2015 Gaming Review

2015 was an odd year for me. "Unstable" is probably the best way to describe it. And that goes for my gaming as well.

The beginning of the year saw a false start on a Technomancer game. This was a case where working on the world and templates was more fun than figuring out what exactly is going to happen in each session.

And after the false starts we had at the end of 2014, I decided to go back to something that had worked really well previously: Dungeon Fantasy.

This time around I went with a "kitchen sink" approch to DF. Just about anything was allowed in the setting. Instead of getting a party of totally mismatched crazy characters though, everyone wanted to play Arakuns (my Racoon-men race). This game when on for five sessions then sort of came to and ending point.

The big story arc was somewhat resolved, and I wasn't sure where to go with the game. Again this was reflecting the general chaos in my life. So, we started another new DF game.

Since my own creative process kept stalling on me, I decided to go with a ready-to-serve solution. I ran the Lost Mine of Phandelver using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (for those that don't know. LMoP is the adventure packed in the D&D 5th edition starter box).

The game went very well and things started to get back to a more consistent format. The Players made many interesting choices so as a GM I was kept very entertained. The most challenging part was converting the D&D monsters to GURPS. I used a few simple rules for conversion, But the special abilities of some monsters are still geared for D&D and I knew that any session could be the last.

Well the session I expected to be the last was... but not for the reasons I thought. The party were practically right outside the "big bad's" room, when they decided to circle back around. Some enemies had fled, and they didn't know what the rest of the dungeon looked like. This cost the characters' lives.

They got ambushed by a bunch of ghouls with paralytic attacks. This was bad enough, but they also never seemed to get the upper hand in battle. Some bad dice rolls, some turns spend on positioning that didn't really help, and a few other factors led to the death of the PCs.

TPKs are never good, but I still felt that this was a good campaign. It lasted a good while, and was a lot of fun. ( 10/10 would TPK again! )

There was another false start with an Infinite Worlds game. Then we went back to another familiar setting: Fallout.

I've run 8 sessions of Fallout so far, and it has been fun. We're running through the events of the first game, but I think things might take a left turn from that soon.

So, here is to another year of gaming!


A note on the blog: updates have been few lately. This is due to a lack of time and because I am not pondering on rules as much (my Fallout game is not using tactical combat). Still, I plan to post more this year.

GURPS in Fallout, or Fallout in GURPS

When I decided to run another Fallout game, I wasn't sure if I wanted to use GURPS, Fudge, or the Fallout PnP game. I eventually decided to go with GURPS because I'm most familiar with it, and I felt that the "grittiness" of the system mixed well with Fallout.

There are some really great resources that others have put together for a GURPS Fallout game, and while looking through many of these I noticed there were a lot of folks trying to emulate the "perks" and other traits from the games in GURPS.

At first I was caught up with this idea, and started looking at what perks I wanted to bring over as meta-traits for my game. But after awhile, I started to feel that this idea was a bit silly.

Video games have been trying to emulate the table top for a long time. The original Fallout game was going to use GURPS, before the SPECIAL system, and even that has a lot of similarities still to GURPS. The Perks and Traits from Fallout are just takes on Advantages and other traits that can be taken in GURPS. They are far more restricted and limited though, as you'd expect in a video game.

So, why are we not trying to emulate in a table top RPG a system that was designed to emulate table top RPGs? This is chasing our tails!

I had to ask myself, do I want to use GURPS to play Fallout, or play GURPS in the Fallout setting? GURPS allows both, but in the end, I'd rather just use the setting and not worry about a set list of meta-traits.

GURPS Fallout Character Survey

For our next game we decided to play Fallout. Instead of the typical character creation session, I decided to give the players a "Character Interview" and then build the characters myself based on their results.

While I'm not 100% pleased with the final survey, it worked well enough for us to build characters. In the future I may revisit this survey and expand on it. Most of the questions come straight out of Basic Set, so I don't take full credit for this.

Below is the basic form, but I used Google Drive to host the form and record the responses. That can be seen HERE.

