GURPS Hekinoe 2.0: An Itinerary and Outline

Hello.

One of the problems eye constantly struggle with is the desire to return to Hekinoe, not just the same universe like I'm doing with my Seasonal Arc campaign, but the planet itself. I want to go back there. There are still stories there that need to be told and there are new ways to punish players like Lance and Eric. The only way I'll ever be able to really return to Hekinoe is to finish converting it. In the past, this has been an exhausting process that leaves me scoured out inside with no desire to game. But it's something I want to do. It's something I need to do. It's the only way I'm going to be able to return to Hekinoe to run games or write in. So that's what this post is about. An itinerary and outline of sorts. What I need to do, how I want to organize it and so on. It's not going to be super in depth, it's just going to be a way of organizing and focusing my thoughts. 

Recently I had a brief period where I was going back and forth about Pathfinder Hekinoe vs. GURPS Hekinoe. I had considered, briefly, using Pathfinder. Pathfinder is a more palatable system for players, and it's meaty enough that I think I could make Hekinoe work well in it. I also know it well enough that I can competently and confidently hack it the fuck apart and make it work precisely the way I want it too. However, GURPS is a stronger system overall and doesn't really need to be hacked apart to make work in the first place. I will admit that it can be taxing to navigate all the rules. But, I have a pretty good group of players in mind for the future and I think they can handle it.

So let's get started with my things to do list. The first step is to establish what system I really want to use, and as we've just mentioned, it's GURPS. I am infused with the glory and adrenaline of progress. Woo. 

The next step is to re-map Hekinoe and The Known World. With the changes of Hekinoe 2.0 that I mentioned several weeks ago, I'm going to need new maps for the world to kind of spread out the existing cultures a little and cut out the dead weight (I'm looking at you Plains of Dust). Since we're remapping already and spreading the currently existing contents of the world out a little bit, we can also probably dip our toes into creating a map of the globe as well as putting down continents and such that exist inside my head but have never been placed on a map. Once we figure out where everything is and establish which cultures know where what is, we'll need to alter the main timeline of the world to reflect the various changes that have taken place. We'll also likely need to come up with one or two new continent names as well. 

The next and final step of this very short things to do list, is complete the campaign book. That said, I'd like to also establish a kind of progression guide and chapter list and that sort of thing to kind of focus myself and establish what I'm doing and in what order and that sort of thing. Bouncing around from thing to thing hasn't really worked for me in the past and has left a few dozen out of order documents in my Google Drive folders that I would have to struggle to arrange in a good order. So I want a chapter outline and that sort of thing for this attempt at a campaign book.

So we need to organize ourselves and our chapters to get things situated. For chapter one, I'd like to have an introduction. Who I am and what my experiences have been over the past 20 years or so of gaming. What sorts of games I like to run and that sort of thing. I'd also like to lay down what my expectations are of my players and that sort of thing. Overall I'd like it to be a hey, here is who I am and how I game chapter. Something to give my players insight into how I do things and why I do things certain ways. This seems kind of silly to me, as most of the people I game with have gamed with me since I started, but I've never really laid down why I do things certain ways before. So maybe it'll have value. Who knows. If the chapter ends up being lame, I'll just yank it out. 

After the first introduction chapter, I kinda don't know what to do next. Should I jump right into lore or rules or what, you know? I think I'd like to lead with lore and background material for the most part. So I think I'm going to have chapter two be a fairly large chapter about the races, nations, and continents of The Known World, which is the area of Hekinoe 2.0 that encompasses all our pre-existing material like Kusseth, The Fallen Empire of Man, Serethnem, etc, etc, etc. They'll all be broken up into a few different continents and stuff as I've previously said, but the name will still be used for all the things familiar to us from previous versions of Hekinoe. This chapter will start off with the timeline of Hekinoe and then I'll break it up by continent. This chapter will also be the chapter that includes the racial and cultural templates for the purposes of building characters and that sort of thing. 

I'd like chapter 3 to be about the various organizations and people of The Known World. Groups like The Organization and people like Savage Doc Managan and Laram of Volungshemle. Basically a chapter designed like those old 2nd Edition AD&D Forgotten Realms books Heroes' Lore Book and Villains' Lorebook. I'm not sure if I'll end up including stats and that sort of thing. Part of me wants to, but part of me wants to keep things nebulous and undefined. We'll see. 

I'd like the next chapter, chapter 4, to be about the technology of The Known World. Primarily this is just going to be equipment lists and stats, but I'd also like to talk a little bit about steam technology and electricity and that sort of think. Maybe. Maybe it'll just be gear. Lots and lots of gear. Maybe also some gear specific rules and such. We'll see.

The next chapter will be about sorcery and to a lesser extent, psionics. This chapter is going to go over the lore and history of sorcery and psionics and that sort of thing. The majority of it will be rules material though, as the rules that govern sorcery and psionics and what they can and cannot do will require extensive documentation. Which will be totally fun and exciting to write down for like the fiftieth time. 

The next chapter should be the final chapter involving lore and background material. Chapter six will be about the flora and faun of The Known World. It'll be the Monster Manual chapter. Which should be entertaining to craft. Here is where you'll find all the night fowl and dragon and great ursine stats and stuff. This chapter will definitely include stats, because that's where all the fun is in a Bestiary style chapter of a campaign book. 

The next chapter will be about character creation and advancement. Character creation is pretty straightforward in GURPS, just buy shit, but I want to outline a few aspects and talk about points levels and that sort of thing. The rules for advancement are also pretty straightforward, but I'd like to discuss them in a little detail with my players, rather than rely on them just reading them in the GURPS rulebooks. I want to lay out precisely how advancement is achieved and what some of my opinions and rulings on the topic are going to be. 

I want the next section to a general kind of rules focused chapter. GURPS has a host of optional rules and cinematic rules and that sort of thing. I'd like to talk about some of my rulings on those and kind of lay out which ones I like and which ones I don't. I'd also like this to be the chapter where I talk about generalized rules and mechanics stuff that I've changed from base GURPS. There shouldn't be too much stuff of that nature, as GURPS is pretty solid in my opinion, but what little there is should be clearly documented for players. I'd also like for this chapter to be where I put all the Hekinoe specific skills and techniques, as well as documentation on which advantages and disadvantages are allowed or verboten in which situations. 

So this is what we're looking at:

Things To Do

1. Figure out game system. GURPS. Duh. 
2. Re-map and rename stuff for Hekinoe 2.0 changes.
3. Adjust the timeline of Hekinoe.
4. Complete the fucking campaign book. 

Campaign Book Outline

1. Introduction to me and how I game and why I game and what I expect of myself and my players. 
2. Continents, nations, and races of The Known World. Racial and cultural templates go here, towards the end of the appropriate section. 
3. Organizations and people. Not sure how long this chapter will be or how long it will take. I only have a vague idea about the majority of the cults and secret societies and such of The Known World. 
4. Technology of The Known World. Gear and equipment and stuff. 
5. Psionics and Sorcery. Background information and rules information about sorcery and psionics. 
6. Flora and Fauna of The Known World. Monster Manual/Bestiary chapter. 
7. Character Creation and Advancement. Creating characters and making them better, faster, stronger. Etc. 
8. Rules, as well as other bullshit. 

It doesn't really look like much, if I'm being completely honest. But it's something. It's an idea of how to proceed and what I need to do. It's not some vaguely defined unwritten idea that I should do something or complete something or poke and prod at something. Ideally it will help me focus and organize my thoughts and get me making progress on the changes to Hekinoe 2.0 and converting Hekinoe to GURPS and writing it all down somewhere in a way that people will eventually read and hopefully understand. 

We'll see.

House Rules: Death and Dying In the Desert

So one of the things I’ve always been irritated with DnD about is the abstract and completely divorced from reality nature of hit points and dying. In the current edition, you drop unconscious at 0 hit points and then have to make death saves. Which are DC 10 d20 rolls  where you either stabilize or die. Three failed death saves in a day and you die. There are other rules for rolling bad on death saves, being attacked while at 0 hit points, rolling a natural 20, and so on and so forth. But here’s the thing that really bugs me, the thing that has always bugged me. Regardless of what your current hit point total is, how many death saves you’ve failed today, and how many hit dice you have left, you are as fine as you are when you’ve just finished a long rest. You operate at peak efficiency regardless of how numerically rough your health is at a given moment. I understand it, but it aggravates me. There should be a cost to getting into combat repeatedly and throwing yourself into the meat grinder with wild abandon, and there isn’t.

On a side note, would you like to know the name of a system that abstracts health and wellness and death and dying but has statistical penalties for having low hit points and low reserves of energy and treats combat like it is always a dangerous thing to engage in? Fucking GURPS.

