GURPS Weapons & Tactics: Flails

One thing I like a lot about GURPS, ever since Man-to-Man, is that weapon selection matters. What you use to fight can heavily influence your options and opportunities. Weapons make styles, and styles make fights.

Some of those weapons come with their own specific utility. So I'm going to do a series of posts on some of what I consider especially interesting weapons in GURPS. That is, weapons that have some particular use or utility that warrants special consideration, special tactics, or special rules. They often give up something - often a lot of something - to fit some specific role better. This isn't a rules classification, it's more of a way of thinking about the different utility of some weapons. Today I'll look at one I like a lot.


Flails

A classic. Flails seem pretty straight-up weapons in GURPS, but they have some special rules attached.

Flails all come with a set of defense penalties for your opponent. -4 to Parry, -2 to Block (halved for the smaller ones, like nunchaku or weighted scarves), cannot be parried by knives or by fencing weapons. Your only fool-proof defense against them is to Dodge.

They also come with pretty good damage - a benefit to having a chain section connecting a lever and an impact surface. For two-handed flails, your selection is pretty small - either a flail or a three-part staff (aka three-section staff). For one-handed flails, you've got a bigger set of choices. The king of those is the morninstar, which gives swing+3/crushing, which is pretty much the top end of one-handed damage ranged. Only the mace matches it one-handed and it doesn't give you nearly as much. They're all cheap, too - $80 for a morningstar (which is 4x as much as the next closest one-handed flail), $100 for a two-handed flail (and only $60 for a three-section staff if you want to go all Gordon Liu in combat.)

What makes this a special weapon choice? For starters, it's DX/Hard, you don't get a wide variety of weapon choices. It doesn't give a lot of useful defaults (Axe/Mace, Kusari for two-handed flails, and the other flail skill, that's it). You'll need ST 12, too, for a morningstar, or 13 for a flail, which isn't that high but it's not low, either. ST 10 or less and you're down to the half-penalty nunchaku and the various less effective varieties. Flails are mostly Parry 0U (a few are -2U) so you'll want a shield or an off-hand weapon to protect yourself with.

That's another point right there - your advantage with a flail is purely offense. Unless you're playing DF and have the Dwarven modifier on it, you can't attack and parry on the same turn. Your advantages with the weapon are damage and imposing defense penalties, so don't use it to defend. Stay close, think about Committed Attack for the extra step if you get hassled by Reach 1,2 weapon-using opponents (especially fencers), and think about armoring up. This isn't a light infantry weapon.

Don't forget about Defensive Attack*, either. You can trade off a little of that extra damage for a chance to Parry on your own turn. You can still act aggressively, just hold a bit back to make sure you aren't defenseless. This is especially useful for Weapon Master types (who get a discount on multiple parries and bonus damage to offset the tradeoff.)

Perhaps surprisingly, given that it's DX/Hard, both the One-Handed Flail and Two-Handed Flail skills are ideal for lower-skill fighters. The aforementioned penalties to defend against them make them ideal for guys who can't afford to trade off a lot of skill for Deceptive Attack. But you only trade off 1 point of relative skill compared to a DX/Average skill (in other words, most weapon skills) for a high-damage weapons that imparts steep defense penalties. Score! You can even use Telegraphic Attack and only partly offset the parry penalty and/or to just paste low-Dodge fencers, who don't get to Parry no matter how many pluses you give them to their weapon.

Flails do swing/crushing damage**, though, so they don't get any multipliers for location except for pretty difficult and easily armored targets - Skull is good for x4, but easily armored up, Neck is x1.5, but hard to hit and easily armored up, Vitals just doesn't give you all that much, for examples. You'll probably want to hit for these kind of places anyway, if you have the skill, or just take a random roll. They make a great choice for people so strong they don't need or want to hit specific locations beyond "center mass" anyway, like giants.

Your goal with the flail should be to minimize the chances your opponent can Dodge and Retreat, since that's their best defense against you. As with all weapons in GURPS (and reality), being stronger and more skilled will make it work better for you. But flails give you a bit of a jump on both, by adding in some defense penalties to your opponents and giving you solid damage for only a small skill tradeoff. Point for point you'll lag behind a swordsman or an axeman or spearman, but you'll always be just a little harder to stop.

