GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #5

The GURPS: Star Frontiers (SF) project is as easy as just playing GURPS Space at a TL10^, or it is a slog of conversions to get everything just perfect. I am opting (for now, since GCS is not working for me currently and I am back to GCA), to go with the former.

SF has always been a TL10 setting, with no blasters and only lasers. This also means that starships (GURPS: Spaceships) at TL 10 have engines that produce 1G acceleration per engine mounted in a ship's mounting space (a total of 20 spaces), and antimatter reactors that provide 4 power points per space used. This closely matches the SF ships in capabilities, without delving into the Star Wars-like TL11 super-reactionless drives, which grant 50G acceleration per engine space.

At TL11, this transition moves beyond the technology of Star Frontiers, and we are delving more into Star Wars technology levels. At TL12, this is Star Trek.

GURPS Spaceships will be your best bet for ship design, since the systems are simplified and streamlined. Even the space combat system in here is a lot better than in other books. I get trying to use Knight Hawks directly and converting, but another part of me wants a better system.

The Blaster Issue

TL11 is also when we get into blasters, and those have an armor divisor of (5), which is brutal, even to the TL11 lighter armors that characters wear. Since blasters do burn damage, they use the lesser of the two values on the High and Ultra Tech Armor Chart (B284-285), and remember, armors with the [3] note get higher DR values at tech levels past when they were introduced.

Star Frontiers features lasers, not blasters, which begins to push projectile weapons far off the stage and diminish their significance. So let's stick to TL10.

The TL10 Tactical Suit

A TL10 tactical suit has DR 30/15 (1.5x multiplier), and a TL11 tactical suit has DR 40/20 (2x multiplier). The first number is used only against piercing and crushing attacks, while the second applies to all other attacks.

So our TL10 laser pistol does 3d(2) burn damage, and our TL10 laser rifle does 5d(2) burn damage. We round down for character feats and combat results, so the DR 15 tactical suit protects against 7 points of damage. It still provides us with a good measure of protection against a 3d(2) laser pistol and halves the damage of a 5d(2) laser rifle.

The TL 11 Tactical Suit

Okay, let's move on to TL11 and blasters, as well as the same tactical suit. A TL11 blaster pistol is 3d(5) damage, and the rifle is 6d(5). Even with a 20 DR TL11 tactical suit, that divisor of (5) knocks the suit down to 4 points of protection, giving some protection against the pistol and almost none against the rifle.

The Battlesuit

To protect against blasters, you start to need full TL11 battlesuits at DR 140/100. With the divisor of (5), that puts the battle suit at 20 DR, which makes pistols worthless, and rifles have a slight chance of getting through. You need that heavy blaster of 8d(5) for battlesuit combat, and that is on average an 8-point penetration.

Mount a TL11 light force screen on that battlesuit (UT191), and you gain 200 points of semi-ablative DR, which will withstand a few hits before the operator is scrambled.

Battlesuits at TL10 are somewhat unusual at 105/75 DR, and you need to consult GURPS: Ultra-Tech to find a weapon that can penetrate them at that tech level, specifically the semi-portable plasma gun (UT128), which deals 20d(2) burn damage. So, halving our battlesuit DR to 37, the average of 20d is 70 damage, which fries the inside of the suit like an egg. Traveller players know this weapon well, the feared PGMP, plasma-gun man-portable.

The heavy plasma gun at this TL is also an option, dealing 3d5 (2) damage on average, for a total of 55 points of damage against the 37 DR, resulting in 18 points of penetration. Portable railguns (UT142) work, too. Battlesuit combat is out of scope for Star Frontiers and better suited to Traveller. Still, it is fun at TL10 to try to find things to crack these battlefield nuts.

But that "high-tech personal armor game" gets dodgy at TL11, and the regular adventurer armor and weapon types work better with the lower armor divisors of lasers of TL10. If you use TL10 Gauss weapons, that is an armor divisor of (3), and the armor becomes slightly less effective. Even TL7 battle rifles with APHC ammo do 7d(2) pi-, which can punch holes in DR 30 TL10 battlesuits. The armor and gun game at TL10 is still functioning within the range required for Star Frontiers to maintain that mix of weapons and provide interesting personal combat without automatic one-hit kills.

Why All the Math?

5E players are probably reading this and have their eyes glazed over at this point with all this number crunching. Hey, this was the 1980s and 90s, and we didn't have smartphones; we only had graphing calculators. And those were cool. Nerds did math, and we loved it.

Why are we going through all this trouble of matching up armors and weapons? Well, part of the Star Frontiers genre was "fun space combat," and we need to ensure that map-based battles against robots, space pirates, alien creatures, and evil space aliens go relatively smoothly. At TL10, a mix of energy weapons and projectile weapons is still feasible, the armor game feels compelling, and people aren't walking around with one-hit-kill disintegrators.

We are trying to create a "D&D in space," which is what the original game aimed to do, targeting a younger audience. The balance between energy, melee, and projectile weapons needs to be kept. For us, the universe and its adventures were a success, and we remained in this universe for decades afterward.

Hardened Armor?

There is a solution with advantages for high armor divisors, but it requires careful consideration. On page B47 under Damage Resistance, there is an option for Hardened armor, which reduces the armor divisor by one step.

This could be applied to personal armor if you found it too weak, and would increase the armor "point cost" by 20% per level. A (2) would become a (1), a (3) would become a (2), and a (5) would become a (3). This will seriously alter your DR game with high-tech weapons, and possibly unbalance combat, but it is an option within the rules. I wouldn't go overboard with this, but it is a tool in the game that can pare down those high penetration divisors.

Just call them "advanced materials" and double the cost of the armor. Make it lose 1d6 of DR per penetration (due to the hardness making it shatter easily), or adjust the balance accordingly.

Two levels of Hardening on a TL11 tactical suit would take a (5) penetration blaster down to a (2), give us a DR of 10, and even the odds a little against that 3d blaster pistol and 6d blaster rifle. That would be my limit for TL11 weapons and hardening, but it puts some "gameplay" into the armor game at those TLs and solves the "cracked like an egg" problem of high-tech energy weapon combat.

You may want to limit this to "just energy weapons" (15% instead of 20% per level) since these armors are already tough against piercing and crushing damage. GURPS provides us with tools to adjust things if they feel like they are detracting from the fun in our games.

This is what fluency in the system gives you: access to the best tricks and tips on how to optimize the system's performance. The more you learn and play GURPS, the better it gets.

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.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #3

The conversion for GURPS Star Frontiers is still coming along, and I am still working through the equipment list. Some items, like the gas mask and life jacket, come from other GURPS gear lists. The equipment list is elementary, but with a few unique items. Many items seem stuck in time, like they were pulled from an 1980 Sears catalog with camping supplies, so this is a retro-future game. No one would notice if I added a thermos, portable cooler, and survival stove to this list.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note I am using GURPS Ultra Tech power cells. The 20 SEU power clip in Star Frontiers is directly equivalent to the C Cell in GURPS, and in our game, we had "mini power clips" and "micro." The GURPS rules have these, so it is easier to use the GURPS cells and have a wider variety of batteries for power items since no one is sticking a pistol-clip-sized battery in their watch.

