the best medical and biological scientists in the setting, limit their alterations to prosthetic eyes and limbs. The only field of biotechnology they match the standard GURPS Tech Level in is uplifting; dolphins and chimpanzees are currently well on the way to human intelligence, though they haven’t reached that point yet. Vilani biotech is even worse off. It’s not that they don’t care about biology; they needed to know how to process their food back on Vland, after all. But between a lack of disease and naturally long lifespans, the general Vilani medical tech base never passed that of Earth in the 1950s (for instance, they have a working knowledge of blood transfusion but their grasp of germ theory is shaky and they have no concept of genetics). They do, however, have a lot of experience with medicine manufacture; with access to thousands of worlds worth of biospheres, the Vilani have developed miracle drugs from plant and animal extracts. They just can’t match Terran expertise in every other area. E: I think I mentioned it but in case I didn’t: Vilani have TL10 through this period; Earth hit TL9 roundabout 2050, TL10 at the start of the Interstellar Wars, and TL11 between the 8th and 9th Interstellar Wars. Speaking of the Vilani tech base, every Vilani world draws from something known as Imperial Standard Technology, a collection of time-tested designs and techniques developed over millennia (the book implies Vilani and Terran tech diverged in their design philosophies somewhere during the age of steam) to suit every conceivable purpose. The bureaus control use of IST and charge license fees, but as long as a Vilani can afford it (which they usually can) you can assume Vilani technology matches Terran technology in most fields. The big exception (outside medicine) is electronics and related fields like computer science and robotics. Vilani electronics of any kind, no matter the complexity, are designed for specific purposes. They have no conception of programming like Terrans do because they make no distinction between hardware and software; every task is performed by a machine designed top to bottom for it. For instance, while Terrans have access to smart phones and laptops that can be configured to obtain information from any source, Vilani equivalents can only access sources they were built for; a Vilani computer might be able to send emails, watch TV from one station, access one newspaper, and play one videogame, but they’d have to get another device to use video chat or play another game. While you can configure interfaces to a certain extent, you can only get electronics that fit specific purposes. In return, all of those devices are cheap, hearty, and never malfunction, but, still. Even their robotics are limited by their inability to accept new programming or perform different tasks than some engineer thought up 2000 years ago. It’s certainly inefficient, but that’s Vilani society for you. The book does note Vilani engineers have a habit of going nuts for programming when they figure it out, much to their superiors’ dismay.  With the differences between Terran, Imperial, and standard GURPS technology all sorted out, we move into what is basically the equipment section. Rather than go through this all bit by bit, I’ll just gather the major themes and noteworthy items. Computers don’t come in premade packages here’s; you have to construct them by picking their defining traits, size, terminal type, and software and working out the resulting cost, size, and complexity. There’s a big list of options that goes on for several pages, but most importantly which side manufactures the computer determines which options it has to take and which it has to avoid; Vilani computers being lighter and cheaper than their Terran equivalents but only running one kind of software is, in fact, mechanically enforced. We get a list of Vilani drugs: the sleeping pill Anakundu rely on, which can cheaply and reliably either reduce insomnia or reduce sleep deprivation; an injection that substantially increases natural healing in exchange for sometimes causing unconsciousness (and that’s it); a patch that induces hibernation, halving the amount of oxygen users need and send them off death by dehydration or starvation for as long as three months; a combat drug that accelerates thinking speed; another that provides a substantial boost to all physical rolls; and an antibiotic that massively boosts a person’s immune system and fights off both viruses and bacteria. None of these are addictive and only the combat drugs have negative side effects (no matter how much you take); the first three don’t stack, the combat drugs stack indefinitely in exchange for a more lethal calm down, and injections of the antibiotic extend its effects for each injection without penalty. However, all of them except the first two only last a few hours, meaning you need multiple doses a day to keep it going and that stuff gets expensive. For context, an unskilled laborer’s monthly income in this setting buys two days’ worth of antibiotic doses. I imagine those Terran plagues roared through their reserves. But still, miracle drugs.  Armor and weapons aren’t particularly exciting sections; we’re just told to consult the corebook and use what we find there, except that only Terrans have power armor, Vilani use mostly kinetic weapons, and Terrans augment kinetic weapons with primitive energy weapons. Likewise, we get selections of scientific and survival equipment but they don’t stand out. Vehicles get a bit more attention. At this point Imperial and Terran vehicles use anti-grav technology almost exclusively, with planes, cars, and I think even boats relegated to secondary roles. The book lists three types:
Then we get a table of Imperial and Terran versions of all three vehicle types (no notes on other kinds of vehicles) and the chapter ends. With that we mark the two thirds point of the book and begin our transition into where we learn how to actually play this game. Next time we look through the chapter that theoretically covers starships. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 23:23
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Night10194 posted:Pendragon's 'need to catch up a player who missed a session' includes a solo scenario for 'the Knight was just hanging out at a crossroads or bridge, waiting for someone to start poo poo'. Sitting at a bridge and waiting to do An Adventure is the true calling of Knights! I've said before, but Pendragon is built around the core idea that knights are massive drama queens.