GURPS treats combat like it is deadly and risky and you can get pretty fucked up in any fight because fights are chaotic and deadly and you’re never a giant sack of hit points. You can always die by being stabbed once or twice and a super high HT only serves to make it slightly easier for you to survive being grievously injured. GURPS was designed to make combat difficult and dangerous. DnD has a different design goal. DnD rules are designed to have X amount of encounters each scenario with the assumption that each encounter will consume Y of the party’s resources with only combat encounters that are specifically designed with a certain level of difficulty in mind having the risk of player death. Basically, DnD is weak sauce easy mode. Which has been the case for the past few editions. In 2nd Edition do you know what happened when you hit 0 hit points? You died. No death saves, no you can still be healed and pop back up, etc. You died. You ran out of hit points and you died and the group's Cleric had like six spell slots total. You still operated at peak efficiency whether you were at 1 hit point or 90, but still. Anyway. 

So my goal for The Seasonal Arc has been to portray Hasta as a deadly world of harsh deserts and murderously hungry desert creatures. Part of the way I want to portray that is to make the creatures tougher and nastier, the combats more difficult, and the death and dying rules a little more aggressive. I also want to slightly increase the player’s capabilities to show that the races of this world have evolved to be tougher just like the beasts have. 

The way I’ve decided to show that being at low hit points is bad is by leveraging levels of exhaustion. There are six levels of exhaustion and at level one your ability checks (skills) have disadvantage. The negative effects scale up until level six, which is death. So I’ve instituted a house rule that says when you’re at half your max hit point total, you gain one level of exhaustion. This level of exhaustion is removed when your hit points rise above half your hit points. This makes it risky to remain at low hit points in battle. But it’s not something that will completely cripple a character and mark him for death immediately. 

The other aspect of health and wellness in DnD is death saves. There’s no real mechanic for showing that you’re in rough shape if you’ve failed two death saves. A character with max hit points, max hit dice, and no failed death saves should be in better shape than a character that’s used a bunch of hit dice and and has failed two death saves. This is all abstract, but it should feel like that second character is closer to death, shouldn’t it? I feel like it should. But that’s just me. 

There are two ways I’ve thought of going about this. The first, and this is the one I currently have listed in my house rules for The Seasonal Arc, is to say that every failed death save you have imparts one level of exhaustion. This means that a character at 0 hit points with two failed death saves will have disadvantage on ability checks, their speed reduced by half, and will have disadvantage on saving throws and attack rolls. The second way I’ve thought of doing this is that each failed death save you have reduces your maximum hit point total. So one failed death save reduces your maximum hit points to ¾ normal and two failed death saves reduces your maximum hit points to ½ normal. 

Part of me, the sadistic part I suppose, is screaming to do both. I feel like both is too much though. With access to unlimited healing, the reducing of hit points isn’t that much of a penalty. It just ties up the characters with cure wounds and healing word studs more, which has value I suppose. I think we’ll just stick with the levels of exhaustion for failed death saves. It’s the quickest and easiest and doesn’t bog down combat with a bunch of “how many hit points do I have right now and how many can I have total” questions and math. 

The main point of this post is to figure out what I want to do with hit dice. I have instituted a house rule that says long rests restore all your hit points, but only restore hit dice equal to your Constitution modifier, minimum of 1. But that’s not really a penalty. If characters have access to unlimited healing magic, they won’t really need to spend many hit dice. So the rule is effectively pointless. But hit dice are tied to health and wellness and recovery and stuff. They represent reserves of energy, I think. So I need to represent that in some way. 

The easiest way to do that is to say when your hit dice are low, you gain a level of exhaustion. Just like with hit points. But again, we run into the issue of hit dice aren’t going to be used as much because of unlimited healing magic. We could go the 4th Edition route and say that healing is done by curative magic allowing you to spend hit dice and boosting the effect of spending them. But that’s silly to me and fuck 4th Edition. It does tie in with what we see in a lot of fantasy novels where healing exhausts the person being healed. But that’s not really the way magic works in my universe. 

Another option is to take a note from GURPS where prolonged periods of exertion like combat and stuff drain your hit dice. But this runs into the problem where in a group of characters, the Wizard with a Constitution of 8 has the same amount of energy reserves (hit dice) as a Barbarian with a Constitution of 16. Fourth level characters will all have four hit dice, regardless of hit points and Constitution and whether or not they are a physically tough class or a physically fragile class. I like the idea that hit dice represent a reserve of physical energy. I like the idea that if they run low or out, maybe just out, it would impact your overall physical capabilities. When you’re exhausted, you don’t run or fight as well as you would you’re well rested and full of vitality. 

Hit dice are a restorative mechanic in 5th Edition. They’re useful because the game isn’t designed for characters to have unlimited access to healing from magic. So it’s pretty safe and easy to completely change how you gain them and what they’re used for. 

So let’s do a little spitballing here. They’re not really dice anymore, but let’s keep calling them that because I feel like it. How about each character has hit “dice” equal to the highest number on their hit dice. So Barbarians have 12 hit "dice" and Rogues have 8 and so on. Let’s also say that you increase/decrease your hit “dice” by your Constitution modifier. So the Barbarian with a 16 Constitution has a total of 15 hit “dice” and the Wizard with a 8 Constitution has a total of 5 hit “dice.” Let’s also say that when you run out of hit “dice” you gain a level of exhaustion. Because you are exhausted.  

Ok, hold up, I’m being stupid. 

So we’ve established that, at least in my opinion, hit dice exist as a form of more limited healing for characters to recover from fights because healing is not infinite. They’re not used for anything else as far as I can tell. So in the first place, limiting their recovery and having negative effects for using them is kind of pointless. They’re not something that’s going to be used often enough to really have an impact except in that one irritating instance where the group splits the party in the middle of the desert and can’t safely take a long rest or walk into a clinic in one of the towns or cities. In talking about this all with some other DMs, Lance also made the point that hit dice and the healing they provide are a mechanic designed to help prevent the 15 minute adventuring day where healers would expend all their spells on healing and then everyone would rest and reset all of their abilities after adventuring for an hour or two.

So if hit dice are essentially useless in a campaign setting where the PCs have access to unlimited healing and spell slots, why bog down the game with additional mechanics tied to hit dice and how they affect you when you run low on them? A more sensible solution would be to just remove the hit dice as a mechanic of the game. This also serves to make those extraordinarily rare situations where the players do not have access to unlimited healing more difficult and a little tense because the players and their characters know that they can’t spend an hour resting and restore all their hit points with their hit dice. 

I like it.

This has been productive. I’m glad we were able to do this. Usually I spend so much time adding rules to games and modifying existing rules. It’s kind of a strange experience to be removing a major mechanic like hit dice from the game. 

The Why of Yofga and Hasta

So I know I mentioned rebooting Hekinoe to some degree, but that's on the back burner for a bit. For now, the main task is to get my 5th Edition campaign for Kyle's group put together. I've got a world and some house rules and so on and so forth. I even have what I think is a plot that will work.

Part of me keeps asking myself, why bother with a 5th Edition campaign on a world that exists in the same universe as Hekinoe, but isn't Hekinoe? Especially when I'm initiating some major changes to Hekinoe. Well, there are a couple reasons for this of varying degrees of merit. So let's talk about those today. I guess?

The first reason I want to run a 5th Edition campaign is to give Kyle and Kevin a break. They've been alternating campaigns basically since I joined their group like two years and some change ago. I just figure that it would be a nice break for both of them if another DM steps in for a bit to let them both play. I figure that I was always appreciative of those times Eric stepped in to try and DM something with our group, so Kevin and Kyle might feel the same way if I took up the mantle for a bit as well. I dunno. I very much get what it feels like to run an endless series of campaigns with little to no respite from it, so I guess I just want to show my appreciation for being accepted into the group and for having a chance to play a dozen or so characters.

The second reason is that I miss DMing. I am definitely something of a control freak when it comes to gaming and I struggle constantly (and not always successfully) with telling everyone what to do and reminding Kyle and Kevin of this or that. I'm sure it wears on Kevin and Kyle and the other players and resisting that urge to tell everyone what to do and why they should do it wears on me. In addition to wanting to be in control again, I miss crafting environments and NPCs and plots. I miss worldbuilding. I miss surprising and confusing and terrifying my players. I miss having secrets and knowing things. I miss playing the "I don't know. Does it?" game. I miss DMing.

The third reason, and this is a snarky and selfish one, is that I am fucking sick of "immersion." I have expressed a certain dislike for the immersive aspects of our current campaign. We've always experimented with dim lighting, and it has always given me a headache and I have been up front about that. With the fog machine and soundtrack and lack of maps and visual media, it's borderline unbearable. I'm just sick of being constantly distracted from the game and what everyone is saying by the hissing fog machine and the soundtrack, and never knowing what is happening or what our environment looks like or where anyone is due to lack of representation of those aspects that I can see, and going home after every session with a raging headache from squinting at a backlit tablet in a lightless basement and a scratchy throat and congested nose from the fog I'm constantly sucking in. So yeah, full disclosure, part of why I want to DM for this group is so that I can game in a well lit and comfortable environment.

