GURPS Challenges

 I have an idea for a third volume of the GURPS Basic Set. In the great love of the letter "C," which I suss out from "Characters," "Campaigns," "Compendium," and "Charles," I call this GURPS Challenges.

What is a challenge? Well, it's an hurdle that the PCs must overcome. The most common challenge is a monster or alien of other bad guy whom the PCs must kill, but so is getting into the Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy where the crime boss will be. Getting past a locked door is a challenge. Traps are challenges. Keeping away from an avalanche is a challenge. Getting through a bad flu when you have to fight a fleshy-headed mutant in the Forbidden Zone is a challenge. (I recommend beer for the last one.)

The idea for this book is a mash-up of many ideas. In a way, this is the GURPS Compendium for 4e. It has been 17 years since 4e came out; Steve Jackson Games can breech "no Compendia for 4e," as it was 18 years from the release of 1e to the release of 4e. There's no 5e in the near-future; this is how we can patch these holes. A few chapters are things that come wholesale from other GURPS books and should be in the Basic Set.

Second is the idea that "GURPS needs a monster manual." There are problems with this since GURPS is generic and, as Kromm has said, it's more like Fudge than like D&D, but a little less meta than Fudge. However, there is a need of "things to kill." Savage Worlds, also a generic system, does a much better job of choosing these for its core book, and gave over about the same amount of space to it in the Adventure Edition is GURPS gave in the Basic Set. There's no space wasted on deer, four bears, and nine equines, but instead there are ogres, soldiers, giant worms, mechs, alligators, zombies, and more. Those are going to be used more than the extra ursines and equines or any deer. Gaming Ballistic had a big Kickstarter on a Bestiary. Folks like challenges.

So, what goes into this? First thing is that there needs to be a list of what genres this will address. I'd start with the worked example lines: Action, After the End, Dungeon Fantasy, Monster Hunters. Add to those the the published settings for Fourth Edition: Banestorm, Discworld, Girl Genius, Infinite Worlds, Prime Directive (or a generic Star Trek-ish setting), Reign of Steel, Transhuman Space, Traveller. Throw in a few common other genres: Cowboys, Cyberpunk, Eldritch Horror, Ninjas, Pirates, Superheroes, World War 2. For each setting, there will need to be at least one of each challenge. Many will bleed over from setting to setting, and others will be generic; an illness for a bunch of cowboys is going to be something like tetanus, which is going to be handy in many settings since it's a real-world illness. The reason for making challenges for specific genres is to make sure you have many bases covered in terms of point level, Tech Level, magic level, superpower level, and so on, but the less genre-specific you can make that challenge, the better.

What are challenges? Well, let's abstract what the tasks are for roleplaying games. As I see them, these are the most common abstract tasks:

1. How do I hurt someone or something?
2. How do I (or someone else or something) avoid getting hurt?
3. How do I heal damage?
4. How do I convince someone to do or believe something?
5. How do I keep someone from convincing me?
6. How do I hide someone or something?
7. How do I find someone or something hidden?
8. How do I move someone or something?
9. How do I keep someone or something for moving?

Some of these map up well to GURPS books. The first two are in GURPS Martial Arts; the fourth and fifth ones are for GURPS Social Engineering. You can come up with other GURPS books in the idea of addressing some of these; a putative GURPS Medicine would bring all the many healing rules (and add more illnesses) into one book, while the last four items could be something like GURPS Thievery. Moving also is related to a GURPS Vehicles; any of these pertaining to animals and plants would be rules for a  GURPS Bestiary.

Anyways, what do these mean in game terms? What goes in this book? First off is a bestiary, or a bunch of foes who can cause pain (addressing the first two meta-tasks). I’d start with three foes—fodder, worthy, boss—for each campaign idea. After making these foes, there would be notes for how to handle these in other campaigns. This might mean shaving off a trait to make it more portable; it might mean having a note for how a dragon will work in a world of ray guns. (This is the premise for Rifts.) A comic book supervillain could get tweaks to work as a fantasy wizard; a samurai with a laser sword is—well, you know that one. Add some more thoroughly generic foes, like giant Venus flytraps or giant spiders for the third act, and you have examples of how GURPS can have versatile but ready-to-use foes. Ideally, many of these would be utterly divorced than the inspiring campaign idea. (Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying has a reasonably good list.)