You can call the C Cell a "power clip," but it is still a C Cell.

A "power belt pack?" A plastic battery case with a D Cell, belt hooks, and a few power ports. The "power backpack?" The same thing, but with an E Cell in a backpack harness.

I have the doze grenade in there but have not vectored out the effects. This will require a designed superpower-style effect. It is funny how every "standard equipment pack" comes with a single gas grenade that puts people to sleep and a spray hypodermic, which is essentially a reusable syringe. If we were talking "what we know today," then every dose of a drug would be its own single-use injector. A "stim dose" should be one plastic, self-injecting, single-use dose.

But remember, we are stuck in the 1980s here with this game. It is too easy to say everything is this hyper-slick "Iron Man tech" where helmets nano assemble and every piece of gear looks super modern and sleek. That is modernist garbage, Unreal Engine 5 asset flips, 3d Studio Max sci-fi items, and VFX slop. Not everything has to "look and feel" like super-science modern tech. You will lose what makes the original setting special and extraordinary.

We will stick to the spray hypo and single-dose cartridges.

We saw the original Traveller turn into Mega Traveller, and they did the same modernization. Back then, we said the entire game looked "California-ized." We loved the retro-1950s original look and feel of 70s Traveller, and to see the game turned into modern sci-fi made it feel like the game lost something. Computers weighed tons, and could never be carried around with you. You radioed back to the ship if you wanted someone to look up something from the ship's database.

If we want the game to feel as it did, we are sticking to the retro-future, early-80s pastiche, cut off at 1982. Even Aliens is out since it is from the late 80s, along with Return of the Jedi from 83. We are stuck with Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Tron, E.T., The Thing, Flash Gordon, Logan's Run, UFO, and Blade Runner. There are some Roger Corman films here, as well as Thundarr and Planet of the Apes.

Also, note that in Star Frontiers, there is a subspace radio. This is faster than light communication, at 1 LY per hour. This changes a lot, and news can spread quickly in this universe, with most planets learning of major news within a day. Distress calls can be "phoned home" to planets. The consequences of this were never explored in the game, so to keep lore-accurate, there needs to be a strict rule for the limits and capabilities of communication in this universe.

In GURPS-speak, Star Frontiers is closer to a tech level 7+2, like Tales of the Solar Patrol, a 6+3 setting.

Time Off

I am still here, just storing books and moving a few I want to look at again. I play more than just GURPS; having that perspective is good. I also write on a few related blogs, SBRPG being the most frequently updated, and it reflects the current state of my most-played game shelves.

GURPS is still on those.

The Star Frontiers project continues, but the original Star Frontiers game does not translate well to GURPS. The original SF game is 1d100, and the weapon damages don't make much sense. What GURPS does in its science fiction implementation works much better, except for starship combat. When GURPS tries to go into a hardcore math and physics simulation, it gets tedious, dull, and my eyes glaze over. I still have some design thoughts and soul-searching to do here, most importantly, what is the project's goal, and what do I want it to do?

A Star Law game will be different than a UPF game, the same way a PGC explorer's game will be different than a space pirate game.

Star Frontiers never became much more than its original module series set on Volturnus, a sort of John Carter of Mars imitation, and the original game would have been better had it focused on that aspect. I would rather have the four races send their cryo-sleep starships to Volturnus, focus on settling that planet as the campaign's hub world, ignore the sample universe, and tell referees to "make up the rest of the universe themselves."

The game had other adventure modules, but few compared to this original series.

The comparison between John Carter of Mars and Volturnus does not go away for me; the first adventures were classics and delivered on that genre excellently. The "outside universe," being something everyone felt they needed to escape to, felt like a false god, and when you finally did, players quickly discovered there was nothing much out there.

Volturnus had "dirty influences" like space pirates (you could never steal their ships) and other outside influences, but I feel the series could have been much more and never got there. Selling something that wasn't Star Wars in the 1980s was impossible, especially if that game could not be used to "play" Star Wars in a roundabout way. Star Frontiers would have been better off as a more generic science fiction game, just like D&D was, and pulled in pop-culture influences.

You could pull in various other classic science fiction works and base campaigns around those, such as Starship Troopers, Dune, The Forever War, War of the Worlds, Foundation, 1970s Star Wars and Alien, 80s Blade Runner, and too many others to mention.

An actual science fiction game like D&D would Appendix N all these sources and deliver that.

GURPS science fiction delivers on all those classic books and reflects a stronger foundation in those classics, while Star Frontiers is just one of them. As a result, basing a game "just on Star Frontiers" feels like it is missing something. What is missing are those classics.

Looking back on the 1980s, the game that delivered on the science fiction classics was the FGU's Space Opera. After this, we had GURPS Space, which still works well.

These days, we have the excellent Cepheus Universal (CU), which takes more modern science fiction stories and turns them into 2d6 games. Note that CU's inspirations lean more towards science fiction movies from the 1980s to today. If we are talking classic "book-based" science fiction from the 1950s to 1980, I would choose GURPS Space or Space Opera.

Star Wars in 1977 was the death of the classic science fiction book.

Star Frontiers is very much John Carter with Volturnus, so the roots of this game come from the pre-Star Wars era. If you wanted to make great Star Frontiers adventures, you would imitate classic science fiction books of the past, not copy movies from the 1980s to today. We did this in our 40-year Star Frontiers campaign; it was a mix of all the greats. We less copied Aliens and Blade Runner, and instead played these long-arc, sweeping campaigns where those larger issues of morality and humanity were reflected in "space dungeon" adventures.

This is still a project, but with tariffs throwing the world where I work upside down, I need to focus my energies and creativity carefully.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #2

Okay, a few updates on the project are due, plus a couple more observations.

The game will be based on a TL 10 base.

The damage conversion for personal weapons is 1d10 SF, which converts to 2d6 GURPS. This is for ranged weapons only and roughly matches the SF auto pistol with 9mm pistol damage. This will throw the auto rifle out of whack, but that is likely going up to 5.56mm or 4.7mm PDW damage to 4d6 GURPS. I am keeping the d6 damage without adders to keep the dicing clean and match SF better in terms of simplicity and clean damage ratings.

Melee weapons will be as they are in GURPS, with a few exceptions around some of the "shock" and "electro" melee weapons. These can better be done in GURPS with added "shock and stun" electricity effects than SF, which just adds a few d10 of damage.

Starship damage is going to the d6 scale, with hull points being 60% of the base game. The "combat table" on the back of the Knight Hawks rules will get converted to 3d6 GURPS rules, with a 50% being a +0, a 60% being a +2 to-hit, a 40% being a -2 to-hit, and so on. Starship movement and damage tables stay as-is in Knight Hawks.

For starship combat, one hex of starship scale will equal 10 yards of GURPS scale, which is what all the weapons are "designed and tuned" at. This means a target at 10 hexes of starship range will be as hard to hit as a target at 100 yards in GURPS, or a -10.

I could apply a -1 per hex of range modifier for starships and be fine, "This is how it is."

