Low-powered campaigns

[AlexanderHowl]

Or being the victims in a horror campaign. For example, 100 CP is a perfectly acceptable level for the victims in a vampire story. Even if they 'know' vampire lore from movies, it should not necessarily be accurate. It would be more interesting to have vampires repulsed by the smell of roses rather than the smell of garlic, have rosewater burn them instead of holy water, and to have them be vulnerable only to weapons made from rosewood rather than weapons blessed by priests.

In that case, the vampires would have Dread (Roses), Weakness (Rosewater), and Vulnerability (Rosewood, ×4). They might have Regeneration (Regular; Except against damage caused by Rosewood, -20%). Unkillable 3 (Achilles Heel, Rosewood, -30%; Hindrance, Roses, -25%; Special Trigger, Human Blood, -5%). They would otherwise have no particular weaknesses or vulnerabilities, meaning that the victims' attempts to use cross, decapitation, fire, sunlight, etc. would be rather useless.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There are several ways to address that.

* You can run a campaign that does not involve multiple situations. I've been playing in one for most of the past decade.

* You can run a campaign set in a time when ordinary people did not have so much insulation from danger and hardship. Anything up till 1875 is plausible. Or don't set your campaign in a civilized country. Going to the Congo, or Kafiristan, or Oz is an adventure for people like you and me, but to the people who live there it's just how people live.

* You can run a campaign that isn't about that sort of adventuring. Not every story has to turn on life and death situations to be dramatic. I've gotten mileage out of trade pioneers trying to make a profit, and out of young people looking for someone to love, or swashbucklers attending salons and trying not to embarrass themselves in the witty banter.

Yes, there are certainly many ways around that plausibility problem, but they mostly involve very atypical campaign types and adventure hooks, at least judging from the vast majority of RPG scenarios I hear other gamers speak about. With due allowance for the inherent imprecision in letting a lifetime of anecdotes do duty as data, I think I can state pretty comfortably that most gamers feature violence and danger more frequently than you do.

In fact, every regular gamer I've met has expected his PC to be able to decide to use violence to resolve a conflict in every single adventure and for NPCs to try to kill the PCs at one or more points. Frankly, just because I fairly frequently run game sessions where no one dies, not even a faceless 'mook', I might be closer to the anomalous end of the spectrum with you than the mean, as when I've played with other GMs (who aren't from my regular gaming group), the norm seems to be multiple deaths every single session.

Of course, there is an inherent plausibility problem in that level of violence, in that almost no real person has ever been exposed to as much violence, death and killing as a typical RPG protagonist. Certainly not if we use computer RPGs as the model and, I feel, not even in pen & paper games the way the majority of gamers seem to be playing.

It's true that there are both times and places where violence and danger are perhaps unavoidable for even ordinary people. However, if those people truly are ordinary, most of them, except for the very lucky and/or unexpectedly capable, will simply become victims. Anyone might survive one encounter with murderous raiders, but someone for whom such encounters are commonplace will shortly suffer whatever dire fate the raiders prefer, because that's how probabilities work for normal people.

On the other hand, there are some few examples in real life of people who survived a very high number of extremely dangerous situations without much in the way of back-up, spent months or years in high-intensity, high-pressure environments like war zones, who have been in dozens of combat situations, maybe even killed scores of opponents, who consistently made difficult decisions under stress with enough clarity to come back alive and accomplish their missions.

It's just that these people would all come to very high point budgets if constructed under GURPS rules, because in order to consistently succeed at a very large number of difficult tasks, failing at any of which could have catastrophic consequences, you need a lot of traits that GURPS values at many points. Even if it was mostly luck that they survived, in GURPS terms, that's enough Luck and Serendipity to make hundreds of Fright Checks, Will rolls, Active Defences and whatever actual skill checks they used. Which comes to high point values, however you express them.

And that's the play style that I prefer. Formidable challenges, with gritty rules that make success far from certain, but protagonists who are, if not perhaps always equal to the scale of the challenges, at least plausibly the people who are best equipped to handle them.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'd also point out that there's a big middle ground between the unadventurous civilian like me, or perhaps you, or Bilbo Baggins, and the colossus bestriding the world. A police officer, even the hero of a police procedural that skips over the dull parts of policing, faces challenges and dangers I couldn't cope with, but he's not a titan who could transform the world. He's a guy doing a job. Or she's a gal doing a job. "Just because I say I like sea bathing I don't mean I want to be pickled in brine."