To add to these foes, add ways to modify them. Racial templates. Mutations. Prefixes (like in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1). Much of the genre-specific nature of these should be left out to allow for space elves and wild west greys.

Beyond these foes meant for combat, there could be a bunch of adversaries for social situations. I’m  talking about snobby gatekeepers, stingy merchants, crooked gamblers, desperate pickpockets, rival politicians. Folks you’re not planning on having to fight but who have something you want. (They’d have enough stats for a fight, much as the fighting foes would have enough stats to handle requests to step aside. Nothing too dramatic, however.) Again, make them more generic so you can use them across many campaigns. In many ways, the foes themselves are an excuse to introduce how to handle a social situation with GURPS mechanics. The NPCs aren't as important as the situations they'll key, but some of their traits will be relevant. Go through GURPS Social Engineering to find the general situations: haggling, debate, trial (and a quick legal system for punishments), asking for information, that kind of stuff. Thinking about it, it might be better to have situations, with NPCs incidental.

Some systems for challenges can come from published works. One is traps from Dungeon Fantasy. Not only can there be traps for fantasy thieves to disable, there can be ones for spaceport rabble, for soldiers on the Italian Front, for infiltrating a hostile computer system. (When you get down to it, a program looking for intruders is a trap. You can extend the trap paradigm over many instances.) As before, make one trap for each sample campaign, make it more generic, and add some truly generic traps, like the wilderness traps in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures.

A challenge mostly left out in GURPS is illness. (Which is why I tried getting a Pyramid article on it published, but I digress.) There are rules for illnesses in GURPS Basic Set Campaigns (and in DFRPG Exploits), but no samples given. So, like traps and foes, make one for each campaign, then some basic real-world ones. These need to be curated so that they’re game-relevant. There are a bunch in GURPS Compendium II for 3e, but some of these are too long-term for most games. (Leprosy in particular can fall off.) GURPS Bio-Tech likewise has a few; these are better examples, though there is need of some more mundane illnesses as well as fantastic ones.

I mentioned GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures above. The hazards it has for outdoor threats could be extended to other threats. A whole bunch of GURPS Action 5: Dictionary of Danger are hazards like these as well, and they’re generic and work in many settings. Much of GURPS Action 5: Dictionary of Danger would work as battlefield hurdles as well.

There are a few things that have come up in other GURPS books over the years that are generic and thus belong in something like a Compendium (but isn't wholly one). I'll once again talk about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures and also throw in GURPS After the End 2: The New World since both have rules for outdoor adventures (and both are among my favorite GURPS supplements, much as GURPS Action 5: Dictionary of Danger is). Those need to be in the Basic Set, so they'll wind up here. You can borrow some of GURPS Underground Adventures, "GURPS Fathom Five" from Pyramid #3/26: Underwater Adventures, and GURPS Action 9: The City; the point is to have many adventuring environments covered.

Beyond the adventuring environment, the expanded surprise rules from DFRPG were in How to Be a GURPS GM: Combat Encounters, so they'll have to be in here, too. (And can there be a bit about random starting distances for encounters?) GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for chases. These likewise could be made more generic and address getting away from anything and be here. (Aside: why is the interval for HT checks when running 15 seconds? That doesn't sound bad in of itself, but when you're dealing with seeing how much ground was covered, you're multiplying Move by 15, which is annoying. Why not make this 10 seconds instead? Even 20 seconds would be better. Unify all this, please. This is like hot dogs coming in packs of 12 but hot dog buns coming in packs of 10.)

One last thing I'll throw in as a thing to have here are scenario structures. How do you handle crawling in GURPS: dungeon crawls, hex crawls, urban crawls? How about mysteries? Heists? Raids? Races? Investigations? Traveller-like exploration? This is something that GURPS has lacked, like many other games as of late, which often forces things into a railroad, which is never a good game outside of a convention or other demonstration. GMs need help here, and this would not only help GURPS GMs, but GMs of other systems. It could be a drawing card for inquiring GMs to switch to GURPS if they have scenario structure help in a crunchy GURPS book. It would help sell one book, at least.