Full disclosure: Both I (with Tarjan Telnar, my DF knight) and the PC in my game Honus are flail-users. Me because I think morningstars are awesome and made for a fun knight, Honus because it's a high-damage weapon that imparts defense penalties so he's not left behind by more skilled fellow PCs. Please note that I didn't address the kusari and its derivatives - they have a lot of their own special rules and cases that don't overlap with flails. I'll talk about them another time.

* Thanks Joseph R for pointing this out in the comments.

** Well, unless you allow the very silly Bladed Flail from Low-Tech Companion 2. If you do, you're asking for it. It's in the cinematic weapons section with double-bladed swords and barbed chains for a reason.

Car Wars pocket box edition out in PDF

For those of you who don't follow the Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator, you might have missed this:

Car Wars is out in PDF

It's the little pocket box version, with a 64-page rulebook and 100 or so counters.


Pretty cool. Car Wars was the first SJG game I ever played, followed later by Ogre, then Man-to-Man, then GURPS. I still have all of my old Car Wars stuff (plus a replacement set of counters I got used, after my originals mysteriously disappeared en masse.) I'm looking forward to the new version of Car Wars but it's cool to think you can play the old for for $6 plus some printing time.

What would you change if you could reboot your campaign?

Ever have those "It's too late, but I should have . . . " thoughts about your game?

I do. Here are the ones I've currently got about my Dungeon Fantasy game.


If I could do my Dungeon Fantasy game all over from scratch, I would . . .

. . . go with larger, cheaper coinage. I'd make coins 50 to a pound, what the hell. I should have done that in the first place, because it worked for my old fantasy game. I thought 250/pound would make things easier but I find it was a useless change.

. . . ditch Quick and Dirty magic item prices. Oh sure, cheap utility magic is part of the fun of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. I know that. But I think it would have made for a very interesting dynamic if the price per point of energy was just $20 flat, not $1 for items of 100 points or less. Fortify +1 on a whole suit would run you $1000, making better quality armor or just heavier armor a good deal compared to magically enchanted armor. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

. . . use the Alternate Talent Costs from Power-Ups 3. Just because it would make Barbarians cheaper, and thus have more points to spend on beefing up their character.

. . . invite my two newer players from day one. A no-brainer here. I wish I'd known they both lived close enough to come and play and wanted to come and play from day one.

. . . institute my Shape Earth rulings right off the bat. It's hard to run a megadungeon when your PCs can casually tunnel holes right through the walls whenever they feel like it. A one-second duration on Shape Earth makes for a lot less "we shape some stone down from the surface to block up this trap" type stuff, which means more explanation and less engineering discussion.

. . . put my dungeon a little further away from the city. Not that a day trip dungeon is a bad thing. It would just have been fun if it took a day or two of hiking to get there, opening up more wilderness encounters and forcing more of a decision about when to back off.

. . . I'd put more branching choices in entrance of my dungeon. I like my dungeon entrance, but I think it narrows your choices too much, too soon. A big central location with side passages and staircases down right away, that would have been a good idea. The fortified entrance would still have been cool, but it could have lead right out to a branching-choice main room.

I'dd have run a couple of rules differently, just because I'd like to try them out.

None of this is stuff I can change now, not without some violence to the world, the PCs, and the game. I'm fine with that. But if I knew then what I know now, that's what I would have gone with.

What about you guys? If you could restart your game, what would you change?

The Myth of the Featureless Plain

One thing that comes up in a lot of combat rules analysis (especially for GURPS) is what I think of as "the myth of the featureless plain."

You probably know what I'm thinking.

Two combatants.

No surprise.

No prior damage or exhaustion.

No allies.

No time limit.

Unlimited room to retreat.

No lighting penalties.

No bad footing.

No level/height differences.

No walls.

No terrain, really.

Just a big, wide open hex mat on white paper that extends forever in all directions.


It's on this battlefield many hypothetical situations fight it out. The Reach 2 guy who you can never close with. The close combat fighter who can never grapple anyone. The shield guy you can't flank. The Counterattack or Riposte or Arm Lock specialist who auto-kills you if you attack and has a single super move that you can't counter. The DX monster you can't touch or the ST monster you can't hold on to. Dodge Man who avoids all attacks with ease. Defensive Grip dude who takes his +1 because the penalty for a flank defense never comes up, because you can't get to his flank.