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Aug 3, 2020 12:15
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I've said before, but Pendragon is built around the core idea that knights are massive drama queens. True to the legends! Just as any RPG that wants to be about Greek mythos and Greek style epic heroes really needs to roll with the heroes being terrible people who are going to make the world around them so much worse even if their goals are nominally good and are very likely to meet a horrible fate for their hubris.
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Aug 3, 2020 13:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I've said before, but Pendragon is built around the core idea that knights are massive drama queens. One of the rules is that if you try to get excited about something but you don't hate Saxons/care about Hospitality/love your family enough and miss the roll, you become very sad, and then become so sad that if any of your friends try to cheer you up you attack them and have an inexplicable fight scene until you snap out of it. My assumption is this is the Arthurian way of setting up all those thousands of 'These two superheroes are buddies, how do we get them to have a fight because it would be cool' comics. Pendragon is ALL ABOUT knights being massive drama queens, it is the appeal. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 14:00
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Given how many of Arthur's knights joined the table after being soundly beaten in a fight or winning against some great foe, that tracks.
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Aug 3, 2020 14:19
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God I love Pendragon so loving much. It’s one of the best examples out there of a game designed for a specific purpose (be Arthurian knights) instead of accommodating a billion playstyles in one or more genres. E: Night10194 posted:My assumption is this is the Arthurian way of setting up all those thousands of 'These two superheroes are buddies, how do we get them to have a fight because it would be cool' comics. You aren’t the first person to notice a connection. Seriously, half of them have superpowers; Gawain gets stronger or weaker depending on the time of day, Arthur can’t bleed as long as he has that sheath, Galahad has plot armor, etc. E2: vvvvvvvvvv #relatable Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 14:33
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Sometimes you just have a bad day and disappear into the woods for a few years.
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Aug 3, 2020 14:38
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Each day, you must pray to receive The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 26: The Deck of More Priest Kits 129: Old Man in the Woods Hemmingway’s lesser-known sequel. The PCs are in a wooded area and find a mumbling old man with long stringy hair frantically searching through the saddlebags of horses. Also there are several armed men around him, recently-killed, and the old man is also wounded but apparently not slowed down by that. (He’s a level 6 priest, by the way; I assume spiritual hammers and dust devils did these guys in.) He’ll find a book and sit down to read. He won’t notice the PCs unless they actively approach him, in which case he’ll badger them for their whole life stories, wanting to know everything about their adventures, “until they reach the next town and its library.” Pretty low PC involvement. The only real choice is “how much do you want to interact with this dude?” But keep, could set up a useful NPC to pull back in later. KIT CORNER: Scholar Priest (PHBR 3: The Complete Priest’s Handbook, mislabeled here and elsewhere as PHBR3 (Wizard)) An academic researcher who can cast flame blade, essentially. More likely to talk than fight. You need an Intelligence of 13, and need to take Scribe as your secondary skill of those are the rules you’re running with. Contrariwise, if using NWPs, you get Reading/Writing as a bonus one. You must always have writing materials with you and if you lose them, have to replace or regain them ASAP. Your main benefit is that you can spend Weapon Proficiency slots on Non-Weapon Proficiencies, which is honestly pretty cool in the pre-Skills and Powers days. You also get “a +3 reaction bonus from other scholars, admirers of scholastic concerns, writers, journalists, and people who imagine that they are scholars.” But if that person is another scholar, there’s a one in six chance that that turns into a -6 adjustment because the PC disagreed with their pet theory. (In the fantasy academic journals or whatever?) This means that RAW, there’s a not-insignificant chance that any scholar they meet will attack them immediately. 