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Headin' out!

I have decided to discontinue this blog, at least for the purposes of posting about things.  I have set up a blogspot location instead, as almost all the blogs I read have a presence there.

See you on the other side!

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Brap brap brap...

Reading through some of the Guns rules again, I'm reminded that the RoF and To Hit chart has always sort of bugged me.  RAW, you only start getting to-hit bonuses on 4 or more shots per attack.  This is a little weird because many real life military forces adopted the three round burst precisely because it's in the range of "hit more easily" and "not losing control of the weapon".

I'm going to have to comb through the forums over at SJ games to see how many others have dropped the bonuses down one bracket to start at 3, but I suspect the difference will be relatively minor.  A quick glance at most of the common firearms reveals some pistols would start getting hit bonuses, whereas before their RoF3 prohibited that.  Further, the more modern M16's, which would be featuring in the session I'm working on, would have the option to fire only one controlled burst and actually get their hit bonus.  Presently, a burst weapon gets up to three bursts, if memory serves.  So a fully auto M16A1 may have RoF 13, but the otherwise similar M16A2, with its 3RB capability, would actually be capped at 9.  This means a single burst would get you nothing, as you'd have to fire two in order to claim the single +1 between 4 and 6 rounds per attack.

This may also improve the rate two round burst weapons (which may not actually be listed anywhere in GURPS).  There's a couple, such as the AN-94, and a Korean one that I thought was the Daewoo K1 or K2 but evidently not.  Under the current system, they'd only ever be able to claim +1, and that's if they fired all three bursts.  Under the new, they'd get up to +2.

Naturally, rules tweaks should be read into a bit more.  The designers behind GURPS are smart guys so they probably had good reason to start the bonus at 4, but maybe it was a mistake, like having like seven distinct Guns specialties.

Bodes research, either way.  I wonder if there's a Pyramid article for that...

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Gotta Get Guns, Son

I had, a week or two ago, shared some materials for the Tiberian Dawn GURPS game I was considering running over at the SJ Games Forums.  One of the points brought up was that somewhere in the sizable publication list of Pyramid Magazine - the GURPS e-zine - was an article that offered up an alternative take on the way the Guns skills are handled in GURPS.

For those who aren't familiar, GURPS puts personal firearms down as "Guns", an "Easy" skill with several specializations.  These stock specializations are Grenade Launchers, Gyrocs, Light Anti-Armor Weapons, Light Machineguns, Muskets, Pistols, Rifles, Shotguns, and Submachine Guns.  This skill defaults to DX-4, and most of the skills default to each other at -2 (pretty generous), except LAW, Grenade Launcher and Gyroc defaulting at -4 (pretty normal).  Familiarity mechanics further differentiate guns in each class.  For example, Rifle covers both old-school muzzle loaders as well as modern G36's.  Penalties are based on differences in Action (muzzle loader, bolt, etc), Caliber (9mm to .50, etc), and grip (bullpup vs conventional, etc).  Thus, being able to shoot translates to all guns, but depending on what you're trying to achieve your lack of experience with one or another will cause some hiccups.

The categories are pretty well defined, but pretty much out of the gate there's some problems, particularly overlaps between them.  I wont drag this out with many examples, but one includes shotguns:  A hunting shotgun with a smooth bore and buckshot is the pure form of the archetype, but a rifled one with a slug is basically a rifle (except using the shotgun skill).  Additionally, because the default is so generous, you quickly run into point reshuffling situations if you want to be good at multiple types of firearms.  I wont get into details here, but let's say it can be a problem.

So this article:  "ALTERNATE GUNS SPECIALTIES AND TECHNIQUES" from Pyramid 3-65, March 2014, by Hans-Cristian Vortisch.  To get down to business, he provides a well reasoned layout for what these categories are overkill and actually less realistic than a lot of us GURPS types would want.  He lays down that there should be three categories:  Pistols, Long Arms, and Light Anti-Armor Weapons.  He proposes anything without a shoulder stock is basically a Pistol, anything with is a Long Arm, and anything that shoots anti-tank ordinance is a LAW.  

These all now default at -4.  Controlling automatic fire versions of these is now a Technique that defaults to the core skill at -2.  Grenade Launchers and the like are now a Technique called Payload Warhead which is also at -2.  

There are now twice as many familiarity penalties, docking -1 based on caliber, ignition, action, grip, sights, and feed.  If you want to shoot an ordinarily stocked Long Arm without your stock (like an SMG with a retracted one), then you use the regular skill at a penalty, as discussed in Tactical Shooting.