You know, your completely atypical battlefield.

I call it a myth because you have to really work to make that happen in a game.

In most campaigns, this doesn't happen. It's rare to get a truly unmodified skill roll in circumstances where nothing outside of you and your opponent can affect the next few seconds. It's possible, but it's rare.

Even in a duel, you won't get this. No walls? No edge of the dueling arena? No cheating? No outside interference?

It doesn't happen even in structured environments. Grappling matches re-set you to the middle if you go off the edge of the mat. Fighters get separated and re-started if they go too far or do too little. This kind of thing happens - cage fights have cages, so you can circle but a clever fighter can box you in. Tournaments have fighting areas. Duels have an agreed upon ground and features in an around that.

Never mind actual melees. You know, with multiple combatants and unfair setups and situations where Arm Lock dude really doesn't want to grapple you because he needs his Parry against the next guy. Or where Counterattack dude leaves you alone because he's got problems elsewhere. Or back shots, or bad footing from blood and sand and dead bodies, and random missiles that thump you from a flank because your friend made his Dodge and the arrow kept on going into you instead.

This is why I often gripe about the one-on-one featureless plain basis of analysis. It's not a bad way to start your analysis of a rule, but it's not the end of it. A lot of the uber-tactics of the featureless plain are just foolishly suicidal in a melee, or might be merely risky. What might work great one-on-one on a featureless plain isn't as effective in bad lighting, on bad footing, when you're tired and wounded from the fight just before. High-cost tactics (Extra Effort in Combat, say) might not cost anything in a short fight but cost greatly if you don't get to rest before more folks come. There are costs and benefits that might not be apparent in just this circumstance.

Not every fight takes place in Nogard. Few, in fact, do. And if your game features more featureless plains than dark, dingy places with uneven footing and mismatched fights, you might want to consider looking at B402 for inspiration, just for a start. In my own games, a fight without some basic penalties is a pretty rare thing, and the more cramped spaces, terrain issues, and "don't step there!" hexes I can manage, the better. Battles are rarely fought in ideal circumstances for either combatant. So mix it up - and see how things work when everything is less than ideal.

Game Inspiration: Dueling with Shark-toothed Clubs

Over on National Geographic, there is a nice little description of duelling with shark-tooted clubs.

Check it out - scroll down to "
"Armed to the Teeth."

"The main bodies of the weapons were made of wood, and shark teeth were painstakingly sewn along their edges using thread made from coconut fiber and human hair. Because the islanders had no metal, they used spiral snail shells to bore holes in the teeth before sewing them to the weapons.

[. . .]

Often in these battles, two "champions" would fight in a central skirmish. The champions "were dressed in this really cool armor made of very tightly woven coconut cords, and they had tiger shark 'brass knuckles' and helmets made out of dried pufferfish with spikes on them," Drew said."

Pretty fun stuff, eh?

How would you represent this kind of weaponry in GURPS? Easily. The Polynesian shark-toothed club, the tebutje, is in Low-Tech on page 62. Spoiler - it's treated as a bone macuahuitl, which is also in there. Both are shark ridge-like edged material studding a club.

The spears? Bone-tipped barbed long spears or pikes will do the trick. The bone and long spear bits are in Low-Tech, barbed is easily added using the options in LTC2.

The multi-shafted clubs? Just increase the cost and weight of the tebutje. It won't do much to make it a better weapon, though, but it might increase you chances of hitting (say, by reducing Dodge by 1) but it would also be easier to parry (+1) and probably a bit difficult to use (-2 for a top-heavy weapon). You could add +1 damage for the extra weight, if you're so inclined. Most crazy weapons are like that - look cool, but the added doodads make them less handy and less effective even if they're more intimidating looking.

The armor? Easily treated as cane armor or horn armor (also in Low-Tech, this time on page 106). The helmet is trickier, but treating it as spiked cane isn't a bad option.

The rules? Simple - follow the ones in the article, make sure you use the rules for shooting into close combat (for the thrown clubs), prime up on the rules for long weapons reaching over allies, and let people Sacrificial Parry all over the place. And use the Tournament rules to pace it out, because in this kind of match you'd expect a fair amount of clash-and-stop and probably some rules for when it ends.