130: Meeting with a Lady The PCs are traveling over a little-used mountain path when they are surrounded by female warriors led by an Amazon Priestess. They’re trespassing. No NPCs along the way bothered to tell the PCs why nobody uses this pass. The priestess is fine with women, but will only let men through if they’re vouched for by women and also agree to fulfill a quest for her. This is basically the same as #13: Turnabout. Is there nothing more interesting to do with the concept of amazons? Until there is, I’m just going to pass. 131: To Help Your Fellow Man A frozen wasteland, which the PCs are traveling through “in search of a man who has information necessary for them to complete their quest.” I’m just going to pretend you didn’t say that, card, and we’ll move on. The PCs hear screams. It’s because a man is getting mauled by a polar bear. I suppose that’s a good reason to scream. The bear is very angry, but if it’s distracted from its victim, the victim will get up and try to stop the PCs from attacking the bear, “up to and including getting in the way of their attacks.” Because... he’s a pacifist priest. He’ll help them if the bear is driven off, though. I’m not... 100% certain that this is an accurate depiction of pacifism. But keep, you could always play it less as “pacifism is dumb!” and more “this particular individual is well-intentioned but also kind of insane.” KIT CORNER: Pacifist Priest (PHBR 3: The Complete Priest’s Handbook) Be a fantasy Gandhi or Reverend King. The kit has no requirements. “Nor are there special rules for abandonment of the kit, if the character eventually feels that he needs to be wielding force to achieve his ends.” How unexpected for AD&D! I would have expected the system to hammer you for a behavioral infraction. The book immediately points out that this character does not gel well with most AD&D parties and expectations, and suggests thinking carefully before allowing it, and maybe designing the adventure around the pacifist character. (For example, making it an escort quest.) “However, it is inevitable that in combat situations the player of the pacifist priest will feel left out (he can't fight); additionally, he'll feel compelled by his philosophy to argue with the other PCs, to chide them for their violence, which will get on their nerves. Therefore, the DM should keep such quests short, so that the pacifist priest doesn't drive the other characters to the point that they'll kill him.” WELL then. So what do you get for being true to your character concept even in the face of your party members wanting to throttle you? You get a +2 Charisma (to a max of 18), and also a +2 Reaction adjustment to anyone “not utterly opposed” to your philosophy. Examples of such utter philosophical antipathy include clerics of war gods, or “warlike nonhuman races like orcs, ogres and trolls.” An orc would punch Gandhi, no problem. It’s official. You can’t wear armor, or use “weapons, spells, or any other tactics” to deliberately harm pretty much anyone. “If he ever violates this decree, his god will not punish him (because the pacifist's oath is one he took for himself, not for his god), but his own guilt will deprive him of all magic spells for the span of one month. (If the DM wishes, if the priest is a follower of the god of Peace, the god can instead punish him as a "Betrayal of Goals" from the Role-Playing chapter.)” THERE’S the AD&D I know!
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Aug 3, 2020 15:29
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Dallbun posted:You also get “a +3 reaction bonus from other scholars, admirers of scholastic concerns, writers, journalists, and people who imagine that they are scholars.” But if that person is another scholar, there’s a one in six chance that that turns into a -6 adjustment because the PC disagreed with their pet theory. (In the fantasy academic journals or whatever?) This means that RAW, there’s a not-insignificant chance that any scholar they meet will attack them immediately. This is very true to life. Conferences are bloodbaths.
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Aug 3, 2020 15:32
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wiegieman posted:Sometimes you just have a bad day and disappear into the woods for a few years. That's what you get when you convince drama queens that God hates knights boning.
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Aug 3, 2020 15:41
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Night10194 posted:This is very true to life. 
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Aug 3, 2020 16:13
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The answer to the question: "Why didn't you go into academia"
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Aug 3, 2020 16:21
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And now I'm picturing the Pendragon system applied to academia. If anyone wants to run a PBP Pendragon game, I'm there, PMs are open. Was a hard sell on my friends for a number of reasons, including my incompetence. I also realise at this point that knights are shonen as all gently caress.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:05
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Josef bugman posted:The answer to the question: "Why did you go into academia"
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Aug 3, 2020 17:08
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Night10194 posted:This is very true to life. They're also drunken bacchanals and weird, nerdy hook-ups. Academic conferences are basically very smart people regressing into a frat party.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:25
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And now I'm picturing the Pendragon system applied to academia. What's the academic equivalent of Hate (Saxons)?
