GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #4

Damage types.

Silly, pedantic, element-based damage types.

One thing about role-players is that they fetishize damage types far more than they should. Science fiction games often fall into this trap, but you see this in 5E with all the damage types there, with 13 types being in the game.

Starfinder had eight types, but weapons have levels, and every three or four levels, every weapon type was repeated, with most of the damage types represented. So there would be eight level 1-3 pistols, eight level 4-6 pistols, and so on. Sometimes you needed a cold pistol, other times you needed that electricity pistol. Starfinder's weapon lists were massive, easily filling hundreds of entries, and adventure paths would add dozens more weapons for no good reason.

The game also had two armor class values, energy and kinetic.

The Esper Genesis game falls back on the 5E tropes, but unless a monster has a resistance or weakness to that type of damage, the damage is just damage, and who cares? You have one AC value. Of all the science fiction games, this one does things the most "5E way," and you are not worrying about damage types for most attacks.

And we get to Star Frontiers. You can combine a suit and a screen to layer defenses against different types of damage. Of suits, you can do with either laser or ballistic/melee protection. With screens, you get protection against laser, ballistic/melee, electrical, and sonic attacks. Typically, all our characters wore suits that provided ballistic and melee protection, as well as a screen for lasers. This way, you could rely on the suit for protection in more social situations, such as a fight in a space bar, and then, when the lasers started flying, the screen was turned on. Electrical and sonic attacks were rarer, so those tended to be the ones that got through your defenses more often.

Star Frontiers combat meant "turning on your shields" in personal combat, and making sure you had the correct resistances to damage types in your group. GURPS really isn't about that, and it is a different style of combat in the system that is more armor-focused. We have force screens in Ultra Tech that can function similarly, with a DR 60 (for personal conforming, TL 12^, super science), and you can specify an energy type for a 50% cost reduction. Star Frontiers is not a TL12 setting, though. For a TL 11 field, I would halve the DR to 30.

The conversion is at a point where, if I try to convert mechanics, I will be here doing these little conversions forever, trying to tweak it and make it work, but inevitably breaking something else. One of the things is that GURPS has solved many science fiction gaming problems with the rules the game already contains. GURPS is a well-tested and well-designed system that works, taking into account numerous science fiction tropes and pieces of gear and technology.

I am not giving up on this, but if I want an exact simulation of Star Frontiers, that would require a significant amount of design work. For most people, just use GURPS Space and flavor the setting with the Star Frontiers races and setting, while using GURPS to replace the gear and tech lists entirely.

For the average game, tossing out the Star Frontiers gear, which TSR designed for their "attack versus defense" game, is the way to go. GURPS is far better designed, written, and put together for science fiction gaming the way it is, and more people should just use the races and universe.

GCA: Random Characters

While I love the GURPS Character Sheet (GCS) program, the paid-for alternative on Warehouse 23, GURPS Character Assistant (GCA), is also a good option.

One of the best functions of the GCA alternative is the "Create Random Character From Template" option in the top menu. This option takes a template, preferably one of the more expensive ones, and randomizes the choices so you can create a random character to begin playing with.

Of course, if there are potential synergies, such as weapon master (or fast draw) in a weapon the character is not skilled with, I am allowed to go in and fix those, and do a few clean-up items. If something is game-breaking, I will change it. But I keep things as they are, and if my knight is a shield, spear, and flail user with a sling as a ranged weapon who gambles and has a criminal background - that is who I got.

Spells and gear I will need to add myself. I will let the character's skills guide me, especially for spells. If a wizard has elemental or demon lore, that will change the spells I choose. I will need to build a gear loadout for each character.

Random characters are fun! They force me to play with weapons, skills, advantages, disadvantages, and builds that aren't my typical choices, and challenge me to optimize that build with future character points. If you are an experienced GURPS player and want to challenge yourself outside your comfort zone, play a random character and build them into a viable one.

Also, I am not as attached to these characters as I am to my "pet characters", which I tend to stick with game after game. Random characters will be much more fun since there is little chance that I will want to protect them, and another amazing random creation is a button-click away. After a while, I will be invested in them and want to protect them, maybe, but still, I won't care as much if their story ends, and I need to start another.