I know from experience, it can be real fun to throw a ritual duel like this at PCs, since they're likely to be more badass than the local champion, but much less well prepared to fight with the unusual weapons. It because badassitude vs. experience. If they haven't seen this kind of thing before, a quick look at the First Encounter With a New Way to Die box on Low-Tech page 60 will help here too.

Musings on pricing the Shield Wall Training Perk

This spawned from a Google+ discussion. The original poster put up a funny image (an old one, but still a good one) and we rules guys turned it into a discussion of rules and pricing of Shield Wall Training. I had a few thoughts, as usual.

Shield Wall Training - what's it give you?

It provides two benefits.

1) You can Block for someone adjacent to you on your shield side.

2) You can attack while wielding a Large shield without the usual -2 to hit.

If you've got a Large shield, it's a really great deal. You net a +1 DB over a Medium shield (albeit for a lot of additional weight), and you don't suffer a -2 to attack with your weapon hand. Hurrah!

Even if you don't have a Large shield, it's still useful if you have a pretty good block and a friend you want to protect. If you want to protect people behind you, you need another perk (Sacrificial Block, which is in DF15).

But still, a pretty good deal at 1 point. Should it be more? Well, let's try to price it as a Technique.

First, what's it give you?

You can Block for another person, if they're next to you. That's pretty narrow but it's still something other people can't do. So that's -1 to the default.

You negate the -2 to attack while holding a Large shield. This is tricky to price - Shield is the skill you use, but it's not a -2 to shield, it's a -2 to attack with that skill or another. It's hard to buy off a blanket penalty to an open-ended set of skills with one technique. If you look at Cavalry Training, for example, you buy off the penalty for striking from horseback, but you don't buy it off overall but by weapon.

Of course, some people will read this and think, okay, you should have to buy off the -2 by each weapon, and it should be expensive. Which is fair enough, but it will be expensive, and apply only in a very narrow set of circumstances (you're holding a Large shield).

Second, how do we price it?

The question here is, do you price it as buying off -2 of penalty? Tough, because the TDS assumes the penalty is always on if you try the technique - Kicking defaults at -2, and your price for it is based on that -2. A Large shield gives you a -2, but others give -0. Shields come in 4 basic sizes (Light, Small, Medium, Large) and give penalties of -0/-0/-0/-2 for an average of -0.5, rounded up to -1.

So worst case, where you assume that -2 is so important that you need to charge as much as possible, Shield Wall Training defaults to (Weapon Skill)-3, it's Average (it's an offensive technique, and merely expands who you can defend), and it costs 3 points to buy off.

Better case, using the average, it's -2, it's still an Average Technique, and costs 2 points to buy off.

Best case, you figure that -0.5 average isn't very important at all (affects only some of the uses of the technique) and it's a base -1, and costs 1 point to buy off.

All of those would be per melee weapon skill. So using a Large Shield without penalties is going to cost a lot. A medium shield costs you 1 point of DB but will save you a lot of points.

You can also choose to break off the skill penalty from the blocking for others. If so, you could push all "Block for others" into one perk, Sacrificial Block (from DF15, mentioned above) and put all of the "buy off the -2" into separate Techniques for all weapon skills. That would be expensive (2 points per skill) but it would make it easier to price out.

Personally, I just don't think you get enough for it. GURPS prices getting rid of the -4 for off-hand use at 5 points for all skills, 1 point for each skill. This costs more for less benefit, done this way. Now Shield Wall Training is valuable. It's a good deal a 1 point. But so are a lot of perks (Grip Mastery, anyone? Naval Training, when you fight on ships all day? Teamwork? Exotic Weapon Training?). The thing about perks is they should be a good deal. They should be pretty damn useful for people within the narrow range of utility they have. They're a good tool for dealing with odd cases and edge cases (like your shield training affected other offensive skills), minor rules exemptions, and other "doesn't quite fit" issues you want to deal with.
They don't all need to be equally valuable, just valuable to the character who acts in the manner covered by the perk.

My thoughts on the pricing-as-a-Technique approach.