Absolutely true.

There is, however, the minor problem of the fact that this middle ground is, in any reasonably plausible world, filled with professional people of adequate, but not awesome, competence who devote most of their efforts to ensuring that adventures, challenges and dangers do not happen and if they do, are never handled in a dramaticaly satisfying fashion, where people who have a personal stake in the outcome are allowed to make decisions that affect it.

Actually 'just doing a job' means that the protagonist probably doesn't get any sort of dramatically satisfying climatic confrontation, isn't necessarily the one making the important decisions and if he ever develops a personal stake or attachment to the case, should properly speaking be disqualified from any role in the investigation. Not to mention that police detectives in almost any country today face less danger than pizza delivery people or night shift liquor store employees (realistically, so do soldiers in the US armed forces, even while Iraq and Afghanistan were both ongoing).

Realistic people can have interesting lives, but generally not in the way any published adventure or campaign I'm familiar with makes the lives of RPG protagonists interesting. In real stories that grip me, most of the interesting stuff happens in the minds of the people involved and most GMs or players just aren't good enough at writing dialogue and acting it out in real time to deliver truly gripping tales of internal and interpersonal conflict. Hence, we mostly rely on external, violent conflict for the excitement in RPGs.

And it just happens very rarely that ordinary people face violence on a regular basis in a way that has the same people personally involved and also making the ultimate decisions. Because ordinary soldiers work in companies or larger units, ordinary cops have dozens of units arrive as soon as an officer requests assistence and so on. And the people in charge aren't the same people who carry out the hundreds of tasks involved in dealing with an incident.

Having the buck stop with you and not having any cavalry that can charge to the rescue immediately is pretty much exclusively the domain of some sort of highly capable teams of experts, either special operations forces or some law enforcement equivalent. And I feel that this describes almost every party of PCs I'm familiar with, i.e. they make the decisions and they personally attempt to carry out those decisions.

[Maz]

I like to play low-points campaigns as it tends to make people have to plan and think more, rather than just rushing in and rely on high skills/attributes to get out of trouble.

Yes I know you can have the same situations with high point-value, by upping the dangers. But when all PC's have base dodge above 11, luck, effective HT:14+ and so on, things simply stop being quite as dangerous. And they can more often be stupidly reckless and still survive. Sometimes that's fun. Kick in the door and see what happens. But other times its more fun to be forced to plan and be careful and when the **** hits the fan you have to really rely on each other to make it though.

Once more, yes you can force that feel through at high points as well, I know. But it's just easier (the default) at low CP.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Maz

I like to play low-points campaigns as it tends to make people have to plan and think more, rather than just rushing in and rely on high skills/attributes to get out of trouble.

Yes I know you can have the same situations with high point-value, by upping the dangers. But when all PC's have base dodge above 11, luck, effective HT:14+ and so on, things simply stop being quite as dangerous. And they can more often be stupidly reckless and still survive. Sometimes that's fun. Kick in the door and see what happens. But other times its more fun to be forced to plan and be careful and when the **** hits the fan you have to really rely on each other to make it though.

Once more, yes you can force that feel through at high points as well, I know. But it's just easier (the default) at low CP.

How do you address the fact that in a lot of cases, a reasonable plan is "inform the people whose job it is to deal with this"?

Are the situations always such that only the PCs have any kind of motivation or ability to do anything about whatever threat they are planning to handle?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

How do you address the fact that in a lot of cases, a reasonable plan is "inform the people whose job it is to deal with this"?

It depends on the genre of the campaign.

In the campaign I'm a player in, which is cosmic horror, the threat is wealthy and powerful cultists with influence with the police force, who are engaged in ritual magic in an effort to summon primordial entities that potentially could destroy civilization. So there are forces of corruption and bureaucratic inertia, lack of actual laws against what they're doing, and skepticism about the reality of the threat.

That's often the assumption in Lovecraftian fiction, though there are also the stories where the protagonists DO call in the Feds to take drastic action. . . .