Side note: Fred and I have recently discussed how when I run my desert world campaign I should make it immersive theater of the mind. By immersive theater of the mind, I mean we should have a space heater running constantly in Kevin's basement while we game, ban all beverages while gaming, and bring a powerful spotlight to blast people with periodically to represent the unrelenting gaze of Hasta's furious sun, and also periodically throw handfuls of sand into their faces. That would definitely be hilarious and immersive and maybe just a smidgen petty. Maybe more than a smidgen. Maybe a lot more than a smidgen. Hehe.

The fourth reason is that I want to challenge myself a little bit. My comfort zone is Hekinoe, Pathfinder, and a certain group of players. I feel like it is important to step outside that comfort zone and challenge myself a little. So instead of the somewhat environmentally stable technologically advanced fantasy world of Hekinoe, I'm trying a campaign on a dying fantasy desert world. Instead of using something I can quote rules and stats from memory from, like Pathfinder, I'm running 5th Edition (which yeah, I'm pretty familiar with at this point, but still). Instead of gaming with Eric and Jason and Lance and Jeremy, etc, etc, I'm running a campaign with this newer group. Instead of doing my politics and warfare plots, I'm doing a semi-tropeish save the world campaign. So yeah, I'm kind of challenging myself a little bit to step outside of my comfort zone a wee bit. Which is cool. It's important to try new things and grow as a GM. I guess.

So those are the reasons why I want to do a 5th Edition, non-Hekinoe campaign. So what am I trying to do with the campaign?

This ties in somewhat to challenging myself. My goal for this is to do a save the world campaign, which I don't do too often. If I have, it's been a while. Pre-Hekinoe at least. My goal is to try and make a save the world campaign, but put my spin on it. Keep my plot creation ideal of grey morality and NPCs with personalities and a world that responds to the actions of the PCs but doesn't pause while they're not directly interacting with a given portion of it. 

My goal is also to use this campaign as a means of focusing and disciplining my scenario creation. Back in the Orcunraytrel Arc we'd game maybe once every two months, sometimes with longer stretches between sessions. We'd augment this with constant RPs via email. Emailing to do RPs between sessions isn't really an option with this group. It's been tried before and kind of falls flat. This group does a game every two weeks, almost without fail, thing that I am very unused to. I'm not sure how my somewhat lackadaisical scenario creation is going to cope with that. I'm normally way more slackass about scenario creation than that. So I'm going to have to get into the practice of disciplining myself and focusing harder on getting scenarios done and that sort of thing. I'm not sure how I'll ultimately cope with this or if I'll be able to keep it up, but I'm going to challenge myself to try. 

Or I'm just going to say fuck it, play video games, and pull everything out of my ass. We'll see.

Another goal is to put 5th Edition and my house rules for it through their paces. I want to hack it up and twist and see how far I can push it before it breaks. Pathfinder tolerated Hekinoe and my house rules fairly well. I want to see what happens when I put 5th Edition under some stress and change how its rules work for magic and recovery and so on. I've tweaked things here and there in ways that tickle my fancy and fit with Hasta and the way it is, now I want to see how that impacts 5th Edition and how it works in a practical way and not a theoretical way. Like yeah, theoretically, I understand that combat is going to be made easier by the group having access to healing spells that are limited only by the fact that they can be used once per round, rather than by spell slots per day. But how is that going to interact with limited recovery of hit dice and being subjected to exhaustion levels more frequently? Six levels of exhaustion kills you, even if you're at full health, and you gain exhaustion levels in my house rules when you hit half hit points and 0 hit points. How are those going to work together? I'm excited to see how all my house rules interact with one another and I'm excited to see how they need to be tweaked. It'll be neat.

So there's some of my goals for my 5th Edition campaign and that sort of thing. Wee!

The Myth of the OP Player/Build/Etc

One of the things I'm doing to get back into blogging is going back and finding unfinished drafts of posts and seeing if there are any I want to finish. This one was originally started on 12/27/2013.

One of the things you run into a lot with RPGs is min/maxers. The guy who tweaks every little thing to finagle the maximum amount of whatever out of the rules. This problem is a lot worse in point buy systems like GURPS because the nature of the game allows for a lot more customization than a rigid, class based system like Pathfinder or DnD. You can only min/max so much in Pathfinder core rules, mostly just in terms of ability score, as there aren't any sacrifices you can make anywhere to boost something else up. 5th Edition is even less min/maxable. It's actually kind of impressive how little you can actually tweak your character to secure advantages.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with min/maxing and trying to make your character awesome. That's the point of these games on some level, to be badass. To leave bodies on the floor in your wake. To be awesome and more competent than everyone else. That's what player characters do, or at least try to. Now, it's one thing to find sweet feat combinations, and completely another to play a Fighter with an Intelligence of 7 and a highly boosted Strength or Constitution and then come up with really well thought out tactics and plots. Mental retardation is a real thing, and I'm not making light of it, but there is a reason we don't put people with IQs of 50 or 60 in charge of armies and groups of soldiers. I only take issue with min/maxing when it gets ridiculous and ignores my background material or the character is a collection of stats and not an actual character.

Players often try to find complimentary feats and class abilities and racial abilities to leverage the most power against their foes. Power in this context is a general term for the character's schtick. Karrak's power is shooting things. Donovan's is talking to things, and Karl's is magic and shooting things (with magic). Eran's power is obviously master debating in the woods, while shooting way better than everyone else, and being sneaky. 

Often, you'll hear someone say "that is so over powered," usually as an exclamation indicating they are pissed and feel it is unfair, or an exclamation indicating they think they are brilliant little fucks for coming up with it. Now the problem with finding something over powered and thinking it is unstoppable is that it often ignores a few things about the nature of the game.  

The first thing it ignores is that experience  (I use the word experience here as a catch all term for advancement) should only be rewarded if there is a challenge in the scenario. If a group is consistently walking through encounters, or a certain type of encounter (combat, social, trap, etc) without taking damage (and not because of crafty tactics during the fight or brilliant plans for getting around the encounters), if there's no risk in a situation, why should they get rewarded? That's the whole point of leveling/advancement systems. As you overcome challenges, you get better at things. If there's no challenge to anything, you shouldn't be getting better, because you've plateaued and aren't challenging yourself. It seems pretty straightforward to me. So fine, you're monstrously powerful. Cool. Prepare to be stuck at level three for the rest of the campaign. 

The second thing it ignores is the GM. Assuming something is OP/unstoppable/makes you invincible ignores the fact that the challenges a party faces are not random meaningless situations (assuming your GM isn't a fucktwit). They are built by a thinking creature that typically has a much better understanding of the game as a whole than the players. We're ten levels into the campaign and Eric still can't figure out where to find the cost breakdown for adding new spells to his spellbook. Lance thought for some reason that armor class is  calculated differently for animal companions so his wolf companion had an AC of 7, despite AC starting at a base of 10 and his wolf having +2 worth of natural armor and a Dexterity of 17 and the Dodge feat. I'm not saying this to poke fun at them or to indicate they are big dumb heads. I forgot how Craft skills function last night. Nobody is perfect. However, the nature of the GM's job demands that he know the system of the rules better than the players. Which means, quite literally, anything you can do, he can do better and also that you're probably doing it wrong. Cary used to blast me constantly with OP builds of Pathfinder characters, generally they were solid and functional for what he designed them for, but at least a solid 25% of them completely failed due to him not really understanding relevant rules or even being aware of rules.

Obviously I only deconstructed those failures for him about 50% of the time. You never know when it'll be useful to completely break a player's build and knock their sense of special snowflake entitlement down a peg. 

Thirdly, players are arrogant useless fucks that are predisposed to think that they are brilliant and crafty little fucks that can pull a fast one on the GM. I kid. What I mean is that people, myself included, are predisposed to think they are brilliant and cunning. Unless they are so full of self loathing that they GM Pathfinder games to punish themselves. So yeah, when you find a little bit of synergy you never noticed before, you assume no one else has, and that you've won everything forever. The problem is that these little synergies typically only apply to one aspect of the game. 

Cary and I were just talking about mythic characters and he explained a build to me where an attack has to do over 80 damage to him before he can start taking damage. Which is pretty impressive if someone shoots or stabs Donovan. But what about hold person or phantasmal killer? Finger of death? What about poisons that deal ability score damage? What about negative levels? What about non-combat situations? What about a Fighter that has the feats that lets him stun or daze on a successful attack roll? Will this stuff function if he is unconscious and the Fighter performs a coup de grace? What if he is submerged in water due to a trap and begins drowning? So yes, assuming it works like he thinks it does, his build does possess a power level of over 9000. But it only applies to a small piece of the game, direct damage. If direct damage is the only thing you're leveraging against your players to challenge them in a campaign, you fucked up.

The fourth thing OP builds ignore is the world around them. In this instance, the world around them can be the environment, foes, NPCs, etc. Fine, you've got a combat monster character with  power level of over 9000 thousand. What happens when your goal is to get information from an NPC rather than curb stomp them until their insides squirt out their butthole? What happens when your NPCs have a better understanding of tactical combat than your player's combat monster collection of stats?