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Aug 3, 2020 17:32
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More academic feuding in the link, most notably the Orangutan story: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/lnOAS
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Aug 3, 2020 17:36
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Xiahou Dun posted:They're also drunken bacchanals I've been witness to one of these before (I was serving food at the event). I have never seen so many people drink so much or so quickly deteriorate from stiff and formal to standing on tables singing karaoke and opening their dress shirts so the person next to them at the table could grope them.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:38
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I was going to link the Orangutan story. It demands to be read.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:40
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Dallbun posted:This sounds like it would take a ton of work, but it's also amazing. Dynasties of people-who-studied-under-other-people, receiving a fraction of their mentor's Glory. Hate (Engineers). They get all the funding and all the respect. Hark, the dishonorable swine have ordered another twenty 3D printers; they know full well that the physics department's floors haven't been replaced since the Nixon era, the blaggards.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:40
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Cythereal posted:I've been witness to one of these before (I was serving food at the event). I have never seen so many people drink so much or so quickly deteriorate from stiff and formal to standing on tables singing karaoke and opening their dress shirts so the person next to them at the table could grope them. You know that really lovely episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the magic beer that turns people into cavemen? That's basically a documentary about academic conferences.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:42
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Xiahou Dun posted:They're also drunken bacchanals and weird, nerdy hook-ups. Was part of a frat in undergrad and attended faculty parties in grad school. The frat parties were wilder, true, but the faculty definitely drank more.
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Aug 3, 2020 19:33
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Chapter 8: Starships (Starships, Trade Campaigns) You might assume from the chapter title Chapter 8 covers starship design and construction, and you’d be partially right; it does cover that. Some of that. Like, the percentage is in the single digits. It covers some of the basics and then veers into campaign rules of all things. Instead of chapter fiction this time, we get…  We get a motherfucking Pirates of the Caribbean quote. … Anyway, we start with a list of the sort of thing almost every starship will have:
No discussion of power plants or turrets or anything here, but we do get a lot of info on jump drives. They work by forming a bubble around the ship in an alternate dimension; all journeys take about a week no matter how much distance they cover or how powerful the drive is, and you can jump between two points in a system if you have the fuel and don’t mind the wait (especially if your maneuver drive sucks). Jump space has multiple levels that can take travelers farther in exchange for using more complex machinery; while all jump drives use the same basic principles and can access layers lower than their maximum, drives with different ratings have about as much in common as diesel engines and jet turbines, meaning you need to rip them out and replace them entirely if you want an upgrade. The book avoids specifics, largely because all of this defies physics as we understand it and it’s not worth speculating about.  Each jump requires liquid hydrogen as fuel (consuming more for longer jumps) and has to be kicked off farther away from any object larger than the ship by about 100 times that object’s diameter or get ripped apart; no such requirements for exiting jump space, but you still need to be within the sphere of influence of something substantial to jump back out. Locating celestial bodies between systems to use as waystations for smaller jump drives is a major endeavor that can change local economic and political dynamics. You need to do a lot of math in order not to die, fail to jump, or jump somewhere you don’t want to; Terrans use big navigational computers and Vilani use CD-ROMs. As in, the Imperium charted every star in its borders and every possible jump between them centuries ago, stores that info in futuristic CDs, and makes those CDs available to all its ships. Instead of waiting for a computer to crunch the numbers, Imperial navigators feed these “jump tapes” to their computer, do a little math to make sure everything’s just right, and jump in seconds. If they lose their tapes or get stranded somewhere they don’t have the tapes for, though, they have to make their way back with maneuver drives. Which must suck. In game terms, it takes four successful rolls on different skills to execute a jump, each of which has different penalties for failure. We next get a brief section on travel time using maneuver drives (a complicated equation involving acceleration, distance, and the square roots) and jump drives (always a week give or take a couple days). A note on jump drives and travel times. The way in which a ship travels changes drastically depending on its jump rating. Jump-1 ships can only be found along mains, strings of adjacent worlds; while most ships active in the Imperium have only jump-1 drives, those ships are limited to very small areas of space. Jump-2 drives make the Ziru Sirka possible; instead of it being limited to a specific cluster, maybe a couple if you can locate bodies in open space, it could then theoretically expand across the entire galaxy – very few parts of space are completely sealed off by larger gaps. While jump-3 drives didn’t cause the same kind of paradigm shift, I need the stress just how much faster they made interstellar travel, much more than make it half again as fast. A golden example? Shulgiasu, the regional capital of the Vilani Imperium and the greatest imaginable war goal for the Terran Confederation until after the Seventh Interstellar War, is about 15 or 16 jumps away from Terra using jump-2. Even if a ship could somehow jump without stopping the whole way there it would take it 3.5 months; when factoring in just how much logistical support a battlefleet needs, it could conceivably take a year or more for one to complete the journey even without facing any resistance. With jump-3, you can complete that same journey in five jumps. Even with repairs and stops that probably won’t take more than a month and a half. Jump-3 made the conquest of the Imperium possible and would completely reshape the way charted space worked once it came into effect.  