What I changed as a GM in the last few campaigns

I deliberately the first person in this post because this is what I do, but I don't imply that these are beads of universal wisdom. I posted this on a G+ thread earlier, but I meant to leave it somewhere that archives better than social media.

I don't try to keep PCs in a party. It is OK to let them explore parallel lines and coalesce whenever. This requires people happy to participate in the discussion event when their PCs isn't in the scene. Players also may take over antagonist for the duration of a scene and often turn out to be way nastier than if NPC'ed. 

I use the FATE-like aspect approach. I make simple statements that players chose to deal with or not. Not dealt with aspect are guaranteed to be biting back at the right time. I dropped hints in my session report as to what was in before and after the session and you can see how the PCs dealt with them. Through their actions, I generate new aspects. This allows multi-step solution to complex problem, and give characters a lot of room to breath as far as story arc goes. 

I use mainly the influence check as a mechanics to resolve conflict. I keep physical combat down to a few key event that have a critical impact on the campaign. When there is a combat, ask yourself what makes this situation unique and will challenge your player's GURPS mastery the most. 

Players aren't PCs, I allow influence check against PCs and when they lose, the character has to act accordingly. This makes it easier for players to make sub-optimal choice without looking like dorks. 

I think of characters as temporary threads into a bigger braid: they can come and go. There is more chance for them to be knocked out of the story than simply being killed. My players actually like to be able to jump into new characters to be closer to the main arc until the tide turn. 

I am not a big fan of character point inflation. I'm cheap with them, but will allow to shift limited points (FATE-inspired move here), and won't shy away from granting expensive advantages (patrons, contacts, ads) wherever the players worked hard to get there.

K35 - A character sheet for a campaign

In this post, I present some ideas on sandboxing that I tried in my Reclaiming Khazad-dum campaign and report on how it went. 

The Gist

I made a character sheet for the campaign and I gave campaign points for the players to shape the campaign to their liking. 

The motivations

There are a few:

1. It feels like personal awards are not always appropriate as most PCs are well into the 300 points range, yet I want to give awards for good play.
2. I want the players to approach the Reclaiming part as a complex problem with lots of fire to put out, and complete freedom to decide how to go about it.
3. I enjoy having dice tell me which way things are going to go.

K34 - and thus died the Kraken

This session is the conclusion of a side adventure with alternate characters that pitched the Kraken against Gandalf, Quickbeam, Elphir, Beorn and Gwaihir the Eagle-Lord. 

The setup

Time 0 for session 3

It all resumed with the Eagle-Lord lying face up under a yard worth of water, grappled by the Kraken. The Kraken had been lured in really shallow water after the lake was partially drained and Gandalf lured it from the depth using a blue sphere of light. The blow from the diving Eagle was harsh, but the Kraken was still a serious threat.

Quickbeam was then carrying Elphir of Dol Amroth on his shoulder while Gandalf was slinging anemic fireballs to the beast. 

Felling the beast

If you laugh at the GM's artwork, you won't be invited anymore.

While Quickbeam and Elphir were wading to the Kraken, Gandalf propelled Beorn (in bear form) halfway to the beast.  Gandalf then offered a reprieve to the Eagle-Lord by casting a spell to push away water around both creatures' head. This beached the Kraken which was embroiled with the Eagle. By then, Beorn caused much damage with its claws and disabled a basal tentacle. Quickbeam put Elphir on the ground so the knight let out a power-blow that tore a large gash in the beast's side. Beyond the gash, a void full of stars was sucking in air. Elphir was struck by horror at this sight and failed to prevent tipping over into the emptiness. 

By his side, Quickbeam tore an even bigger hole in the Kraken's side while Beorn knocked one of the large eye off its socket. The beast had absorbed by then well over 100 HP of damage to its head and became unresponsive. 

Quickbeam used a tentacle as a rope to climb down into the oblivion while Beorn simply jumped straight in to follow the listless Elphir. When Gandalf arrived, all that he could see was Quickbeam hanging over a bottomless void. His intuition told him to Jump!, and so he did. Quickbeam let go and all fell into a maelstrom.

Social Academy: Reward structure for social-based GURPS campaigns

This post is part of a the GURPS Social Academy in support of my new campaigns The Empress of India and Tsukumogami.

The earlier posts are the following:

1. The Reaction Roll
2. The Unassisted Influence Check 
3. PCs as targets of Influence Checks
4. A non-fantasy model for religions
5. Mitigating the reaction Roll
6. Reward structure in social-oriented campaigns.

Preamble

On a small enough scale, advancement isn't the same as inflation

I think that we tend to think of character advancement as a fundamental component of a RPG. I'd like to suspend this assumption for a moment, and hopefully for a lot longer. One of the many gems that I found in FATE is the principle that characters change without necessarily becoming more super. A good player will foresee the trouble ahead and shift skills in the Pyramid, or add/remove stunts such that the character can face better the challenges ahead. A bad player will miss the boat and deal with the mismatch.