As a reader suggested, I could use the OG GURPS 3 Space rules for combat and construction, but I need to read up on them and consider them. It is fun to do it the GURPS way, and another type of fun keeping this more like OG Knight Hawks. The starship game is further off, but that is my plan for how it will go. Testing is needed!

One of the strangest parts of Star Frontiers' personal combat is "the defense game." We have suits that protect against physical or laser damage and screens that do the same. In our games, we stuck with the skeinsuit for physical damage resistance and albedo screens to turn on for anti-laser protection. You often needed to guess the defenses you needed, or you were left without.

Also, the defenses do not work the same. Albedo screens take damage and drain 1 SEU per 5 points of laser damage. Inertia screens drain 2 SEU and halve ballistic or melee damage. Gauss screens drain 2 SEU and absorbs all damage. Albedo suits have 100 hits and disintegrate but prevent all damage. Skeinsuits halve ballistic or melee damage but are ruined when they take 50 points of damage.

There is fun to the defense game, but this also gets tedious for some groups. I want to model the special armor and defenses, but another part of me just wants to make one force screen and one or two skeinsuits (civilian and military) and make them protect against most types of damage. When I get to armor or defenses, I have some serious design work in store for me and questions about where I want my game's focus to be.

I will likely simplify the defenses for a simple story-based game. Otherwise, I will model them all as designed to be true to the original game. I am not "designing them with points" unless I have to. If something absorbs 100 points in SF, it will absorb 120 points in GURPS (1d10 to 2d6). If something drains 1 SEU per 5 points of damage in SF, it will be 1 SEU per 6 points in GURPS.

An average STA of 50 in SF means characters in the original game were superhuman regarding hit points. In GURPS, everyone will be much more fragile, and I may need some of these armors to have some fixed DR. Something tells me modeling my armors off of comparable GURPS armors will be the way to go.

From now on, we do a lot of math, so be forewarned...

Also, remember that the game is TL 10, so the DR of the TL 9 armor will be multiplied by 1.5. This will make many projectile weapons useless against soldiers (both UPF and Sathar) in DR 30/15 tactical armor. The dominant weapons will be lasers with their armor divisor of (2). Allowing variable SEU settings for laser weapons may make armor useless, so there is an argument for keeping the laser pistol at 3d(2) burn and the laser rifle at 5d(2) burn and not having SEU settings on the weapons.

GURPS Basic Set thought about all this stuff, so it may be easier to default to the well-proven rules here rather than do all this conversion work and end up with a broken game. I can see using GURPS weapons and armor and not doing all these conversions or just doing the force screens and calling it a day. A skeinsuit is just a GURPS TL 9 "ballistic suit" at TL 10 and has a DR of 18/6. This will make many of the projectile weapons in the game useless, but that is the price of progress.

The original Star Frontiers needed to account for STA scores from 50 to 70, so damages were high, and the defenses worked in specific ways. All weapons were meant to be viable and have trade-offs and benefits. Switching to a projectile weapon was a good tactic if you had a Sathar wearing an albedo field. The guns were designed to be viable alternatives to each other.

In GURPS, the default assumption is to model the passage of time and technology, with projectile weapons becoming as obsolete as crossbows and muskets on the battlefield. Any character with a TL 10 DR 18/6 skeinsuit will laugh off every projectile weapon in the game, and adding a helmet with a visor will eliminate the headshot option.

Even if you assume all projectile weapon ammo is APHC (reducing penetration damage to pi-, or x 0.5), the 2d6 pistols will only penetrate at a 2d6 roll of 10 or higher, and the 4d6 rifles will fare a little better, but the internal damage will only be on average of a 14 - (18/2) / 2 = 2 points per penetrating shot. A 3d6(2) laser pistol's average damage to that same suit will be 11 - (6/2) = 8 points per penetrating shot. The laser rifle will be 15 points.

The intelligent characters will carry laser weapons in a TL 10 science fiction setting, and the 9mm pistols and 5mm rifles will be tossed in the metal and polymer scrap bin. They could be encountered in backwater and primitive situations. Still, in the main worlds and most portions of civilized space, the laser pistol will out-damage the 5mm APHC auto rifle against the most commonly encountered armor in the game.

And hey, math is fun! Don't be afraid of it.

Converting all these exotic weapons and defense types will be a waste of time if you want to bring armor and weapon damage closer to GURPS norms. Just assume a TL 10 setting and use the laser weapons in GURPS Basic as your go-to weapons. The Gyroc Pistol TL 9 with APHC ammo is a viable option, doing 6d6(2) pi+ damage, so against that skeinsuit it will be 21 - (18/2) x 1.5 = 18 points of damage. Gauss PDWs are not in Star Frontiers but in GURPS Basic.

Note that GURPS Ultra-Tech has a 6d(2) burn laser rifle (the carbine is the 5d(2) one, now) and a few other TL 10 weapons, and this will expand your game considerably but also add sonic stunners, which are cool options. The TL 9 projectile weapons and new ammo types (APEP) are dramatically expanded here, making that skeinsuit far less effective.

A game using Ultra-Tech will be dramatically different from just using GURPS Basic. The comment about "sticking to laser weapons" is far less accurate with Ultra-Tech being used for the game, but for a game with new players, sticking to laser weapons and DR 18/6 skeinsuits (with an anti-laser screen option) may be the easier way to go.

You could convert things to play more like the original game, but if you look at the above math, you will need to do a lot of design work to make it work the way SF did and perhaps break some of the things we like about GURPS.

For me?

As a setting, it is easier to use the GURPS Basic weapons and armor as-is and reskin the ballistic suit as my skeinsuit. I will need to model or find an anti-laser screen equivalent, which I am sure is in the rules somewhere.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Try #2

I am restarting my GURPS: Star Frontiers game, but doing it the right way this time. Well, what is "the right way?" I am creating an equipment and weapon list in the GURPS Character Sheet (support the project, link on the sidebar), sticking with those items, and only supplanting from other gear lists as I need.

This is more like a "GURPS sandbox" conversion, where I make a focused gear and weapons list and just use that. I am not allowing random weapons from GURPS Ultra-Tech or any other source; it is fair game if it is on the "in-game" gear lists. The only change is to add the GURPS power cells from UltraTech as my "power clips" for the game since UT has the smaller A & B style cells that can power some of the smaller devices.

I will make a list of races and build those as templates.

I may create "template packages" for the various primary skill areas and the skill choices, like "robotics skill," a 25-point GURPS template you can pick and add to a character's skills. I may also add the starship skills from Knight Hawks as templates. This will make building characters (and NPCs) as easy as setting a point level and picking packages.

Laser pistols will be capped at a maximum of 5 SEU, rifles at 10, and heavy lasers at 20. We made this house rule back in the day, and it worked well. Smaller weapons can only be turned up so much. If you want big, go big.

A 1d10 damage in Star Frontiers is a 1d6 in GURPS (or 2d6).

