Bullet time

I hoped to have news today of Jamie's latest project, a book about the early years of Games Workshop, but it turns out I have no more info to impart than is already on the crowdfunding page, so instead I'm going to talk about a passage that caught my eye in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:

"We rested our rifle barrels on the brimstone and we shot nine more on the lava where they ran. It was a stand, what it was. Wagers was laid. The last of them shot was a reckonable part of a mile from the muzzles of the guns and that on a dead run. It was sharp shootin all around and not a misfire in the batch with that queer powder."

These fellows are ordinary NPCs, which in GURPS terms might be 100-point characters. The highest that most of them would be in Guns skill is around 15-16, but we can assume the final shot that Tobin, the narrator, is talking about was made by the company's best sharpshooter. Let's say he has a skill of 22.

"A reckonable part of a mile" -- that's got be at least 1000 yards, which is -16 for range. And the last Indian shot was "on a dead run", and even though a component of that motion would be directly away from the shooter, it's got to be at least another -6.

So far our shooter needs 0 to hit. But he can aim for three rounds, which gives him the Accuracy bonus of the weapon (+3 for a Sharps .59 caplock) and another +2 for the extra rounds spent. Also he can brace the rifle for +1.

With an adjusted skill of 6 the shooter had a 9.3% chance of success (GURPS makes skill rolls on 3d6). I wouldn't take that shot myself. Ammo's too precious. But it was the last of their enemies and everyone's blood was up, so obviously our man decided to go for it.I bet the referee gave him a character point in Guns for that, too, which is pretty much useless at that level and in any case you learn more from failure than from success -- but hey, nobody turns down a CP, am I right?

But that's fiction, or it's gaming. How about real-life skills? I found this assessment of 1911 handguns. Now, those aren't rifles and they are from 60 years (a whole Tech Level) after the events of Blood Meridian, but still Mr Kolesar is getting a spread of 2 inches with his Colt at 50 yards. That would be good enough to ensure a face hit every time, which in GURPS terms is -5 and another -8 for range, so -13 overall. The Colt has Accuracy +2, so with three rounds to aim and holding it in both hands that reduces the penalty to -8. To hit pretty much every time means adjusted skill must be 17, so Mr Kolesar's actual Guns skill in GURPS terms must be at least 25. He's built on more than 100 points, I bet.

Incidentally, Tobin also says they didn't get a single misfire from a batch of black powder they just mixed up Captain Kirk style. They shot sixty-seven of their enemies and not every shooter can have been as good as that eagle-eyed guy who downed the last one, so let's say at least a hundred bullets were fired. This is the mid-nineteenth century and misfires occur on 16+ on 3d6 at Tech Level 5, so you'd expect four or five in every hundred shots. That must have been some magic formula.

Anyway, I recommend Blood Meridian. It's what you'd get if Michel Tournier and Lord Dunsany collaborated on a fabulist Western. And if that doesn't pique your interest, what would?

I dodged a bullet

A couple of recent posts have picked away at the problems I have with GURPS, but that's only one half of the picture. My relationship with GURPS is as much love as hate. At the core of it, 4th edition is a very elegant edifice. The trouble is that the edifice in question is overgrown with a riotous ivy of special cases and the rules are scattered all over the place like so many broken vases.

But I’m not going to gripe about GURPS today. Coming up on Friday we have the Christmas special scenario. That’s actually system-agnostic but when my group ran it we used GURPS 4e, which gives me an excuse to redress the balance a little by defending a much-maligned GURPS rule, namely the ability to use Dodge against missile weapons.

First off, this isn’t Matrix-style stuff. You aren’t leaning aside to let that bullet go whistling past. There’s a temptation to think that one dice roll means one specific action, but that’s not it. When somebody’s shooting at you and you make a Dodge roll, that roll represents all the ducking and weaving you’ve been doing to make yourself a harder target.

Recently in our Wild West game we had a situation where we were shooting at some fellows on horseback. How do you make a Dodge when you’re planted in the saddle?

You could say that it’s impossible to Dodge while on horseback, but the logical outcome then would be for everybody to dismount at the start of every battle. Not much in keeping with the spirit of a Wild West game, that. Which is why GURPS 4e does allow Dodging while riding.

The rule is on page 398 (you really have to go digging around for these rules) and it states that you can Dodge normally in the saddle if you have Riding skill of 12+, but you lose -1 from Dodge for each point of Riding skill below 12.

How is it possible? Remember what I said. Dodge isn't one single action, like darting out of the way before a bullet hits. It's more of a way of representing dodging and weaving about during the fight that makes you less likely to get hit. So when you're firing from horseback, the horses aren't stationary firing platforms like the turret of a tank. Horses don't stay stock-still like that. They would be constantly wheeling and milling about. And if you can ride well, you can combine that with crouching in the saddle and so on to make yourself a trickier target to get a bead on. You see exactly that technique in a movie like The Outlaw Josey Wales. That’s what the rule on page 398 is modelling.