[AlexanderHowl]

Cosmic horrors are generally so overwhelming that it does not really matter if the PCs are 100 CP or 1,000 CP, they are just two different flavors (sweet or spicy) of victims for the cosmic horrors.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Cosmic horrors are generally so overwhelming that it does not really matter if the PCs are 100 CP or 1,000 CP, they are just two different flavors (sweet or spicy) of victims for the cosmic horrors.

That's a good point. After all, Call of Cthulhu (with fairly ordinary protagonists) and Delta Green (with superspy pr special ops protagonists and the resources of a whole government) ultimately have the same expectation of futility, in that the PCs may win small local victories, but the end result is the same.

If you alter that expectation of ultimate futility, even if you present the exact same horrific cosmic threats, you've got an entirely different genre than cosmic horror, i.e. Monster Hunters.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Or being the victims in a horror campaign. For example, 100 CP is a perfectly acceptable level for the victims in a vampire story. Even if they 'know' vampire lore from movies, it should not necessarily be accurate. It would be more interesting to have vampires repulsed by the smell of roses rather than the smell of garlic, have rosewater burn them instead of holy water, and to have them be vulnerable only to weapons made from rosewood rather than weapons blessed by priests.

In that case, the vampires would have Dread (Roses), Weakness (Rosewater), and Vulnerability (Rosewood, ×4). They might have Regeneration (Regular; Except against damage caused by Rosewood, -20%). Unkillable 3 (Achilles Heel, Rosewood, -30%; Hindrance, Roses, -25%; Special Trigger, Human Blood, -5%). They would otherwise have no particular weaknesses or vulnerabilities, meaning that the victims' attempts to use cross, decapitation, fire, sunlight, etc. would be rather useless.

Meh. I don't find that sort of inaccuracy particularly appealing. If a folklore monster becomes widely enough known to be a horror sub-genre, the basic information conveyed isn't going to be that wildly inaccurate. That doesn't mean that there isn't room for those who depend on movie-lore to get it wrong. So hereafter, some "movie-lore" vampire fails.

You can kill a vampire by driving a wooden stake through it's heart. [You can kill ordinary people this way too, but to be effective against a vampire, the stake [I]must[I] be made of rowan, or possibly hawthorn (sources differ) and the stake must be driven in either with a single blow, or in three blows (again sources differ). This doesn't actually "kill" the vampire but it will render it helpless, if the stake is driven well into the ground, so that the vampire can't simply pull it out (only some sources note this).]

Vampires dread the cross, and if of silver, can be burned by it. [You can't use any old cross-shaped object, such as a crossbow. There's at least some doubt that even a Protestant-style cross will work. Some sources state it needs to be a crucifix, i.e., no figure of Christ on the cross means no effect.]

A vampire can't cross running water [in human form]. [The vampire is fine with stagnant water, so fleeing into a marsh, swamp, fen or bog won't stop the vampire. In dog or rat form, and possibly bat form, if the movies are correct about that transformation being possible (it's a late addition to the legend, after the discovery of vampire bats), but not in mist form, the vampire can cross running water.]

A vampire must rest in its native soil. [This isn't simply soil from home, but soil from its burial site.]

There are more points just on vampires, but I think you get the gist of it.

[AlexanderHowl]

Which folklore? Roses preventing the dead from rising dates back to ancient Greece and have been part of funeral practices since the time of Homer. They have been associated with divinity and holiness since 1600 BC and are associated with Christ, Mohamed, etc.. Quite frankly, you would be hard pressed to find a more universal symbol of holiness in human culture than roses.

[Brandy]

Originally Posted by Icelander

How do you address the fact that in a lot of cases, a reasonable plan is "inform the people whose job it is to deal with this"?

I think this is a good point. In any setting where the speed of communication is instant, this is going to be an issue. So, one thing GMs should do is be very careful about the decisions that they make with regard to high speed communication in fantasy and ultra-tech settings. In a modern setting, this is not easily side-stepped.

Another thing is that there isn't any reason to assume that in a low-powered campaign, the PCs are part of a larger organization such that they have a duty to inform others. If the PCs are part of a small autonomous group, there are lots of motivations available for doing something other than "telling the authorities". Any group operating in a grey area of the law opens up this possibility.

I agree with Icelander that it is a good question, but it is a question that has readily-available answers.