GACKS: Week 11 and GURPS BrOSR Flaws
First, let’s list the SEEN posts for the last week, then quickly discuss what happened, and then I will have a lot to say about what needs to be done for the game to run more smoothly.
Good for What Ales You
Dwarves thirsty for a drink have been turned away from the Beer Beard tavern! Every dwarf on the street knows this is an attempt to create what scholars call "Artificial Arse-ity" and hike up beer costs for honest-working dwarves.
Thyhalera Open for Business!
A weekly market is announced with an area dedicated to trading near city walls. All kinds of craftsmen, hunters and traders can now peddle their wares in the city, tax free! Long live free trade! Bring your products and slaves for sale in Thyhalera!
Trade area is 090.040
Visitors are subject to non intrusive security checks and are guarded by fainil militia.
Wolves and Wolfmen
A party of tall canine-like humanoids has been spoted in forests west of Thyhalera. They were accompanied by a pack of wolves.
Mysterious Figures in Shimmerleaf Woods
Figures in dark hoods have been spotted on the northern edge of Shimmerleaf forest.
Signs in the Forest
Weary traveller in a tavern tells that he had seen man-made signs north of Shimmerleaf forest
Steelwing Company Offer
The Steelwing Company begins to actively promotes itself as the merchant company for adventurers.
Our merchants operate in Or-Tabram, Mossgrove, Balyrd, Wolfhome, Shimmerleaf, and Thyhalera, and adventurers from anywhere are welcome to do business with us.
Steelwing will pay the best prices for recovered treasure, but we are especially interested in purchasing the things other merchants might ignore or pass up, including:
- Maps and dungeon sketches
- Books, journals, ledgers, letters, and historical documents
- Magical items and relics
- Rare monster parts, herbs, ores, and unusual materials
- Any object with historical, magical, scholarly, or commercial value
In addition to buying and selling, Steelwing offers secure merchant banking. Adventurers may deposit coin or bullion with any Steelwing office and withdraw those funds from any Steelwing operation, making it unnecessary to travel with large sums of wealth.
Steelwing also offers an Inheritance Guarantee. Every account holder may designate an heir to inherit their deposits in the event of their death. To honor the patronage of our customers, Steelwing will add a 10% Patronage Bonus, up to a maximum of 1,000 gp, before releasing the funds to the designated heir.
The Fall of Wolfhome
An army of orcs, ogres, demons, and night flyers attacked the barbarians of Wolfhome at night. Due to the cultural distaste for walls, Sky Riders had only meagre defensive measures in the form of traps and bonfires. Some of the adventurers were seen participating in battle, with one falling to a fainil lance, and some were coordinating the evacuation of the civilians. Due to Gnoll's Bane falling to a lightning bolt launched by a fainil warmage, the barbarian defensive forces were sent into a full rout. The forces of darkness now occupy Spiderhome (formerly Wolfhome), and survivors and refugees will soon arrive to Or-Tabram, unless they fall to gnolls or whatever other dangers lurk along the road.
Spiderhome Rises
The vile Council of Wolfhome falls! Allied Thyhaleran, Clan Uggrit forces join Chief Nyvor Stormrunner in liberating the oppressed barbarian tribes! City is renamed to "Spiderhome" to gain the favor of the Great Spider Spirit. Orcs, ogres, fainil and barbarians feast together in the great hall, repurposed as a clan hall and mercenary base for all the allied forces. Bright future awaits this reorganized tribe.
A Promise of Shelter
A placard placed beside the tavern door, and one on a pole outside the city gates, state that Beer Beard tavern opens it's doors to refugees. The 3 copper coin entry fee to Or-Tabram will be covered and a week of shelter with a roof will be provided free of charge."
Comments on Faction Actions
Last week, two previously NPC factions became player-controlled. But the highlight was an attack on Wolfhome that resulted in the fall of the latter. The confrontation resulted in one of the major player-controlled faction dissolving. Some of the PCs who were in Wolfhome at that time also participated in the battle, and three of them were slain, with the rest managing to flee along with the civilians. Having your character die “off-screen” between the sessions is something unusual for 99% players, but my players seemed to take it well enough. That’s good! There’s been some other non-public action going on with some quite ridiculous convergences happening due to seemingly inconsequential at the time player actions from a month ago or so.
Also, zone of truth is a lame spell.
GURPS BrOSR Flaws - What needs to be done
The more we play this game, the more I realize that there’s still a lot that needs to be done to provide a smooth experience. As of now, the game feels like a raw alpha version (known nowadays as “early access”).
As you know, GURPS isn’t a ready-to-play game, but a game engine. To play a GURPS game, you have to design a GURPS game first. While GURPS Basic Set contains pretty much everything you need for a conventional game, GURPS has dozens of splatbooks that expand the options, provide new rules (that may or may not be inconsistent with previously established rules - you have to figure that our yourself), etc. Rules are aplenty, but there is a dearth of procedures.
Initially, I believed that importing procedures from ACKS II would make it better, but it was only partially true. Yes, some procedures worked wonderfully, such as the random encounters, wilderness exploration, etc., but certain other procedures creates such a messed up spiderweb of rules that no sane person would be able to make sense of them on the fly. Sure, I do have an idea of how things should work (and even then I make mistakes and/or forget some things), but players aren’t mind readers! What a surprise! Thus, I get lots of orders that I need to resolve myself, because the players don’t know how they should be resolved. The workload on me as the only referee increases, and nowadays I find it that sometimes I just don’t have enough free time in the evening to resolve the backlog of orders. That’s why I temporarily stopped accepting new players.