Love-hate, remember, so I still can’t resist a little gripe. That “full Dodge if you have Riding 12, but…” is a typical off-the-cuff GURPS rule. These special cases are strewn throughout the books. They’re obviously just made up out of desperation as the designer was having to colour in these corners of the game, and because the number is arbitrary it’s hard to remember. It’s not a rule that’s repeated throughout – “you can do First Aid on jet-skis if you have Skiing 12”, etc.

Control of the horse isn’t automatic at Riding skill 12, so why create a special case? Just use the rules that are already written, for Pete’s sake. That’s what infuriates me about GURPS. It’s like going round the Ashmolean Museum to find it’s been redecorated by a Vegas hotelier. The GURPS books list a few dozen people responsible for “rules refinement”, so that’d be why. Too many cooks, guys.

A better rule would be this: "in order to qualify to make a Dodge roll when mounted, you must first succeed in a Riding roll". So that way you can attempt to dodge if you can control the horse. Easier to remember, and more logical.

One day (I mean, one month) I’m going to rewrite GURPS 4e to streamline and rationalize the whole thing. In the meantime, here are some GURPS Legend character generation rules to be going on with. And whatever system you favour, be sure to come back on Friday for the Yuletide adventure.

Start by forgetting

We're starting a new roleplaying campaign tonight. It's being run by Oliver Johnson, co-creator of Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword, and he always brings a unique blend of innovative story background and palpable atmosphere to his games, so excitement among the players is high.

The player-characters will begin with no memory of who they are. That in itself isn't going to win any prizes for originality. I think I'll be playing in at least one other amnesia-driven game this year alone, and that's even if I can't get my hands on a copy of Alas Vegas, but when added to the GURPS character generation system, amnesia should make for a particularly interesting cocktail.

GURPS encourages you to flesh out the details of your character's backstory -- too much, in my view. I've seen much better (more interesting, more subtle, more convincing) characterization from players developing their characters from the inside, once the game begins. The design-at-start approach is a little too much of an authorial straitjacket. But how about if you begin knowing nothing about your past?

With Oliver's upcoming campaign, which is set in New Mexico in 1862, I originally had it in mind to play a gambler. But then I thought, well, how would I know I was a gambler? I'm dressed like a gambler, maybe. Perhaps I found a deck of cards in my pocket. But what does that prove? What if another player-character is wearing a tin star. He might be a sheriff, but there are other explanations.

Here's how Oliver himself put it:

"The more I sit here reading through the rules, the more I'm convinced that GURPS is the enemy of roleplaying, and only when handled in the lightest way can it aid rather than overwhelm the game. That was why I decided to start everyone as amnesiacs. I want people to interact and make up their stories on the spot and have some good roleplaying, rather than prescribe their characters through these arbitrary skills and advantages and disadvantages and overthought back stories -- which, instead of expanding the character, merely justify the aforesaid self-award of skills, advantages, etc."

If GURPS allowed for a little more uncertainty, there might be some of those discoveries Oliver is talking about. As it is, I still have to know a little bit too much about my character -- those pesky GURPS disadvantages force you to join the authorial dots and end up with the usual cartoonish characterization. But in a different rules system with a little more leeway the amnesia could become a wellspring of creative improvisation.

One option would be to give each player say 80 points to spend on basic attributes, advantages, and disadvantages. Arguably you would know those pretty much right away, memory loss or not. But you don't buy any skills at the start of the game. When called on to use a skill, you roll 3d to set a brevet value X for that one roll only. You then roll in the usual way using X as your skill level for that one roll only. If you succeed, that sets a minimum value for your (still unknown) level in that skill. If you fail, that sets a maximum value.

For example, you attempt a Stealth roll. First you roll 3d to get your brevet value. Let's say you get a 12. So now you attempt the skill roll as if you had a Stealth of 12. Say you roll 9 - okay, that means you know your actual Stealth value cannot be lower than 9. Or say you roll a 14 - that's a failure, which means your Stealth cannot be higher than 13. Over time you'll nest in on values for all the skills you use.

This brevet system for discovering your unknown skill levels is not greatly different from the way James Wallis's Fugue system generates characters' skills in the course of play, as astute readers will have spotted, but I'm looking for something that's compatible with GURPS -- and, because we want to keep playing an open-ended campaign that could last years, we'll need a bit more detail than just having a skill or not having it. Also I confess a slight allergy to RPG systems that co-opt the tarot, simply because so many of them these days do that.