Starships? I will stick with the Knight Hawks rules with a few modifications. GURPS will handle all to-hits and skill rules. Turns and movement will be Knight Hawks. Ranges will be handled by GURPS, but 1 hex of starship scale will be one meter of GURPS scale, and the GURPS range modifiers will apply. If Knight Hawks gives a -10% chance to hit, that will be a flat -2 in GURPS per -10%. Otherwise, starship damage, weapon damage, and all other rules will be Knight Hawks.

I could use 1d6 as the "base die" for starship damage and scale hull points down to 60% of KH.

Vehicle combat in Star Frontiers can work as-is, rolling d100 as needed. However, there is a power difference between Star Frontiers' heavy weapons and GURPS' more realistic ones. This needs to be tested or followed closer to GURPS' standards.

I am not messing with any of the GURPS starship combat systems again; those derailed my game last time. I want a GURPS sandbox, a transplant of the starship rules, and a thin emulation layer to make everything work with GURPS. All the character, ground combat, and other rules will be GURPS.

I tried this with a mix of GURPS Space, Ultra Tech, and Starships, and it did not feel the same. It felt like a GURPS: Space game wearing a Star Frontiers skin. There is a certain "toybox" that Star Frontiers needs to work well. When all of GURPS: Ultra Tech is thrown into the mix, even at TL 9 or 10, the game just feels like it derails and goes everywhere. Like huge skill lists, a part of me feels Star Frontiers needs to be a simplified, almost "pulp" science fiction experience.

Curating carefully and making focused lists of options is key to pulling this game off.

TL9 Star Frontiers

We loved Star Frontiers; the races, story, and sandbox universe were perfect for us. This game (and Aftermath) killed AD&D for us growing up. The universe here was fun, but we quickly outgrew the rules. Within a year, the game had broken down, many characters had over 100% skills and attributes, and it was clear the game was a short-term-only system.

Our love for this game was so intense that we couldn't resist the urge to push its boundaries. We experimented with various rule systems, trying to find the perfect fit. However, our enthusiasm waned over time, and we eventually lost interest.

My attempt at a GURPS conversion was challenging. I struggled to get the ship combat mechanics right, a crucial game aspect. I aimed for an Interstellar Wars vibe, but the system quickly proved frustrating. GURPS Spaceships, with its lighter-weight design and combat system, including a map-less combat option, is a promising alternative that I am eager to try.

This strange problem in GURPS is that it adopts a starship scale, sticks to huge negative modifiers for range (like -39), and gives weapons huge to-hit bonuses (like +33) on a 3d6 scale. It should all be factored out and simplified. Give me a starship combat system that uses regular 3d6 to hit numbers!

I like the SF universe and GURPS. Converting them is difficult, like any conversion.

One part about GURPS for science fiction is that it goes hard. Really hard. You can play lighter-weight science fantasy in it. Still, if you want the entire, to-the-millimeter starships made out of scaffolding, exposed engines, solar panels unfurled, fuel tanks running low, spaceplane attached, and life-support pods, hard sci-fi experience, it is right here.

This is the good stuff, TL9 hard sci-di, before 1G reactionless engines, where you take weeks and months in space travel. Where your "spaceship" isn't this made for a videogame enclosed hull, but a scaffolding holding habitation pods, engines, fuel tanks, cargo pods, and electronics bays together. You can also have military ships in this configuration with reinforced structures, weapons pods, and armor, and this isn't "movie sci-fi." These ships are floating superstructures that throw missiles, railguns, and lasers downrange.

There are no personal energy weapons in TL9, just high-tech guns. Sometimes, the game's original design overdid the attacks versus defenses, trying to match suits and screens to different attack types.

Doing a Star Frontiers at TL9 would be interesting. It would be set in an early-era frontier setting. I would put the races' home worlds on the map (Prengular, Dramune, Ktsa-Kar, and Araks). There would be UPF once the Sathar showed up and the defense alliance was worked out. No Volturnus, not yet; that is late-stage campaign stuff. This is the pre-First Sathar War era.

At this point, the four races are colonizing worlds and integrating their societies. The principal colony worlds will likely be the "places of adventure," and just exploring and finding the mysteries of those will sustain a game. Places like Truane's Star, Athor, White Light, Timeon, and others will be enough "mystery planets," and rolling the campaign back to an earlier point gives each one of those worlds a creative "reset" and allows me to create places of mystery and other exploration challenges.

Part of this galaxy's original problem is focusing too much on Volturnus and not enough on the core worlds. This is a John Carter of Mars thing, but there should be more detail and mystery to what we already have rather than making the rest of the universe unimportant compared to the new shiny.

The ships in a TL9 game would be slower, and those cool dispersed structure ships instead of the Star Wars-like "boats in space," which are getting tired these days. Give me the realistic starships of Interstellar, Ad Astra, and The Martian any day. Those are my gold standards in the genre.

I don't like the "flying hotels" that most sci-fi starships have become. They are too modern, serve as instant bases and fire support, and turn any sci-fi adventure into "fly up and blast it!" Many Traveller adventures go out of their way to say why "the ship isn't available because..." The same-old Millennium Falcon syndrome "flying space RV" sci-fi ships get stale and boring.

I never liked Traveller's Scout-Courier starship. It was too easy a ship to own, use, and land on planets anywhere players liked. The design was fun, and the look is iconic, but for adventures, it is far too easy and eliminates much of the fun of exploring and getting out of the ship. I am probably in the minority here, but these have never worked out well for our groups. Yes, a VTOL space plane is similar but much more fragile and needs to return to the mother-ship after dropping passengers off. You can't "live inside it," and you must protect it.

I would rather the "ship" be like a space station in orbit, where the best it can do is run communications when it passes by and launch space planes down to the planet's surface. The best you have is a space plane, and that is it. If sticking around is too dangerous (most of the time, leaving is safer), it flies back up to the ship, and you are setting up a camp. The space planes may also serve as the ship's "fighters," so they may have a use being in orbit, more than sitting parked so random space aliens can crawl into it.

Otherwise, hard sci-fi Star Frontiers all the way. I don't want the lasers and "defense game," which was silly. Just the races, universe, and metaplot. I don't wish to see "space RVs" and have easy space travel. Most of the adventures are planet-based. Being in a starship crew is like working in a nuclear sub.

It may split character types between "starship crews" and "away teams," with different skills needed in each area. This is where the lore and expectations of character creation split hugely. I may just want to play the "away teams" for planetary adventures and have the starship crew be GURPS Ultra Lite characters who do things in the background. Being a "generalist" who is expected to fly ships, fix things, have personal combat, be skilled in melee, and 101 other things will reduce your enjoyment of the game and put too much stress on creating a character. It is better to specialize where you can eventually become a "do it all" in Star Frontiers and Traveller in GURPS.

This is also where I went wrong on my first conversion attempt. I built a do-it-all guy, and he did nothing well. Even in the ship combat system I used, he sucked terribly, and he was not fun to play either on the ground or in space. I would rebuild him as a starship guy first and not go hard into combat, exploration, or even mechanical areas.

Exploration and ground skills? Areas for improvement. But he has to be able to fly and fight in space competently over everything else. This is GURPS; your character must do a few things well or become "so what" generalists. The heavy negative modifiers for anything challenging will take your generalist and turn them into a do-nothing and terrible character to play.