Thus, the referee is the bottleneck of the game, but this problem can be solved. Now I understand completely some of the decisions behind Serious DM’s rules for his Shattered Skies/Drakonheim game, and I agree with them fully. Most actions, including some of the seemingly simple ones that shouldn’t deserve much attention, must have clearly written step-by-step procedures that tell the player how to resolve an action without the referee (or with minimal interaction with the latter). The referee should be the referee, not the Gamemaster. The more arbitrary decisions that I make, the more I nudge the campaign towards an untimely demise.
The procedures that I wrote up (i.e. stole from ACKS) are mostly concerned with the adventurers - random encounters, exploration, etc. I had only a vague idea of what kind of procedures one would need as a domain leader, because I had no experience running a game with factions and domains. Theorycrafting can get only only so far - you need some hands-on experience to understand all this. Now I do have some experience, and I understand what needs to be done - I have a clear goal to work for. Content-wise (monsters, spells, equipment, etc.) I’m doing good for the most part (more on that later), but procedure-wise - not so much.
So, I’ll have to write step-by-step procedures for factions and for adventuring parties that interact with said factions. Judging by the questions posed by players, these procedures are very much necessary, as they are (rightfully) confused by even some simple things as buying or selling stuff. Construction projects, troop training, hiring mercs or henchmen, scouting - all this crops up frequently.
Thus, I have the following list in mind:
Buying as a faction/character
Selling as a faction/character
Crafting as a faction/character
Organizing expeditions as a faction (logistics and supply!)
Identifying enchanted items
Improving domain’s revenue
Population increase/decrease
Construction projects
Levying militia or conscripting troops
Training troops (to improve their skill or give them new skills)
Training characters
Earning character points as a character/faction leader
Establishing trade routes
Smuggling
Spying
Reconnaissance
Pillaging and looting
Appendix B for the Underdark
And the list goes on and on. Some procedures might need two time scales - realistic and cinematic. The cinematic scale could be used with 1:1 time, where waiting four months for your troops to be trained would not be feasible, and realistic scale could be used with, for example, 1:7 time. Fortunately, ACKS II can prove a framework for many of these, but they still need to be adapted to GURPS to take into account all the various skills and that sort of stuff. In addition, some of these (#9, #16, #17) need to be married to GURPS Mass Combat to function properly.
Speaking of GURPS Mass Combat. While it did prove to be a good way to abstractly play out battles, certain problems appeared. First, the reconnaissance procedure is lacking, as I mentioned in the previous post. Second, due to the very same reconnaissance procedure, it requires referee input. The actual battle resolution doesn’t really need that. It’d be nice to have a way for the players to resolve the battle completely without me, and just sending me the results.
The formula that I use to calculate Battle Ratings of creatures should be reworked (I’m already in the process of doing that), because it produces strange results. The current formula is basically the ACKS formula, but the actual play experience showed that it’s not a very good fit for GURPS. Some troops that are actually pretty bad in regular combat (for example, regular ogre tribesmen) are excessively good in mass combat. Flying troops have extremely high BR too.
GURPS Mass Combat also could use some minor tweaks. When calculating troop class superiority, even a single creature of a certain class can give you a whopping +3 if the opponent has no creatures of that class. For example, a lowly quasit who cannot really fight effectively, will give you a +3 over an entire army of ground troops regardless of its size. (Edit: Disregard this, I’m blind. There IS a requirement of the troops of a particular class being at least 1% of the enemy’s total Troop Strength)
Many of the listed procedures are also tied to the domain economy. AD&D is not an economy simulator, but GURPS and, to a larger extent, ACKS II can somewhat be that. How far should we go? ACKS II domain economy is actually quite simple for the most part and requires a very simple spreadsheet. GURPS, however, can complicate things further, but do we want that? I doubt that tracking how many tons of food you produce per month, how many tons of stone you have, etc. is something many players want (although, I’ve seen at least several people claim that they do.) However, I’ve had multiple players complain that it’s unclear what and how many resources they have aside from money. Cutting off supply of certain resources or fighting for some kind of scarce resource can create conflict that fuels the campaign, so this is something I’d like to account for. A semi-abstract approach should be better in this case, in my opinion, where, for example, if your domain has a quarry, then you have enough stone for most mundane stone wares and 1 abstact unit of stone that does not accumulate every month that can be spent on some kind of construction project (stone walls, for example.) This in turn would require me to come up with a procedure for prospecting and exploiting the resources found, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.
On the adventurer/party level, tracking exact amounts of resources still could be interesting, so I should keep in mind some kind of conversion between these abstract units and actual measurements. (Or not? I’m still not sure.)
All this is tied to one content problem that I brought up a long time ago, but that became apparent during the game. GURPS sorely lacks prefab structures. Of course, that’s something that is basically useless in a conventional game, but here it’s very much required. You simply cannot use the construction rules from GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 every time you want to build something. One needs to use these rules to create a catalog of prefab buildings, so the player can go “I spend $X and Y weeks to build a walled outpost. Done.” ACKS II has prefab buildings. AD&D 1e has prefab buildings. D&D 3.0 of all things has prefab buildings (Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook is a fantasic book and so is Mongoose Publishing’s Book of Strongholds & Dynasties). GURPS doesn’t. We simply need to take these as examples and recalculate the costs and times via GURPS rules. That’s simple, time-consuming, but worth it in the end.
This rant might seem all doom and gloom, but the intent is actually the opposite. I know what the problem is and I know what needs to be done to fix it. I just need some time and brainpower. Fortunately, I should be away for almost the entire September on a work trip where I should have a lot of free time to devote to working on this.
Even in this raw, unfinished state, this campaign is the best TTRPG experience I’ve ever had. Can you imagine how good it is going to be once all the kinks are ironed out?
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