This conserves points a bit.  Formerly, if you wanted to be a Patrol Officer equally good with Shotguns, Rifles, and Pistols (common police weapons in the US), an averagely dexterous (DX10) person would need to drop 12 points in - 4 points per skill - to raise it up to the "Professional" level of 12.  This represents a huge amount of time - 2400 hours (as given in Basic).  Under the current system you would need only 8 points - 1600 hours - to achieve the same level of skill, since familiarity would be erased due to the 4 points you put in Long Arms.  Similarly, making automatic fire skills a Technique means you can more easily distinguish those who've been made familiar with this method from those who have not.  As someone who messes around with skills for exactly this kind of distinction, I find it attractive.

So with that in mind I think I'll deploy this system in a future game since it plays a little nicer with players.  Is it perfect?  Probably not.  Do I think it's an improvement over the former system?  Sure.  If nothing else, it's fewer lines of Guns.  Each point gives you two familiar weapons, so you could quickly move beyond the need to even fool with it, depending on just how much firearm variety you have in your games.  For this Tib War one, two points in Long Arms more than does it.  Presently I've only worked it out in my head, and given how my brain works, I wont likely see any problems until I'm pinned down deep in enemy territory with half a mag left and a fixed bayonet.

Now, what kind of other alternate rules modifications and house rules shall I flex...

'Ere we go, over the top...

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Destructible times!

About a week ago I was thinking about running another one session game sometime in the near future.  Like the one I mentioned in a previous blogpost last month, I wanted it to be based around firefights, be contained to a single session, allow future sessions to build off of it, and allow me some level of interesting story stuff. I've messed around with modern settings before, as I mentioned, and had some years ago put together a small unit mission where the players were SAAR Para-Rescue guys sent in to retrieve a high value Politico from a chopper crash.  It never came to fruition, which is just as well.

So it occurred to me that there is an already developed setting that I could leverage for games which had a large degree of Normalness I could relate to, a content rich but generally vague backstory I could exploit, and an element of weirdness I could use to make the world seem more exciting than our own - Westwood's "Tiberium" universe.

Some of you might be thinking "Isn't that EA's Tiberium Universe"?  To which I answer "No, you pleb."

STORY TIEM!

Back in the mid 90's Westwood Studios released its flagship franchise, Command and Conquer.  It was to revolutionize the RTS genre, introducing or refining a number of fundamentals we now take for granted.  It was based off of an earlier title, called Dune (which I've also considered gaming in, but didn't think the universe stood on its own away from the millenia-spanning plots of genetic manipulation and prophecy - it's a interplanetary empire setting with probably like two planets of import).  In Dune, you had to harvest Spice Milange, which was an addictive psychotrophic that in high enough concentrations gave you the ability to fold spacetime.  But anyways, those RTS games were popular, so when they moved into a new franchise they needed a new resource to power their style of gameplay - in which the player was both a mining operations manager and a battlefield commander for some reason.

Anyways, I got into the franchise about a year or two later, with Red Alert, which is the predecessor in-verse, but the sequel in our reality.  Basically the plot goes "Einstein goes back in time and kills Hitler right as he's getting out of prison, but ends up making WW2 worse because that leaves Stalin unchecked, which attracted a man named Kane who may or many not be Caine from the bible to lead him in a quest for global conquest."  In cannon, they lose, with the conflict ending sometime in the 50's and the world's history being changed completely.  That's Red Alert 1.  Then, in 1995, Italy suffered a meteor impact that smashed into the banks of the Tiber river and unleashed an alien crystal-lifeform we called Tiberium.  At first this stuff is awesome, as it pulls all kinds of obscure minerals out of plain dirt, including lithium, gold, copper, uranium, etc.  This means you don't have to mine the crap, and you can turn empty meadows into vending machines for money...if you know how to refine the stuff.

Enter Kane.  Kane re-emerges sometime around the meteor impact with a new terrorist organization called The Brotherhood of Nod.  Somehow he already has the key to refining this new material, which very quickly gives his organization considerable economic heft.  Tiberium is then manually spread all across the globe, wherever it can be sewn, to maximize profits.

A counter-organization called GDI arose in 1995 that served to give the UN a more active force in peacekeeping missions and global anti-terrorism.  It had quickly become a world government entity that butted heads frequently with Nod, the latter of which was becoming increasingly bold in its anti-capitalist, anti-west message, going so far as to blow up important trading sites.

Naturally this boils over, and we have another war break out in 1999.  Unfortunately, unlike our modern Terror cells (ISIS, etc), Nod was rather a bit more organized.  Instead of inconsistently trained militants with 3rd world firearms (the M16 in this universe, interestingly enough), Nod has a highly trained and well equipped force of men loyal unto death to their cause.  They were basically a first world army sprung up out of nowhere, and just as well equipped - including things like modern tanks and even American made aircraft (turns out a number of American defense contractors were selling out to Nod or were otherwise secretly loyal to the Brotherhood).

