cyst13

Nolgroth, One solution I can think of for the "I want to be a ship's captain/engineer" syndrome is to let them have their way. But instead of giving them a spaceship, give them an airship or watership and let them move around on the planet. After all, the vast majority of terrestrial captains and engineers never leave the atmosphere. Also, I wonder how much your players really want those occupations. Are they simply conforming to genre expectations the way that fantasy players "want" to be a thief or cleric because they haven't really considered the range of options? As for the level of detail necessary in developing one world as opposed to many, you're right. I mainly run historical games and the amount of information available detailing imperial China far outweighs that of the Trek or Star Wars milieu. However, it's also true that building even a single city can be more laborious than an entire galaxy, depending upon the level of detail you lavish upon it. For the most part, though, restricting the game (at least to start) to a single planet clears you of a lot of headaches. You don't have to reimagine the physics of different gravity masses, atmospheric compositions, star types, and all the other bazillion details that go in to creating a unique planetary environment. Once you set the intial parameters for your home world, you can relax. You've got the frame set up. All you have to do at that point is write-up 6-12 billion character sheets with balanced point totals and you're rarin' to go.

Your theory of body count exaggeration is certainly valid for the casualty statistics coming out of the US military at the time of the conflict. However, it's been nearly thirty years since the end of the war and historians have had the opportunity to compare those statistics with the records kept by the Vietnamese. It is true that there is no precise number. Vietnam was (and still is) a low tech agrarian nation with a divided government and little bureaucratic tradition. But simply comparing the census (which is done for taxation purposes) from before and after the war will give a rough estimate of how many people died in that period. Then you have to control for the normal birth and death rate and make decisions about whether people who died of malnutrition because the war kept them from harvesting their crops are war casualties and similar judgements. Our current lack of a civilian casualty rate in Iraq shows how difficult it can be to determine a number, especially when some people really don't want to know the number. Ambiguous as this question may be, though, what is unequivocal is that many more Vietnamese died as a result of the US invasion than would have if we had not invaded.

One way of dealing with the "have starship, will travel" problem is to not give the PCs a starship. I mean just think about how incredibly expensive an interplanetary starship has got to be. I can't see any reason why you should have to hand one over to a green PC group. Instead, keep them on their home planet long enough to get used to each other and their surroundings. Once they get the itch to travel, let them purchase passage on somebody else's ship. That way, you know where they are headed and you only have to deal with creating that one destination. If this option seems overly restrictive to you, keep in mind that the starting planet does not have to be isolated from the rest of the sector. You can have millions of aliens passing through on a regular basis. Which would give the players an opportunity to play alien PCs without the necessity of owning their own ship.

Good point about the combat incidents. However, as you mentioned in an earlier post, the Viet Cong primarily fought hit and run battles, engaging full scale only when they felt confident of success. So I don't know whether your reasoning would apply to that situation. Again, this is something I'd actually have to research in order to proffer a real opinion. As far as the Vietnam Vets go, I certainly wasn't trying to single them out for blame. I only referred specifically to them because that's what your campaign is about. No army in the history of warfare has had a monopoly on war attrocities. I can understand you not wanting to deal with that in your campaign. It is an unpleasant subject. But, then again, the entire war was unpleasant all around (gross understatement). This touches on the issue of whether war is a suitable subject for entertainment. Since you've read books like Roll Me Over, I'm not assuming you're one of those pumped-up jocks who think it would've been so cool to run around the jungle blowing away gooks. I've met a number of guys like that in my life, though. I wonder how much RPGs or movies or books that focus strictly on the combat aspect of war while ignoring the social costs contribute to the attitude that war is fun. Again, I'm not accusing you of contributing to this. I've played in a number of war games myself and I love combat oriented boardgames. It's just that after having lived through the recent build-up to the Iraq invasion and listening to my fellow Americans accuse the French of being surrender monkeys because they wanted to wait and see if Iraq really did have WMDs before invading, I can't help but feel that many people in this country simply are not capable of imagining what it must be like for the people who live in a war zone. Whatever course you choose to take with your game, I wish you all the best.

If you want a form of life support that only works partially rather than absolutely, you could simply buy the normal life support with a limitation defining it the way you desire.

