Difficult Terrain and Bad Footing - What a Mess!

Difficult Terrain and Bad Footing - What a Mess!

Don’t you hate it when fights happen on a featureless plane where you can retreat endlessly? Many outdoor environments aren’t as easy to traverse as just walking from one room to another, and fighting is even more difficult! Have you ever been in a forest? On a beach? Does it snow where you live? Such difficult terrain makes positioning and movement much more important in combat, and consequently makes it more fun. So, let’s talk about the difficult terrain rules and try to consolidate them in one place, because, oh boy, they are all over the place.

GURPS Basic Set doesn’t have much about difficult terrain and bad footing. Page 387 has a box about movement costs, separating difficult terrain into obstructions and bad footing. Now we know that minor obstructions slow you down. The examples are quite interesting as well, because I don’t think the book mentions anywhere else that to enter an ally’s hex or a hex with a body on the ground costs an extra movement point. As for severe obstructions, “several bodies” could’ve been more concrete. How many? Because that question may come up in combat, and it did come up in my games before. Also, there is nothing about the size modifier of the moving creature and the body of the creature. There is a lot of room for improvement here, if you don’t want to decide arbitrarily every time it comes up.

 

As for terrain that is considered bad footing, we have mud, waxed floors, stairs, and shallow water (no more than 1/6 your height). All these require more movement points to move through. But is that it? If we look at the combat modifiers list at the end of the book, we will see that attacks, both melee and ranged, take a -2 penalty or more from bad footing, and active defenses take -1 or more. But is that it? If we check the Terrain Adaptation advantage, we’ll see that it removes Move and DX penalties for one specific unstable terrain type. This seems to imply that there are some DX penalties involved here that apply not only to attack and defense rolls. But that’s actually it for GURPS Basic Set. These rules are all over the place, and they aren’t really comprehensive.

 

Speaking of Terrain Adaptation, while it’s fresh on the mind, I’ll say that there are four additional forms of it that can be found in other books. Terrain Adaptation (Swamp) can be found in GURPS Horror. Terrain Adaptation (Clouds) can be found in GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves. Terrain Adaptation (Jungle) can be found in Pyramid #3-95. Terrain Adaptation (Underwater) can be found in GURPS Martial Arts: Yrth Fighting Styles. Unlike all others, it costs 10 points, not 5 points.

 

There is also a perk version of this advantage called Sure-Footed. Unlike Terrain Adaptation, it only removes combat penalties, not the Movement and DX penalties. GURPS Power-Ups 2: Perks has the following terrain types for this perk, implying that the same ones can be used for Terrain Adaptation – ice, sand, slippery, snow, uneven, and water. Interestingly enough, Sure-Footed (Water) works in water no more than waist-deep, which seems far from 1/6 of your height from GURPS Basic Set. GURPS Aliens: Sparrials also has Sure-Footed that applies to tree branches. Remember the stability trait from the D&D dwarf race? I represent it with the Sure-Footed (Uneven) perk.

 

Also, there are two other perks that do the same thing – High-Heeled Heroine and Naval Training. Apparently, high heels and a rocking ship deck also are considered bad footing. Let me go full Quentin Tarantino here. The High-Heeled Heroine perk description says that you can run, climb, and fight while wearing high heels without suffering any special penalty for bad footing. In effect, you have a form of Sure-Footed. However, Sure-Footed doesn’t eliminate the movement penalties, and this perk seems to imply that it does. Perhaps, there should be a Terrain Adaptation (High Heels) advantage then to make it consistent.

 

Now that I think about it, do different types of bad footing stack? For example, would a slippery staircase impose a -4 to attacks and -2 to defense? Would wearing high heels increase it to -6 and -3 respectively? I think that’s a fair assumption.

 

But still, we haven’t found the answer to what DX penalties the Terrain Adaptation advantage was talking about. What’s wrong with you, GURPS? I managed to find an answer in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures. It says that a -2 penalty is applied to DX rolls to remain standing, and Acrobatics and Jumping rolls. Pyramid #3-95 expands it a little bit by including all full-body DX-based skills, such as Dancing.

In addition, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16 says that slopes are often bad footing, and moving up or down a slope costs +1/2 movement point per hex, or +1 per hex for steep slopes.

                The book also has a passage about fighting on slippery footing, such as ice or wet rocks. In combat, the GM may require you to make a DX-2 roll after each attack or defense roll. Perfect Balance gives +4. Failure means that you fall down, and have to make two successful DX-2 rolls in a row to stand back up. I think that a DX-based Survival (Arctic) would work here as well, if we are talking about ice.

The passage also mentions “environments that allow a generic DX roll (e.g. walking rather than skating on ice).” But where did that come from? It seems that something like this should be in GURPS Basic Set, but it’s definitely not there. And it’s not in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16 either. The only place that talks about it is, surprisingly, GURPS Magic. The Ice Slick spell covers a patch of ground with a sheet of ice. However, the mechanics are actually different from the aforementioned bad footing! All melee attacks and active defenses are at -3, while other physical skills and ranged attacks are at -2. This is very different. In addition, anyone attempting to walk or run across an ice slick must roll against DX-2 for every yard of distance. If he fails, he falls. The spell says “He may, with another DX-2 roll, attempt to stand on his next turn.” What does that mean? Does it take two Change Posture maneuvers, but only one DX-2 roll? Or do you fall on your knees, and not prone? This is unclear.