Additionally, several whole nations sign on to support the Brotherhood to end Western influence, especially that of GDI, which in a few years had grown extraordinarily powerful.

Nod was also quite good at clandestine operations, handling propaganda campaigns exceedingly well; going so far as to frame the wholesale slaughter of a Polish town on GDI over Tiberium smuggling.  This actually ended up backfiring, luckily for GDI, and allowed Nod to be lured into a trap, thinking GDI had its back to the wall.

The end result was a GDI victory, though once again much of the world burned.  The final blow was an orbital weapon - an ion beam cannon - ushering in a new age of GDI superiority.  That was Tiberian Dawn.  Destructible Times indeed.

There was also another problem faced by the world in the wake of the conflict:  Tiberium.  Sometime between its landing on Earth and the beginning of the war, Tiberium went from being an inert crystal to a dangerous substance.  It began to emit various forms of radiation (including a few that were novel to us), which ended up being rather lethal to every living thing.  Further, it unpredictably mutated humans, typically degrading them into cellular blobs we called "Viceroids".  Unfortunately, by the time it had become a known dangerous substance, our global economic paradigm had already shifted to be founded on the substance, and it had spread wide.  Further, it had begun spreading on its own rather quickly - taking over things like trees to force them to create "spores" of sorts, airborne shards of Tiberium.  The war further spread the substance.  By the time the sequel takes off, the planet is wrecked, and most people live in a wasteland hell infested with the stuff and various mutated creatures caused by it.  This is the beginning of Tiberian Sun, which covers the resurgence and re-destruction of Nod, our introduction to a mysterious alien race (via a crashed and abandoned starship of theirs), and the impending collapse of our planet.

There's two more games after that but you can feel free to ignore them because they weren't particularly well received (as Tiberium 'verse games), and were kind of weak in the story department.

GET TO THE POINT, MAN!

Now that I've rambled on with stuff that could have been presented in a link to the CnC Wiki, let's talk about the game I'm planning.

The Tiberium War was a shooting war, with both conventional and unconventional methods.  Nod was both a conventional military force out to conquer the world and a clandestine terrorist organization doing everything from suicide bombings to guerrilla actions.  I've read (and written) fan fiction about these cells keeping the major powers on their toes the whole time by slowly bringing the war to their door step in the form of homeless people, disenfranchised college kids, the poor, and other unstable people.

For the game in question, which is likely to be the only game in this setting (given how difficult it is to coordinate schedules for players and the like), the players will be a group of GDI paratroopers inserting into rural Estonia in order to extract some high profile scientists that have been missing for some time now.  Estonia is not officially in support of Nod, but by the middle of the First Tiberium War it is under Nod Control (because you do a mission there and Nod controls it).  However, it wouldn't surprise me if a formerly Soviet, likely anti-GDI nation state harbors (officially or unofficially) Nod sympathy. The players are going to HALO drop into this rural region, and hump it some miles into a woodland wherein a variety of crumbling post-Soviet industrial ruins awaits.  Specifically, they're heading towards an old Soviet concrete factory (or somesuch), which GDI-aligned agents have fingered as the site the missing scientists.  After entering the site, which appears to have a light garrison (relying on obscurity), the team is to evac the scientists and as much research as can be carried to a rendezvous some miles off for extraction.  Anything that can't be carried must be destroyed.

This takes place in the Summer of 1998 (or so).  GDI at this time was operating its own military in addition to the military forces its member states operate.  How this functions is unclear, so I'm leaving it largely undetailed in any prepwork.  I'm just assuming that GDI forces work similar to UN forces, where member states contribute volunteers.  Further, I'm suggesting that GDI operates its own distinct military, comprised of permanent members who sign on.  Not important for this game.

Anyways, GDI ostensibly has the power to just drop down from the sky into this sovereign nation and walk off with these scientists, so that's what we're doing.  Now this game will be relatively high powered, as its based around a template that is, as of this writing, up near 100 points on its own.  Guns, armour and other equipment based on the original PC game and additional research will be available, so this is also an equipment heavy game for me (I'm typically a stingy GM that makes even so much as a dagger valuable in a Sword and Sorcery game).  The players have the advantage of training (from shooting to combat tactics, forward observation skills to combatives, medical training to demolition), surprise (falling out of the goddamn sky), defensive equipment (PASGT!) and initiative.  They are disadvantaged slightly in firepower (GDI was at this time issuing the Calico M960 as a front-line firearm, which is a poor choice given the enemy has M16's and whatnot), and probably in numbers as well, though the exact strength isn't known to me at the moment either.