On a lighter note, the next subsection is financing. And oh man is this a subsection. Starships require a lot of money to build and run, and this section lays out all the costs incurred by standard operation; you have ship mortgages, crew salaries (each of which is determined by a complicated equation involving multiple skill ratings and their reputation), docking fees, service fees, dumping fees, customs, fines, tigers, bears, oh my. In some campaigns you won’t have to worry about costs and in the rest you’ll have a chance to turn a serious profit despite all the things you have to pay, but that poo poo can really catch up if you aren’t careful about your bookkeeping. This is GURPS, man. Math is a way of life. The rest of the chapter on starships that has nothing to do with starships; it’s the structure for two separate campaign types that I guess they wanted to keep out of the campaign section at the end of the book. First, trade campaigns. By Imperial law, all trade passes through designated hub worlds and merchant ships are forbidden from jumping between minor worlds directly. We covered how this works back in chapter 5. The system, while inefficient, avoids economic instability caused by shifting trading routes and keeps trade easily tracked and controlled. Granted, Terran ships can just ignore the system, instead turning to what is effectively the black market – a system of informal meetings, hidden markets, and backroom deals that exists separately from the official economy. Even though it’s technically illegal, the black market’s as much an Imperial tradition as anything else these days; it’s certainly been around for as long as the rest of the Imperium. Participation is viewed a lot like underage drinking is in many communities; definitely illegal, probably dangerous, likely to get you caught by the law unless you’re careful, and not particularly shameful or socially destructive. Free traders almost certainly can’t use the formal trading system, but they can use the black market to make a killing (and most do).  You have two major ways to make money in the system; taking freight and passengers, and conducting speculative trade. The first method is the safest; while you can usually only find cargoes and passengers moving along the established trade routes even if you’re dealing with the black market, both give you guaranteed (if modest) returns. Figuring out how much basic freight and how many passengers you can pick up is determined by your origin and destination’s Bilateral Trade Number, determined by a complicated equation involving world trade numbers for both systems, complementary trade classes, political borders, and relative distance; most results determine give you a few rolls to determine amounts, while low results indicate all traffic between the worlds is covered by official traders and there’s nothing to be had. You have a bunch of rules for how loading works and how to deal with different kinds of passengers, but ultimately, the system is designed for players more interested in having exotic Vilani adventures (who still want to track all those expenses for some reason). If you’re out to make money, you mostly forget about all that and jump into speculative trading: buying goods low and selling them high elsewhere to turn a profit. Speculative trading is at once more and less complex than freight and passengers; it takes less math but a hell of a lot more steps. Every time you land on a planet and look to buy things, you need a roll one of two skills to find cargoes to buy (modified by cultural familiarity and any reputations you have), another similar role to find buyers for your cargo if you have any, a roll on a chart to find what goods are available, rolling on another chart defined what the prices are for all of those goods (bought or sold) expressed in percentages, and possibly get another roll to convince a merchant to buy or sell partial loads. Only one person at a time can roll and whatever they roll stands. Also you can only look for new deals once every five days. While you can hope to make a small profit buying and selling whatever you find wherever you go, the real money lies in playing trade classes; certain goods are much cheaper on worlds with certain classes and far more expensive on those with opposite classes, so you make your money by, say, buying up food on an agricultural world, selling it on an industrial world in exchange for vehicles , and heading back to the agricultural world to sell those vehicles for more than you spent. There’s always a chance that you miscalculate potential prices, can’t find the goods you want, or just get bad prices all around, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Speculative trade is an old Traveller standby and the heart of the default campaign in most versions of the system, and it’s no different here; I will say the smaller number of trade classes make it harder to find profitable goods and those classes are highly unbalanced (there isn’t a single thing agricultural worlds offer higher than average prices for), but hey, it works.  Before we go on, I want to make something clear; I haven’t been covering specific skill rolls beyond the fact that they exist. While I’m not exactly the greatest GURPS player out there, I want to point out that you have to make a LOT of skill rolls to get anywhere and in many circumstances messing up even one of those rolls can have serious long-term repercussions. The book’s tone suggests a campaign of scrappy underdogs trying and succeeding at getting rich, but contributing even a little to all of this requires a lot of point expenditure in skills and stats, the sort of thing you get out of experienced professionals and people along the upper limit of human potential without crossing into record-breaking territory. The book does want you to play exceptional people but I feel it leans into its complexity a bit much for the tone it’s trying to get across. But then, that’s GURPS for you, and I suppose this is something determined by personal preference. Next time we cover the third part of this chapter, the other default campaign style, and blow through as many as two full chapters due to how… well, you’ll see why. We’re nearing the end, folks, and I want to take a break before doing Rim of Fire. You can only take so much GURPS at a time before it gets to be too much. So I need your help deciding which of these two to do during the break;
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 20:49
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Cythereal posted:I've been witness to one of these before (I was serving food at the event). I have never seen so many people drink so much or so quickly deteriorate from stiff and formal to standing on tables singing karaoke and opening their dress shirts so the person next to them at the table could grope them. Fighting, loving, and getting drunk happen at alarming rates at every convention of every kind and subject, full stop.