In my current 5th Edition group, there is a belief that archery is overpowered, which I don't agree with. The example is the Fighter archery fighting style, which confers +2 to ranged attack rolls. This combined with an archery feat that confers -5 to ranged attack rolls and +10 to damage creates a pretty deadly archer. There's also a feat that ignores all cover except full. 

Ok. That is impressive. You might even call it OP. But guess what? It is completely negated by stepping behind something. Unless the archer has a decent amount of elevation, you can completely negate the archer's power by sitting down on the ground behind a waist high wall. This relates to my fourth point because NPCs are intelligent. Even animals are going to either try to eat the face off the deadly archer, or run the fuck away from him. More intelligent enemies are going to utilize cover. Players kind of tend to see the NPCs populating the world around them as bland and faceless. They forget that any tactic or thing they can do can likely be done by the citizens of the world around them to some degree. My point here is that if something doesn't work, the foes of the players are going to try something else.

I dunno, I'm kind of all over the place here and there's a little bit of overlap between my four points. The ultimate point of this post is that creating an OP build is kind of a myth in my opinion. You might be able to be good at one single aspect of the game (combat, talking, etc), but that's about it. It also doesn't necessarily make you unstoppable in that area either, because there is more to the game than high damage or hit points or AC in combat or high skill bonuses in non-combat situations. There are always going to be impossible tasks that you can't succeed at, there are always going to be lies too unbelievable (whether due to the outrageousness of the claim or because the NPC has information the player does not). If you the GM are doing it right, the game is varied and interesting and not guaranteed to play to the player's strengths at all times and characters that specialize to an extreme degree to get that extra edge are going to suffer. 

Running Campaigns

One of the things I do is game every other Saturday with some guys that I know through a guy through work. At this point I consider them friends, so I game with a group of friends every other Saturday. We currently play 5th Edition DnD. There are two DMs in this group: Kyle and Kevin. They've both run a few campaigns and one shots and such in the time I've been gaming with them, which is probably approaching a year or so now. With the crashing and burning of my Pathfinder campaign, I've been kind of wanting to show my appreciation for them by DMing something for the group. Kind of give them both a break and get myself back into the role of running games. Something relatively short, definitely not a three year long campaign, but something more than a one shot or multi-session dungeon.

I also want to run it as a sort of palette cleanser after the Pathfinder campaign. Not because it left a bad taste in my mouth. I liked that campaign and am curious how it would have all ended (which is now up to Eric to decide). What I mean is that I've been running campaigns for the same group of friends, for the most part, for 21 years and ran a campaign for three years with guys who were adjacent to that group of friends. Shawn was part of that original group and he introduced me to Lance, who introduced me to Jason, who introduced me to Cary. I've grown accustomed to these guys and their friends and their various idiosyncrasies. I feel like it would be beneficial for me as a GM to run things for a different group of people. A group of people that grew up on different games and versions of DnD than we did. Doing the same things over and over again and running games geared towards the same set of expectations and whatnot leads to stagnation. Because of the my experience as a GM and because of my experience with my core group of players, I've very rarely had to plan any alternative routes for task completion in my scenarios over the past three years. I almost instinctively know what they're going to do, how to get them to do what I want, and what is going to interest and bore them. This isn't a criticism of any of us. We're all just accustomed to each other's tastes and quirks. For the most part.

This is more about me expanding my horizons and seeing what other people have to say about me as a GM and what they have to say about Hekinoe. I dunno. These guys are cool. I think it'd be fun to plop them down in Hekinoe and see what they do with it. So I've decided to do this. The first step is figuring out what I want to do. The first step of that is determining system.

My heart always flies like an arrow to GURPS for representing Hekinoe, but that's not exactly ethical in my opinion. I don't really feel right demanding they all buy new books and stuff, especially when both of the core GURPS books are fifty bucks each. I also don't really feel right giving them all free pdfs because I like GURPS and want to support the game. Anyway, long story short: I've opted to go with 5th Edition for this campaign, but significantly modified. As I've said many a time before, various versions of DnD don't really work with Hekinoe, also DnD is stupid.

So the main point of this post is to establish how much I need to modify 5th Edition to fit it into Hekinoe. Just like other 3.X Edition versions of Hekinoe, some things will get handwaved because game. I want to tweak it to make it fit, but I don't really want to overdo it. So we need to first establish a little bit about this continent I plan on setting this campaign on and how it different from The Known World and go from there into modification of rules and mechanics.

The first difference is that it will have its own set of races, and there will only be four races. The Buillon, the Gobeneru, the Halflings, and Humans. The Gobeneru are of the Goebleen/Ethryll/Hulderfolk lineage and Humans will be the same type of stock as Uncout, so there will be some familiar/common races. The second difference is that magic is more stable and does not cause mutations and magic items don't eventually explode when used. However, magic is also weaker. Because background, this continent will have the lowest risk of misfire of any of the continents in Hekinoe. The third difference is that the tech level of this continent is more along the lines of normal DnD, rather than the Wild West era technology of The Known World or the Iron Age era technology of Orcunraytrel. Steel is a thing, but guns and steam engines are not. This continent also has no Elduman, so there are no psionics on it.

So how is this continent different from DnD? This question kind of shows what the necessary modifications to 5th Edition's rules will be. This will keep me from going hog wild and doing things like converting armor to damage reduction, making massive reductions in hit points to everything, etc, etc, etc. There will be plenty of modifications. No need to add more nonsense onto what has to be there. There's a fine line between needing to modify a system and needing to use a completely different system. If I just end up hacking apart 5th Edition to be more GURPS like, rather than to fit Hekinoe, it might be more appropriate to use GURPS in the first place.

Anyway, Hekinoe is different from the core DnD world described in the Player's Handbook. Let's talk about that.

Races. Hekinoe has no Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, etc, etc, etc. It's all my own races. You could, like Lance, be an idiot and say that the Sereth and Vyanth are just Elves because pointed ears (nevermind that they're actually an offshoot of Uncout, but whatever) or that Greenskin Abraxens are Orcs, but that's not true. Some of the races of Hekinoe resemble common DnD races, and that may be intentional on my part, but they are not those races. What this means is that I need to stat up the Buillon, Gobeneru, Halflings, and Humans. Not too difficult. It's actually be pretty easy to make them work, Buillon will be a modified Goliath race, Gobeneru will be a modified Halfling or Goblin race, Humans will be Humans. Halflings will actually be something I have to write up from scratch.

No gods. Hekinoe has a decent share of powerful supernatural entities. Primarily members of the Nel race, but there are others. However, these are not gods in the traditional sense. Gods, in DnD, are creatures powered by the faith of their followers, they have ideologies they want followed, they exist on planes that are fairly mutable to their whims, and command legions of planar entities like angels or demons. They are also to a certain extent omnipotent and omniscient, at least in areas related directly to their followers and their areas of control. The supernatural entities of Hekinoe have none of these capabilities. It may seem like they do, but they do not. This means Cleric, Druid, and Paladin are outright gone from the class options. Ranger may stay, but will lose its spellcasting abilities. Can't have divine magic without divine creatures to give the characters magic.

No planes. Hekinoe has no planar cosmology. The only plane is the real world. This means several things. Spells involving planar travel need to be modified or removed. Spells that pull things from other planes need to be altered or removed. Creatures native to other planes, such as angels and demons, do not exist in Hekinoe. There are small sort of demiplanes that I for some reason decided to call adjacent realms, places like The Shadowwlands, the Hound's midnight forest, Nel holdings, and various little sorcerous apartment complexes built by various hermit beard wearing Wizards. Mostly this amounts to some spell alteration and a little bit of outright removal.

Magic. Magic is going to be a big sticking point and will require heavy modification. In Hekinoe there are three types of magic type stuff: magic, the psionics of the Elduman, and the Gifts of the Nel. Each of them have their own unique rules. The two present in this 5th Edition campaign will be magic and Gifts. Magic in Hekinoe is an external energy source that spellcasters shape through symbolic incantations, gestures, and raw willpower. It's a large and chaotic energy source separated from, but always seeking entry into, the physical world. I've described sorcerous energy as an endless sea of power shaped like a funnel with a magic user at the bottom of the funnel. Gifts are an internal energy source, they're the lifeforce of a Nel. Both are powerful, but both have some a variety of limitations and restrictions on their use.

In DnD, magic is an internal force, otherwise the Wizard ability known as arcane replenishment could not exist. How else could you replenish arcane energy to restore spell slots if it didn't come from within you? It's also an external energy source? Or something. It's super dumb. None of the rules about magic mean anything in DnD. How do Clerics gain more spells per day if they don't do stuff that furthers their deity's goals or rise in their church hierarchy if the power comes from their god and not them? Clerics, as non divine beings, have no divine energy. It comes from elsewhere. Their level and ability scores should have no impact on their spells, as all that power comes from their god. Anyway.