Likely what I will do is take my SUPER SECRET GM MAP and lay out where everything is both in the macro and micro (big map and the facility itself).  Then I'll let the players determine how they want to handle their equipment and approach, fighting through or avoiding whatever they like, and reaping the results thereof.  That is to say, instead of railroading them through a variety of run-or-gun encounters on their way to the facility, I'm taking it hands off a bit.

I may even attempt to leverage largely unused skills at my table, such as Orienteering, to add another dimension to "Move from Point A to Point B". 

Naturally I can't actually discuss plot stuff, as two of my followers are my players.

The actual team will probably be an 8 man group that splits off into two four man teams with different approaches.  Most of these will be NPC; I probably couldn't handle more than 4 or 5 people at a time right now.  Really, I'm only expecting one, maybe two, to be available.  If it's just one or two I'll keep it split up like that, as two four man teams, with some NPC followers the player can command.  If I end up with a full fireteam worth of players, that would be nice too.  Maybe the players could themselves be the whole team?  SEAL teams operate around 7 men per unit, though, so maybe not.  Five man teams are more like SFOD-D level.  Then again, my players are just generic "Paratrooper", which our modern reality makes way more complicated (Some Rangers, SEALS, Green Berrets, Para-Rescue and regular Army Infantry units are all themselves "Paratrooper", and they do vastly different things).

My real take away is practice for shooting rules, maybe to one day make use of Tactical Shooting properly.  Small steps and all that.  Naturally I'll be using the full Basic rules, plus things lifted from High Tech (equipment) and Martial Arts (combatives, which will play a minor role).  Houserules may factor in; a while ago I mentioned using Random Hit Locations whenever a player did not actually aim, or when they shot on the move, unless they bought a perk that disallowed that.  Not sure, though.  I'll chime in here again probably with some more information eventually.

The cool thing about modern military stuff is that you can easily form a campaign that is just a series of "do this" missions, without having to worry about stringing something together.  I always get the impression that my typical campaigns get a little long in the tooth from being so run-on, day in day out.  At the very least, a shooting war will be a change of pace, so long as I work out the shooting rules comfortably enough to remember things like engagement ranges, RoF hit bonuses, cover DR, etc...

All in good fun.

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Fantasy Japan

I've been working on a campaign off and on the last few months, as I've found time and energy.  It's mostly just theory and "get ideas down" level at this point, but it is coming along.

I've wanted to do something set in a historical Asian period for a while now.  Sometime in early 2013 I'd started on a setting based roughly on Three Kingdoms era China, wherein the players were provincial agents from a wide variety of backgrounds assembled by the new Magistrate for various special assignments.  This was to take place in a kingdom that had participated in the Warring States period just prior to the campaign's start, but had collapsed due to internal troubles after truce brought that war to a close.  Essentially inspired by the old Dune RTS campaign map, the players were supposed to perform various special assignments that would advance their kingdom's hold over the former territory of this "Middle Kingdom", at the cost of the remaining natives and eventually the other two factions who'd also moved in.  None of the three states felt they could survive another protracted war - beggared and war weary as they were - but all wanted control over this bountiful "middle kingdom" so that they could have an economic advantage over the others.  This sidesteps, well enough I feel, the problem with running RPG games set during open war - pitched battles don't RPG well.

The three factions were based on various Chinese philosophies.  One was a hyper-religious Taoist faction that had learned to channel otherworldly powers to improve the capabilities of their armies, up to and including possession and wielding of the five Chinese elements.  Another was a hyper-militant Legalist society that had the best war machine of the three.  The players themselves were from a Confucian-esque society that represented the remnants of the old Dynasty.  It was going to be a territory control / expansion / exploration style campaign, with an element of player classes, which is unusual for me because I was running it in GURPS.

An alternative to the "Middle Kingdom" was the players representing refugees from the old Dynasty fleeing to "Totally Not Taiwan", much the same way the Ming dynasty fled to Taiwan during the Manchu invasion in the 17th century.

Anyways, this ended up getting tabled.  Some months back I started remembering it when I'd started thinking about doing a campaign set in Japan.  I'd considered doing some kind of war-time game set during Sengoku Jidai, but remembered some of the elements I'd put down in my Three Kingdoms design notes.  So, again sidestepping the issue of pitched battles, I started considering a game set during the late Sengoku Jidai era, right as the war was drawing to a close.  Initially it was going to be based around Ronin trying to make a living in rough brigand country in the wake of their lord's suicide, but I remember wanting to play around with the idea of territory expansion and decided to make use of it here again.  

I drafted the idea of a short, five or six game campaign with a clearly designated goal (unusual for me these last few years).  The players would be a hodge-podge (or uniform, if they like) collection of various agents serving their Diamyo for a special assignment (sound familiar?)

