An introduction to techniques in GURPS

The Palantir players are turning into GURPS sharks. We began the campaign with a streamlined combat system: using a pared down selection from the Basic Set:campaigns.  We introduced soon after a modified action point system to model short term fatigue. We then moved into a wider spectrum of combat options from GURPS Martial Arts. Once we got the hang of this, we introduced Extra Efforts. It is now great time to take this to the next level and get into techniques. This is what this article is all about.

030 - Rebooting Annuminas

Getting fancy with the adventuring gears.

This encounter covers three small bits. A playtest of the probabilistic rules on learning and researching. Some roleplaying around the dining table and a rather abstracted travel overland back to Annuminas. The meat of Session 9 is in the next encounter.

Two weeks in the Shire...

The last two weeks had been fun for the company. Shirefolks still raved about Irina and her friends slaying the wargs in Westfarthing. Arnadil and Sir Galdor were sorry to have missed the encounter with the winter drake. Irina sent the best of her day straining her upper body with a borrowed bow a little too heavy for herself. She religiously practiced for days on end on strength training in hope to be able to shoot well with a more powerful bow [Playtest report #1]. Arnadil looked for a mentor in Bywater to teach him about the North. He found a great storyteller called Tom Herder, but poor old Tom turned out to be a better storyteller than an actual teacher [Playtest report #2]. Finbert begged the grumpy Halin to spar with him at wrestling. Halin, unenthusiastic eventually obliged [Playtest report #3].  Sir Galdor spent the best of his time at the Green Dragon, playing dice and making a bit of silver (10 celebins). Kasper dissapeared in his room at the Green Dragon for most of the time. Spending some time with Araliniel on the Treatise, and reading. 

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. 

Making rangers out of dwarves

This post is a playtest for the ideas posted here about reconciling adventure-based advancement and GURPS skill learning. I didn't want all the dwarves to spend 200 hours working and all get a skill point at the same time. 

Here is the setup: Khazek Strongmoss, son of Erek is tasked to bring to operational readiness a guard-size unit of rangers. The quirk you may ask? The recruits are dwarves. The other quirk is that Khazek is a wet-nosed member of the Royal Family with no teaching experience. The timeline mostly impose an on the job training. How can a simulation geek GM should handle this situation? I could narrate and wave hands, or I can roll a bunch of dice. Guess what I chose? Let's specify that all that dice rolling was done using a script, no physical dice were harmed in testing this scenario.

Reconciliation of adventure rewards and the GURPS skill learning system

I've posted a few times on the topic of learning and skill acquisition in GURPS. There seems to me that there is a drastic disconnect between getting a point at the end of a session and placing it in a skill, and having to learn for 200 hours in order to accomplish the same. Learning is learning, I propose here a records -keeping free way to handle abstracted learning which is compatible with the possible fast-pace of adventuring-based learning.

My motivation here is for the campaign Reclaming Khazad-Dum, where a large number of NPCs will have to learn vital skills, and time is sensitive. It can be applied in all other situation where PCs want to improve an abstracted manner.

The feint : turning what you are good at into a combat asset.

In this tactical tip post, I'm going over the feint and all of its nuances. Some characters in the Palantir Commission campaign would benefit from adding one of these sweet moves into their tool chest. The relevant sections in the GURPS sourcebooks is Martial Arts p.100-101.

All of these options are different flavors of the feint action. In order to do a feint, you must take either a feint action, or combine the feint with an attack in a all-out attack (feint).

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.