Don't fear those 18- skills! The negative modifiers for doing anything cool stack up fast.

Your "ship crew" may never see personal combat or firefights or have the skills. Pilots, technicians, scientists, medical people, sensor operators, communication specialists, weapons system operators, pilots, and robots will be there. You can play the ship crew instead of the away team; that is fine.

The ground crew will look like typical GURPS adventurers and have survival skills. Your ground-based adventures will be very survival, science, and combat-oriented. This allows you to focus on character design better and enjoy the game.

The Rules-Light Tyranny of Simple Skills

Both Traveller and Star Frontiers have this problem. This one came up in my GURPS Star Frontiers campaign, derailing my game. Here is your typical starting SF character's skills:

• Beam Weapons 1
• Technician 1

Usually, you pick a combat skill plus your specialty- a medic, technician, computer, robotics, or whatever. In Traveller, you get similar skills, but the skill list is more extensive, so you typically start with 4-10 skills in various areas. Still, the levels and specialization focus areas are similar to Star Frontiers. Traveller's skill list was better, by far, but SF was designed for a younger audience. SF did more with the skills, offering actions in each skill that you could attempt at various percentages.

However, trying to convert SF to GURPS poses a problem. I had characters I wanted to recreate, and my first attempts are rebuilding them were these "good at everything generalists," which frankly had no focus and sucked. If you are designing a generalist in GURPS, stop and rethink your design. You won't be happy with it.

The character I was trying to rebuild was a technician, pilot, and beam weapons "action hero" type guy.

He ended up a sci-fi, do-it-all generalist with a two-page skill list, and I was not happy with him. In Traveller, your character can die in character generation; in GURPS, your character can "die" in character generation, too; you can blow it and have the character come out terrible. It is like cooking dinner, failing terribly, tossing it all, and ordering takeout.

You can get through GURPS character creation and have a mess of a character that can't be played. That is a terrible feeling. Sometimes, I would rather play a 50-point know-nothing scrub and earn my character points to learn what comes at me. GURPS takes time to learn. But what takes even more time is re-learning how to roleplay.

You enter the world of GURPS, and your world expands exponentially. Things you would "brush off" in a throw-away rules-light game suddenly become matters of life and death. You can't get the cargo-bay ramp closed. Who cares?

The door will tear off when the ship tries to get enough speed to accelerate into orbit.

All that atmospheric pressure blowing in the ship will cause the lower deck to explode from within.

And the ship will fall back to the ground, tearing itself apart as it loses structural integrity.

In a rules-light game, whatever, the hard technician skill roll, fix it, take a 20, and get flying. Some games don't handle the above situation; like in a Star Wars-type reality, you can fly around with a door open forever since the rules and the genre don't care.

But in hard sci-fi? Close that ramp, or it will be game over.

And if no characters can perform a hard hydraulics skill roll? You are stuck. Or try something else, like shutting the ramp and welding it shut. You lose the ramp, but it is better than losing the ship. All mechanic skills default at a -4 skill level, so a 16- turns into a 12-, and modifiers further lower that.

Does someone on your crew know hydraulic repair?

Not a problem.

That one small situation that would have been a throwaway moment in a rules-light game becomes a critical area of knowledge your character can pick up and become good at. This "world expansion" happened to Traveller players who picked up GURPS Traveller, and all of a sudden, the universe felt incredibly large, and everything felt "real" all of a sudden - like putting on a VR headset and being teleported into the world.

I get it. Rules light players are sitting there, groaning and wondering why "elevator repair" is such a big deal. It is a big deal to a GURPS character, especially a technician dealing with blast doors, hydraulic lifts, ramps, starfighter storage systems, docking clamps, massive cargo lifts, landing-bay doors, and deck-sized lift systems.

You look at Star Wars; every shot inside the Death Star has hydraulic systems in the frame.

Rules light players laugh, but we know this skill is worth its weight in gold. Combine this with knowledge of security systems, computer hacking, and electronics, and my character is now "the door guy."

I can't do that in Traveller or Star Frontiers. The former is more straightforward to accomplish this, but not to the detail and level of GURPS.

Which returns to my character design. Maybe I never knew him to the level of understanding who he really was. The generalist character in GURPS sucks. That character doesn't need anyone else, and they will never be great at a few things.

Even if you design NPCs using GURPS Ultra Lite to help the PC in a few areas, that is preferable to being a generalist. Doing this speeds up play, and since the Ultra Lite rules are legal at my table, it allows me to mock up "party members" and crewmates for PCs quickly and play with one fully designed character and a team of UL NPCs as the ship's crew.

Heck, most aliens and monsters will be UL NPCs, too. If an alien has a power, such as a mind control power, make it a simple N-skill roll and get playing. Throw some ! bang skills in as well, as needed, for NPCs. There is no need to break out the powers book for this. UL handles 99% of NPCs.

However, simple skill systems and rules-light games sell themselves as "easy," but I rarely find them to be worth much. 5E's skill system is like this, too. It does not work well for me, and I can't customize it and buy into areas I want to specialize in after character creation. What's worse, with a simple skill system, I never get to know the character and the world's interactivity is reflected in the game's skill system.

Simple skill system? A simple, less interactive, flat, and unengaging world.

The deeper and more in-depth the skill system, the better the world becomes. One-to-one skills reflect immersion in the world. The better the skill system, the better the world. This is where rules-light falls down hard. The worlds are flat and uninteresting, meant to pretend you can interact with them with a skill system so simple it barely tells you anything.

Are Conversions Even Worth the Trouble?

Some games are so large that they aren't even worth converting. They showcase a world, adventure path, and rules where everything is part of a whole. I picked Pathfinder because I have a massive collection of 1e pawns perfect for hex-based battles.

I am still working on a " Pathfinder-flavored" Dungeon Fantasy game since I have the pawns and background material. But converting in every spell, magic item, class, and power is off the table. This will be straight Dungeon Fantasy wearing a Pathfinder 1e look and style, much like the excellent Savage Pathfinder set of rules (without all the conversion).

I will likely base this around everyone's favorite starting town, Sandpoint, since it has a book of information and is as iconic to the game as the Keep on the Borderlands module. I would modify the town, the underwhelming dungeons underneath, and the sparse pickings in the overland map to add more dungeon locations and excitement to this map. This book assumes the Rise of the Runelords adventure path is completed, so take note of that.

That said, the 3.5E era Rise of the Runelords adventure is also a good resource, and if all Pathfinder 1e was is the core books and this module, that would be a lifetime of gaming or converting over for Dungeon Fantasy. A word of warning about any Pathfinder adventure path: there are places where they actively discourage exploration and expansion of locations and source materials, which is annoying. I know why they do it, to "keep the story moving" and "hustle the party along to the next place."

Because if you stick around in one place too long, you will gain levels and power, and the next part of the story will be a pushover. The appendix for the book above contains an ancient city, and it goes out of its way to say, "The real loot is in the tombs" and "Don't be scavengers here."

Seriously?