Of course, some campaigns need characters to inflate, and that's cool. I just can't imagine a context where Fast-Talk-22 is exciting.  Ok, everyone gets to put their pants down for a moment every time that the character snaps his/her fingers, which can be funny.

How I designed Chapter 2 of the Palantir Campaign

This post presents an image export of my core mindmap for chapter 2 of our Palantir Campaign. I absolutely loved creating the adventure using the iPad version on MindJet (which is free).  During gameplay, I would collapse most nodes except these that I needed. 

Here is a link to a full size map. The graphics below is "a little" useless.

Zoom a lot on the full size image to read the labels... sorry about that.

Hit points are for reeling...

As I prepare the last chapter of the Palantir Commission campaign, I am prepping for some extent of high heroics in some dark places. I don't want to loose the gritty touch and the Tolkien feel. This means that heroes in Middle-Earth should be able to shrug off damage without resorting to healing magic and six packs of potions sold by the alchemical ACME company: it just doesn't work with this world.

Wounds are what tracks medium-term character conditions

I see HP as a way to gauge how hard you ought to get hit before it cause long term harm. Buff warrior can take a hit and without flailing, little ones can't. The medium-term effect of a battle is in my opinion the sustained wounds.

HPs are good to track short term conditions

I want to look at HP as "flesh fatigue": a countdown to reeling and the point where a character needs to roll against HT to stay up. For this reason, I decided to buff the first-aid skill as follow:

• First-aid can be initially delivered to control bleeding and in the process grant up to Margin of Success or 4 (1d6-2 as per TL4 as  per Basic Set), whichever is the smallest. A success by 0 means simply that blooding is under control. This step requires 30 seconds. 
• After 30 minutes (TL4 delay as per Basic Set). Another First-aid check can be made if the conditions are right, granting again the least of MoS or 4 HP. This step requires clean bandages, splints, balms, and time.
• Daily healing rates are raised to 2 HT checks per day or rest, 4 for Hobbits. First-aid can only recover freshly lost HPs, not these from previously tended injuries.

This means that as much as 8 HP can be regained within 30 minutes of a wound, assuming a very skilled First-aid deliverer. These recovered HP are, however, not going to negate wounds until all outstanding HPs are recovered. Cripplings are treated normally. I anticipate that wounds will accumulate and force the character out of danger to recover for a few days every now and again.

Addendum, with Nirodel the elf joining the campaign, there will be a bit of healing magic in the commission. 

Mechanism to adjudicate Astrological Divination

In the campaign Khareo's Tale, a lot of the plot revolves around astrological divination rituals. Knowing what to provide as the outcome of a divination spell can be difficult to gauge. This is particularly so if you want to consistently scale the usefulness of the information with respect to the margin of success. This post describes how we are doing it on our campaign. 


This is a joint post with Sophie Blouin, who brainstormed with me and had the idea of buying destinies using powerful prophecies (which I find very cool). 

In a nutshell

Astrological divination is concerned with position and timing. The better is the divination roll, the more precise is the prediction in these two scopes. Astrology is a ritual subject to normal ritual modifiers (GURPS Thaumatology) and some specific one about the object of the divination. A star chart prop was designed to simplify the adjudication of divination checks. 

The star chart. The number indicate the MoS cost of each area.
Latin is used for flavor, but the English word is shown in smaller print.

This post is further divided into three sections: Ritual Magic modifiers, Interpreting the results and examples.

Creating and holding on to initiatives in GURPS combats.

Disclaimer: +Jason Packer has written down one of the point that I wanted to make. So I'll dodge the truly academy-style advice and try something more geared for GMs. I am missing the point a bit. You are warned.

Why did you leave your arm open like that?

Many good folks have toiled, racking their brains, to find an elegant way to pace GURPS combats. The obvious solutions is to encourage people to "Do nothing" or use evaluate actions. Do Nothing as in catching your breath, for example. The benefit from Evaluate actions rarely compensates for the lost turns that it exacts: why spoil a perfectly fine second of your life staring at your opponent if it isn't going to boost your overall "to hit" probabilities?

Other Melee-Academy Posts:

• +Jason Packer : Circling around like sharks
• +Peter V. Dell'Orto  : Stop Hits
• +Douglas Cole : Combat grappling and wait
• +Mark Langsdorf  : An alternative tactic for grapplersr (and other, more normal folks).

Web App for Hit Location and Realistic Wounds

We'll make this post an official web page for the app. The App implements hit location from GURPS Martial Arts and other elements from GURPS Baisc Set: Campaigns.

The App, located here, allow to either target a body part or roll randomly. Only the notes that are relevant to the damage type inflicted are shown.