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Aug 3, 2020 22:05
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Falconier111 posted:The Game of Life: Star Wars Edition. I want to see this deep dive.
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Aug 4, 2020 00:22
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Dumb academic arguments and fistfights are like 50% of ars magica tribunals.
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Aug 4, 2020 01:09
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Falconier111 posted:[*] The Game of Life: Star Wars Edition. I just gotta know just what weirdness they put in this one for Star Wars, yeah.
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Aug 4, 2020 03:01
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Wrestlepig posted:Dumb academic arguments and fistfights are like 50% of ars magica tribunals. Yeah, and in the supplements you start getting details on what these were about.
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Aug 4, 2020 03:06
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mllaneza posted:And by the way, I don't think you've gotten enough love for the clever intros to each part of the review. They add a lot and are very much appreciated. Chiming in to say that the openings are amazing, yeah.
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Aug 4, 2020 08:12
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You gain much more experience for killing than for peacefully avoiding The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 27: The Deck of Imperialism and Religion 132: Primitive Education A tundra-type area. “The PCs have been hired by a local town to find a group of primitives that has been raiding the town.” No reason given - probably some kind of baseless accusations like “we were here first and you’re destroying all the natural resources and driving away game” or whatever. Primitives, am I right? If the PCs don’t have a tracker, they’re gonna end up ambushed in a desolate pass - twelve warriors bursting out of the snow, led by an anagakok. They’ll flee if the anagakok is defeated. If they do have a tracker, they can reach the “primitives in their camp,” where they’ll be “much harder to defeat.” You know, what with them needing to defend the women and children who are present, and who throw rocks, sticks, and offal in a desperate attempt to save their families, community, and way of life. There are no suggestions that this can or should be resolved in a non slaughter-based way. Just gonna be over here, passing. KIT CORNER: Anagakok (PHBR 4: The Complete Wizard’s Handbook, mislabeled here and elsewhere as PHBR4 (Priest)) A “wizard from a primitive society” inhabiting an inhospitable clime, who helps his tribe find food, predict the weather, and defend themselves. Some alternative terms are given: Magian, Phylacterist, Veronican, etc. All the names sound awesome, incidentally. You can be a Frigid Climate Anagakok, or a Torrid Climate Anagakok. Either way you need to have a 13 Constitution. You’re BANNED from the schools of Illusion and Necromancy “because of their spells’ relative uselessness in surviving hostile environments.” Uh… sure! There had better be some pretty drat cool compensation for that! (There won’t be.) Your weapon selection is different; you can pick one from bow (any), dagger, harpoon, javelin, knife, sling, or trident. You get Endurance, Survival, and Weather Sense as bonus NWPs. You have to spend all your starting money and lose any spare, so your rugged “savage” survivalist is very likely to be starting the game with meticulously-recorded of bedrolls, pouches, bells, vials, and gewgaws. (I mean to be fair, my character would probably have those anyway.) Here’s the meat of the bonuses. You can find enough food to feed yourself and a number of people equal to your level, every day. It doesn’t say it takes any time in particular, nor does it seem to be tied to your native environment. What is tied to your background is an immunity to natural extremes of heat or cold (pick one). You don’t even get a saving throw bonus vs. magical cold or fire, though. Finally, you can cast a special good fortune spell with only a somatic component on yourself and (level) others each day, which lasts (level) turns and makes “all opponents have a -1 penalty on their chance to hit” those affected. So… +1 AC? That’s just +1 AC, right? The downsides, because being banned from two schools of magic is not enough, is that because of your weird appearance (tough, leathery skin if you’re from hot places, being extra hairy if you’re from cold places) and “strange manner,” you get a -2 reaction penalty from NPCs “unfamiliar with the Anagakok’s culture.” You also get -1 to hit, damage, saves, and ability checks when in the diametrically opposed environment. I’m summarizing - the book describes this in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, obviously.) 