I am starting to play through some excellent Basic Fantasy adventures with the GURPS rules, such as the Morgansfort campaign. Now, these adventures and Basic Fantasy are great games, and I can enjoy these adventures with many old-school games, even classics like Old School Essentials or Castles & Crusades. Since I source all my old-school monsters and treasures from Basic Fantasy and convert them to GURPS (see my B/X Conversions page), this works easily for me.

Doing this playtest will likely force me to update my conversion page. Still, there are many good suggestions for quickly adapting B/X monsters to GURPS without needing expansive bestiaries written for the game. Are they perfect? Not by a long shot. Do they work? They should, and with powers that are more like bang skills, like a spider's "entangle 13-" or "venom 11-" powers, they should work well enough, and not every monster is the same (or should be), and even powers can vary. Some spiders won't have entangling or venomous powers.

This is my issue with most kitchen sink fantasy bestiaries, and after a while, players know what to expect. A monster "outside the norm," like a mana spider that shoots magic missiles, will be seen as cheating by the referee, or a goofy one-off. For me? Mana missile 14-, 1d6 damage, 6 shots, and uses spider stats. I'd give them a one-use 12-minus magic web spell. Monsters are not supposed to be familiar. That next fire beetle may explode after it dies. You just don't know.

Much of today's fantasy games contain bad habits or false assumptions that D&D forced on us, and we follow them without questioning. Part of the fun of fantasy gaming is not knowing what to expect. D&D has enshrined all its goofiness and has become predictable and boring. This recycled fantasy culture gets boring. Yes, it is iconic. But this place isn't where fantasy gaming started, and it is not the place in the unknown that makes us fear the next monster in the dark.

For me, GURPS works well and gives me that "immersion feeling" that I crave when I convert a setting to GURPS. This was reported from players of GURPS Traveller as well, even though people played the same setting with the original 2d6 rules, once they switched to GURPS, it almost felt like people were "in VR" and actually experiencing the world in person.

GURPS is highly immersive, with a level of detail and reality that makes you feel like you are in the world, looking around, watching people walk by and doing their things, hearing the sounds and smelling the smells, and living there. I can't explain why this happens, only that it has been reported many times, and I also get that feeling.

This is the GURPS Reality Immersion Field.

It exists.

I will likely expand the setting a little; the encounters and adventures mention traders on the roads, but I have no other towns near the fort to trade with, so I may add a few places of my own. The setting is perfect for expansion, so I shall create a few more towns and link this to the city to the north.

A solid, expanded, old-school adventure with random characters and GURPS?

This sounds like fun.

Kickstarter: Mission X

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamingballistic/mission-x

How did I not know about this?

I went searching Kickstarter for GURPS projects, and I found this one.

A Dungeon Fantasy style GURPS science fiction game taking inspiration from Aliens, Stargate, and X-Com? From Gaming Ballistic, the source of all these high-quality Dungeon Fantasy books, adventures, and expansions? Are you kidding me? This looks amazing.

Tracking this, and a sidebar link added for the most visibility we can give the project.

Let's send this one to the moon!

Daggerheart

One of the more interesting things I have heard about the upcoming Daggerheart is that one of the first steps is to define your world. You do not get every lineage and background in every world! If your world is just "frog people" and "bird people," that is it; no Tieflings and Dragonkin are running around in there.

Finally. A fantasy game that gets it and isn't a sticky ball of everything, plus the next 100 lineages the publisher can put out over 10 years. Monsters are hopefully the same way; you could likely omit dragons if you don't want them, or say dragons are the only monsters in the world. A lot of fantasy movies are just "humans and dragons" as the only inhabitants and monsters in the world, and a game that sets up that "design space" is a nice thing to see.

In fact, this is just like GURPS.

GURPS also does this "design your world" step first. This is also why GURPS is far less played, since every option you need to DIY yourself, while Daggerheart gives you premade choices. Very few people have the time or imagination to create a whole world from scratch. This is why Dungeon Fantasy is a popular variant of GURPS; a lot is premade for you. There are also projects out there to bring kitchen sink fantasy monsters and races to GURPS, which are great projects and benefits to the community.