Generalized Utility Record and Personal Summery

Basic Information

Name:
Gender:
Age:

SPECIAL

How would your rate yourself? (Total should be around 40)
Strength (1-10)
Perception (1-10)
Endurance (1-10)
Charisma (1-10)
Intelligence (1-10)
Agility (1-10)
Luck (1-10)

Family

Father's Name:
Alive?
Father's Job Assignment:

Mother's Name:
Alive?
Mother's Job Assignment:

Describe your relationship with your parents.

Assignment History

What training have you received?

Do you have any self-taught skills?

What is your current job assignment?

What other job assignments have you held?

Relationships

Friends:

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers you could call friends:

Enemies:

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers you could call enemies:

Close Professional Associates::

If you can name and describe other vault dwellers who are your close professional associates:

Background and Interests

What were the most important moments of your life?

How would you describe your own code of morality?

What are you deep held beliefs?

Likes:

Dislikes:

Hobbies:

Other Interests:

What motivates you the most?

What are your plans for your life in the vault?

GURPS Lost Mine of Phandelver

So, awhile back I decided to run the Lost Mine of Phandelver (the D&D 5th edition starter box adventure) using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. Why GURPS? I've covered that before. So, I just wanted to go over the general experience of running a 5e adventure with DF.

Since this adventure was for "first level" adventurers, I decided to use the Dungeon Fantasy on the Cheap with a slight modification. I gave the players 150 points for the 100-point templates than told them to ignore the Disadvantages. After they created these characters, they could then buy disadvantages that fit the character and use the extra points to improve other stats. I found taking this approach created characters with fewer and more interesting disadvantages.

Previously I had been a player in a group that ran the LMoP, and what impressed me the most was how much the actual play of the adventure went exactly the same. The first few sessions played out with only minor differences. The "combat balance" felt about the same, and the player dealt with the enemies at the same speed.

The player's choices did diverge quite a bit, especially as the game went on, but the play "felt" the same. In some cases, enemies were defeated much faster than in the 5e game due to GURPS's rules such as major wounds, and -HP.

Here might be a good time to mention that I found converting 5e monsters to GURPS very easy. I had difficulty in the past converting D&D 3.5 monsters, but not this time. I don't know why that was exactly, but it may have had more to do with the lower level of the monsters (and fewer special cases and abilities) than the edition. Still, I found converting Str directly to ST, and the other attributes' modifiers as straight add/subtraction from 10 for the corresponding GURPS stat, to be very quick in converting stats.

Things went very well and the game had some interesting actions by the players (they basically sold the Cragmaw Castle to the Dragon...). But as we neared the end, I knew that the difficulty was about to ramp up.

The adventure seems to have 3 level ranges it deals with: ~1 for the hideout and town, then ~2-3 most everything else, and level 5 for the mine. Even though the players did many of the optional side adventures, and gained a good amount of CP, I had a feeling that the final mine was going to be a bit much for them.

I was almost wrong. The players took the shortest path to the "end" and might have been able to take out the big bad, but after the jelly attacked their goblin pal, and a few bugbears fled into the darkness, they got worried about a flank attack. So, they backtracked to the beginning got a bit worn down by some minor pests, then found themselves in a big dark room filled with ghouls.

Paralytic Attacks = dead PCs.

I treated the paralyzing attack as a stun, and gave the players a HT roll to recover, but the attacks kept coming. The Orc bard held out the longest, but eventually fell.

Overall, the game went very well. While it didn't end "successful", I think it was a success. It played very well and was probably the most fun I had running DF. Maybe in the future I'll revisit some of the published adventures for 5e.

Updates soon...

It's been awhile since I've posted anything, but I have several new post inbound. Here's a quick rundown of what I've been up to:

We tried a few different campaigns out, with a lot of false starts.

I ran the Lost Mine of Phandelver (the D&D 5th edition intro module) using GURPS DF. I'll probably write up my general impressions on how things went soon.

Then we had a few other false starts, before...

We decided to go back to Fallout! I'll be running my first session of that game this week.

There has been a lot of other stuff going on in my life that has made things a bit crazier than normal, but hopefully things have settled and the updates will resume.