Basically, their clan had been at the top of the world during the high water mark of their Sengoku period, but had a series of poor generals, rulers, and combat defeats that brought them to their knees.  Instead of being erased completely, their Diamyo capitulated and the clan survived to through the remainder of the war as a client to the Shogunate.  Now, it's been several hundred years into their version of "Pax Tokugawa", and society has remodeled itself much like the Tokugawa Shogunate's in our world.  Samurai are bureaucrats, class structure is rigid (and legally enforced), and the country is (almost completely) at peace.

A few weeks prior to the campaigns opening, some peasant washes up on shore in their prefecture.  Taken into custody, he reveals himself to be an outcast who had dwelt on an island off the coast of the clan's prefecture, along with several hundred others.  Evidently, some banished (formerly) high class individual had recently come to the island and set himself up as a petty bandit lord.  This wouldn't be terribly unusual, as it happens here and again, but it turns out this individual has uncovered some precious resource (probably gold, I haven't decided between that or some kind of mythic, magical substance).  He intends to use this resource to essentially buy his way back into high society.  This unfortunate individual tried to steal some of said resource and sneak back to the mainland, but got caught and very nearly killed on his way out.  He managed to escape, but that doesn't change the fact that he's a criminal, so as soon as the clan's leadership were sure he'd told everything he knows they cut his head off.

The island in question is legally the possession of the clan the players serve, but is far enough away from the clan's mainland holdings that it hasn't really been exploited in several hundred years.  It briefly served as a naval base of sorts in the early part of the Sengoku, but wasn't particularly strategically located and was abandoned.  It has been a known outlaw holdout, but literally nobody has cared to enforce the clan's right to it.  Naturally, now that this resource has been revealed, the Diamyo wants it so he can assert his clan's relative independence, maybe stake a new claim to the Shogunate...

The first step is to get an expedition over to the island to see what exactly is going on over there.  Now the Shogunate has spies everywhere so the whole operation has to be quite clandestine.  With strict controls on the number of soldiers, ships, and various other assets they can have (as a client state), the clan can't exactly mount a huge assault on the island.  Further, if word gets out they suddenly have a source of this precious resource, the Shogunate would surely want it for itself, without having to deal with the clan as a broker.

The players are supposed to be various agents who are part of this expedition.  Sent over on a small trade ship of sorts, there isn't room for a whole army, or even a small one.  The members of this expeditionary force are selected largely due to political obligations within the clan, comprising representatives from the Zen temple, urban samurai-bureaucrats, low class laborers and ji-samurai, as well as miscellaneous ronin and even what are essentially proto-Yakuza (representing the interests of wealthy merchants).  This opens up a wide variety of backgrounds for characters, which is good because I am taking the "enforced archetype" model.

By enforced archetype, I mean each player is basically selecting a class of sorts.  All this does, though, is give you a basic template that dictates the bare minimum skills/traits you must have in some form, along side a list of other traits you are approved to select or forbidden to have.  These archetypes range from several classes of samurai to peasant-warriors, ashigaru soldiers to warrior monks.  Each boon of sorts comes with a bane to counter-balance it.  For example, the wealthier samurai-bureaucrat archetype has a number of social advantages, free access to fine quality weapons and their skills, and gets heavy armor for free.  However, the weapons are a little "too" fine - a bit stylish and fragile for combat use though quite sharp and deadly anyways, the armor is a bit overbuilt and frilly since it's mostly for show, even if it will turn all but the strongest blows, and their weapon skills are basically Bullshido at this point.  More pragmatically trained fighters, like the peasant warrior Ikko-ikki or the Ashugaru, have their own problems, like low caps on skill levels or poor equipment quality.

This is all mostly to see if I can add some flavor to class-based character design.  Naturally the players will, since this is GURPS, get plenty of customization opportunity.  The mandatory stuff is mostly just a reflection of social rank / obligation, with the goal of giving everyone a larger "approved" list than a "denied" list.  It doesn't have to be a combat heavy campaign, but if it is I'm challenging the players by not allowing them to be super-strong fighters, while compensating in some fashion.

The campaign itself I figure to be some kind of hex-crawl of sorts, as the players take five or six "expeditions" as they assess and attempt to assert the clan's authority over the island.  I've not run a hex-crawl / exploration style game before, so this is an opportunity to give that campaign style a try.