Basically we have three magic classes: Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. Warlocks make pacts with Nel for power, Sorcerer's can only be the Halfling race because they use Gifts from an ancestor who was invested with Gifts by a Nel, and Wizards cast spells using the ambient magical energy from the world around them. The first problem here is casting ability scores. Warlocks use Charisma, and they get their power from a patron they persuade or make a deal with to gain it, so Charisma is fine for them. Since Sorcerer's use internal magic energy that is at least partially their lifeforce, they use Constitution instead of Charisma (which is idiotic even in normal DnD). Wizards do learn certain forms of spells and incantations, but spellcasting in Hekinoe is more about forcing the energy of magic into a certain shape with your willpower, so Wizards use Wisdom instead of Intelligence.

Because there are no Old Ones, demons, or fey in Hekinoe, Warlocks will need a different set of pacts and stuff. Since magic is much less narrowly focused in Hekinoe than in DnD, we'll need to modify spell lists to incorporate all the spells that don't directly reference divine might into the spell selections for the classes. The spells that directly reference divine might will need to go or be altered to fit the Warlock list. Because Sorcerers have bloodlines and traits related to their ancestors who were shaped by the Nel that gave them power, we'll need a different set of sorcerous origins for sorcerers. Wizards will also need some specialty options for Druid and Bard type stuff to go along with their options for specialty school. 

So that's kind of the broad strokes about what I'll need to be doing for this 5th Edition campaign. I may or may not get into the mechanical modifications to magic on the blog here. We'll see. 

Shadowrunning

For those of you that don't know, I currently play in a Shadowrun campaign run by Lance every other Monday night (usually). Shadowrun is a cyberpunk RPG set in 2070. I am a big fan of the cyberpunk genre. When I say cyberpunk, I mean the actual meaning of the word. Characters that are typically working in the shadows or outside the bounds of normal society struggling against a dystopian government or mainstream culture and featuring things like cybernetics and hacking. In the case of Shadowrun, you're shadowrunners, mercenaries with no identities doing espionage for or against the big corporations that refuse to become wageslaves. Shadowrun is special because it injects fantasy into this genre. So you have megacorps being owned by dragons and a crew of shadowrunners composed of magic wielding elves, chromed out trolls, physical adept (magic using monk types) dwarves, as well as hackers and drone users of various races, and so on. It kind of seems a little kitchen sink-like, but it works.

Shadowrun has been around for a while. The first edition came out in 1989. Lance and I and our group play the 5th Edition of the game that came out in 2013. There have been several video games as well. The current crop (Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, and Hong Kong are quite good. There's also Boston Lockdown, but I can't speak to its quality. So it's not DnD with a pedigree going back to the seventies, but it has been around a while. I've gotten my hands on copies of previous editions, but only for the purposes of the lore, so in this post if I refer to mechanics I am speaking only of the 5th Edition of the game.

The game is a skill based classless system similar to GURPS in that you invest far more time in character creation than you do in leveling and your increase in abilities is rather slow and it is skill based and classless and has positive and negative qualities you can add to your character for a points cost. The main mechanic is rolling d6s attempting to achieve a certain number of hits to be considered a success (opening a lock) or meeting or exceeding an opposed roll's number of hits (attacking an enemy and comparing your roll with their defense roll). Hits are a result of 5 or 6 on the d6s. The number of d6s you roll is determined by your skill level, relevant attribute, and gear or qualities you may have that augment it. Your characters and some gear (mainly weapons) also have inherent limits to them. When attacking, your number of hits can't exceed a weapon's accuracy. Certain skills and such can't exceed your physical limit (a calculation based on your physical attributes), mental limit (based on mental attributes), or your social limit (your social attributes). Your attributes are Agility, Body, Strength, Logic, Intuition, Reaction, Willpower, Charisma, Magic, Essence, Edge, and Initiative.

The first thing I want to say is that I have been enjoying playing it with Lance and his associates. Good people and Lance is a good GM. The second thing I want to say is that this system is one of the clunkiest most unnecessarily over complicated rulesets I have encountered in my primarily d20 system focused gaming history. This, coupled with the third thing I want to say, makes it a very frustrating game to play. Oh. The third thing. The rulebooks are some of the most poorly designed I have every fucking encountered in terms of layout, rules clarity, and the separation of background material and rules.

I'm not going to speak about my dislikes of the system, as they could just as easily be my personal likes and dislikes and my d20 system Stockholming coming to the fore, but I would like to talk about a few things I like about the system.

The first is the concept of Essence is it relates to social interaction and cybernetics. Essence is part of the calculation of your social limit. Did I say that already? It tends to stay at 6 or go down and it represents your metahumanity. It's also tied to your Magic attribute, if you have one. One of the primary things that decreases essence is chrome, cyberware. There are high quality versions of cyberware that reduce it less, and there is bioware as well which tends to reduce essence by a smaller amount than its cybernetic equivalent but tends to be vastly more fucking expensive. The gist of this mechanic is that when you replace your skeleton with titanium bones or implant kevlar into your skin or replace your fingernails with razors blades, you lose something of yourself, something hard to define. Something just begins to seem off and inhuman about you and others react to this offness. Thus the impact of Essence on your social limit. If it wasn't obvious, a really shitty social limit is going to prevent you from being an effective talky character. If you can only get one or two hits tops due to your social limit, it doesn't really matter how many handfuls of d6s you are tossing onto the table. 

This makes a lot of sense to me. If your bones are titanium, you're going to move and carry your weight differently. You're not going to react to physical pressures on your body in the same way. You won't be easily shoved and surfaces are going to respond differently to your weight on them than they would flesh and blood bodies. If your eyes are implants, you're not going to need to blink to keep them moist or squint in the sun. If your skin is made of kevlar, it's not going to itch or cause you to slap at mosquitoes and bugs on it. A completely cybernetic limb isn't going to twitch or shift to find a comfortable position because it's asleep and you won't crack your knuckles as a nervous tic. As you pile on the chrome, the comforting little tics and idiosyncrasies of flesh and blood that we rarely notice are going to fade away and since we rarely notice them consciously, we'll just have an indefinable sense of something being off. You might say that having kevlar skin or metal limbs is fairly obvious, but in a cyberpunk setting the chrome itself is not unnatural or weird. It's no different than wearing glasses or walking with a cane would be in our society. Maybe I'm over analyzing it or attributing more to the mechanic of Essence and social limit than the designers were, but it makes a lot of sense to me and it's kind of an elegant way of showing what replacing your flesh with chrome does to you.

The second thing I like is the damage tracks. There are two, physical and stun. Physical is lethal physical damage based on your Body attribute and stun is nonlethal and mental damage based on your Willpower attribute. Shadowrun recognizes that there is a sort of mental hit point value for your character. Both damage tracks have negative effects they inflict on your character as they decrease as well. Which is a big beef I have about DnD. There's no difference in the effectiveness of a character with 1 hit point and one with 100. Shadowrun also doesn't go for overblown hit point sacks. My character, Marius the Elf Street Samurai, only has like nine boxes on his physical damage track. Damage is figured out by the damage value of a weapon and the target making a roll of their Body + their armor's rating. That's a slight simplification, but the gist is that if your weapon's damage exceeds the target's roll, you start marking off boxes.

The third thing I like is the concept of racial minimums and maximums for attributes. This is something I liked about 2nd Edition AD&D as well. The attribute range for humans is 1 to 6. During character creation you start at the minimum for your races and use your attribute points to increase from the minimum. Elves are faster and prettier than humans so that have a range of 2 to 7 for their agility and 3 to 8 for their Charisma. Trolls and orks are big and tough so their racial minimums and maximums are higher for Strength and Body than a human's. This doesn't mean all orks and trolls are tougher and stronger than all humans. But the troll that is a street samurai using melee weapons is probably going to be stronger and tougher than the human or elf street samurai that uses melee weapons. This makes sense. Orks and trolls are big, they can physically support more muscle mass and whatnot than a human or elf can. Elves are slender and graceful, their bodies are naturally able to achieve more agility than a humans, the same way cats are naturally more agile than a cow or dog. Halfling characters in DnD could have a Strength far surpassing that of the average human, even just at character creation, even though they are skinny and half as tall as the average human.

Next up on my list is how Shadowrun does initiative. Just like DnD, initiative is a measure of turn order in combat. It's your Intuition + Reaction +1d6. There are things that can increase your bonus dice and whatnot. The first thing I like is that initiative is based on a physical attribute (your reaction speeds) and a mental attribute (your awareness of your surroundings). I find it odd that Reaction is not folded into Agility like it is in other games, but whatever. So I think it's really neat that the majority of your initiative in Shadowrun is static with only a minor amount of variation. It makes sense, people who react quickly and pay attention to their surroundings and are experienced with seeing when people are ready to kill would statistically, probably maybe, be quicker to react and be ready than people who are not those things. Anyway. So one interesting thing Shadowrun does with initiative is that everyone takes their turn, then they subtract 10 (I think) from their initiative and anyone with an initiative above 0 gets to go again. So instead of gaining additional attacks because class feature or attack bonus, you gain additional attacks and actions for being super fast and stuff. I dig it. Additionally, there are some forms of attack and defense and some special actions you can take that cost you initiative. It's kinda neat. I like it. It makes combat a little bit more fluid and interactive and that sort of thing. 