Starting a GURPS game with no memory naturally rules out giving character design points for Allies, Enemies, Reputation, etc. Those are things you'll discover or acquire in play. But that's a much better way to handle them anyway, just as in stories it's better to show than to tell.

Howdy pardner

The Good, The Bad and The Undead campaign runs on Kickstarter until the end of this month. I could tell you more about it, but why listen to me when you can get it straight from the horse's mouth in this video by Jamie Thomson, co-author of the book?

There's a free demo of the first part of the book by Ashton Saylor, and YouTube games critic Patrick C Worth has put up a playthrough video of that. And here's a profile of Callie MacDonell, the sharpshooting talent behind the GBU artwork.

Gunsmoke and grave-mist

The Kickstarter campaign for all-new gamebook The Good, the Bad and the Undead is painting the town red at the moment. If you don't know anything about it, take a look at Ashton Saylor in the video. I asked him and Jamie Thomson, who was originally slated to write GBU, where they got their ideas from:

Dave Morris: There are so many Wild Wests to choose from. The character dramas of Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle, psychological epics from directors like Mann, Ford and Hawks, and then there’s the whole down-n-dirty, morally complex European tradition of the spaghetti western. I’m just wondering which are your personal favourite western movies?

Jamie Thomson: Pretty much anything with Clint involved. Unforgiven is probably my favourite western of all time. Followed by all the spaghetti stuff. Oh, and also Ulzana’s Raid - a real classic.

DM: Talking of different aspects of the Old West as a story environment, what is it about the setting that appeals to you?

JT: Its semi-feral frontier lawlessness (relatively speaking compared to the east coast cities) allows for greater opportunities in story telling and characterization. Historically, you get a lot of larger than life characters knocking around as well. Plus six guns. They look so cool. And Apaches. And those hats.

DM: What are the themes you were interested in exploring?

JT: Not sure about that... it’s cowboys versus vampires after all. I suppose it touches on fear and the psychology of fear, mortality, death, moral questions about the price of survival, the breakdown of civilization and whether you can remain true to yourself in the face of it and so on. But mostly for me it’s six guns vs fangs in the night

DM: It’s often said that fantasy works when it brings out something in the story that couldn’t be told in a conventional setting. Does that apply to The Good, The Bad, and The Undead?

JT: There are interesting questions about the price you are prepared to pay to keep your own sense of what is right and wrong intact and other issues to explore. But I’m not sure there’s anything you couldn’t do in another setting. I think you can pretty much explore any theme in any setting, just in different ways. With the western horror setting you can push things to the max but at the end of the day I think it’s exploring old themes in new ways, which can sometimes give you an unusual perspective on it.

DM: It’s not a traditional good guys versus bad guys story. I’d be interested to hear what inspired you to take the narrative off in those unexpected moral and emotional directions. Is that coming from the movie idea of the western, or does it owe more to the fact that this is a literary work?

JT: It’s the thing that puts an interesting twist on the tale – the relationship between Walter and the Marshal. What do you do when the good and the bad are faced with an even greater evil? What is it like when you are forced to work with something or someone that you know to be morally unsound (to put it mildly.

DM: Whenever vampires are in a story, there’s the question of whether they should conform to the usual tropes (crosses, holy water, garlic, etc) or whether you’re free to reboot them in a new image. What did you decide?

JT: We’ve got our own take on it from Aztec mythology. They’re not your run of the mill Transylvanian vampires by any means. But I won’t say more in case it spoils the fun.

DM: I see that you’re talking about this as an interactive novel rather than a 'gamebook'. That’s how I describe my retelling of Frankenstein. In GBU’s case, is it simply to alert readers that the story isn’t a game to be won or a puzzle to be solved, or are you getting at something deeper?

JT: There are no dice or skills or any ‘game’ stuff really, so I think it’s just so people don’t get confused, expecting some kind of rule system etc. But Ashton might have a different take on where the story goes!

The Good, the Bad & the Undead

Once upon a time in the west of Europe, Fabled Lands LLP planned a co-publishing venture with Osprey Books to release a series of gamebooks. We were scheduled to kick off with the Virtual Reality series, and it was decided that including one new title would give the series a boost. Jamie Thomson agreed to write The Good, the Bad and the Undead.

Well, the best-laid plans... Jamie never got around to writing the book, but that worked out fine in the end because the Osprey deal clutched its heart and died. The VR books got reincarnated as Critical IF, but it looked as if our prospective gunslinging gamebook was destined for six feet on Boot Hill.

But then riding to the rescue came Ashton Saylor. Taking Jamie's notes - well, more like mescal-fuelled mumblings, to be honest - Ashton put together a blistering Wild West tale of heat, greed, lust, and death, where the only thing separating the good guys from the bad guys is whether their burning thirst is for sweet water or salt blood.