133: An Unfriendly Town The PCs enter a town that is a theocracy of “a neutral religion.” They’ll have to wait an hour before they can enter, because it’s prayer hour. Even then, Paladins will be kept out, others will be grilled on their religious beliefs, and clerics will have to swear not to proselytize. The city has no taverns, thieves’ guilds, or “places of ill repute,” (neutral gods hate drinking, thievery, and prostitution, you know) and there are lots of religious laws that will be dealt with swiftly by guard patrols, each accompanied by a cleric. Why do the PCs want to come in here again? There was an encounter very similar to this in the DoE Set One. In that version, the PCs were met at the gates by the literal avatar of the city’s patron god. And it still wasn’t very interesting, because there’s no particular hook or reason for the PCs to want to engage with the place. Pass. 134: The Inquisition The PCs are in some theocratic city that has a ban on all magic except that granted by their local god. The PCs are unaware of this “unless they have actively sought out the local laws,” which seems a little weird. Do you not hear about this kind of thing on the road? They get accosted by a “group of thugs” (just four of them) who are eager to pick a fight with these mid-level adventurers for unclear reasons. The city guard shows up quickly, but if the PCs use magic and were seen, they’ll be in trouble, and either kicked out of the city if they plead ignorance, or put on trial FOR THEIR LIVES if they lie and deny having used it. I honestly might throw out the thug encounter, but randomly deciding that a new city has strict magic laws might have merit, I suppose. And at least it doesn’t make the place as comprehensively annoying as the last card. Keep. 135: Zealots The PCs are in a new and unfamiliar town where there are lots of proselytizing church members shouting on the streets. There’s been a religious revival ever since this church ended a drought last year. What’s the name of the church? Who or what does it worship? The card does not address that in the slightest. But you’d better make something up quick, because a 9th-level preacher and 5 assistants storm into the tavern one evening, spread out, and start preaching, physically or magically restraining people who resist. And if the PCs fight back, the city guard will arrive to defend the preachers. So it’s best to just weather the sermon like you’re at a high-pressure timeshare presentation, I guess? It’s just so obvious that the card needs a sentence or two to provide flavor to this church/religious movement and give the DM something to work off of when running it. The fact that it’s not there makes me very irritated. But fine, keep I guess, you can just make it an extra-strident version of an established religion.
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Aug 4, 2020 16:26
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GURPS has adjusted its template point values upward a bit since 2006. Nowadays 150 character points are "gritty and realistic, but able to survive in dangerous situations" and 250 points is "ensemble action hero". Here's some genre examples: 150 points: GURPS After the End (gritty postapocalyptic survivors, might run to 200 points if they're experienced) 250 points: GURPS Action (ensemble action heroes who have to work to together to accomplish stuff, a singular action star like James Bond might be more like 450 points), GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (mid-level D&D characters, first-level ones are more like 125 points) 400 points: GURPS Monster Hunters (human and inhuman heroes fight WoD-style monsters with brains, brawn, and magic) Superheroes tend to run from 500 points (your Spider-Mans and your Batmans) to 4000 (Supermen who can throw down with battleships)
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Aug 4, 2020 17:46
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Stormcast Eternals So, I really enjoy the lore of Age of Sigmar these days, but Soulbound's only got the one book. So let's take a look at the army book lore. Back in first edition of Age of Sigmar it barely had any! Fortunately that is changed. We will be leading with the poster children of the new setting - the Stormcast. You know the pitch - they are eight-foot demigods, heroic souls rescued from death by Sigmar and rebuilt into immortal warriors, eternally reincarnating on the Anvil of Apotheosis, though often at a cost to their memories and humanity. The process is painful, scarring and more than a little worrisome for most Stormcast, though many would never admit it. They fear they will lose who they were, should they die too much, and become elemental beings of the storm and stars, forever severed from their human lives. It should also be noted: the original Stormcast entered the battle without the aid of their mages. The Sacrosanct Chambers, home to the great scholars of the Stormcast, remained sealed as those inside worked to try and refine the Reforging process and purge it of the flaws that plagued it. It was their work that kept the Stormhosts strong, as they helped Sigmar work the anvil and rework the process during the many deaths of the early wars. Even so, it wasn't easy. The Reforging was volatile, and not all souls could be remade, not if damaged enough by terrible sorcerous weapons, while other souls broke out of the forge and fled. Most were recovered and their Reforging completed, but not all. The souls that could not take on physical form were instead bound into the statues lining the Avenue of Saints in Azyr, and it is unclear if these serve as havens for them or prisons. The rise of Nagash after the Necroquake forced the Sacrosanct Chambers out into the field, and so many Stormcast have come away with greater scars than in prior decades. Fortunately, they also are set to seek out the lore and magic that might allow Sigmar to fix the problems, rather than just playing triage. This lore is brought back to the fortresses of the Stormhosts, though no two of them are the same in design. Their one uniting trait is that all Stormkeeps are built around a realmgate, which is why they are often in inhospitable locations, where Chaos could not easily reach. The