So, we're talking about 75 combat foes, and about 25 each of non-combat foes, traps, illnesses, and hazards/hurdles. Assuming the combat foes take up two to a page and the others take up three, those are about 70 pages or so, not counting explanations and extra rules for them. Adding the don't-call-it-a-Compendium stuff (outdoor survival, surprise, chases, scenarios), and the book looks like about 128 pages. Increasing the crunchy bits by 50% would make the book about 160 pages. I’m not sure having more crunchy bits beyond this will add more.

Somethings that I'm not throwing in here are player traits, things with point costs. There's a series for just that, the GURPS Power-Ups series. You want a bunch of disadvantages, skills, or techniques? Those are possible GURPS Power-Ups supplements. They're a big reason the GURPS Compendia 4e haven't happened yet. Essentially, you only need GURPS Compendium II, and anyone from the 3e days can say that we didn't use GURPS Compendium II as much as we used GURPS Compendium I.

What GURPS supplements come nearest to this? I'm going to pick out GURPS After the End 2: The New World as the best example of this. There are about twenty stat blocks for foes with many ways to easily tweak them, and there's plenty of variety. There are ways to mess with players like illnesses, outdoor survival, and hazards like radiation. RPK clearly put a lot of work into making sure a you could go into this book and quickly find something you could throw at your players, without having to spend too much time learning how it works.

Criteria for including stat blocks, or why the red deer shouldn't be in the GURPS Basic Set

There are criteria for choosing which stat blocks that go in any published work. There's one key criterion that is above all others, and that criterion is:

What the hell do I think the buyers of this book will do with this stat block?

The most common thing is to fight the creature. Seems basic, right? Why is the basilisk in GURPS Basic Set Campaigns? Easy, so players can fight the basilisk. A corollary to the idea that if it has stats, you can kill it is that to kill it, it has to have stats. Stats are how the game system interacts with the beast. In the end, the foe is a game element.

Another reason to include a creature is to be buddies with it, or at least have it be some kind of sidekick for a character. While I think there are too many horses in GURPS Basic Set Campaigns or at least the book should summarize the minor differences more succinctly, there is a need for a horse. Characters will often ride horses, carry stuff on horses, or even buy them as Allies. Having the stat block helps define those uses, and even serves as a way of advertising them. Nothing says that you can have a horse as a a mount, a beast of burden, or an Ally better than printing the stats for a horse.

A third reason is to be the creature. I haven't made a fuss about including a house cat since preternaturally intelligent cats are often protagonists in fiction. (Plus I'm a cat person.) They're also good choices for Alternate Forms since they're everywhere. Cats in roleplaying games are so common that a few folks evaluate roleplaying games by how they handle cat-on-human combat, so they have that additional use for some strange reason. (Multiple uses are good.)

A fourth reason is to show something. You also might see that I've left out the oxen from my criticism. Well, there's actually a use for the oxen, though one the GURPS Basic Set doesn't take up: you can use an oxen to show off trampling. Alright, a buffalo would be better here, but the point is that you can write out an example of a game situation—a trampling attack, in this case—that is not uncommon but hardly the norm. You don't need more than one beast to show off trampling attacks, much as you don't need four bears with full stats since you've made your point.

So back to Bambi. He's a boring foe since most characters can beat him easily and hunting is abstracted anyways. Nobody buys him since he's wild and can't go into town with you. Likewise, he's not a common choice to play, though some druid somewhere might want to turn into him to deliver a message or go full antler. He doesn't show off traits that are interesting. The traits he does show off are common. Bambi is getting in the way of the Tick-Tock Croc, who would be better since at least some characters would find him a challenge.

Oh, yeah. There should be some level of uniqueness to a monster or NPC entry. In the Basic Set, a different kind of horse just needs a sentence or two saying what traits are different from the main horse entry. You don't need two creatures whose purpose is to be an example for trampling.

Mind you, this doesn't apply to what would appear in GURPS Bestiary. I want to see Bambi in there, with a full set of traits. At that point, the buyer can figure out what he or she wants from the animal; that is the point of the book.