I have always had a problem with choice paralysis. I can have so many games on my shelves that I play none of them. I get this with fantasy games as well, give me too many choices, and it gets harder for me to sort through and use all the character options the game gives me. If I play fantasy, I narrow down the choices and focus my world on the best of the best, given the story. If all my world needs are orcs, ogres, and goblins, why am I including kobolds, gnolls, bugbears, and 101 similarly functional humanoid lineages? At a conceptual level, they are different-shaped things that serve the same role.

Once I set up "Vikings versus Orcs," that is it. Throwing Giants, planar monsters, demons, or Drow elves in the mix messes the whole story up.

I make the same world-building and genre definition choices as Daggerheart does in my GURPS games. I like doing that since it makes my game concept stronger. I'm not worrying about the 499 other monsters in the book and how they fit in, and I can conceptualize and tell stories better in a smaller world with fewer conflicts.

It is nice to see more worldbuilding as the first step in the game, and D&D and even Pathfinder are moving away from DIY worlds and forcing you more and more to play in the officially supported setting. This is also why I prefer Tales of the Valiant over D&D, there isn't all the "product identity" in the generic fantasy ToV game. I can create a generic fantasy world with a defined story in ToV far easier than I can in D&D. And Daggerheart is following that model.

Tales of the Valiant can inherit choice paralysis quite quickly if you buy the spell and monster expansion books that Kobold Press put out for 5E. They have about 2,000 monsters for the system these days, and over 1,000 spells. ToV is massive with the additional books for 5E. Even with all those, my world is mine, and I am free to ignore all that.

GURPS is also as generic or specific a fantasy setting as you want it to be. The only difference is that GURPS is a lower-level design language of a game, while ToV and Daggerheart give you many premade choices and an easier starting path.

Something about Daggerheart reminds me of the Cypher System. I have a strange feeling that the games have a similar design mechanic, as Cypher System does many narrative pools and tools for both players and referees to use, along with meta-concepts such as "GM Intrusions" and players spending XP to alter the narrative.

Like Daggerheart, Cypher uses a "pick-based" character design system, where you say you are an X who does Y because of Z, such as "I am a Rugged Warrior who Controls Beasts." Daggerheart puts choices like those on cards and lets you combine them like Cypher does.

I hope this game does well; it's nice to see a rules-medium, narrative-focused game with narrative pool mechanics come out. While I love GURPS, there needs to be more fantasy games than just D&D for streamers to tell stories with, and the "Critical Role" style is what drives a lot of interest in the hobby. They have a complete SRD and free resources to download, so they are being overly generous to give themselves the best chance to grab a following.

Many YouTube D&D channels are struggling, as YouTube is instructing them to explore other subjects. Daggerheart should take off and replace D&D for many of these groups, giving them new life in their channels. D&D is such an elephant in the room that the hobby would be better served by having different games diversifying interest and live-play shows. If Daggerheart can revive fantasy live-plays, that is a good thing, even for GURPS, since interest in live plays does have crossover.

I wish them luck and hope the streaming shows playing this game take off. It would be beneficial for the hobby to have more games that people play, rather than relying on the default D&D.

And, of course, I hope there are more GURPS live plays, too.

The Weird Fantasy Genre

With weird fantasy, one of the best games that tries to dive into it is the great Dungeon Crawl Classics game. The dungeon is not supposed to be "the normal," as entering the dungeon is more like Alice stepping into the looking glass. This is the upside-down world, where nothing should work or seem normal, and a place apart from reality, like a near-death perception-altered experience.

D&D 5E turns dungeons into video-game levels, boards in a strategy guide to clear. This comes from D&D 4E, which is why modern Wizards D&D is not D&D. The classic D&D experience is defined by that "Beyond the Looking Glass" dungeon crawl, of a dungeon master using their twisted imagination to create an out-of-body experience in other players' head spaces.

I have had my 5E groups go through a dungeon without fear. All my AD&D groups had fear.

Making D&D into "influencer fantasy" with slavish influencer art and the yoke of nostalgia guts the game's spirit and power. Wall Street has stripped D&D of its identity. D&D 2024 is not D&D. It is a tabletop game influenced by Diablo IV.