I'm not certain what the term "lower incidence of combat" means. How could the US have a lower number of combat incidents than the people they were fighting? Perhaps this is a number relative to the total number of soldiers in either army? The recent documentary "The Fog of War", in which Errol Morris interviewed Robert McNamara, quoted the statistic that the Vietnamese casualties were between two and four million. That's a number range that I've read in other sources as well. If the NVA was engaged in less combat than the US forces overall, that would seem to indicate that the vast majority of the above quoted Vietnamese casualties were civilians. I don't know how this relates to your game at all. What with Senator Kerry's testimony about war crimes being rehashed in the press, this is something I've been thinking about recently. It's truly horrific to contemplate just how many human beings lost their lives in a war with no legitimacy (on the US side). Speaking of Kerry, an interesting take on your campaign might be to take your players out of the war after a while. Their tour is up and they get rotated home. How do they deal with the political situation at home? Do they become anti-war protestors? Do they work for the FBI trying to suppress domestic dissidents? Do they become so disillusioned with civilian life that they re-up for a second tour (as many did)? Even while in Vietnam your campaign can deal with many political aspects. Under Nixon, the CIA was helping to fund the war by selling heroin to GIs. Is there any drug abuse in the PC platoon? Is there any interpersonal rivalry that could lead to a fragging (ala Platoon)? Have any of the soldiers committed crimes against civilians? If so, how has this affected the dynamics within the platoon? R&R back in Saigon could also present some good character development opportunities. How do the PCs interact with the locals? These are just some thing I had on the tip of my brain. Take them for what they're worth. Best of luck to you, and good gaming.

I've also heard many vets say that keeping M-16s combat ready was a real pain in rainforest terrain. Those guns have to be immaculate to work. You could build this as a limitation. Either as jammed/burnout, as somebody above suggested, or as "requires daily maintainence". Perhaps you could require Ego rolls to see whether the PCs maintain their guns on a regular basis or say they jam if they trip in a swamp. One suggestion I would have on lengthening your firefights is to make the combat in real time. At SPD 2, a PC gets one action/6 seconds. In a real 15 min. firefight, most of that time is spent behind cover attempting to ascertain the situation via enemy positions. In game combats, players spend a great deal of non-game time conferring about what to do. If you say "SPD 2!" and none of your players say what they do for six seconds, they just spent their phase. If you are playing on a battlemat, make sure the players can't see anything more than the PCs can see. If there are well hidden snipers, don't put them on the map until the PCs make a successful Per. roll. Also, if you plan to play any further war campaigns in the future, I think you should give some serious thought to having the PCs be non-Americans. While I don't wish to belittle the experience and sacrifices of any U.S. GIs who served in Vietnam, the reality is that it was an exceptional time for them. Most only spent one year there and then returned (if they were able). For the Vietnamese, this was their life. Their tour of duty lasted the entire war, and even once it was over they had to deal with the enormous aftermath (2-4 million dead, dioxin poisoning, land mines & unexploded ordinance, extensive environmental degradation, U.S. economic boycott, etc.) I've never seen an American film of any political stripe that focussed on the experience of the Vietnamese themselves. They are always either enemies or local colour. To understand what it must have been like to fight as a Viet Cong soldier would take some real digging at the library, but it would definitely make for a mind bending game experience.

By the by, if you're going to kill one of the PCs in the first game, make sure you discuss it with him first. I hate having to spend an hour or two making my character exactly the way I want him, then the GM just screws it all up as a duex ex machina. If he's cool with it, go for it. But if he balks, you should respect that or you may end up taking the campaign before it really starts.

If you guys are happy with the Ninja Hero book, that's great. As a simply caveat emptor, though, I just wanted to let whomever know that I read the book once and it hasn't left my bookshelf since. With the UMA, though, I pull it out almost everytime I make a character without ranged attacks (and sometimes even then).

Or Call of Cthulhu.

The UMA is the only Hero Games book other than FrED that you absolutely must own. It's cover to cover essential information for building any type of physical fighter. All sorts of nifty stuff that you'd probably never think of doing yourself. Unfortunately, Ninja Hero is largely superfluous. It tells you the most obvious things that anybody who's seen more that a couple of Bruce Lee flicks could figure out for himself. If you like page after page of the author telling you "the characters in a Wu Xia campaign should be pretty powerful, but the guys in an anime campaign should be even more powerful", then by all means, throw away you moolah.