I'd Play or Run B/X D&D

"Quiet Fools! The Dungeon Master has arrived!" - Tom Servo

No, this isn't an April Fool's joke, despite the date. I'm just looking back at Basic/Expert set D&D and why I'd actually jump in on a game of it. Assuming I had free time for another game, which is a joke. Springtime is busy time for me.

Jeffro's brief discussions of running X1 prompted me to pull out (one of*) my copies of X1 and re-read it. Then I started in on Expert Set.

One thing I like about B/X, and about the Expert Set in particular, is how clean and simple the rules presentation is. There aren't a lot of special cases. The explanations are clear, the layout makes it easy to find things, and there isn't a whole lot of extraneous discussion, High Gygaxian waxing about The Game or The Mighty Master. It's purely how-to-do-it, with quick asides where the DM's decision needs to cover a situation.

The stat rules are simple, too - +1 to +3, not a lot of cases where one class benefits from one thing but not another, or people will eleventeen languages, or percentile strength to make the gap between 18 and 19 a huge one. Not only that but everything 13 and up gives a bonus, so you don't need ultra-high stats like in AD&D to matter (ST 15 on 3d6? Wow! Worth close to nothing in AD&D, sorry, next time roll better.)

Not only that, but the assumptions are spelled out well - everyone can climb, Thieves can climb sheer walls. Everyone can swim unless you rule otherwise. Everyone can build a stronghold at the same level. Alignment is simple and oriented on broad strokes of action (group oriented vs. selfish vs. actively destructive). And so on. There are plenty of figured examples, too, for folks who just want buy a freaking castle and not design every 10' square of it by hand, or who aren't sure what a good campaign area should look like.

In a way, it reminds me of GURPS - the rules complexity is a bit lower than GURPS, but it really sounds like "take these and go do stuff with it" rather than "take these and do them in a particular way." It's not a prescription to play but a solid set of baseline rules that cover 90% of what you need and has enough to let the GM know how to consistently make up the other 10%. I feel like I know what was intended by the rules and how to just go with it without violating that intention.

It doesn't need a lot of house rules, either, not obviously so. Maybe just a few - I think the Thief really needs d6 hit points to survive. I'd consider using the Advanced Edition Companion's rules for race split from class if people bothered me enough about it. And I'd dump the Tarantella spider (the joke wore thin by the time I was 10, nevermind now). Maybe another to deal with weapon choice and two weapon use.**

But otherwise it's clearly a pretty good rules set. Too bad they marketed it so heavily as the kiddie intro to D&D.

Now I'm not saying I'm going to stop playing GURPS, or that I'm planning on running a B/X game. I think I'd quickly get to the point where I wanted a lot of what GURPS offers in my game. But as long as both the players and I were willing to take it all lightly, play it as written to see what happens, and just go with it, I think it would be fun. That really goes for all games, but it's a case of not wanting to play B/X with people who want it to be GURPS or AD&D or white-box D&D or anything else. Just, let's play this thing as see how it goes. I'd certainly play in it (as a fighter, I'm not a fan of not-fighters when I play games.) It still has a lot of the pull that D&D did back in the day when I first read it.

Good stuff. And much respect to the retro-clones, but man, the original B/X is just cooler to me. I'm glad it's back in print and people like Jeffro are out there running it.



* I didn't throw out my D&D stuff, and I inherited a couple collections. So I have 2-3 copies of X1, Basic, Expert, and other adventures. Some are in terrible condition, some aren't, but I've got them. Don't hate on me for not having a family that chucked my stuff, okay?

** One rule I thought of while reading the Holmes translation notes:
Two-Handed Weapons give +1 to AC, but you strike last in the round (and then in initiative order, if there are multiple wielders). Dual weapon attacks are fine - anyone can do them, and you get to attack normally with both weapons on the same target (fighters can split targets). Shields give +1 to AC as well (and magical ones would give more.) You'd get a nice spread this way - two-handed weapons give some protection and high damage, but act last. Shields let you act quickly but give you a defensive bonus. And two-weapon attacks give you more damage, potentially, but you're losing a lot of AC. On the face of it, it seems like it gives you a lot of real choices - a mix of offense and defense, a mix of offense and defense that trades off speed for damage, and pure offense.

Obviously this would go with the rules for differentiated damage by weapon type.