Is it fun? Yes. Like a video game is fun.

Dungeon Crawl Classics tries to achieve this by using strange dice and random charts, but the charts ultimately define and limit the experience. True out-of-body existential discovery and horror cannot happen if everyone knows the results on the charts.

The charts will prevent you from truly discovering and realizing what we all once knew with these games in the 1980s. The Satanic Panic happened because more and more people were being enlightened (look up the late-80s enlightenment movements, like crystal therapy, and so on), and AD&D 2nd Edition was created to put the genie back in the bottle. Wall Street stopped mass spiritual enlightenment in 1989 when D&D was at its height of cultural influence.

Note: This is not what I actually believe, but to get in touch with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, this is where your thinking has to go. A game is a game, but many in spiritual movements latched onto AD&D as a transcendental tool. Religious groups responded to this and pushed back. 

To get into the proper gonzo mindset, you must free yourself from the idea that tabletop games are simple replacements for video games (2000-2020) or consumer-driven, identitarian lifestyle gaming (2021-present). When you feel "the game is more than just a game," then you have the proper mindset. 

All that sounds crazy, but trying to understand that concept and theory will put your mind in the correct mode to run weird fantasy games. This is not just a video game with goofy stuff or some superhero power fantasy where you are "meant to kill the monsters." Kitchen sink fantasy, while fun, ultimately leads to "videogame-ism" and puts you into a mindset where you will never reach this higher state of enlightenment.

Wall Street took over D&D and made it "safe" again. Even DCC refuses to go to some places, and keeps itself safe for every audience. The collection of things considered to be in "kitchen sink" fantasy shrinks as controversial topics are bleached from the genre, such as half-races and succubi. And stale and controlled is what most of today's "gonzo fantasy" becomes. It is a commoditized fantasy, featuring goofy elements like silly hats, big mustaches, talking bananas, and strangely drawn art. You get the visuals right, but not the heart and soul.

With kitchen-sink fantasy, I love how familiar it is, but the world it creates feels like any version of D&D. Gonzo goes a step beyond that. For me, it is a starting place, a doorway to that more enlightened, mind-altering, and almost spiritual place. It is the "normal" from which we jump into the "abnormal."

True gonzo fantasy is like stepping through the Looking Glass.

Part of me dislikes the kitchen-sink genre since it leans too hard on D&D's tropes. Our games become nothing more than "D&D simulators" compared to our stories and imagination. Yes, they are D&D simulators coaxed in realism, but GURPS can do so much more than power a simulator.

Shadowdark does a little better, and it "gets" what the dungeon should be, if in an abstract form, where "the dark" is a powerful, evil, irrational metaphysical force that wants to consume the party and all that is good. We are making progress, but we are not yet where we need to be.

However, Shadowdark also begins with a more humanistic and ordinary world. We can't enter an altered state of heightened perception if we start out in that "101 fantasy races eating cupcakes in a town" mess of fantasy art we get in D&D 2024 these days, which looks more like a Target ad than it does D&D art. We must start with a more "our world" humanistic, grounded base to get that stark difference and experience that perception shift.

These people playing as anthropomorphic dragons or gentrified orcs will never experience a heightened reality because identity swapping dulls their experience and senses. You are so focused on your new self that you never see the outside or witness the stark differences between realities. If a human begins to change into a dragon, that is special. Who cares if you get to start as one and be the same as everyone else?

In GURPS, we have tools to help us journey towards true, authentic, pre-1989 weird fantasy thinking. One of the best is GURPS Cabal, designed for more conspiracy-minded campaigns and urban mysteries. But trying to imagine all these strange planes and dimensions intermixing with a medieval world where they don't even know science yet...

They can't even explain combustion or bacteria. How will they understand a strange point in space where two dimensions cross and the rules of how the world works are entirely different in one or more ways? What happens when a figment of a reality comes close to our own and only affects one aspect of mental perception? There could be a place where you try to write in your native language, and all that comes out is strange alien gibberish.

This place will never be explained, and you will never tell the characters the real reason why. They may never figure out the worlds they inhabit. We have enough trouble in this world trying to figure out the unexplained. Imagine a world of myth, trying to make sense of it all.