So. Last thing, the priority system. Originally I found this system incredibly confusing and clunky, but it's actually kind of neat. There are five priorities: A, B, C, D, and E. During character creation you choose your metahuman type (race), magic (which determines your magician type and spells and magic skills), skills, attributes, and resources (cash). You choose things by assigning them a priority. So if you want to have a lot of cash, you assign your resources priority 4 (400,000 nuyen). I tend to like Elf characters because I am partial to brutally quick little characters. Elves are only an option if you choose metatype priority as A, B, C, or D. Elves at priority A are noted as Elf (8), elves at priority D are Elf (0). The number after the parentheses are points you can use to increase your Edge (which is basically luck), Magic, or Resonance. So you can choose a "weaker" race, but augment it with other features. Anyway. It's an interesting system that's less complicated than completely constructing characters from scratch via points values, but is much more reasonable than just mandating all races and classes are equal in power. 

So yeah, there's some stuff I like about Shadowrun and stuff. 

Donovan Yells At Nel (Incomplete)

So this was something I was working on months ago, during an RP where Donovan was yelling at Nel. I got this really amusing image of Donovan hosting a talk show, and this is what came of it. I found it slightly amusing, but I could never really go anywhere in my head with it. But here it is:

Donovan sits on a well upholstered leather chair, its empty twin next to him. The Elduman sits with his legs crossed. He stands. He's wearing a nicely cut grey suit, sapphire cufflinks at his wrists matching his unblinking eyes. Behind him in blocky white letters across a large field of blue is "Let's Talk"

An easy smile crosses his face and he leans towards us.

"Hey," he says.

After a pause, "I'm glad you could join us today. We have a special guest."

He holds a hand up, palm facing us and says, "Which isn't to say that all our guests aren't special. But our guest today is a good friend of mine, one I've known for years, one who's personal story I've been a part of. One I'm proud to be able to give this chance to have his time to speak."

Donovan begins clapping and says, "Fellow Talkers, let's have a round of applause for my friend Eran Jenevan."

::cue off screen clapping track::

Eran steps towards Donovan and wraps his overly numerous digits around Donovan's hand. Donovan places his free hand over the Sereth's and his own and gives it a good strong shake, a pleasant smile beaming on his face. He then gestures at the two chairs and the friends sit.

The Sereth is dressed in a rumpled black suit, he runs his fingers between his neck and collar and there's a slight sheen of sweat on his brow. As we zoom in on he and Donovan, we see burn scars across most of his exposed skin. Eran shifts in his seat several times until Donovan places a pale hand on his knee.

"Hey. I'm glad you could join me today. Thank you for having the courage to share your story with us all today."

Eran clears his throat and mutters mostly to his chest, "Uh, no problem, is there uh water. I'd really like some water."

Donovan moves his hand to Eran's chin and raises the Sereth's head so he's looking forward instead of down at the floor.

"It's ok. You're ok," now looking at us he says, "we're all ok."

::cue off camera clapping track::

Eran's cat eyes flick from Donovan to us and back to Donovan.

He says, "Yeah, ok. Sure. I'm ok. Yeah."

Donovan pats Eran's knee and then clasps his hands in his lap and says, "We sure had some times together, didn't we?"

Eran nods, "Yeah. Some stuff. Things. There were wolves. Undead. Demons. Nobody ever wanted to uh go after the last two and stuff."

Donovan continues, slightly interrupting Eran, "But today isn't about us, it's about you Eran."

He pauses before saying, "Eran, I want you to tell me about the black pyramid."

Eran gulps audibly and says to his chest, "Uh, there were some pirates, one had scars. Uh, two were twins. No one could keep their names straight. Not even, uh, that one guy we don't ever talk about."

Donovan puts a finger to Eran's lips.

"I know it's hard. But we're here for you. You are strong and independent and this is your time."

Eran's eyes zero in on the Elduman's finger on his lips. The Elduman grins apologetically and clasps his hands in his lap again.

"There were uh Sereth bodies all over the place. Old bodies with bows and arrows and stuff. There were ones with guns. Long rifles, newer models and older and stuff. It was weird."

Donovan looks at us, "I can imagine your shock. No one but the pirates knew of Orcunraytrel and you come upon Sereth that had been dead for decades. How did it make you feel? Here."

Donovan faces Eran now and taps a pale finger to the Sereth's chest.

Eran's eyes flick down to his chest as Donovan slowly, almost reluctantly removes his finger and returns the hand to his lap. 

Eran says, "Uhhh..."

Donovan smiles a blinding smile and gives a friendly nod.

"It was uh weird, yeah. Weird."

He gives a nod, looking for confirmation from Donovan. The Elduman nods.

"Weird. But I uh didn't really pay much attention to it. There were illusions, and a trap. Yeah the trap. A wall came flying at me for no reason I could figure out an uh..."

He trails off.

Donovan pipes up, "And Karl..."

"Oh, yeah, it uh knocked Karl into some lava. He was upset about that."

Donovan looks at us and say, "I can understand that, but you were dealing with unfathomable things. How could he expect you to watch your footing while trying to process the presence of your people in Orcunraytrel?"

"Yeah. Sure. That uh yeah, never came up."

Donovan nods several times and Eran does the same, remaining silent as he does so.

"And then..." says the Elduman.

"Oh, well yeah, we killed some shadow statue thing and found this pool of glowing water and then we found a big metal coffin with someone inside and then we killed those twins and then we left."

"What happened then?"

"Well, Gob and uh Karl went all crazy about the writing on the pyramid and stuff. I guess it was kinda like the language the Sereth and Vyanth used before they separated into two races. I didn't even know that was a thing."

"How could you be expected to? These are things from the distant past, and your simple race doesn't write anything down, they just keep oral histories. You couldn't be expected to understand what was to come next."

"Uh yeah. That. I guess uh Gob and Karl uh figured out that the writing was a list of dead and there was more writing. It was like a challenge to Sereth to come and free someone important or something."

Donovan lays a hand on Eran's knee, "Did you suspect then that it was the Briar King within the pyramid?"

Eran shakes his head, "No."

"Go on."

"Well, uh, we uh went in and we opened up the coffin and we found this guy, Andorian. A Nel."

Donovan nods and hisses out, "Yes. A Nel. Then?"

"Well uh, he thanked us for freeing him and stuff and said he was one of the Briar Kings and offered everyone boons. He did stuff to uh you and Karl and made Karrak immortal or something, which we never proved. So you know, for all uh Karrak knows, he's not immortal. No one ever checked. I offered, like thirty times, but he would never let me check."

"We're you shocked or surprised at all? This knowledge of a second Briar King, one who is alive and in front of you no less, on top of discovering your people had been coming to Orcunraytrel for decades. You had to be reeling? Revelation after revelation."

"Nope."

Donovan nods to and leans forward in his seat and takes on a classic thinker's pose as he gazes unblinkingly at Eran. 

"Eran, did Andorian grant you a boon?"

"Uh yeah. He even offered one to Gob."

"What was your boon Eran?"

"I uh told him to go tell my family I was uh ok and stuff."

"Did he have a problem with that?"

"Uh no, not then."

"Not then. Indeed."

"Yeah..."

"Are you ok, Eran? Are you ready to continue?"

"Uh yeah."

"Good," the Elduman puts a hand on Eran's knee, "I want you to stop if it gets to be too much. Ok?"

"Uh yeah."

Donovan sits back in his chair and steeples his fingers before asking, "What happened when you got back to the fort?"

Eran gulps audibly and says, "Well, uh, the Andorian guy kept showing up at the tower."

Donovan smiles sadly, "Eran, you're safe here, this is your time. You can say as much as you want."

Eran mumbles something towards his chest.

"Eran. This. Is. Your. Time. You have the power here. You have the power to face him and all he did to you. You can throw open all the doors, expose everything to the light of day. Or you can leave them as they are. Hidden. Your pain behind locked doors with only you to bear it. We only go as far as you want, Eran. You're in control here. You say what you want to say today."

Eran mumbles more at his chest.

"But say it to our friends."

Eran's cat eyes flick vaguely towards us and then back to Donovan.

"He followed me. Everywhere. He kept asking questions about me, the Sereth, Orcunraytrel. He had so many questions. He wanted to know about what the Sereth had been up to for the past few thousand years. He asked about supernatural creatures in Orcunraytrel."

"Why?"

"I uh couldn't ever figure it out. I mean, why would I know more than him? He'd been there for thousands of years, and we never knew shit about anything. We kept killing Asosans for money and stuff. And boars in the woods. I think. I didn't know anything about supernatural entities. I'm a hunter."

"What was he expecting from you? Did he ever say?"

"He said he wanted my help finding Evandor."

"The other Briar King?"

Eran nods, "Yeah, uh, he said Evandor and he were the Briar Kings. He said Evandor would have followed him to Orcunraytrel when they abandoned the Sereth. He said Evandor liked to play games with mortals and uh he would be hanging around, playing games with them, and uh pretending to be a supernatural creature."