It's hard for me to acquire regular players that game "serious" enough for my liking, and I'm not a particularly skilled GM, but if it gets a run I'll be glad for it.  Since I'm giving the players reduced options, I suspect keeping it relatively short will be key, since I suspect I'll be stepping on my players toes more than they'd like.  I'll try and work with them, though, to find a happy middle ground.  My one regular player already has the idea of a fraud "Samurai", much like Toshiro Mifune's character in "Seven Samurai".  Oddly, I didn't think of that, so I'll have to figure out how to work it.  It's basically just one of the peasant archetypes with a stolen sword and a false set of identity papers.  Not sure what I'd value his deception at, though, since it's highly unlikely anyone would work it out in the context of this campaign - he's a ronin-for-hire from some far off place (or so he claims), so his crude ways are probably fairly easily excused.  The short timeline doesn't imply someone calling his bluff.

If I do more development work I might share it here.  I do most of my work in Google Docs, but it may be a good idea I show it around to get more critique.  And if it goes nowhere, at least I've padded this blog out a bit, eh?

I may also toss other setting sketches up here for similar reasons.  Better people take it and run with it than my notes rotting away in Google Drive!

[chainlinkandconcrete-blog-blog]

Aw man, I shot Marvin in the [roll 3d6]...

I recently ran a GURPS game set vaguely in the SLA universe.  My player was an Operative tasked with patrolling a section of the city sewers to keep vagrants, mutant rats, and other undesirables from taking up residence.

It was a typical one-fight dungeon, made at 3AM the day of the game, based on just passing familiarity with the setting.  I just wanted to have a little shootout in the sewers of Mort, and not much time in which to construct something. I haven't really run a gun oriented game in a long time, and certainly I've not done any gun-centric campaigns yet.  Thus, I'm only passingly familiar with the firearms rules in GURPS.  To add a bit of character to the otherwise standard dungeon, I decided to use one house rule (might actually be a rule in Tactical Shooting) I picked up from somewhere - random hit locations. 

Typically, when a character wants to shoot someone they declare what region they're attempting to hit, declare if they're aiming or not (to get a bonus), and then do their attack roll.  The rounds either hit the area or miss completely (though near misses are a rule you can dig up somewhere as well).  In this case, if my player just wanted to "shoot at" the target without taking a moment to aim, each successful shot was given a roll on the random hit location table and damage resolved from there.

My justification for this is straight forward enough:  Nobody's really holding perfectly still every moment of every turn, and a typical "shoot" attack is essentially firing from the hip towards your target.

Turns are only one second, though they are usually roughly concurrent.  Against a gunshot, a character gets an active Dodge roll, if they're eligible for any active defense at all.  What this attempts to simulate is not players actively attempting to dodge bullets so much as players being a moving target, bobbing and weaving and suchlike.  This actively increases the difficulty of a shooter to strike them.  Additionally, the player who isn't aiming is in a sense "shooting from the hip"; minute changes in both participants of the firefight could conceivably change a torso strike into a leg, arm, or neck one.

The odds still heavily favor striking the torso, though this does give the "run and gun" firefight a slight tinge of additional lethality as it makes lethal head wounds slightly greater chance of occurring on an otherwise typical level of skill.  And, of course, if you were willing to take a turn to Aim, you got to pick where your shots went towards.

Keeping to the theme of this being last minute, I decided on this just as I was making it to the shop we were holding the game.

This isn't the first time I've played with the idea, though.  A couple years back I messed around with a setting taking place in the modern era, but also featuring mages.  In order to capitalize on GURPS' depth of options and prevent shooters in the squad from feeling flat compared to the mages, I opted to leverage abilities from Tactical Shooting.  This lead to me wondering about "run and gun" style hipshooting a bit more.  

Typically GURPS just caps your skill at 9 (giving you a -4 with 9 being the highest possible outcome) to simulate this, which is fine.   But it still lets anyone "run and gun" shots where they please.  A great deal of firearms target training, especially in CQC situations, revolves around training yourself up to shoot center mass quickly while on the move.  So you could say this is part of your regular Guns skill of choice, and you'd be right.  I wanted a bit more, however.  Some thoughts at the time:

*  Anyone can shoot at their target with their regular skill and take a chance on the Random Hit Location chart.  This includes untrained guns users as well as veteran soldiers.  Accuracy upgrades on their firearms (laser sights, etc), improved their skill as usual.  This represents basically snap shots without dedicating extra moments to really maximize their accuracy.  This means some guy hugging a position and taking shots of opportunity and guys running between two points had to rely on a random roll to determine where said shots landed; they're aiming "at the guy", not "at the guy's face".

* Anyone may aim at their target, getting themselves the typical aim bonus and any modifiers for laser sights and the like, and declaring where they would like to direct their rounds.  This applied to anyone, untrained shooter and veteran alike.  This means anyone who stood still a second and pointed their gun at a body part got to shoot the body part.