Of course, players forget history in modern gaming, and fantasy worlds are just Ren Faire-dressed modern worlds. Of course, these worlds have scientific knowledge because ...magic! GURPS players know about and respect Tech Level, so you will find a player base here with a more profound understanding of history and the progression of technology.

Another great resource is GURPS Powers: The Weird, which initially explores the concept of weird science. However, the later chapters touch on topics discussed in the Cabal book and delve into this genre's power types and sources. You get some great power ideas that places, people, or monsters could have, such as illusions that can heal or harm, scale adjustment, and other strange, mind-altering ones that break your perceptions of reality.

Mix all this with GURPS Fantasy (or Dungeon Fantasy), and try introducing "the weird" into a game world. Don't make "everyday magic" a part of the world; keep wizards and other casters mysterious and rare. Magic is not understood, accepted, or a technology metaphor. It is not used in everyday life by everyone. Magic can be feared as "something that steals your soul" - even if you rely on it for convenience. Wizards must keep their work secret for fear that someone may stab them in the back for being a devil worshipper.

Then, introduce the weird.

Make the population fearful. Make the strange happening truly strange and not reproducible by "simple magic." Something else is going on here. You will begin to experience the reality warping sensation of seeing characters deal with something they can't explain, and their players can't either. What do you do next if you can't explain it, dispel it, understand it with divination, go into a dungeon and turn it off, or wish it away? D&D assumes you have perfect knowledge and control of your world, and that everything on the spell and power lists will be able to solve every problem in the universe.

This is how it was with AD&D for us, of which the excellent Adventures Dark and Deep is my stepping stone. When we entered that dungeon as characters, we felt like we were stepping out of this dimension and into another. There was a transcendental experience that was more than playing a video game or running a simulation. The dungeon door was the portal to another universe. Today, the above game carries on that mantle.

GURPS was created in that era. When we played GURPS, we stepped out of this world and into another on a different path, but it was there. This was when we stepped into another world entirely, created using the alchemical parameters of the game, and felt like we were somewhere else. While in AD&D, the dungeon served as a metaphor for moving into another reality, in GURPS, entering a world nobody had ever seen before was referred to as a "dimension shift."

GURPS is the more mind-expanding game, and it doesn't need the dungeon metaphor for the shift.

But you still need to build the grounding metaphors, establish the parts of the everyday world to relate to, and then contrast the differences between the world we perceive and the one we cannot.

GURPS = Easiest Realism Fantasy

The common theme of many realism fantasy games is how hard they make everything, especially character creation. I took a trip into Rolemaster recently, and while the charts and game are cool, the character creation bogs the system down with a lot of unneeded math and crunch. GURPS is relatively straightforward in comparison.

Realism fantasy is different from deadly or gritty fantasy because there is an assumption that combat will be detailed with realistic effects of damage applied. Shadowdark is a deadly and gritty fantasy game. Still, since it uses the 5E engine, Shadowdark is not necessarily realistic, and it takes more work and referee assumptions to get there since the game does not give you the simulation systems you need for a realistic fantasy game.

Shadowdark is very gritty and deadly, but it does not give me the tools to run a game with a high amount of realism, nor does it give the players that much to work with in terms of skills and combat options to have the things they need to reciprocate and solve problems realistically.

Shadowdark is more of a board game than a simulation. GURPS is more of a simulation.

There is some cosmic war between Rolemaster and GURPS, of which I am unaware. Regardless, the system's goals in the fantasy genre are very close to providing gritty, deadly, realistic, skill-based fantasy play. GURPS has better combat options and fewer charts, whereas Rolemaster has the crit charts. GURPS can be played from a character sheet, whereas Rolemaster can't.

Rolemaster makes these internal assumptions that guide certain races and heritages, making certain professions and skills easier for those backgrounds. The game builds a "hidden" set of best paths and ideal combinations into character creation and advancement methods. In a sense, this is the game's "traditional fantasy cred," where dwarves don't make great wizards, and the other sets of fantasy tropes are created through the game's character system.

GURPS has none of that. You play as a zero-based human or a racial fantasy template and begin designing for it or adding templates until you are done. Unless you put them in there, the game has no internal assumptions of who can be the best at what. If you wanted dwarves to be unable to use arcane magic, put that in the dwarven racial template for your world as a disadvantage.

