Thursday, September 26, 2024

Review of GURPS Power-Ups 10: Skill Trees

 This is really an Alternate GURPS type of Supplement. I personally love skills over classes, however skill lists can be pretty long - especially in a game system designed to support all genres and settings.

GURPS Power-Ups 9: Alternate Attributes offers ideas for adding to or replacing the primary attribute set and this does something similar for skills.

In GURPS you roll against attribute + skill to accomplish most tasks. Picking a good mix of skills lets you fine tune a character to suit your tastes and needs. This lets multiple characters of the same basic type or role feel very different. However, it can be overwhelming and new players often miss important skills.

Even experienced players can do this, or misremember a skill and what it does. Wildcard skills (introduced in GURPS Basic) are one way to deal with this problem but they are very cinematic. GURPS Power-Ups 7 Wildcard Skills explores and expands upon them.

GURPS Power-Ups 10: Skill Trees is another way of handling this issue, less cinematic and more like Talents. Skills are grouped into broad categories called Trunks with subcategories of Branches, Twigs, and Leaves.

This feels more like a narrative game if used and the concept is more intuitive than a long skill list.

For example you could have a Trunk called "Animal" (listed in the supplement) and animal skills are included in it. You can do the same with Talents but they have at least two drawbacks.

  1. If the affected list is large enough its often just as good to just buy the the primary attribute.
  2. With a high enough Talent you can be just as good using a skill at default plus Talent as a trained person. I never really liked that myself.
  3. In many cases the Talent does not cover as much as you would like, notably trivial rarely used skills are rarely explicitly included. Power-Ups 3:Talents  mentions the idea of simply including some of those for free but it can be a time taker at the game table.
It includes 26 skill trunks and enough guidance to make more that suit a specific campaign.
For example in an IOU or other college based campaign each major course of study could be its own skill Trunk. Each student would learn Scholar as a part of core academic training but also something like Natural Sciences or about half the other listed trunks would suit a Academic Divisions or Departments and each student would learn such a trunk but add detail of specific branches, twigs, and leaves that suited their interest and class schedule.

Some Examples

A specific martial style would typical be a branch and practioners could train up subcategories of twigs and leaves to represent their individual choices and flair.
This would suit Ritual Magic (optional version of the default magic system) rather nicely.

Lets say I wanted to use this for Shaman.
Shaman
Aptitude for interacting with spirits and peoples attitude towards them.

Main Skills: Autohypnosis, Diplomacy, Dreaming, Esoteric Medicine, Exorcism, Fortune-Telling†, Meditation,  Occultism, Public Speaking, Religious Ritual†, Ritual Magic†, Savoir-Faire†, Symbol Drawing†, Thaumatology, Theology†.
Other Skills: Any Current Affairs, Expert Skill, Hobby Skill, or Professional Skill relevant to gossip, rumor, paranormal activity, or anything that may be attributed to spirits.

That list took me less than 5 minutes to build using examples in the book, I took bits from two existing trunks.
It lets me build a shaman who is less cinematic than using a wildcard but results in a pretty clean sheet compared to buying and listing each skill separately.
If I wanted to give it more oomph, say in a campaign where spirits were real.
I could apply From Skills to Advantages (Pyramid #3/44 Alternate GURPS II) or simply apply modifiers to a trunk or subcategory. For example Add Cosmic and Reduced Time to do things faster. Most enhancements would likely be overpowered with a prerequisite Cosmic for each type. This might be a good thing to consider if doing this for a campaign or another edition of GURPS.

Summary

Overall I am not sure how much use this will see in my campaigns. Largely because were all used to the current method and changing will take some getting used to.
On the other hand I am considering partial implementations such as 
Skill Boosters such as some magic items and software that can enhance someone trained or not this can replace Talents in that roll. Its a bit broader but feels better to me, at least narratively.
Specific Training Programs or Martial Styles could benefit from this with no real hassle for my players or me as the GM in tracking something new. We just treat it roughly like a Talent. And I would include the Untrained Tasks section (p. 17) in this.

Offhand I would love to see this in GURPS 5e or perhaps a supplement bundled with Alternate Attributes and wildcards (which may need redoing for this as an Alternate GURPS GM Guide.
I also feel it is better for lower point campaigns where you want people to not be incompetent at related material.

 

Monday, September 9, 2024

Aersalus Season 1, Session 4 The Bloodbath

 

The Cast of B-Team (Aersalus)

Listens to Ocean aka Osprey (Rory) Halfling Magistrate, mage, healer, priest, historian.
Rhum Kaldalsson (Curtis) Minotaur artist.
Trapper (Chris D) Gremian, artificer, hunter, Armsmaster.
Unit 7 (Brice) A Cog, magical construct golem.
In Memorium Christian
NPC's
Altan ru Chuulaii the tax collector
Raito
Tesseikai Watersinger, healer

The Blood Filled Dawn

Tesseikai appears to have been the only survivor of the group that was at the farmhouse tending to people. Listens spends most of the night watching over her, waiting for her to be able to give a report on what happened and making sure her spirit is not damaged as well as tending to her physical wounds.
His Restoration spell fails to restore her finger and he thinks the magic of Blood Mama is the cause.
She does not want to stay but Listens orders her to stay, citing medical authority. Rhum seems to feel she should be allowed to do what she wants, leading to some tension but Rhum backs down as Listens asserts his rank and position to back up what Rhum seems to feel is minimal healing skill or status. He seems convinced she is the better healer, ignoring the the wisdom that healers make lousy patients.
Listens talks to  Raito and informs him that he intends to investigate the farm and would like additional backup. Raito has been moving people closer to town for increased safety, again impressing Listens with his leadership.

Come the dawn they for a small group of soldiers and the magisters team to investigate. Trapper seems to have spent much of the night making a clockwork prosthetic finger for Tesseikai, which she appreciatively takes.
Trapper is tasked to scout just ahead as the best tracker, Listens feels that others walking through first may erase some valuable clue that Trapper is best equipped to find. However, Rhum tries to rush ahead and go his own way. Listens notes the unwillingness to follow orders or perhaps work with the team and ponders solutions when things are not quite so urgent.

Blood, Lots of Blood

The group travels through an eerily quiet forest and reaches the farmstead.  They see lots of blood, everywhere but no bodies.  Trapper scouts the place around while Listens takes overwatch and switches his perception between the material and spirit worlds in hopes of spotting something, anything useful and keeping the group from being surprised.
It appears bandits raided the farmstead and likely the fighting attracted Blood Mama who then killed almost everyone.  Far as Listens and Trapper can tell a few bandits (likely 4) made it out alive. Trapper follows tracks and will come back to them later. Listens, not much of a tracker saw spiritual markers that helped him see more than most. Also the crops and plants in thee area are withered, as well as stuff in the root cellar which rapidly rotted.

Aftermath

We called it there, short game. good one overall but the group needs to develop more cohesiveness and desire to work together. Our background is that were new to each other, so that's ok but my job as character and player is to make that happen.