Skill +

One of the most common criticisms of GURPS is that it has too many skills. It is hard to argue against this with the huge number of skills found is Basic Set. Then there is skills that require specialization which can make some character types need dozens of skills.

Some folks find Wildcard skills a good solution to reduce the number of skills needed and simplify the game, but I've never liked Wildcards skills. Some are "job" or class based skills that are not always clear what skills they cover (For example, guess what Barbarian! covers. Did you guess any combat skills? Well, you're wrong it has none.) Other wildcards are "category" skills that cover a group of skills that you can guess at. I prefer this second type, but find that the very hard skill cost x3 tends to make these skills super expensive, especially when many of the skills covered default to each other.

I've been playing around with an idea I like to call Skill+, or "Skill Plus". A Skill+ skill that covers a group of skills that are closely related and default to each other. Let's say for example Sword+ would cover Broadsword, Force Sword, Rapier, Saber, Shortsword, Two-Handed Sword, and the Art and Sport versions of these skills too.

Now I could have just made a Wildcard skill called Sword!, but this would make a very expensive skill vs. just buying up one skill and relying on defaults for the rest. Since most of the sword skills default to each other at -4 or less, these means that for 16 points (4 levels at max cost of 4 CP) or less, the player could increase all these skills (with one being four levels higher). But instead of finding the most common default and buying that up high, why not just have all the skills "default" from a meta-skill ... that is what Skill+ is about.

But what should the default be? Since this skill is designed for all the other skills to default from it, I think the most fair thing is to use half the average cross skill default. So sword skills would default from this skill at -2. But since the main skill has no use, why not just have the -2 built in... or bought off?

At first I thought to just advance the skill by two difficulty levels. In this case making an average skill into a very hard one, and give the skill the -2 built in. But, this may cause problems with Hard and Very Hard skills.

The other option, and the one I am leaning towards is to front load the cost of "buying up from default." Skill level cost caps at 4 points, so two levels are 8. So here is how the skill cost progression works:

Sword+, DX/A, Starting at Att-1 for 9, then 10, 12, 16, etc. (level cost + default buy up of two levels for 8 points).

I think this system works well as something between the standard skill list and Wildcard skills. If I find the time, I'll go through the skill list and create a list of skills+.

GURPS Misconceptions: Rules required

A friend of my mentioned that in his D&D 5th ed. game, a player was running from an enemy and wanted to shoot him in the leg to insure his own escape. D&D to my knowledge doesn't have any rules for hit locations, but my friend just ruled on the fly and the game continued. The reason that my friend mentioned this though was because he started to think of all the things that would have been needed to resolve that in GURPS.

That made me start thinking. In other games systems when a situation comes up where there isn't a rule to cover it, the GM rules on the fly using his or her best judgment. But GURPS has rules for just about everything. Because of this, people think that when a situation comes up that those rules cover, then those rules must be used. But the fact is, there is no reason why a GURPS GM can't just rule off the cuff.

GURPS is simple and GURPS is complex. How it plays in individual games is entirely up to the GM. Just because there is a rule to cover a specific situation, that rule doesn't need to be used if GM and players don't want it! Remember "And all the detail is optional – use it only when it makes the game more fun." (Basic Set p.8)

So, if hit locations add too much complexity to your games, don't use them. And if later a player wants to shoot a perusing enemy in the leg, rule on the fly. If you know all the modifiers off the top of your head (-2 or -BULK from Move and Attack, -2 for Leg, and Range penalty), then use that, if you'd need to look it up ... DON'T. Just make it up and keep playing.

I must admit that I've often found myself saying, "I know there is a rule for that" and started searching my books. This is a habit that I am still trying to break myself of. I'm starting to think that having to use an existing rule is almost as bad as forbidding an action when there isn't a rule that covers it. In both cases the GM can just guess at a modifier/target number/whatever, and let the play continue.

Rules should be there to help the GM and players, not get in the way. They should make interacting in the shared imagined world easier and create expected results from character actions. And whether a rule simply doesn't exist to cover a specific situation, or isn't know, or is being ignored, it doesn't matter. The play should be the same: the GM makes a call, the dice are rolled, and the game goes on.