Playbook: Attribute Penalties in Different Gravity

Jumping on Earth (left) and on the Moon (right)

I was writing up some character creation advice for a sci-fi game I hope to run soon and begun trying to explain how to buy advantages to represent experience with working in different gravities, as the setting lacks artificial gravity.

In order to give advice, I had to understand the rules, so I went through and read them (GURPS Basic Set, p. 350).

I quickly found them confusing, badly explained and broken. So in an effort to make them easier to understand and use (especially for newer players) I made some modifications.

Playbook: Armour Damage Threshold

Long before I started this blog or joined the GURPS Discord, me and Jose of Blogging At Default, Taking Extra Time have regularly bounced ideas back and forth, discussed things and come up with some new rules to handle situations. One of the things we had both run into is that, especially at high TLs, weapons can't keep up with armour, especially not military-grade examples. Someone in a combat hardsuit is all but invincible to any handheld weapons of the same TL. This presents an annoying combat balance problem if other players aren't wearing the same armour, as anything that might seriously threaten the hardsuited character will simply turn the rest of the party into red mist.

So the solution we came up with was a system to gradually degrade the DR of armours, based on the attacks that are hitting it.

Playbook: Focus Enchantment

While I'm not posting a lot, I'm still keeping my ear to the ground within the GURPS blog-o-sphere, especially the GURPS Day summaries over at Gaming Ballistic. One post that caught my eye was the Southern-Style GURPS post on some tweaks to the GURPS Magic enchantment system. It reminded me that, during a fit of worldbuilding for a fantasy setting a while ago, I too made an alternative enchantment system. Handily, I also wrote up a summary intended for players, so I've already spent a while polishing the description to make it look and read well. So I thought I'd share it!

Playbook: Alternative Reluctant Killer

Pacifism (Reluctant Killer) is, basically speaking, totally broken. It forces your character into the same depressive stupor as Cannot Kill [-15] after actually killing anyone, while severely impeding your ability to do anything in combat, for a mere -5 points. Put bluntly, its underpriced, doesn't produce interesting roleplaying and is totally pointless. So I tried to fix it. Your mileage may vary.

Playbook: Zero-G Dodge

GURPS rarely reduces a character's active defences due to environmental factors. My guess is that this is more of a game balance choice than a realism one, since Dodge is typically already low for non-superpowered characters and dropping it down even a single point represents a huge decrease in survivability, especially against ranged weapons where Dodge is the only available defence. I've recently been planning for a sci-fi campaign in a setting with no artificial gravity and decided I wanted a set of rules for dodging attacks in free fall, to help drive home the feeling of a different environment. So I came up with three different mechanics, which you can pick at your leisure.

Playbook: High-Cyclic Controlled Bursts for Ultra-Tech Guns

GURPS High-Tech has a great little rule where some guns can fire "high-cyclic controlled bursts". For those who haven't read the book, this is when a gun fires several rounds so quickly after each other that they all leave the barrel before the has moved due to recoil, giving the entire burst Recoil 1. GURPS Ultra-Tech was written before this rule was devised, so lacks rules for them, even though it explicitly mentions that ultra-tech firearms can stack cartridges within the barrel for ultra-fast firing speeds! So I wrote some quick rules to fix this.