All that's needed for The Good, the Bad and the Undead to rise from its shallow grave is your help. Ashton will be running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the book. That starts July 30th. So why am I mentioning it now? Because the Facebook page is already live and in the weeks ahead Ashton and Jamie will be unveiling the secrets of their world, telling us more about the characters and the game mechanics, and revealing some of the extras and stretch goals for the campaign.

I've read the first few chapters and the whole story outline and I can tell you that it's shaping up to be something revolutionary in gamebooks: a compelling mix of nail-biting gameplay and blazing action that comes alive as you read like a blockbuster movie. If you're a fan of gamebooks you will not want to miss this.

And to get yourself in the mood, why not download Per Jorner's Windhammer Prize-winning gamebook "The Bone Dogs"? It's not so much A Fistful of Dollars, more The Dirty Dozen rewritten by Hunter S Thompson, but hey, six guns!

The Outlaw by "kingzog" - used under Creative Commons licence BY-NC-ND 3.0

Undeadwood buried

Back in August I announced that we had a new gamebook project in progress with the working title of Undeadwood. Its real title was going to be The Good, the Bad and the Undead, but the more I think about it, the more I prefer the former. The pitch was "30 Days of Night meets Django Unchained," but that doesn't sound like something I would personally queue up for. (Funnily enough, though, if you said "A Fistful of Dollars meets Cronos," you'd have my money like a shot. Fine distinctions, I guess, as far as the wider world outside cinema geekdom is concerned.)

Even in October I still had hopes. By November I must have known better, but I am adept at denial. Anyway, it was destined to remain a shrivelled thing, hidden from the light. Jamie and I talked briefly about doing it as a comic instead, but that's unlikely now. It has joined the distinguished ranks of gamebooks that never were. That stake is not coming out.

We did at least get as far as a back cover blurb. Well, I say back cover, but it was one of the titles going in the Infinite IF series, which means an ebook, so the blurb was really just for the website:

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UNDEAD

Texas, 1870. The small, dusty mining town of Affliction, alone and isolated in the middle of the Badlands is the only place with a gaol for fifty miles in very direction, the only place Marshal da Silva can take his captive, the brutal outlaw, Walter Corse.

But when he arrives in town with his prisoner in tow, it is strangely deserted. The wind moans through the dusty streets and dust devils dance where the townsfolk once walked. But when the night comes... so do the vampires. Affliction has been overrun by them, and many of its inhabitants have been turned. The others are kept as food for the rest. The marshal and the outlaw find a shotgun-toting saloon girl still alive and free. Together they must hold out against the vampire hordes until morning.

Notable vampires include the Sheriff William Masters, Reverend Ezekiel Smith, Jacob Colt, the undead gunslinger, Jimmy Nighthorse, an Apache scout, and several other vampire versions from the mythology of the Old West.

Eventually, the marshal and his companions must take the fight to the chief vampire, Tizoca, the Bled One, an ancient Aztec vampire awoken from her sealed tomb by an over-eager treasure hunting archaeologist, along with her ‘consort’, a Portuguese Conquistador – in fact, the marshal's great, great, great grandfather.

(Okay, okay, so it was notes for a blurb...) If that whets your appetite for gun-totin' gamebook weirdness, all is not quite lost. Per Jorner wrote a great gamebook called The Bone Dogs that's a bit Wild West, a bit magic realist, and you can get that free right here.

The Good, the Bad and the Undead actually began life as a proposal for a first-person shooter that Jamie and I floated at Eidos in the late twentieth century. In that version it was a modern-day western, Dusk Till Dawn style, and I'm not sure whether it had any vampires in it, as our original write-up said:

The town is overrun by all the freaks, monsters and weird stuff that was inside Dr Marvell's Travelling Booth of Wonders. The hero's first job is just staying alive long enough to get to the bottom of things. There are pygmy tyrannosaurs, skeleton outlaws, giant fleas, Sioux medicine men, homicidal fire-breathers, crazed knife-throwing dwarves, and bearded fat ladies who sound like James Earl Jones on steroids. How all these nasties came to be in Dr Marvell's booth doesn't matter. How they even fit inside the booth doesn't matter. All that does matter is they're out for your blood.

Yeah, I know - but FPS isn't exactly about the integrity of the story, you know. Anyway, I guess we could post up the detailed notes for the storyline(s), but in the absence of the book itself (or game itself) it's just so many ideas; there's nothing to play through. However, James Wallis thought "Undeadwood" (the title, that is) would make a great Kickstarter - and he should know better than most - so if anyone wants to have a crack at that, be my guest. I'd like to read it, or play it, or watch it - especially if you can work in an Al Swearengen vampire.

The image is by PurpleFilth on DeviantArt. It's from his own RPG and you can check out his other work, and the terms of the Creative Commons licence, here.