Sandbox, you ain't.

Old-school TSR would give you places to expand your adventure in every location. They would dot the Sandpoint landscape with ruins and exciting locations. Every chapter of the adventure path would be full of places where the game master could expand the area with new dungeons, missions, NPCs, and towns to help.

Paizo tends to say, "Please move along." To be fair, they have a section for "continuing the campaign" afterward, but as you go through the story parts, I wanted much more than was given here, especially for expansion.

If you convert these over, please be more like old-school TSR.

GURPS makes it easier to have a flatter power curve, and you don't need humanoids with 30-80 hit points in every room at level ten when you start with the same enemies with 3-8 hit points in every room at level one. In GURPS, I can "increase the CR" of an average orc by giving in 4 points of skill, 5 extra HP, a few points of FP and other stats, good armor, and the combat reflexes advantage.

Slow down and enjoy these places. Explore them. GURPS's flatter power curve has you covered, and you don't need to worry about artificially limiting character progression. Just have fun.

I can use most OSR monsters without too much conversion instead of Pathfinder stats. Pathfinder stats are on that lousy "Wizards scaling curve," so they are way out of line with the OSR. To do this, I halve Pathfinder HD and divide attack bonuses and damage by three. Or just grab a copy of Basic Fantasy and use those numbers.

Another word of warning is that some of the maps and creature sizes are strange in the Paizo adventures. A battle with a full-sized dragon occurs in a room 100 by 150 feet somewhere in the adventure. There isn't enough room for that dragon to fly in a circle. The 3.x and later versions of D&D have always had this disconnect with the proper sizes of creatures, and it shows. Some of the maps here with 5-foot squares are too darn small, and some of the "legendary dungeons" under iconic locations are tiny cellars. Battle-mat limitations, I suppose.

Use the books and maps as "inspirations" and make your own. Go big. Expand. Make these places your own. Part of the fun of a conversion is adding your own stuff, so go to town.

The OSR does not have this problem since you aren't supposed to "balance encounters." But every Wizards D&D release and Paizo version of the game is tightly balanced and easy to break if you stay too long in a place and level up a little. It has been this way since D&D 3.0 in the 2000s, and it sucks.

This is a tricky subject since some conversions rely on a few key things to be there to "look and feel" like the original setting. You do a Star Frontiers conversion, and you need the major races, the iconic gear (skimmers, explorers, hovercycles), and the hard sci-fi starships. Most of these items are reskinned gear in GURPS, but they still need to be listed and stated as the options for this world. You will not have anti-gravity cars and artificial gravity in this setting, though we did when we had a hybrid Space Opera/Star Frontiers game back in the day.

With GURPS Traveller, we have it all done for us. Sci-fi can be tough since there is more to convert, so the setting feels authentic.

Fantasy is easier than sci-fi since I can just throw all the old 3.5E content in the bin and stick to a system designed for a flatter power curve fantasy. Thematically, there is little difference between a GURPS fighter and a Pathfinder 1e one, except the GURPS fighter is much more capable and on a more even power level with casters.

Conversion Notes

The more I play GURPS and master the system, the more I am done with other games. Yes, I know, it is always good to play new things and experience different games, but I have been down this road with game publishers for decades. Some games promise up the world but only deliver a fraction of the B/X town-to-dungeon experience. Some games are written and are 90% similar to B/X, and the encumbrance rules have been changed because the designer never liked the original system.

It reminds me of all the bands that sprung up in the 1990s that sounded like Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. There were some good ones, but everything sounded the same.

B/X compatibility is excellent, and it lets me easily convert to GURPS. B/X Damage and hit points are similar to GURPS and can often be used straight. A 3-hp goblin is more like a minion, and I don't mind those low values for some monsters since they speed up combat (or they could be sickly or wounded from a tough life). Even if you look at GURPS Dragons, hits never exceed 100, so the B/X scale of an ancient red dragon having about 88 hp works, and once you factor in modern firearm damage, a 6d6 fireball fits into GURPS nicely and is quite lethal. Armor? AC minus nine, and it works. Skill, parry, and dodge you can estimate, based on HD.

Be careful with AD&D 2E and higher hit points and HD; they increase quickly with each edition, tripling at 4E and doubling in 5E—which is still too much.

Any B/X adventure can be converted to GURPS on the fly. It is beyond simple. I added a page for my B/X conversions today.

Magic items? Most are used as-is, and magic weapons and armor can apply their bonus to damage, hit, or DR as needed. If a magic sword does an extra 1d6 fire damage, use it like that. If it is broken, fix it.

Saves? A resistance roll in GURPS.

Spells? I stick to the ones in Dungeon Fantasy and use these casting and effect rules. If one comes up in a module, I use the closest one. Magic is an easy system to swap out in any OSR game.

Basic Fantasy 4th Edition is such a great GURPS resource that I keep it alongside my GURPS books. It is the best conversion base and reference work for OSR gaming. It is worth playing as-is! But if you wanted to use it as a sourcebook for Dungeon Fantasy, that works too.

However, many of the OSR and OSR-like games are based on gimmicks (especially with all the random tables in games these days) or the designer's house rules. We are in the age of personal preference; if you like dried strawberries in your cereal, you eat this; if you don't, you eat that. Designers ask us to get passionate about minor differences. Am I really supposed to get behind your version of B/X because it has different encumbrance rules and a few other minor changes?

I am at the point now with B/X and OSR games. They need to bring something new to the table. I have enough of them, and many are just a few house rules away from each other.

YouTube, DriveThru, and Kickstarter keep many of these games afloat. Very few are worth buying into, and I can say that, having bought many of them. A few are based on a passion for how the games used to be played, and these are always the ones that rise to the top since the designer understands the relation of the source material to the inspirations. Cepheus Deluxe is like that for me in regards to 2d6 sci-fi.

Get the best in the OSR game genres and use GURPS for the rules. Cepheus Deluxe is an excellent example of classic 2D6 sci-fi, and Basic Fantasy is my best OSR source game. I have a few new B/X games, but Basic Fantasy's free status and community project will make it accessible and have a future long after every other OSR game goes away. And it was recently rewritten to eliminate all OGL material, so it is safe.

If a game has a unique wargame-like system, like a ship combat system in Star Frontiers (or even car combat in Car Wars), use that instead of the one in GURPS Space. Use GURPS for the skill rolls and apply a -1 or -2 per hex to hit the penalty (I need to test this). The same goes for Cepheus's ship combat. Ship design, combat, and internal damage all work like Cepheus—but make all skill rolls with GURPS and throw modifiers on there as needed.

GURPS is used for the skill rolls.

The unique system is used for everything else.

Only use GURPS for characters. This way, the classic Knight Hawks ship combat will look and feel like the game, but your GURPS characters will make the skill rolls. I wish I figured this out before my game blew up, but I can always restart at the point it blew up.

But I like a one-source system for everything since my mind is beginning to think and work in GURPS. When I play other games, I see how GURPS does the same things better and with less effort. Some of these "invented systems"—especially the ones that come from story-gaming—are so abstract and gamified that they make no sense.