architectural and engineering skills of the Sigmarites have been pulled to new heights by the demans of building these forts. They are heavily reinforced physically and magically, and each serves both as a staging ground for the wars on Chaos and Death and as nexuses of trade and travel, with cities rising up around them. The early Stormkeeps were claimed and garrisoned by the Stormhosts that suffered the most losses reclaiming their gates. The leader of the chosen Stormhost was given a Celestine Writ, a stone tablet bearing a contract written in lightning blasts by Sigmar himself. These artifacts enshrine the oaths granting the Stormhost's commander leave to rule over the keep and its surroundings, on the condition that the Stormkeep not fall while even one member of the Stormhost lives. These early keeps had the hardest time of it, with each night and day a battle. Despite this, the Stormcast lost only a very small number of early Stormkeeps, though often at the cost of thousands of Stormcast lives laid down to defend the architects, workers and mages building them up. The Lord-Celestants keep their Stormkeeps growing larger and larger, to help defend more land and people. They grow from just military bases to also include centers of learning and study, full of scholars and mages. Many books are copied and shipped in from Azyr, while other maps and books are recovered from ruins and old cities, then painstakingly repaired. New books and maps are written, and art also grows as people find new life in the safety of the keeps and their cities. To keep the Stormkeeps linked, the Lords-Arcanum, Knights-Incantor and Lord-Ordinators work together to construct massive celestial batteries. These metaphysically link the keeps to the Sigmarabulum, forming Star Bridges that speed the travel of the souls of Stormcast from the battlefield to Azyr in death. Often, they are able to return to active duty in only days. This requires power: specifically, the power generated by dissolving souls. Much of this energy is harvested from ghosts and rogue spirits slain by local undead hunters, but some Stormcast give their own existences to power the Stellar Bridges, usually because they feel intense guilt over some act they have committed and feel they cannot redeem themselves. These Stormcast suicides have their names etched into the Annals Tempestis on the keep walls, to symbolize the forgiveness of their sins in final death. Some Stormkeeps are already legend, thanks to the great battles and labors required to claim them and defend them. The most famous is the Perspicarum, the Stormkeep guarding the Hammerhal Aqsha Stormrift, the great hold of the Hammers of Sigmar. Then there's the Consecralium of the Knights Excelsior, built of black iron and always coated in storms. It watches over the city Excelsis from across a long bridge, looming high over the city. Anvilgard is home to the Black Nexus, whose Stormhost has scoured the land for miles around of any that would cause trouble, and Hallowheart's is the Celestine Cathedral, which shines like a flare to witchsight thanks to the faith of its guardians, its holy fire purifying the souls of pilgrims. Others are remembered only, having fallen to the onslaught of dangers that faced them. The Celsorium Stormkeep was destroyed when an ogor tribe pushed through the region, chased by the bite of the Everwinter. The icy storms destroyed the city and its keep despite the best efforts of the Stormcast. The Tower of Ravenstar was destroyed from within when the Stormhost staffing it rebelled against their Lord-Castellant's contempt for the common people. This isn't common, though - most Stormkeeps are quickly repaired by the locals, who are eager to support the heroes that defend their lives. On the other hand, the awe and love are often mixed with fear or bitterness, as some mortals see the Stormcast as so high above them, so much more fortunate, and yet not sharing all the bounty they could. This is especially true around the stricter Stormhosts, who crack down hard on unrest and crime. A balance must be kept, ensuring enough freedom that the people are happy but enough strictness to detect infiltration by Chaos cults or vampiric spies. Next time: Structure of a Stormhost
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Aug 4, 2020 18:01
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On the one hand, the Stormcast Eternals do have some cool metal fantasy lore, and GW has done a lot of work incorporating them into the setting in more ways than "they go smite evil." On the other hand, Mors Rattus posted:Sigmarabulum
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Aug 4, 2020 18:42
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Hold firm your Sigmarblade as you cut into the tough flesh of the Sigmarstakes, the Sigmarcook overdid them a bit.
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Aug 4, 2020 18:49
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By popular demand posted:Hold firm your Sigmarblade as you cut into the tough flesh of the Sigmarstakes, the Sigmarcook overdid them a bit. I mean, we're exaggerating a bit, surely. In reality, they'd use their Sigmarblades to cut the Sigmarcook's Stormstakes. Dallbun fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 19:06
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Dallbun posted:This was just one Sigmar too many for me. 'Storm' is a word that's already lost all meaning to me in the context of this game.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:18
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