We hope that GURPS players (and maybe other GMs looking for flavor in their combat storytelling) will enjoy the app.

Please pass along any comments, factual correction or suggestions in the comment thread of this post.

Generic 3D pieces for GURPS tactical combat

About 15 minutes in the workshop, and $7 later, the Palantir Commission just got itself a waldorf-style, very abstract set of components to build tactical scenes. Here is a screenshot from the last session:

The whole scene a few turns into the battle.

Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part III. Learning and skill advancement

The previous post looked into extracting information from sources. It also proposed a way to create sources of information such that their content can be generated on the fly. This post is looking into turning information into knowledge. In GURPS' terms: using information to learn and advance skills to higher levels. 

Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part II. Designing sources of information

In this post, I propose a way to generate the content of sources of information such as books, libraries and collective knowledge within crowds. The GM can plant any information in such source, the rest is randomly generated only as needed.  

Topic Plan

• Part 1 : Character Knowledge
• Part 2 : Designing sources and Research
• Part 3 : Learning from information sources. 

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Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part 1. Character knowledge

This post is the first part of three on character knowledge, mining for, and designing sources of knowledge. The emphasis of this post is on character knowledge: the skill-based abstracted knowledge that players can invoke to fill in details in an adventure. As a GM, I used these as potential monkey wrench as I leave it up to dice to determine how much PCs really know before they walk into something. 

GMing a GURPS wargame/intrigue/dungeon crawl into hell.

... and here I mean that the PCs are going to Hell, not the players...

Here is the setup

I wanted a campaign with more PCs influencing a large scale project such as the reclaiming of Khazad-dum by the dwarves of Middle-earth. I spent years running modern-day wargames, using NATO compliant maps and formatted communications. I think that I've got a strong stomach: adding fantasy to a crunchy wargame can only be fun. Who needs a finicky MLRS battery when you can cast Terror upon your enemies by beating a drum? Although a JLENS deployed over the Area of Operation would come handy to any TL4 armed force.

Social Combats in GURPS

This post explores the use of a mechanic analogous to Diaspora's Social Combat. I like to use role playing where combat isn't the only technical way to play, and merely the extension of diplomacy by other means.  I like to offer a mechanic for players to let them use their wits to exploit. The idea of social combat is to move characters and NPCs through conceptual states to achieve an outcome, without losing all of their composure. 

Flight or fight!

Many attempts to roleplay NPCs in combat requires to get them to make "flight or fight" decisions. Coming up with formal mechanics to model this would be probably inelegant. However, some kind of mechanics, even if vague, allow players to employ other strategy than to kill or render unconscious. Here is an attempt to sketch this down.

Skill pile-up in GURPS

Abstract (if you don't like long blog posts)

In this post, I explore the resolution of tasks when performed by more than one character. I focus on a searching task that must be completed within a given time frame, and seeking an object that is assumed to be there. I wrote this to help me prepare for an upcoming challenge that may happen in the Palantir quest. It is also usable in the more general case where multiple testing overestimates the odds of success when too many people are trying to do the same thing

• Observation: More people added to an already crowded kitchen doesn't result in a better meal.  
• Cause: There is a cognitive and communication-based overhead to the division of a task.
• Leadership: A leader overcomes this cognitive/communication overhead
• Conclusion : A successful leadership manages the division of a task to overcome this overhead.
• Conclusion : Leading all but one worker into a set of complementary supporting tasks brings the highest possible payoff, but is also the most sensitive to incompetence of the lousiest team members (and leaders).  

GURPS as an economic model?

I've been wondering for a while about whether GURPS could be used as an economic engine for a world simulation. This took me to what I think is the edge of some of the mechanics in the game. But yet again, I don't own all GURPS 4e books and I'm probably wrong. The issue is at the edge of GURPS because the system wasn't designed to do that. Yet again, I think that it touched on some core mechanics in GURPS related to experience and character advancement.

Guidelines on awarding experience

Since this is my first real campaign in GURPS, I need to get a handle on handing character points. I don't want GURPS to turn into AD&D where the progression is sometime so fast that the players can keep up with the leveling up, but I want to reward good gameplay. In fact, I plan to reward in large part not so much on the exercise of skills, but on the effect of the use of a skill/traits on the narrative. 

GURPS roleplaying : character points

The GM just gave you some points to play with. Here are your options. Please note that this is how we're handling experience in this campaign, and is not strictly speaking following the rules as witten. Some points are given with no strings attached. Play them as you like. Most points are given specifically to go somewhere: a skill or a technique. These have to be allocated as indicated, or alternatively toward an increase in the controlling attribute. For example, Bow is a DX-based skill. If 2 points are granted for bow, they can be allocated to either Bow itself, DX or a technique related to Bow (more on this later).