CER: Some Empty Vessels

GIS  for "Generic Thug"

So, this might seem like a bit of a bare bones post, but I just had this thought that it might be useful to have some instances of the thug archetypes  My goal is to use some advice from How to Be a GURPS GM that I found for some basic martial builds, and create a very basic shell, to which someone might apply a racial template for diversity. The challenge is to make the characters fit into 20 CER, and I hope to hit the mark exactly, so let's see how that goes.

You can get it here.

These archetypes are inspired by p. 46 of How to Be a GURPS GM. A CER of 20 is not an especially strong target for most 250 point Dungeon Fantasy delvers, but the idea is to give a foundation to work with.

Single One Handed Weapon

This is an enemy that fights with a knife typically, So let's see what we can do to make this interesting. Let's start by giving this guy some decent HT and DX, a Large Knife and some decent skill.

Attack Skill	6	Active Defense	4
Affliction	0	Damage Resistance	0
Damage	3	Health	2
Fatigue Points	2	Hit Points	0
Move	0	Will	0
Total Offensive Rating (OR)	11	Total Protective Rating (PR)	6

Ok, so that puts us almost there. Let's do a Move +2, and an extra HP.

Attack Skill	6	Active Defense	4
Affliction	0	Damage Resistance	0
Damage	3	Health	2
Fatigue Points	2	Hit Points	1
Move	2	Will	0
Total Offensive Rating (OR)	13	Total Protective Rating (PR)	7

Perfect 20, so let's see what that looks like:

ST: 10	HP: 11	Speed: 6
DX: 12	Will: 10	Move: 8
IQ: 10	Per: 10
HT: 12	FP: 12	SM: 0
Dodge: 9	Parry: 10	DR: 0

Large Knife Stab (16): Reach C 1d-2 imp
Large Knife Swing (16): Reach C,1 1d-2 cut
Traits:
Skills: Knife-16
Class: Mundane
Notes: Carries at least a $40 Large Knife

Good, so we have a weakish, fastish enemy, took roughly 5 minutes. Next!

Two Weapons

Ok, cool, a two handed enemy, let's borrow a page from the ambidextrous Swashbuckler template, and use some fencing weapons.

Attack Skill	8	Active Defense	2
Affliction	0	Damage Resistance	0
Damage	5	Health	2
Fatigue Points	2	Hit Points	0
Move	0	Will	0
Total Offensive Rating (OR)	15	Total Protective Rating (PR)	4

We can spare an entire extra point. Let's add it to the hit points again! This will look like:

ST: 10	HP: 11	Speed: 6
DX: 12	Will: 10	Move: 6
IQ: 10	Per: 10
HT: 12	FP: 12	SM: 0
Dodge: 9	Parry: 9F	DR: 0

Saber Thrust (13): Reach 1 1d-1 imp
Saber Swing (13): Reach 1 1d-1 cut
Traits: Ambidexterity, Dual Weapon Attack (Saber)
Skills: Saber-13
Class: Mundane
Notes: Carries at least two $700 Sabers.

Weapon and Shield

Time for a turtley character! Someone with a real good defense, and an iffy offense. Let's see, 

Attack Skill	2	Active Defense	8
Affliction	0	Damage Resistance	0
Damage	7	Health	0
Fatigue Points	0	Hit Points	0
Move	-1	Will	0
Total Offensive Rating (OR)	8	Total Protective Rating (PR)	8

Let's put the rest of the points into DR to distinguish our turtle from our speedy guys, meaning 4 DR... we will need some decent lifting st for this heavy armor so Lifting ST8. Is it realistic? Who cares! The 20 CER version with those changes is:

Most equipment comes
from here.

ST: 10	HP: 10	Speed: 5
DX: 10	Will: 10	Move: 5
IQ: 10	Per: 10
HT: 10	FP: 10	SM: 0
Dodge: 10	Block: 12	DR: 4

Thrusting Broadsword Thrust (12): Reach 1 1d imp
Thrusting Broadsword Swing (12): Reach 1 1d+1 cut
Shield Smack (14): Reach 1 1d-2 cr
Traits: Lifting ST 8
Skills: Shield-14, Broadsword-12
Class: Mundane
Notes: Carries a lot of stuff! Mail armor for all limbs (B283), the head (B284), and the torso (B283), a medium shield (B287), and a thrusting broadsword (B271). All told, this is 62 lbs, and $1,045.00

That one took a bit more thought than the other two.

Two-Handed Weapons

The slow heavy hitter! One good weapon that does a lot of damage! How about a naginata because I don't see enough polearms? Maybe it's just me, but I feel like they are a bit neglected in my games!

Attack Skill	4	Active Defense	4
Affliction	0	Damage Resistance	0
Damage	11	Health	0
Fatigue Points	0	Hit Points	2
Move	0	Will	0
Total Offensive Rating (OR)	15	Total Protective Rating (PR)	6

Eh, that's pretty good, let's knock one point off of Will just to make it an even 20!

ST: 12	HP: 12	Speed: 6
DX: 13	Will: 9	Move: 6
IQ: 10	Per: 10
HT: 10	FP: 10	SM: 0
Dodge: 9	Parry: 10U	DR: 0

Naginata Thrust (14): Reach 1,2* 1d+2 imp
Naginata Swing (14): Reach 2 2d cut
Traits:
Skills: Polearm-14
Class: Mundane
Notes: Carries at least one $100 Naginata (B272)

Notes and Closing

Whenever you see BNNN that is a page number from Basic Set, specifically, all labeled equipment is from Characters.

Racial Templates easily add
some variety to boring
characters like these!

These are very hollow dummy characters. They need a bit of flavor to become interesting, but you can use it for brainstorming. I might suggest throwing a racial template from Dungeon Fantasy 3 to give them some more flavor. If their is a group of them, you probably want one to have leadership, and you might want to give the others streetwise. Highwaymen might have some important skills like camouflage, traps, stealth, shadowing, etc. Why didn't I simply use the Dungeon Fantasy 15 Henchmen templates to make weaker characters? They were a little bit too strong for me, and I have a preference for a graceful improvement (starting with a weak template and buffing it up) versus graceful degradation (starting with a powerful template, and making it weaker)

To make a handful of small tweaks, you might want to look at this post I did a bit ago to make micro-improvements quickly to a template.