Low FP: Too Tired to Resist & Weak Blows

Here is a pair of optional rules for GURPS. It's totally untested, and it will have a strong effect on a campaign. I'm just not sure how much because they have not been tested.

Fatigue Reduced Resistance

Fatigued characters are not only tired, but are less likely to resist disease, hostile spells, and their own internal disadvantages. In addition to the effects listed on p. B426, add the following:

Less than 1/3 your FP left As written, but also self-control rolls are one level worse - (15) becomes (12), (12) becomes (9) . . . and (6) allows success only a 3 or 4! Resistance rolls are at -3.

Fatigue Reduced Damage

Normally low FP reduce ST but do not affect calculated stats such as HP and damage. Optionally, when ST is halve because of low FP, it does affect damage.

Less than 1/3 of your FP left - a written, except ST-based damage is also halved. Roll damage normally, then halve it, rounding down. You can spend 1 FP in order to swing a full-strength blow, but this is a slippery slope down!

Alternate Hard to Kill & Hard to Subdue

So I was saying the other day, most people don't have issues remembering or account for large bonuses, but rather small ones. If you say, "I have a 22 to resist poison!" no one says, "Hey, did you remember to add your Resistant to Poison +8 to that?" But +1s here and there are easily forgotten, or remembered and asked after like your relatives. "Hey, how is Hard to Subdue 1 doing these days? Did you count the +1 from it?"

Here are two ways to push a pair of leveled advantages to simple two-level packages. I've abbreviated the descriptions; the rules and coverage are per Basic Set.

Hard to Kill
5 or 10 points

Works as per B58, comes in two levels:

Hard to Kill: +3 to the affected rolls, plus the "appears dead" element.

Very Hard to Kill: +5 to the affected rolls, plus the "appears dead" element. (Normally restricted to supernatural beings, supers, Barbarians, etc.)

Hard to Subdue
5 or 10 points

Works as per B59, comes in two levels:

Hard to Subdue: +3 to the affected rolls.

Very Hard to Subdue: +5 to the affected rolls. (Normally restricted to supernatural beings, supers, Barbarians, etc.)

Those are priced based on the current costs, giving the lower level a "round up" to make the costs divisible by 5, which is just generally easier for math purposes. You can also make these resistances.

Resistant to Death
5 or 8 points

It's hard to kill you, per the Hard to Kill advantage on p. B58, but without the "appears dead" benefit. Comes in two levels:

Hard to Kill: +3 to the affected rolls. [Priced as Resistant, Common, +3]

Very Hard to Kill: +8 to the affected rolls. (Normally restricted to supernatural beings, supers, Barbarians, etc.)

How about the "appears dead" part? You can throw it in as a bonus, leave it off as a special case, or make it a perk. Or both.

Left for Dead (aka Possum, aka He's Finished)

If you make your HT roll to avoid exactly (made by 0), or by the margin of Resistant to Death, if you have either level, you aren't really dead. Instead, you appear dead, per Hard to Kill, p. B58.

This way you can hand out that effect to characters or foes without needing to increase their specific resistance to death.

Resistance to Subdual
5 or 8 points

As Hard to Subdue, p. B59, and comes in two levels.

Hard to Subdue: +3 to the affected rolls. [Priced as Resistant, Common, +3)]

Very Hard to Subdue: +8 to the affected rolls. (Normally restricted to supernatural beings, supers, Barbarians, etc.)

You could make these "Very Common," but then the price is a bit steep - 10 for +3, 15 for +8, which is high on the front end. It's hard to justify 10 points for +3 to consciousness rolls, even if 15 for +8 seems like a good deal (it's effectively immunity except on automatic failure rolls, except when terribly wounded, and then only for HT 10-11.) I have a hard time thinking that "rolls versus death" or "rolls to stay conscious" are as common as "all threats that affect only the living" or "psionics" in a game with psis. It's also important to note that the exclusions on p. 80 apply - if the effect would be stopped by or you'd get a bonus from Protected Sense or Damage Resistance, this bonus doesn't kick in.


Like I said, this basically puts the bonuses into the "clearly included" and "clearly not" category. They're still conditional bonuses and they'll require you to remember when to apply them. But they'll be much easier to remember and apply when they give steep bonuses. In addition, you are much less likely to accumulate mixed bonuses or over-patch if it's a clear level choice.

Alternate FP recovery & Alternate Fit/Unfit

So I was musing yesterday about getting rid of Fit. Maybe not for this game, but perhaps in the future.

To do that, though, I'd need to find another way to deal with FP recovery. Pulling in 1 FP every 5 minutes has been critical in my DF game. It's often one less wandering monster check, a few less minutes spent in the danger zone, and the ability to bounce back between fights where Great Haste is being used with wild abandon.

So here are a couple ways to basically replace Fit. None of these are tested, but they don't seem fundamentally unsound. They do use a mechanic that you don't see so much in 4th edition GURPS, though - the "X - Y = Z" approach where Z is the time.


HT-based FP recovery

Lost FP are recovered at the rate of 1 FP per (20-HT) minutes, minimum 1 minute per 1 FP. A normal human with HT 10 recovers 1 FP per 10 minutes. One with HT 12 recovers 1 FP per 8 minutes; a frail person with HT 8 recovers 1 per 12 minutes!