* Anyone with any firearm skill at 12 or higher (low end of professional level) could open themselves up to a Perk which allowed them to bypass rule 1; this means anyone with, say, SMG 12 and this perk (which was, IIRC, just called Center Mass Drill), could "shoot from the hip" at whatever target location they'd have liked, getting all the usual skill bonuses from equipment and the like.  This represented a skilled person narrowing in their "shots of opportunity" enough that they still got to decide where rounds went towards even without using their sights.

If your round hit an area that was in some form of cover, it would strike the cover and DR would apply to your round.  Of course, anyone who normally gets a dodge roll still gets it.

This actually came up in my game, as my player crouched behind some locked military style storage cases as he engaged a handful of thugs who, owing to basically no firearms training and being too riled up to think to aim, suffered from the above rules.  This actively saved his life:  The one shot that hit struck at the player's torso, which was tucked behind these cases.  The damage roll was 6 (a major wound!), reduced to 3 or 4 by the cases, and further reduced by the player's heavy jacket.  The result was a relatively minor wound (owing largely due to cover).  Had I done the "sensible" tactical thing, I probably would have aimed everything at the player's head, which would have outright killed him had a round actually struck.  Really, I actually increased my thug's chances of hitting his head slightly, as my thug would have needed a critical success to pull that off otherwise.  However, that would not have felt as "real".

Now it's been a while since I've played with these ideas, and I don't think I still have the setting design notes, as the game never got developed enough to run (though I did have missions designed).  I think there were some confounders, like "snap shot", and the implications of a laser dot sight - which I think was just a stand-in for the CQC training; don't remember.  I brought this up somewhere at SJGames but it wasn't well received, so I shelved the whole idea, as they're far better versed in the system and the finer points of GMing than I.

Some time in the near future, I might create some kind of military themed one-shot dedicated to working out firearm rules (and the house rules above), most especially long range firefights and automatic weapons, to increase my ability to handle all this. -shrug-

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The health effect of potions

One of the staples of the RPG genre, especially in fantasy settings, is that of the potion.  These are little vials of liquid spells, most archetypal of which is the healing potion or health potion.  They serve the mechanic of allowing a character to rapidly recover from wounds they take in battle so that they can continue to join in on the action instead of needing to retreat and recover.  Alternatively, they allow a player to more rapidly recover between adventures, so they can get back to fighting the next day.  They tend to work immediately; a round or so to consume it, and you get your effect.  To channel D&D, a "Potion of Cure Light Wounds" - liquid level 1 healing spell - takes one round (six seconds) to quaff, and you instantly gain 1d8 hit points back.

Non-fantasy games, say cyberpunk, have their own mechanics - miracle healing sprays, nanites, etc. if the worldbuilder thinks it fits the tone.  Maybe that they offscreen it so that it's a miracle healing machine instead.

It's a fine enough mechanic, and one I took for granted when I GM'd in typical fantasy settings, though pretty much from my first few games I felt it reduced the tension of battle and decreased player ownership of victory more than I'd have liked.  Couple that with the archetypal Healer class in the party, and you also find the First Aid / Doctoring / Healing physical skills reduced in importance beyond the first few character levels, if that.

Naturally, fellow GM's, your mileage will vary, based on how you play. In various setting design ventures, I I typically reduced the frequency of healing potions as loot, decreased their availability on the open market (which served story elements such as a temple's monopoly on the commodity), and generally increased the usefulness of better planning in combat, armor, tactics, physical healing skills and actual bed rest and relaxation between adventures.  Especially so since I tended to greatly reduce the availability of magical healing.

I tend to run "realistic", or at least "well grounded" settings (though I got my start in straight, by the book, D&D).  Healing Spells, even the weaker ones, are basically "Laying of Hands" - Jesus level powers.  It never quite felt all that special since you get something at first level in most D&D-like RPG's that instantly seals an aggressive stab wound from a sword (or similar weapon).

When I got back into GMing a couple years back, I had fully transitioned to GURPS.  I was running in the Hyborian setting (also known as the Conan universe) inspired by the tales of Robert E. Howard and the Mongoose RPG.  Though Conan was a mighty hero, he did get wounded, and often terribly so.  There was only one possible reference to a "magic healing potion" - Golden Lotus Wine - which allowed Conan to recover his stamina after being whopped on by some terrible creature from beyond.  Subsequently, I didn't have potions feature in the game until just before my group ended the campaign.  At that time, potions were being created alchemically by a Scholar of Nemedia who had in his possession some fragments of the Scrolls of Skellos (if I recall). The potions were standard health potions, but I decided to give them a twist.  Since the alchemist was working from second-hand copies of an Ancient manuscript written in a dead language (and possibly a code, riddle or cipher further obscuring said dead language), inexactness and guesswork skewed his results.  These potions therefore had side effects, as none of them were perfect.  As I'd come up with this shortly before the game and didn't really flesh it out, the side effects were pretty basic - roll vs HT to avoid throwing up and losing the effect, risking nausea for several hours, actively taking damage if your roll went wrong, etc.