                The Grease spell works similarly. However, it has clearer wording. “Another DX-2 roll is necessary to stand up (but not to sit or kneel).” This implies that you do indeed fall prone, but have to take two maneuvers to stand up. All other effects are the same.

                Speaking of Grease, let’s check its Sorcery version. It differs from its Magic version in that all the penalties are equal to -2, and that you have to roll against DX-2 when moving only once per turn, not once per yard, which is a huge difference. Also, you may elect to move slower to gain a bonus And a critical failure causes 1d-2 injury to a randomly chosen limb. Personally, I’d make it a random hit location, not a random limb. You can bump your head, after all.

                But do you want me to confuse you even more? Let’s go back to the third edition and open GURPS Russia. Russia has snow and ice, right? The pdf that I’ve got is barely legible on the relevant pages, so forgive me if I make any mistakes here. For the most part, it seems that these rules are identical to the Ice Slick spell from GURPS Magic, which is no surprise, as that book has been basically ported from 3e with barely any changes, but has a new addition – if you walk slowly, that is at Move 1, then you only need to make an unpenalized DX roll every two minutes to avoid falling. There are also rules for advanced skating combat, but that’s not something I want to include in this post.

                Speaking of ice and other slippery surfaces – such terrain enables a new movement option – skidding. While it does appear in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons, the more detailed rules for them can be found in GURPS Martial Arts. The only thing that I can add is that GURPS Action 5: Dictionary of Danger lets you use Sports (Ice Hockey) instead of Skating or DX for this purpose.

               

                All right, we figured out, at least we sort of did, the ice rules, but what about snow? So far, we only know that it imposes all the normal bad footing penalties. But have you ever walked through snow? Your speed greatly depends on the depth of snow, and when it becomes deep enough, the +1 movement point cost increase starts to feel very underwhelming. Unfortunately, the fourth edition of GURPS is absolutely silent on this topic. However, let’s go back to GURPS Russia from the third edition! This book suggests treating each inch of snow as extra 5 pounds of encumbrance, which sounds fair, if I had to speak from my personal experience. However, this does require some extra calculations, and if you’d like to avoid that, you can just make gradations of snow depth – shallow snow imposes +1 to movement point cost, medium snow imposes +2, and deep snow imposes +3, or something like that.

 

                Speaking of depth, let’s go back to the topic of fighting and moving in water. As was said in GURPS Basic Set, water up to 1/6 of your height counts as bad footing. Sure-Footed (Water), for some reason removes penalties for water no more than waist-deep. Let’s check the most comprehensive aquatic resource – Pyramid #3-26. It does say that water up to 1/6 of your height counts as bad footing, just like GURPS Basic Set, but also expands these rules a bit. Water deeper than this reduces you to Move 1. However, if you have the Cannot Float quirk, then you suffer a reduced penalty, deep water imposes +2 movement points to the movement cost instead of simply reducing you to Move 1.

                GURPS Action 5: Dictionary of Danger also mentions that even without waves, water can make surfaces slippery, creating additional bad footing. Also, there are rules for waves sweeping people overboard and bashing them against the rocks.

 

                Now that ice, snow, and water are out of the way, we have another terrain feature that comes up incredibly often in games, but the rules for them, yet again, are spread all over the place. I’m talking about undergrowth and other dense vegetation.

                First of all, let’s check out one of the relatively obscure books that I actually like a lot – GURPS Magic: Plant Spells. This book introduces the concept of Density of Vegetation. There are four density classes – Sparse, Normal, Dense, and Impenetrable. Sparse vegetation doesn’t penalize you in any way. If you are running through Normal vegetation, roll every 100 yards against the better of DX or DX-based Running to avoid tripping and falling down. Dense vegatation imposes a -2 penalty to ranged attacks due to cover. While walking, roll against DX every 50 yards, and you may fall if you fail critically. If you are running, use the rules for Normal density, but at -2. Additionally, certain characteristics are modified: +3 to Stealth, +2 to Camouflage, -2 to Move, and -2 to Vision rolls. Impenetrable vegetation cannot be walked through by SM+0 creatures. There also are guidelines for adjusting the effective vegetation density level for your Size Modifier, which is very nice. These rules were slightly expanded in Pyramid #3-95 to include more detailed sensory penalties.

                But yet again, this is not the only set of rules for vegetation. GURPS Action 5: Dictionary of Danger has different rules. Thick vegetation, like something you like find in the jungles, counts as bad footing. Running at Move 3 or higher requires a DX-2 roll each turn to avoid tripping and falling. Extremely dense vegetation entangles you with ST 8 or higher, but you usually don’t move into such vegetation voluntarily. In addition, some plants might have thorns, spikes, or serrated leaves that might deal damage to the entangled victim and possibly poison him as well.

 

                As for the rest of terrain types that provide bad footing, such as uneven surfaces, stairs, corpse piles, pebbles, sand, mud, I haven’t found any specific rules, so I assume that they simply impose bad footing, and that’s it.

 

                And that’s it. As you can see, you would expect something like bad terrain to have clearer rules, as this is something that comes up very often and is important, but the rules are all over the place, and have many inconsistencies. This was one of the most difficult topic to research, but I am glad that I managed to consolidate everything in a single place. Now, I just have to decide how some of the terrain types, such as undergrowth and ice, will work in my games, because rules are a inconsistent. What’s wrong with you, GURPS? This once again proves that while GURPS does have rules for everything, the organisation and presentation suffer a lot. Something like a Rules Compendium would’ve been great.