I think a good way of mixing sci-fi and fantasy is to layer the one on top of the other. For instance, say the world was created by an advanced science wielding culture (ala Ringworld, flying cities and all), but now that culture has departed and its knowledge of science has died out. There is, however, a high mana-level inherent in this world. The science culture never tapped into the mana because they were biased against seeing anything outside their science oriented perspective. Now, though, a wizard class has arisen that has harnassed the mana-magic to its own ends. Mixed in with this are the scattered technological remnants of the original science culture. If you can find a copy of the now out of print Ringworld game by Chaosium, it provides an excellent frame on which to over-layer fantasy elements. All the best of luck to you.

I've always had a problem with the way that targeting a hit location subtracts from your OCV. I understand the logic that a character in a fight will protect his head and trunk to the best of his ability, but when the defending character is unable to block hits, it's still just as difficult to target hit locs. Example: a blinded and immobile man is DCV 0, but if you target a punch to his head, you still receive a -8 to your OCV. A normal OCV 3 man will only have a 6- to punch this guy's head. I've gotten around this by ruling that targeted hit locs. add to the defender's DCV rather than subtracting from the attacker's OCV. This happens before other DCV modifiers. So a defender with a natural DCV 3 who has his head targeted is DCV 11. [3+8 = 11] If he is prone, blinded or otherwise has his DCV halved, he is DCV 6 when having his head targeted. [(3+8)/2 = 6] A DCV 0 defender (e.g. totally surprised or unconscious) is still DCV 0 when targeted. [(3+8) x 0 = 0]. I think this both allows for a greater sense of realism as well as providing extra incentive for knocking your opponent down in H2H combat. Whaddya all think?

reply Yeah, I think the difference in our opinions stems mainly from the difference in our gaming styles. This is especially evident in the character examples you chose (Wolverine, Conan, etc.) As far as compelling characters who are remembered more for their disadvantages than their combat abilities, I would nominate Macbeth, Hamlet, Iago and a whole slew of other tragic fighters in Shakespeare. As far as superheros go, Daredevil is among the most fascinating, specifically because he is blind. I agree that trying to argue people into submission is Quixotic (Quixote is another soldier remembered primarily for his psych. disad.) and will leave this repartee at that. Wish you all the best and good gaming!

As far as a player choosing more disadvantages than he has spent in points, yes; I've done this myself. I don't know that I intentionally set out to load myself down with disadvantages, but this can happen inone of two ways: 1. build disadvantages first and then go back and build chars., skills, powers, etc. or 2. don't add up the point totals on the disads as you are choosing them. That's how it usually happens to me. I come up with the disads rather quickly because they flow smoothly from the character conception and you don't have to deal with power modifiers and complicated math. Before I know it, bam, I've got a an extra 10-30 points of disads. Now at this point most players would either shave to fit the point total or buy extra powers. Both options damage the integrity of the character conception. I usually just keep the extra points and let it go at that. I chose the disads because I thought they described the character well and I thought they'd be fun to role play; not because I wanted to "pay for my stuff". What many players seem to miss is that it can be as fun to play a character who has to squirm out of a tight spot due to his disads or deal with a moral conflict due to his disads as it is to play a character who sails smoothly through every situation. (Actually the former is MORE fun than the latter. If all you want to do is kick ass unimpeded, just sit alone in your your making blam! blam! noises) I'm probably not ever going to convince the people who still look and roleplaying games as a series of encounters to be overcome with powers and skills, but if you ever get sick of that sort of thing, you should try games which focus on character and story. After all, if you just want to engage in combat, you could play first shooter games on your computer. Much better graphics and less math..

If you sweep two attacks against an opponent and he successfully blocks the first attack, does that mean the sweep's second attack is also blocked, or does the sweeper still get his second attack roll?

GURPS is specifically built to be UN-generic and UN-universal so that you have to spend your money on all their books. Even the basic rules are dished out into three different books. You get everything you need to play any genre under the sun with Hero all in one spiffly black and green package.