I think a few of them were just enhancements to your natural healing roll (making it easier to heal on your own), while others gave you a bonus to the amount healed each day, and others gave you a relatively rapid healing, spread over several hours instead of nearly instantly.

I figured real medicine takes a long time to work, and even something that would knit like 2 HP (scraped up knees or a nasty cut on your arm, for example) in a heartbeat would be nothing short of a miracle.  Why not try to make this seem like one?

The mechanic got the usual "yeah cool" at the table, and it didn't get any more attention (and to be honest it was kinda shoe-horned in a bit sudden anyways), since the campaign ended there, or shortly after.  Brought it up at the only Worldbuilding site I was active at, where it didn't get much praise - the going philosophy there being to never detract anything from your players, especially if they have no real control over it.  I figured then it was just a cool idea on paper, but bad in execution, so I didn't use it after on anything else.

Some weeks back I discovered this blog post here:  http://ironrationss.blogspot.com/2014/11/p-is-for-potion-one-hundred-potentially.html

Lo and behold, same idea except with more (and better fleshed out) options.  These tend towards the more fantastic (such as turning invisible, having your tongue turn to oak, etc).  I was stoked since at least one other person thought it was an avenue worth exploring - that of what else do these mysterious vial do.  I was also pleased to point out that finding these laying in ancient dungeons makes you wonder what the effective shelf-life on a health potion is.  In fact, that is something I'd explored briefly in my early D&D settings, giving a player loot that included an expired health potion, which didn't heal anything but tasted awful.

(As an aside, I wonder what Cure Light Wounds tastes like - antiseptic, perhaps?  At some D&D sessions I brewed up Kool-Aide "potions" for my players, utilizing these round bottles with necks I scored at a craft store.  Sadly, most of my regulars and other players I knew were intensely skeptical of them.)

I was remembering that article today on my way home from work and started wondering about more side effects.  Specifically, not just what the immediate side effects of having your weeping sword wounds slam shut on you in a flash, but what's the long term health effects of consuming health potions the way an adventurer typically seems to?

Naturally, my first thought was cancer, since you are (perhaps) causing cells to rapidly divide and close up your wounds.  Most campaigns don't span the years it would take for that to manifest, however.  

If the potions are pure magic, it's possible there isn't any harm at all.  If they're more alchemical in nature, who's to say there isn't some terrible remnant from imperfectly distilled (mass market) healing potions?

And really, this is all academic since gaps between actual instances of using a potion are probably pretty wide in typical campaigns.

I started imagining a character who, having lived a red-handed life deep in fetid swamps, dank dungeons and otherworldly planes, had quaffed a substantial number in just a short while.  I started thinking about modern medicines, ones which alter hormones and begin to develop a physical dependency, like opioids.  The image I got was that of a warrior who, after many potions found himself slowly losing the ability to heal on his own; suddenly finding minor cuts and scrapes that ordinarily require no real attention staying open for days longer than they should.  Perhaps hemorrhages bleeding more severely than they normally would, as his ability to clot up is diminished, requiring more expert and expensive attention to control and ultimately leading to an increased dependency on potions to compensate - itself a potentially vicious cycle.

In GURPS terms, they'd have a lower HT and a disadvantage opposite to that of Rapid Healing.  Maybe developing hemophilia to some degree.  They'd bleed heavier, heal slower, and possibly get sick more often.

The same idea could be applied to other effects as well; habitual use of potions that bestow some kind of thick skin or natural armor advantage could decrease your natural pain threshold.  Ones that give you a speed boost could decrease the amount of patience you have for things in "normal speed", or some kind of delusion where everyone else is moving in slow-motion.  Something that protects you from energy damage (say, fire) eventually deadens your nerves (giving a greater pain threshold, sure, but reducing your ability to use your skin as a sensory organ, eventually compromising your grip on things).

This kind of gameplay mechanic surely has a very niche appeal.  Done right, though, and it may give your players pause on relying too much on "healing through" bad conflicts and adapt accordingly.  They'd still have recourse to potions on occasion, though the above mechanics I'd explored may give them pause there too.

To conclude, sometimes I think it's interesting if your Standard Fantasy Potions get themselves a bit more character.  While "Heal 1d8" damage style potions are all well and good, they are a bit flat and feel quite devoid of any interest, rendering them as minor commodities that players likely will have ample supplies of instead of being bottled Jesus Juice of some kind. -shrug-

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Chain-link and concrete is a blog that hosts things I feel like typing up to kill some time.  The subject will range from tea to bikes to food.  Or whatever.  3:1 odds the blog lies abandoned within a month.