"Would it be safe to say you were stressed out by all the attention Andorian was giving you?"

Eran nods.

Donovan's eyes a brimming with compassion as he reaches out a hand and grips Eran's hand tightly, "Was his attention unwanted?"

Eran's eyes brim with unshed tears as he nods.

"How did you cope with it?"

Eran clears his throat and says, "I uh began uh master debating. Maybe three or four times a day, usually while I was out on patrol, but sometimes in the tower when everyone was asleep. Or awake. Whenever really."

Donovan squeezes Eran's hand and asks, "Did Andorian watch you while you did?"

Eran lets out a sob and nods.

A Wild Dragon Appears!

Hypothetically speaking, let's say four pirate hetero lifebros are wandering around inside the imaginary landscape of a deity's brain hole and they encounter a dragon of all things. The dragon has like a really really good send of smell, and the lifebros can hear the thing coming so nobody is surprised when the pirate bros see the giant lizard burst from the trees into a clearing about ten yards away from them and it in turn sees them.

The four bros have been wandering around in this weird ass place for some time now, so they've all got weapons out and their various special effects popping. The dragon has a basic speed of 8, the Elduman has a 5.25, the Sereth has a 6.25, the sorcerer has a 5.5, and the actual pirate has a 6. So, the dragon goes first, following by the Sereth, the sorcerer, then the Elduman, and finally the actual pirate. 

Round 1

The dragon doesn't know what guns or Elduman or sorcerers are, but it's been around a while and has seen a sword. it doesn't like them. It uses a move maneuver and moves 8 yards towards the pirate. Noticing it is still 2 yards away from dining on man flesh, it uses a move and attack maneuver and moves the last two yards to the actual pirate and bites him. The dragon's Brawling skill is 9 (it's actually 16, but move and attack confers a -4 penalty and the skill level can't exceed 9), and it rolls a 9, so it hits. The actual pirate, being aware of his opponent is like fuck! and tries to twist out of the way. He rolls against his dodge, which is 11 (9 plus one from Enhanced Block: Dodge plus one from his magic ring), and gets a 10, dodging out of the way. The dragon, is peeved by this and attacks with a claw, rolling a 13 against it's Brawling skill of 16. Another hit. Karrak gets a 9 and manages to dodge out of the way. 

The Sereth, lingering about two yards behind the group, decides to take an aim maneuver with his beloved rifle and takes a step back, now being about three yards away from the dragon. His next attack with the rifle will be based off of an effective skills of 24. 

It's the actual pirate's turn, and he has this massive forty foot dragon breathing rotten, caustic breath into his face. Shit. He takes a move and attack maneuver and swings his black short sword into the dragon's snout. He rolls a 10 against his Melee Weapon (Shortsword) skill of 19.(-2 for moving and attacking, +1 for the sword's enchantment, +5 for the dragon's SM), which is a hit. The dragon, being a dragon, doesn't block or parry, it simply jerks its face out of the way of the blade and rolls a 16 against its dodge of 11. That's a fail on the dragon's part. The actual pirate's ST is 10 so his thrust damage is 1d-2 and his swing damage is 1d. The enchantment on the sword improves these to 1d-1 impaling and 1d+1 cutting. The sword itself is responsible for the impaling and cutting stuff, not the enchantment.  The actual pirate's swing does 7 cutting damage. The dragon has thick ass greenish brown scales, and a DR of 21 chews up that damage and spits it out. The dragon has no idea why the actual pirate swatted it on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

The sorcerer, being sorcerous, begins casting a spell. He concentrates and moves away from the dragon (now being about 3 yards from the big lizard). The ambient sorcerous energy of this deity's brain hole appears to be similar to The Known World and the sorcerer has ten energy at his fingertips and his Magery allows him to pour 2 energy into his spell. A smoking ball of incandescent fire glows from within the barrel of the sorcerer's firearm and he rolls an 11 against his skill of 15 with the fireball spell. 

The Elduman takes a concentrate maneuver and steps away from the dragon as it thrashes and bites at the actual pirate. The Elduman is now one yard from the dragon. The Elduman normally has a psionic Energy Reserve of 10, but he activated his Elduman Resilience about 30 seconds ago, so he's down to 9. He burns another 3, bringing him down to 6 and slams psychic crush into the dragon's brain hole. He rolls a 9 against his Will of 9 and "hits" with his psionic power. His Will is actually 10, but psychic crush takes a to hit penalty of -1 per yard from the target you are, just like spells. The dragon attempts to resist this psychic intrusion, and rolls a 10 against his Will of 10 and glares at the Elduman. Since psychic crush is a malediction, the hit/resist stuff is actually a quick contest. To affect the target, the Elduman needs to win the quick contest, so since it's a tie, the dragon successfully resists.

The actual pirate steps back one yard after his ineffective swing and branishes his pistol. Taking an attack maneuver, he rolls against his effective Guns skill of 21. A hit. The dragon rolls a 12 against an 11 on his dodge. The bullet cracks into its scales, 11 damage from the 2d+1 firearm. Doing nothing. The actual pirate drinks heavily as a free action.

At the end of this first second of combat, everyone is still at max hit points. The Elduman is down to 6 points of energy in his energy reserve (but he still has energy in his ring and regular FP to spend) and is one yard from the dragon, the sorcerer is casting his spell about three yards from the dragon and has two energy in it so far. The Sereth is hanging back and getting a seemingly unnecessary bead on the forty foot long lizard.

Round 2

The dragon spits acid at the Elduman and rolls a 6 against his Innate Attack skill of 16. The Elduman tries to dodge and rolls an 11 against his dodge of 9 and takes 13 points of corrosion damage. His Elduman Resilience is up and running, so that slides down to 7 corrosion damage. His clothing has a DR of 1, so that's down to 6 damage. Because it's corrosion damage, the Elduman's clothing is pretty much ruined and won't protect him anymore. The Elduman takes 6 damage, reducing him to 4 HP. He's just taken a major wound (one that did more than half his HP in damage) and he rolls an 11 against his HT of 10. This is a failure and the Elduman falls to the ground, stunned. He can defend himself at -4, but he can't take any actions on round 2 and will make a HT roll at the end of his turn to recover. This continues till he recovers.

The dragon turns its attention back to the actual pirate, now quite pleased with itself. It lunges towards the actual pirate and makes an attack maneuver with its teeth, rolling a 13 against its Brawling of 16, a success. The actual pirate rolls a 14 against his dodge of 11. The dragon rolls 3d and does 15 cutting damage to the pirate. Our actual pirate calls on his Gifts (paying one FP to do so, reducing him to 14) and rolls an 11 against the 11 needed to activate Buffered by the Sky. The 15 cutting damage is reduced by 4 to 11 and then hits his pirate outfit, which I'm assuming is roughly equivalent to leather armor and has a DR of 2, dropping us to 9 hit points of damage. It's cutting damage and the actual pirate has no Injury Tolerance or anything so it gets multiplied by 1.5 to 13 damage and drops him to 0 hit points. He rolls a 4 against his HT of 12 so he isn't dazed or knocked down. Every time you take damage in GURPS, there is something called a shock penalty equal to the damage you take, capping at -4. So the actual pirate will make all his rolls next round at -4 to DX and IQ. Plus, he's taken some damage, so he halves his move and dodge (making them 3 and 6). This is from being at less than 1/3 hit points. For being at 0 hit points he makes a HT roll at the end of every one of his turns unless he takes do nothing maneuvers and makes no active defense rolls. This continues until he is not at 0 hit points. If he fails he passes out. For every full multiple of his HP (-13, -26, -39, etc) into the negatives he gets, he'll make the roll at a -1.

Our dragon still has one attack maneuver left, so he swipes at our actual pirate with a claw and rolls an 8 against his skill of 16. The actual pirate rolls 10 against his adjusted dodge of 6. Several things happen like they did on the last attack with the net result being our pirate takes an another 9 damage, putting him at -9 HP. This changes nothing from the statistics given above.

But wait, there's more. The dragon has a poisonous bite that does stuff. The damage from its bite got through the actual pirate's Damage Resistance, and the Affliction for the venom is a follow-up attack to the dragon's bite, so it automatically hits the actual pirate and he has to make a HT-2 roll. He rolled a 7 against his adjusted HT of 10, so he resists the toxin coursing through his bloodstream. It's probably easier because all of the blood is pouring out of his body instead of lingering in his circulatory system.

The Sereth takes his shot and rolls an 8 against his Guns skill of 22 (16 base, -9 for targeting the eye, +8 from the aim maneuver, +5 for the dragon's SM, +1 for the Weapon Bond perk, and +1 for his bracers) and puts a silenced round into its eye. He deals 27 damage, which manages to punch through the dragon's scales for 6 damage. This blinds the eye (giving the dragon the One Eye disadvantage) and multiplies the damage by 4 for 24 damage, reducing the dragon to 7 hit points. Meaning its move and dodge are halved (4 and 6). The dragon doesn't take the -4 shock penalty due to have High Pain Threshold.