Playing a gritty, realistic fantasy game is far easier in GURPS than in any other system. The "critical effects" can be mostly made up on the spot and become readily apparent with high damage rolls. Do 20 points of damage to a head with a warhammer, and it is easy to describe what happens without flipping through 50 pages of charts. The same goes for melee critical misses, and spell critical hits and failures.

And for spell corruption, I could tag that system as a Modifier as a Limitation, tag it with Unreliable (16+ for -5%, or just say critical misses), and then put a corruption (or divine disfavor) mechanic on there for another -15%, and take -20% off the cost of all spells and spell-like powers (non-serious and temporary effect would likely reduce this down to a -10%). Or I could "say it is so," ignore the design system, and say this is like GURPS Horror. There are dozens of ways to do this, all of which are valid if you are consistent.

I have an imagination; I don't need all these charts. Are they inspiring? Yes. Are they required to play? No, and the character can limit your imagination by making you dependent on them.

Psychological limitations and those internal battles also play a considerable role in realistic fantasy, and GURPS delivers those with the game. The social factors play into the game as much as the skills and abilities, giving me a much stronger game than just providing characters and crit charts. Of course, Rolemaster is more than just those parts; GURPS has all the pieces I need built into the game's core, and they work the same for any genre or setting.

GURPS gets me to realistic fantasy nirvana more easily than any other game. Once people understand character creation, everything else is easy and flows logically. I don't need to learn a new system to do this, either, or support a game like Dungeon Crawl Classics that requires a few dozen dice to play and players constantly asking, "What do I roll?"'

With GURPS, I have that game.

GURPS Combat

The GURPS for Dummies book is still one of the best casual references to the rules ever written. It strips down the complexity of the rules and makes much of the game more accessible and easier to think about. After reading this book, superpowers and other special abilities became much easier to use in the game. I gave this book to a friend, and the game became clearer for her, creating excitement for playing the game.

After she had read the character creation chapters, she was not intimidated by character creation and started coming up with great ideas for the characters. Yes, you can do that in GURPS. In 5E, there is at least sixty dollars for that one character option you want in a 300-page hardcover. After she read GURPS, she shared my opinion that the entire D&D market is a rip-off designed to pull thousands of dollars out of each player. GURPS is a bargain compared to a 5E habit; you can do much more with it, and it is a far better game for creative types.

That won't sit well with her D&D group, but at least she is out of Plato's Cave.

This is the best book to give to borderline GURPS players who are interested but sit in the "where do I start?" camp. She wants to get her own copy. The book lightly touches on many areas, so it is not an in-depth replacement for the core books, but it touches on the best places in each chapter and gets you interested in exploring more.

If there were ever a second revision, I would love a section in each chapter telling you "where to look for more" and giving an overview of advanced options, including links to other books in the series.

Combat is also an area this book covers well and demystifies. One key omission is the shock rule (B381), which you must use if you are into moderately advanced combat. It is mentioned in the section on disadvantages, but not in the combat chapter under damage. Pencil that in!

GURPS combat is better than Rolemaster's. Once you play with all the advanced wounding rules, crippling, knockdown, stun, shock, damage modifiers, blunt trauma, injury levels, wounds, unliving modifiers (zombies, golems, etc.), and critical hits - you have a game that can produce all of Rolemaster's chart results without the charts. If you want to be extra descriptive, buy an anatomy book and know when a femur or scapula can be broken. It takes a little extra effort when a target takes damage, but I would rather have a system that can recreate those results without needing charts and works for any target type.

You can also play with basic combat: hit plus damage. Rolemaster does not scale or simplify as well, and if all you want to play is "roll to-hits and do damage" - just like in any d20 game - that is an option. It is nice to have a combat system where you can shift from "it doesn't matter, handle it quickly" to "full bore wounding and realism" in the drop of a hat.

GURPS has an internal rules flexibility that most other games dream they could have.

Want to say "a month goes by, give me a skill roll for constructing the cabin" to "every second matters, your life depends on it?" GURPS does that seamlessly, and with as many levels of detail as you want.