Beware the games that need to invent abstract concepts to patch rules in other games. I like Level Up Advanced 5E's "supply" system to eliminate tracking food and water, but really? How hard is it to track food and water by day and weight per day and leave it at that? It won't matter in many games, or it can all be left on a horse. When it comes to survival scenarios, you can make it an issue. Or in genres where survival is paramount, like post-apocalypse (or worlds like Dark Sun), tracking these supplies and finding new sources will be life and death.

Require a skill roll to replenish them if you are in an area of abundance, or just say they top them off.

Otherwise, ignore food and water. If I were playing GURPS: Miami Vice, would I require players to track them? If I were playing a similar-themed fantasy game of constables in a large fantasy city, playing Magic Vice Cops, would I need them to track these supplies?

This is where a lot of GURPS's unfair criticism comes from: people taking one specific rule and applying it in every case. You would never do it in D&D, so why is GURPS any different? Sorry, your two vice cops are lying on the corner, starving! You should have kept food and water in your sports car! The rules are the rules!

When you realize that most all rules in GURPS are optional, and if you cut them all out, the game is like B/X in complexity, and 5E is a horrible mess of layered rules and interrupts, you will begin to understand the GURPS mindset.

I can play GURPS using GURPS Ultra Lite and still be playing GURPS, and these characters will be compatible with the whole game. I can use the above one-page rules for all my NPCs and monsters and use them in a game where the characters play by the complete rules.

I can run a nearly complete GURPS game off the 32-page GURPS Lite free PDF, and the rules you need to understand are only half the size of this book—the other half is character creation. Give me a break; GURPS is a rules-light game.

It has a few hundred pages of optional rules and a few thousand pages of optional setting rules, none of which are needed to play. It is lighter in rules than even a game I love, Savage Worlds, which requires you to understand many abstract concepts to get fluent in the system. Savage Worlds' speed comes at the price of programming your brain to work with the game. I still love it, but getting back into the game requires loading that information into my memory.

I can't say any of this about 5E.

5E is over 1,000 pages in the first three books; you only get the basics. Most of them are monsters, spells, and magic items—but you begin to need thousands of dollars of add-ons and third-party 5E books to give the game a good level of customization.

In the core book, GURPS does it all.

And I get so much more depth and customization in GURPS than I could ever buy, no matter how much money I spend on 5E (or even the OSR). I like 5E and love the OSR, but there is no contest here for the better game.

At least not for me.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Part 2

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Today, I created my doctor character, and back when my brother and I played the original Star Frontiers, this loose-knit group of the fighter pilot's friends went on to form the crew of his ship.

I know this character well, but GURPS had some disadvantages that fit her personality perfectly. She was never combat-oriented, so a pacifist who only fights in self-defense plus post-combat shakes fit her well. She is a rich girl, the local physician's daughter, who enjoys horse riding and dance music. She went to medical school because her father paid for it, and she has this listless, bored life of just hanging around and not knowing what to do with her life.

For weapons, she uses a needler with sleep drugs. She gets dual use out of that when she needs to sedate a horse and knows a little veterinary medicine. She probably works as a nurse at the local clinic and as a veterinarian assistant. She owns a hoverbike, knows nothing about fixing it, and keeps a backpack with her medical gear in case she needs to make a house call to a ranch. The pack is 50 pounds, so she can carry it in the field on her back, but it encumbers her seriously. She has a small medical kit on her webbing and a few other handy items she can throw on in a pinch.

In GURPS, you need a medical physiology for each race so she can also treat Vrusk. They probably joke she treats them like a horse, but she would laugh. This physiology skill lets her avoid penalties when doing medicine, surgery, or first aid on the Vrusk. She must learn the physiology of other races on which she wants to perform medicine. Like the mechanic and electrician skills, she needs to specialize.

I can see the 5E players rolling their eyes. Healing skill is healing skill! Why does this need to be so specific? This is slowing the game down! Why is this so complicated?

I put her on a damaged space station, and she had to treat a wounded Drasalite with a crushing injury. In that case, her lack of physiology knowledge will be a huge problem and a significant source of tension. She will need to make do or look it up on a medical computer to try and reduce the penalty. If the Drasalite survives, she will definitely want to spend her XP on getting familiar with alien physiology to ensure that it never happens again.

To a doctor, this is an essential upgrade and capability. You make the skills too rules-light, and you lose this moment. But on a more significant level, GURPS is all about these moments when you have the right skill (and equipment) at the right time or frantically trying to make due, roleplay to reduce penalties, and hope for an excellent dice roll.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

The equipment game is essential, too, especially in sci-fi. You can't just say "healer's kit and a tool proficiency" to perform surgery to stop internal bleeding. She is a doctor, a lifesaver, and while science-fantasy characters would wave their hands and cast a glowing nano-healing spell, she would drag over a surgery kit, wash her hands, and get busy saving a life. She would set up a transfusion with another Drasalite; even though unfamiliar, she would make it work with some research and roleplay. She would stabilize the patient and get them resting in the ruins of the recovery room until a rescue ship could arrive. Her pilot/mechanic friend could repair some of the damage to bring the machines back online and stabilize the rolls with that life-support equipment.

In 5E sci-fi, a medicine skill roll and a repair skill roll are against a challenge rating. Due to the game's science-fantasy genre, there are likely 'special powers' that prevent much of this from being done, with the character's nano-healing power for combat. Wave your hand, top off hit points, and everything is okay.

In GURPS, she puts points into skills, has a healer trait that makes everything easier and has to use specific knowledge - some of which she lacks and needs to make up for. Her friend has to bring computers and medical machines online with his repair skills as time runs low. She needs to make a few skill rolls in different areas to prepare and perform her lifesaving miracles. She needs to find the right gear for the job and possibly have her friend blow open a storage locker. She needs to roleplay, find someone for a blood transfusion, and sit them still next to the patient.

That unique collection of skills and talents is her character class, powers, and abilities.

Very few people will remember that 5E moment since it is either 'cast a spell' or so simplified nobody would care. Very few moments in rules-light games are worth remembering, typically only boss fights, roleplay, or silly mistakes.

In GURPS, that 'saving a life' fight - almost like a mini-game - feels like a combat where life and death hang in the balance. That moment will be remembered for years. Any moment in a more robust game can become an epic battle against the odds.

And saving that life will also prove why she exists.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Part 1

To learn a system, create some of your favorite characters using GURPS. Granted, this is not as easy being new to the system; there are a million skills to sort through, and just sorting through what books you will use is a considerable challenge.

Even if all you start with are the core books - that is fine!

GURPS is a system with a fractal level of depth; whenever you think you know all you need to know, there is another level to dive into and explore. And understanding that level will make you appreciate everything that came before even more.

Before we get started, here is my library definition as per GCA. I am calling this "Space Plus - TL 10," and there are a few significant changes to the lore assumed by this collection. Since GURPS has so many excellent books, it would be silly to ignore some of the possibilities for expanding the story and campaign.

