Mechanics: Encumbrance

Someone else's
opinion.

Encumbrance is a thing that can be annoying to track, and extremely deleterious when tracked; a constant enemy of the low-tech combatant. Here's a small rundown of ways that people can defeat it.

Math: Encumbrance - Lifting ST or Dodge and Move?

So, I made a spreadsheet to calculate the costs of either

1. Buying enough ST/Lifting ST to go down to the desired encumbrance level
2. Buying enough Move/Dodge/Speed to ignore the penalties.

Altogether, the results are a little disappointingly boring, but there are a few interesting things to learn from the chart, let's take a look.

Limitations: Gadget

Actually not especially relevant.

I was talking about gadget limitations for no particularly good reason in the GURPS IRC channel (on irc.sorcery.net at #gurps) and I have players that use it, and it made me start thinking that maybe a primer on how it works might be a helpful reminder to me and my players. Let's dissect these gadget limitations then.

Mechanics: How to Build a Resistance Group

This is probably today's star

I have players that are interested in building a resistance group to fight against an evil empire. This requires a lot of skills and resources that adventurers in RPGs usually don't have in abundance. I think Boardroom and Curia and Social Engineering already have most of the rules and mechanics to facilitate a large amount of what they need, so I feel like this post will largely be referencing relevant sections of those two books, but at least this way I can put them in a sensible order and limit required reading to only a few sections instead of just throwing the PDFs at the group and saying, "figure it out, it's in there."

Mechanics: Encouraging Cooperation

I am using this cheesy clip art
ironically, honest. I am still cool.

I had a player ask about cooperative capabilities recently. He wanted to know how he and another player could work together to do any particular non-descript thing, so I had a look at the rules I have for all interesting methods of cooperative capabilities I could find. Let's see what we have.

Mechanics: Ritual Path Magic versus Incantation

A fun system

Also fun.

A while ago, I compared Ritual Path Magic to the effect-shaping spinoff in Pyramid #3/66. A few days ago, a fully formed system based on the two materials was released for Dungeon Fantasy in the form of Dungeon Fantasy 19: Incantation. I have read some discussions that make me feel like some people have the wrong idea about the system - that it is a limited version of the original. I know it is just semantics, but I think a better word would be specialized rather than limited, but the system proper does have some interesting deviations from the ancestor, and while it is not the night and day difference of say, Sorcery and the original magic system, it is bigger than the difference between the original magic system and threshold limited magic, and anyone that knows what I'm talking about knows that they are really similar, but the differences are big enough to make you feel like you are playing a whole new ball game. Let's take a look at the differences.

Crafting: Simplified Crafting System

Actually, the source post is a bit
interesting too.

So I was thinking of crafting systems recently, and that shows because I was working on the food and scrounging posts for a bit, and I had a thought on a simplified type of crafting system with no frills, no thrills, but basic and generic enough to work anywhere, and probably extend it in ways to make it more interesting. This focuses on a fantasy and not-so-serious world, kinda like Dungeon Fantasy if it didn't preach against the tedium of long term down-time tasks so often. Let's take a look.

Rules: Survival And Food Gathering Applied

Let's Making Food.

Yesterday, I wrote about scrounging or foraging for special food that gives bonuses and the like, and today, I decided to test this system, and eat my own dog food. Let's see if the random numbers I pulled out of "feel's ok to me," produce satisfying results.

Mechanics: Monster Catching

Pokemon is far and away from being
the only or oldest game to implement
catch 'em all mechanics.

I'm going to riff off of a topic that came up on a forum I participate in. The question, specifically was for a deterministic translation/formula to convert pokemon stats into GURPS, which, I suggest is unfeasible for a number of reasons, and probably will give you neither a fun GURPS or pokemon experience. Instead, the better idea is to try to rework the mechanics of that or similar games in a way that makes sense in the GURPS framework.
That said, being a trainer of powerful creatures, monsters, demons, etc. isn't a completely unique mechanic to pokemon, and in a very light way, it is touched upon in GURPS here and there, so we aren't starting from nothing. Let's see what we can scrounge together to implement a system for corralling powerful allies.

Mechanics: Social Combat Via The Regular Contest

It is also a band apparently.

I have had situations in the past where the resolution of an argument PC versus NPC summed up as one quick contest of Diplomacy versus Will seemed to end in a weird series of attempts at fishing for a way to work around the adjudication as if it were a videogame... one even suggested coming back the next day and trying again as if the character would somehow forget in 24 hours. So today, after a random statement on a message board, I quickly cobbled together some rules using regular contests and the standard slew of social skills for dealing with an issue, let's see how that goes.

Mechanics: Level Up System

Blah blah, Google tags and analytics.

This is just a thought I had the other day: some people enjoy level ups because getting a substantial power increase all in one fell swoop is fun because it's obvious that you improved. You are absolutely doing more damage, you are absolutely more athletic, you are absolutely more convincing, so stitching together two ideas from different Pyramid articles, I came up with a level up and experience point system. Whether it is too much bookkeeping or comes out more annoying than it's worth, here it is.

Mechanics: Leading Monsters

Maybe like this,
but not like this.
Really good Discworld
installment though.

So, there is a little bit of an interesting aside in Dungeon Fantasy 2 for Knights on p. 30 that talks about how one creative use of the Leadership skill might be to organize hordes of weak but friendly monsters. I really like this idea, and enjoy lateral solutions to problems that are difficult to solve if approached head on. Additionally, Leadership is a skill that kinda sounds real useful in name, but it's objective functionality is hard to quantify often times. This idea of leading monsters to help with other problems is, in my opinion a very compelling reason to try to come up with a way to apply some objective functionality to the Leadership skill.

Cross-Post: Hirelings

Don't be like Red Luigi.

So it's a thing that is going around. Two posts at Dungeon Fantastic, and one at Gaming Ballistic. I think they have already said a bunch of interesting stuff on the topic, but in any case, I decided to gather up my thoughts on the subject.

Mechanics: Metagame

Not this kind, and I don't even want to
know what it is.

Metagame. It is a supremely overloaded word, that has definitions that place it anywhere from subjectively bad, to objectively neutral, to subjectively good, so before I begin this post, I need to make sure we are singing from the hymn sheet.
Today, when I say metagame, I speak to mechanics that have an impact on the game via the interface of player and game, rather than character and game. By that I mean... normally, the player interacts with the GM's world by speaking and working through his character. The player can therefore only do something that his character can do. Metagame mechanics subvert this usual contract, for better or for worse, to the benefit or detriment of the player by allowing the player some sort of agency that doesn't come from his character. GURPS doesn't have as many metagame mechanics built in as a lot of other systems, but there are still some, and even among those, some are so important, major elements are predicated and built upon them as a foundation. Let's investigate further.