Note & Option: You can potentially scale this; say that FP recover scales just like HP recovery, so FP 20 means you recovery 2 for every 1. I kind of like that, for symmetry, and because it encourages casters to increase FP not immediately branch out into the "safer" independent pool of Energy Reserve. A FP 20 person with HT 10 would recovery 2 FP per 10 minutes, or 1 per 5 minutes. You'd max at 2 FP per 1 minute at HT 19+.


Choose one of the above. Then add one set of these.

Fit (Mark I)
2 or 10

You recover from exertion better than others.

This advantage comes in two levels:

Fit: You recover 2 FP per time increment (optionally, cut the time increment in half). For example, a HT 12 person normally recovers 1 FP per 8 minutes; the same person with Fit recovers 2 FP per 8 minutes, or 1 FP per 4 minutes. A HT 19 or 20 person with Fit recovers 1 FP per 30 seconds!

Very Fit: As above, but also FP costs for non-supernatural, non-extra effort FP expenditures are halved.

Unfit
-2 or -10

This disadvantage comes in two levels.

Unfit: You lose FP at twice the normal rate.

Very Unfit: As above, but you also recover FP at half of the normal rate.



Mark II is the above, but only Fit changes:

Fit (Mark II)
2 or 10

This advantage comes in two levels:

Fit: You have +5 HT for the purpose of calculating FP recovery. For example, if you have HT 10 and Fit, you recover 1 FP per 5 minutes (20-[10+5]).

Very Fit: As above, but also FP costs for non-supernatural, non-extra effort FP expenditures are halved.


Notes & Options: Right now Fit/Very Fit don't have a stat prerequisite; you can easily make one for Very Fit (say, HT 12 or 13) if you want people to have some basic disease resistance, poison resistance, shock resistance, etc. before they can have elite-level energy systems (that's trainer speak for your cardio-vascular system and your muscular recovery systems.)

Mark II means a HT 10 person with Fit is exactly in the same boat they are now, in terms of recovery. Mark I is just easier ("With Fit it's double, Very Fit halves cost too") but Mark II has the attraction of allowing for finer splits and pushes HT needs lower. That's useful because you don't need super-heroic point levels to have fit people and/or people who take a beating but bounce back quickly. Mark II doesn't scale so well, though, and is less and less useful after HT 15, but maybe that's okay.

I struggled to come up with a "calculation" based one, where "Fit" throws a "1 FP per HT/something" into a "2 FP per HT/something" approach that didn't toss up weird fractions. The minus approach seemed okay, and it gives baseline numbers identical to the RAW for HT 10.

The pricing of Fit and Very Fit is just eyeballing - I think Very Fit is a little underpriced, but without the +2 to HT rolls it can't be that expensive. It might do well as 2 and 5 or 2 and 8, even if the pricing is odd. You'd want to invert those for the disadvantages because they have symmetry now. If I'd tried these I'd be inclined to set them at 2 and 10 and just give the points back if it seemed to be overpriced. So that's where I went on this pass.

Then again, Recovery seems overpriced at 10 points, and it's amazing for guys who get knocked out a lot. So maybe 2 and 10 is fine!

GURPS Master Class: Revising Evaluate

Evaluate is basically unused in my games.

The benefit is a bit small (+1 per turn, max +3, one turn per plus), ends early, and generally is superseded by other, more useful options. Low skill? Turn to Telegraphic Attack, Committed Attack, or even All-Out Attack. High skill? +1 to +3 just isn't worth it. Even skill with your foe? Probably better to bet on a critical or a Feint* than to Evaluate.

I've written about ways to upgrade Evaluate before, but since I never seen these used in play I didn't keep track of where I wrote them. So I gave it some thought this week once Doug assigned it out as homework.

I see a complex way and a simple way to upgun Evaluate.

Complex Way:

Evaluate is a Per-based Feint. It's useable against any foe you can see, subject to range penalties. The foe resists with either DX-based or IQ-based skill, to conceal (or fail to create) any openings. You can hold your Evaluate bonus as long as you continue to Evaluate your foe. In addition, you get the usual benefits of Evaluate (+1 to +3). You may choose to keep the results of your Per-based Feint or you can try again and take the new results. The bonuses for the Feint and the Evaluation do not stack; take the higher bonus.

Simple Way:

Evaluate works as written in Basic Set and Martial Arts, but the bonus is +3 for one turn. Additional turns of Evaluate do nothing exceed hold the results.

(Optionally, make it +2 per turn for up to 3 turns, for a possible +6! In that case, only apply half the bonus vs. Feints and Deceptive Attacks. Cancelling -3 is good enough for those.)


I'd go with the simple way. Just hand out a +3 and it's suddenly worth it for many fighters, especially since it can stack with All-Out Attack (Determined) for a +7 to hit without giving a defense bonus to the target ala Telegraphic Attack (Martial Arts, p. 1113). At the same time, it's not quite as good (but much less limited) than Telegraphic Attack. It's better for slightly more defensive minded folks - and cancelling 3 points of Deceptive Attack means you can hold your own, potentially, against a fighter 6 points more skillful than yourself!

In any case, it's important to apply all of the benefits of Evaluate fully - the cancelling of defensive penalties (per Martial Arts, p. 100), bonuses to non-combat skills, and so on. If you don't do that, even the changed versions won't help much.


* Yes, I know that mathematically Feinting a person of the same skill works out to a net zero. But Rock Paper Scissors works out to a net even win-loss over the long run, but it doesn't mean people don't win on some turns. Feint vs. a similar skill foe is betting an attack chance that you'll roll better than your opponent this turn and then mess him up on the next turn. That's, in my experience, a very good choice.