The first is limiting campaign TL to 10. When you get to blasters at TL 11 in GURPS, a lot of the personal protective gear becomes worthless with that (5) armor divisor and burn damage, and the TL 11 armor becomes immune to many guns. TL 10 still has a good mix of lasers and projectile weapons, capturing that sort of early-1980s sci-fi feeling where projectile weapons are still viable, and high-tech weapons aren't one-shot deadly. TL 10 still has low armor divisors (2 and 3 mainly), and there is a good armor game here with gear.

The next major change is the addition of the Bio-Tech and Psionics books. I am assuming the Frontier is discovering massive 'relic ships' or some other precursor race's million-year-old space travel technology and these will become a focal point of the campaign. This also takes the pressure off Volturnus being the end-all of the campaign and opens up space mysteries to every part of the galaxy. With the discovery of these city ships and ruins, the citizens of the Frontier are finding substances that mutate them or parts of the population (Bio-Tech), and also these ships are unlocking powers of the mind (Psionics). 

I envision parts of the population of some worlds changing into new forms, adopting psi-powers, skin color changes, and other mutations that create new variant species of the major races. A crashed ship in an ocean may have slowly mutated parts of the population slowly until everyone knew something was happening. There may be mutated animal races and others with an expanded selection of races and mutations.

This also allows limited super-science and TL 11+ items to enter the game, but I am limiting (for now) everything in the program to TL 10 or lower just to reduce choices during character creation. I can always modify my library later, but for more, TL 10 is the limit for character creation, and TL 11+ items (and starship equipment) are treasures and unique finds.

TL 11+ space treasures, especially personal equipment, and starship systems, are very cool. A starship captain may find a piece of higher-tech starship equipment and that would be a one-of-a-kind find they can install into their ship. This is the "treasure and magic item" game in traditional fantasy gaming in a sci-fi sense, and keeping the general TL lower increases the amount of cool stuff from TL 11-15 characters can find (and fight over).

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

The character I created is your pilot/mechanic-style archetype. In Star Frontiers, they don't let you be a pilot from character creations (with Knight Hawks) since you need technician 6 and computer 2, along with computer 6 if you want astrogation. In the original game, starship skills are 'high-level play', and beginning characters have no hope of having their own ship or being able to fly it.

My guy is a primary 150-point character (-50 in disadvantages/perks) and uses the astronaut template out of GURPS Space. When converting, watch out for the generalist mindset other games put you in. You will want to make your character just as competent as they are in the rules-light game, and I found myself buying dozens of technical, piloting, and other skills to make him able to do the things he was able to in the old game.

For a starting 150-point character, your character will be 100% better if you design for a very narrow set of specialties - just the core things you need the character to do (not want). My guy needed to be able to fly a starfighter or other high-performance craft in standard space (not hyperspace), fly between planets, fix his starfighter (but not the reactor, computers, or other specialty systems), and shoot a laser pistol. His background hobbies were camping, driving his truck to his favorite para-glider spots, and doing extreme sports with his buddies.

That's it. he can't fix radios, computers, shields, sensors, reactors, fuel cells, robots, or anything else (without a related skill and penalty). He could in the original game, but he is a specialist here and that narrow range of skills helps better define him as a character. If he needs a person to repair (or program) computers he will need to learn a new skill or (better yet) hire someone else to do that. He could replace a star-fighter reactor or other system but not repair it.

He has a military rank of one, and I assume he is one of the thousands of reserve fighter pilots in training for his planet's militia. He holds down a regular job and then reports for training every few weeks to train, study space battles, do shipboard drills and operations, clean and do maintenance chores, fly a starfighter older than he is, study repair manuals, and review training afterward. Otherwise, he is a mechanic who fixes ATVs and shuttles, owns a piece of junk ATV himself, and has an apartment in a nowhere town to slum in.

This is where you realize a fine-grained skill system that forces your character into specialty areas helps roleplaying. If he wants to be the captain of his own starship, he will need to find a crew to cover all these areas. He will need specialists to cover systems he can't repair. He needs a navigator, sensor person, computer specialist, doctor, science crew that can operate sensors, and other crewmembers. He will not be able to 'do it all' or 'cover any station' like sci-fi games based on 5E or Starfinder typically assume since 'they want to skip to the fun.'

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

But let's think about the future. He wants to be a starship captain someday. He wants to own his own ship. Maybe he wants to complete his military service term and move on (the timing of the end of this should be roleplaying and decided between GM and player). He could transfer to the Scout Service and deal with diplomats, scientists, and explorers. He could stay in the militia and be given command of a fast patrol ship. He could stay in reserves and work towards becoming a private merchant or transfer to the merchant marine reserve forces and haul cargo for the military when loads come up.

Yes, you can do all that in a rules-light system, but you need a profound experience in sci-fi to even come up with it. With a deeper skill system that forces specialization, these questions come naturally as a part of character design and improvement.

But there are a billion ways to go. That feeling overwhelms some; they need a class and level system as rails. I love being thrust into the stars and asking, "What is next?"

How I answer that question and what the rules allow me to do reflects my choices and actions.

And he will need to improve his skills too. He will need better personal combat skills. He can defend himself now, but he has a lot of room to specialize and improve in the narrow combat areas he prefers to fight with. He needs hyper-space pilot skills, better gunnery, sensor skills, and some more tricky flying advantages. He will need leadership skills and some skills used to manage money. he needs contacts, and skills needed to deal with planetary governments and bureaucracies, which will involve contracts and negotiation. 

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

But those social spacer skills and dealing with business and 'red tape in space' are another part that rules-light games ignore. This is tremendous flavor and color, and having a specialist legal and customs crewmember will allow him to breeze through customs, docking, legal, and taxes with a breeze. Other captains will be caught up in red tape and able to get in, deliver cargo, load up the next haul, and get out, while other captains sit in a processing queue for weeks and wait for customs to get to them.

Today's rules-light sci-fi gives you a space goblin, puts a laser pistol in your hand, and tells you to 'kill it for some fun' and 'loot credits out of its pockets for a reward.'

Today's sci-fi games miss the point of sci-fi so hard the pain is unbearable. If I want to think, reflect on the human condition, discover the unknown, and feel that deep sense of wonder - I will play sci-fi. I will play fantasy if I want to stab things to death for a few pieces of gold.

My character specialization, dealing with red tape and everything he doesn't know, increases the sense of wonder and amazement when encountering the unknown. He needs to deal with other people if he wants to fly a starship and hire a team of experts. There are the mysteries of the body (Bio-Tech) and the mind (Psionics) to deal with and understand. The universe has mysteries (the ancients and TL 11+ gear) to unravel. And there are terrestrial concerns with races getting along, governments, space pirates, criminals, and other groups to deal with while trying to find your place in the stars.

Rolling 3d6 for six ability scores, picking a class, rolling hit points, writing down special abilities, getting a base attack bonus, and holding a 1d6 damage laser pistol gives me nothing to grab hold of and engage me for science fiction. Classes and preset progression paths hold me back and limit my imagination. Characters that can 'do everything' make me feel like I should be 'doing nothing.'

The more limits I must overcome, the sweeter the victory when I finally reach that goal.

And then there will be the next star to visit...