Another week in the life of GURPS

[dr_kromm]

As tradition demands on Friday night, here's the latest dope on GURPS:

• I've finished polishing the final, edited draft of GURPS Action 2: Heroes. All that's standing between it and you is . . . well, a whole laundry list of boring-but-necessary editorial and production steps. But the content is final!

• The GURPS Mass Combat playtest is over. David Pulver is revising even as I type this. Editing this one will be my next task after Heroes.

• There was enough progress on uncontracted and/or unannounced projects to rate a news item of its own, even though I can't share specifics. This week saw a long-awaited hardback come unstalled and start moving toward publication, meaningful creative progress on six contracted-but-unannounced PDFs, an outline for the first PDF in a series of cool PDFs that will save much work done on an ill-fated hardback, and an outline for a long-awaited hardback for late 2009.*

* No, none of these items are GURPS Vehicle Design.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

GURPS Action looks quite promising. Several of my regular players really liked the idea of a campaign about a "consulting criminals" agency who would get hired to pull things out of the soup when ordinary criminals got in over their heads; if I end up running it in my next cycle, this could be exactly the right system for it.

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

Could be! Whenever I watch another movie, I'm wracked with guilt over all the concepts I had to omit (argh!). Neverthless, it's fairly comprehensive. Without regard for the scope of the individual sections, here's an alphabetical list of topics that got at least a heading and a paragraph, if not several pages and their own system:

• Arson
  
• Assistance Rolls
  
• Auto Theft
  
• Bodyguard Duty
  
• Bomb Disposal
  
• Breaking In (fences, locks, doors, glass, etc.)
  
• Chases (a very quick, very dirty system that I suspect die-hard vehicle geeks will hate)
  
• Checkpoint Security
  
• Cleaning (as in corpse disposal and fake evidence)
  
• Code-Cracking
  
• Combat (simplified options, additional extra-effort rules, new cinematic combat rules, banter, etc.)
  
• Communications
  
• Cover-Ups
  
• Demolition
  
• Duty
  
• Enemies (mooks, henchmen, and bosses)
  
• Escape (prisons, restraints, etc.)
  
• Fake ID
  
• Hacking
  
• Impersonation
  
• Insertion (the parachutes-and-scuba variety)
  
• Interrogation
  
• Lifts and Pulls
  
• Medical Attention
  
• Parkour
  
• Patrols and Watches (setting and evading)
  
• Planning
  
• Polygraphs (operating and deceiving)
  
• Psy-Ops
  
• Records (searching, falsifying, and so on)
  
• Repairs
  
• Sabotage (from cutting power to wrecking machines)
  
• Safecracking
  
• Searches (of premises, vehicles, and people)
  
• Security Systems (defeating and operating)
  
• Social Engineering (40 flavors thereof -- quite a big section)
  
• Standard Operating Procedures
  
• Stealth
  
• Surveillance (bugs, cameras, microphones, tracking devices, etc.)
  
• Teamwork
  
• Traps (setting and defeating)
  
• Travel
  
• WMD (mainly defusing them!)

Individual sections have lots of short, squibby rules at the level of subheadings and italic lead-ins. That is, it parallels the treatment in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2.

As far as "criminal teams" movies go, some of my recent inspirations were Heat, The Italian Job, Layer Cake, Ocean's Eleven, Sexy Beast, and The Usual Suspects -- with nods to less-serious fare like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. But I won't deny that loner or near-loner movies influenced specific role depictions just as much: Collateral, Léon, and Lucky Number Slevin for assassinations; Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair for thefts; Lord of War for wheeler-deeler criminal enterprise; the idiotic-but-fun Shoot 'Em Up for over-the-top gunplay; The Transporter for driving and chasing; and A History of Violence for general criminality. In fact, just about all I pointedly avoided was "these crooks are just crazy" flicks such as Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers. I have no idea how much that tells you, but now you know.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I've seen a lot fewer; I'll have to watch some on your list. One of my mental models for this genre is a much older film, The Hot Rock, which I think is a minor classic—but of course it's a mostly humorous treatment. The real issue for me is going to be how to put together a story that calls for a crew with disparate specialties to work together. The nominal campaign frame, "consulting criminals," would seem to call for mostly solo scenarios, which would get dull if they were more than an occasional change of pace. On the other hand, my Transhuman Space campaign had an investigative team made up of a computer hacker, a face, a forensic account, a lab worker, and a muscle/street op, and they managed to find reasons to work together. So I think solutions are possible; I just don't have a general theory of how to reach them.

My previous barber and I used to chat about movies, and I watched Léon on his recommendation. Now there was a winner! The chemistry between Reno and Portman was as good as I've ever seen.

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

I've seen a lot fewer; I'll have to watch some on your list.

Be warned that not all of the movies I named are good movies, in the sense of cinema as art! What recommends them is that they contain something useful for action gaming -- perhaps as little as a 90-second scene, a nifty background character, or a few lines of cute dialog. You're a big fan of books . . . I'm like that about movies. I'll watch dozens before I write a game supplement, and I'll deliberately include good, bad, and ugly influences in there.

The real issue for me is going to be how to put together a story that calls for a crew with disparate specialties to work together.

If you mean "How do I justify this as a premise?", you have a few options. You can simply not try, and ask your players to suspend disbelief as part of your gaming-table contract . . . which, all told, is what Hollywood does most of the time. You can borrow a page from The Usual Suspects or Ocean's Eleven, and have the group engineered, whether by a behind-the-scenes string-puller or a face man whose shtick is "knows everybody." Or you can turn to real life and acknowledge that prisons toss crooks together irrespective of their crimes, giving them ample opportunity to exchange skills and contact info -- a cynical-but-accurate interpretation.

If you mean "How do I make a campaign interesting and challenging to the players of extremely diverse crinimal archetypes"?, the GURPS Action series will probably help you. The first PDF sketches out several campaign frames and gives each archetype a series of possible backgrounds motivations. The second has rules for all manner of criminal activity, explicit advice on keeping everybody useful, and even more detail on those campaign frames.

My previous barber and I used to chat about movies, and I watched Léon on his recommendation. Now there was a winner! The chemistry between Reno and Portman was as good as I've ever seen.

I love that movie. All told, I'm no fan of the "assassins as heroes" movement in Hollywood. As a rational person, I know that killing other humans degrades the killer's sanity and humanity, and that the choice to kill repeatedly not for passion or patriotism, but simply for lucre, isn't one that's chosen by well people. But inasmuch as I can set aside my disbelief for a good movie, this movie takes the prize. Reno manages to portray a hit man who isn't mentally healthy and who is likeable not because he's in a pleasant line of work but because he has charming foibles and a cute sidekick who has enough damage of her own to view a hit man as a suitable mentor and guardian.