It's our actual pirate's turn again, so he takes move maneuver and pays a FP (reducing him to 13 FP), and moves straight up 3 yards into the air, away from the dragon. Then he rolls a 9 against his HT of 12 and remains conscious.

The sorcerer is up and takes a concentrate maneuver and puts two more energy into his spell (4 total) and casts it through his revolver at the dragon. He rolls a 7 against his Innate Attack skill of 17 (14 base, -3 for distance, +1 for revolver giving him an increased reach, and +5 for the dragon's SM). The dragon rolls an 11 against its adjusted dodge of 6, a hit, and a ball of fire smacks it in the side and deals 18 burning damage, which the thick scales totally rebuff.

The Elduman's turn rolls around and he derps around on the ground, but manages to roll a 7 against his HT of 10 to recover his wits.

At the bottom of the second round, we have the actual pirate at -9 HP and 13 FP. We have the Elduman on the ground looking less dazed and at 4 hit points, the sorcerer feeling some performance anxiety, and the Sereth looking smug.

Round 3

The dragon has one eye now, so he's at -1 DX in combat. So his speed drops to 7.75 (he still goes first), his move drops to 7 and is halved to 4. His dodge is 10 and halved to 5 and his Brawling skill drops to 15.

The dragon makes a move and attack maneuver and charges towards the Sereth and rolls a 9 against his adjusted Brawling of 9 as it tries to bite the bullet slinging fuck in half. The Sereth rolls a 12 against his dodge of 10. Ouchie. The dragon does 6 cutting damage (seriously?! two 1s and a 4? fuck off dice roller app!) which impacts the Hound's hide armor's DR of 4. Eran ends up taking 3 damage (because of the 1.5 multiplier of cutting damage), which reduces him to 9 HP. He looks up at the actual pirate with a confused expression on his face as if to say, "What's the big deal?"

As if feeling some manner of performance anxiety, the dragon seeks to compensate for that display and slashes at the Sereth with its claws. It rolls a 4. Ahem. Well. That would be a critical hit, so the Sereth doesn't get a defense against it. I did not intend for that to happen and I wrote the Sereth's smarminess in before rolling it. So yeah, the dragon rolls 3d on the critical hit table and gets an 11, which is normal damage. That was anti-climactic. So the dragon rolls 3d+1 for its slash and deals 14 cutting damage, which drops to 10 after DR and jumps back up to 15 once it hits flesh. This drops the Sereth to -9 hit points. Oh look, he and the actual pirate can be bleeding their guts out besties.

So now the Sereth has the -4 to DX and IQ shock penalty. He also rolls a 12 against his HT of 12 because he took a major wound (injury equal to 1/2 his hit points or more) and avoids being knocked down and stunned like the Elduman was. Because he's at less than 1/3 of HP, he also halves his move and dodge down to 3 and 6. Because he's at 0 or less HP, he'll have to make a HT roll to remain conscious if he decides to do anything other than a do nothing maneuver on his turn.

With its dominance once more established, the dragon spits a gob of acid towards the actual pirate and rolls a 16 against its adjusted Innate Attack skill of 15 (16 normally, -1 for the actual pirate being 6 yards away).  A miss.

It's the Sereth's turn now so he decides to take a ready maneuver and drink a potion, he also steps back one yard from the dragon. He rolls a 7 against his HT of 12 and remains conscious. The potion (lovingly crafted by the sorcerer healer bro bro) restores 4 hit points, bringing the Sereth up to -5 HP. Wooo!

Planning to essentially do the same thing, the actual pirate rolls an 11 against his HT of 12 and remains conscious to quaff a potion. The potion restores 3 HP, bringing him to -6. He also flies another yard up and away from the dragon.

The sorcerer takes a concentrate maneuver and steps towards the Sereth, poking him in the shoulder with the barrel of his revolver. He draws 4 energy from the sorcerous energy of the environment and rolls a 10 against his skill of 16 with the major healing spell. Because his skill level is so high, the cost drops to 3 and leaves 14 sorcerous energy accumulated around him (10 from concentrating to cast fireball, 10 from concentrating to cast major healing, -4 for fireball, -4 from major healing, +1 refund for skill level from fireball, +1 refund for skill level from major healing). Sorcerous energy hazes around the Sereth and he heals 8 HP, bringing him to 3 HP.

The Elduman still lying on the ground and somewhat leery of drawing the dragon's attention again, pays 3 energy (reducing him to 3 in his reserve) and activates his telekinesis for a minute and grabs a grenade from the actual pirate's belt and hurls it at the dragon from above. The grenade is a special one made by a short one-eyed chemist the group knows, it just explodes when jostled to much. The Elduman rolls a 10 against his effective Throwing skill of 13 (base of 8 for defaulting to DX-3, +5 for the dragon's SM). The dragon, still focused on the actual pirate, sees the shimmering force and the small object, and it rolls a 15 against its dodge of 6 and the grenade smacks it in the back. The grenade explodes, dealing 32 crushing damage to the dragon, which is reduced to 11 points of damage, dropping the dragon to -5 HP.

So at the bottom of the second round, everyone is still kicking and the dragon is down to -5 HP.

Round 4

The dragon, having never encountered the flaming nonsense of a grenade, and never having been injured this much in three seconds of battle before, and being a big animal that is moderately intelligent, and being a figment of the deity's memories, retreats. The group, being somewhat worse for the wear, but not dead, decide to not hunt down the giant lizard in an illusory forest inside a deity's brain space. The actual pirate drinks heavily over the course of several ready maneuvers. 

Breakdown

This is just an example of actual GURPS combat, all the rolls are legit. It was equal parts playtest and educational example. There are a few things to remember though.

The first is that the player characters are made as a translation, not a conversion. I took Pathfinder created characters and translated them the best I could to GURPS. What I mean by this is that in Pathfinder, Psions use Intelligence as their primary statistic, whereas in GURPS, psionics mostly use the Malediction modifier, which bases their powers off of Will. So instead of having a 13 in Will for 15 points, Donovan has an IQ of 13 for 60 points and a Will of 10 for -15 because his Wisdom was 10 in Pathfinder. If Donovan had been built from the ground up in GURPS, he would look differently.

The second thing to remember is that I gave the dragon it's full Damage Resistance on its eye hit location, instead of its Nictitating Membrane DR. This means that Eran's first shot would have done around 80 damage and put the dragon at -49 hit points. Which means a HT save or die, then another one at -62.

The third thing is that a DR of 21 is way the fuck high. If this had been a campaign event, I would have tweaked it so the small caliber revolvers the group carries could penetrate it. If we want to go the "realistic" route, creatures with scales or shells should have the Semi-Ablative, -20% modifier on their Damage Resistance, which would mean that every ten points of damage dealt to the creature reduces its innate DR by 1.

Fourth thing, hand grenades deal explosion damage. This is special because when you total the damage and deal it to the target (if there is one), you then divide it by 3 times the number of yards bystanders are from the explosion site, rounding down. So everyone within one yard of the dragon would have taken 10 crushing damage, everyone within two yards would take 5 crushing, everyone within three yards would take 3 crushing, within four to five yards would take 2, six to ten yards would take 1.

I also didn't muck about with the retreat option for an active defense. If you are attacked with a melee weapon, you can take a step move (basic move/10, but never less than 1 yard) and gain +3 to your dodge defense, but you're are still vulnerable to their close range melee attacks.

I also did not do anything with armor piercing rounds, which the Pathfinder version of the group has access to, which would have given Karrak's revolver a chance of actually damaging the dragon. I also didn't have Karl or Karrak fan hammers or thumb to increase their shots per round (and thus their chances of high damage, though this is only relevant if I had given them armor piercing rounds). If we're being honest, I also fudged the whole psychic crush thing that occurred on the first round because I didn't want to repeat the Pathfinder battle. I also had Eran aim instead of just shooting the dragon on the first round, he had plenty of bonus without the +8. I made these choices because I wanted to give everyone a chance to do something in GURPS.

I also fudged several maneuvers. With Donovan's telekinesis and the grenade I handwaved that Donovan already had it activated in my head (which takes a ready maneuver, just as it should have for Karrak to start walking on air) but it also takes a ready maneuver to pick up an object to throw with telekinesis, so Donovan wouldn't have been able to throw the grenade until the third round. Karrak's Buffered By the Sky also got fudged. I think you can use it in addition to making an active defense like a dodge, but I'm not 100% positive. However, if you use it more than once per round you get a cumulative -4 penalty to it every time you use it after the first. I didn't include the rolls in the second round where he gets dropped from 0 to -9 HP, but reducing his chance to activate Buffered By the Sky would have failed if he had done it with a -4 penalty, which would have put him at -13 HP and forced a HT roll to not die.

This wasn't a totally legit GURPS fight, but it is a much better example than the previous test battle from a few years ago where the Doctor rapid fired lasers at the Robot and reduced him to 0 HP and I thought he was dead. Additionally, I probably forgot a modifier or thirty somewhere in there. I wrote this post in the back of a moving ambulance rattling around on I-75 and using my phone as reference, dice roller, and calculator.