Wall running

[Maz]

A player ask how far his super fast alien can run along a wall. I have Martial Arts and Action and have read up o nthe parkour rules but I find no mention of vertical wall running (mirrors edge style).
So are there any benchmarks I can work with? For a normal Move:6 human, and a cat-like alien race with Move 11?

[Phantasm]

Well, I can say from experience that a normal Move 6-ish human can only run on a wall for a few steps, for maybe only a single second of movement, and usually horizontally on the wall instead of vertically, and even then only after moving for several seconds before kipping up onto the wall. (They had to paint over my footprints on the wall in my old HS, back in the late '80s....)

I'd be willing to say that Move 6-10 is one second's movement, 11-15 two seconds, 16-20 three seconds, etc. YMMV, though.

[Maz]

Whops, I meant horizontally.

[Anaraxes]

Realistically, the answer is that you can't. There's no force pushing you sideways against the wall; with no normal force, you'll have no friction to keep you from sliding down to the floor, or even a force to keep you from just pushing yourself away from the wall with the first step.

Cinematic ability-wise, buy Clinging.

[Maz]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Realistically, the answer is that you can't. There's no force pushing you sideways against the wall; with no normal force, you'll have no friction to keep you from sliding down to the floor, or even a force to keep you from just pushing yourself away from the wall with the first step.

Cinematic ability-wise, buy Clinging.

Uhmm... people do this in real life. Only for a yard or two, but they do it.

[Bilanthri]

I would think that this sort of maneuver would require a successful acrobatics roll since you aren't really "sticking and running" along the wall so much as using it to redirect momentum. One or two seconds would be the limit I would put on this for a realistic campaign, and for two seconds you'd need to be moving pretty fast to begin with, and your travel along the wall is certainly going to be an arc rather than a straight line.

That being said, running up a wall is not as difficult...Jackie Chan does it all the time.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Maz

Uhmm... people do this in real life. Only for a yard or two, but they do it.

It isn't really running on a wall, despite the name. It's actually more of a long jump that's deflected by pushing against the wall, and designed primarily to look cool. It's telling that the wall run record is less than half the distance of the long jump record.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by RyanW

It isn't really running on a wall... designed primarily to look cool.

Yes. You can maintain intermittent contact with the wall longer if you don't really push against it. That is, you're not running along the wall at full speed, the way you do on the ground, shoving with your legs to move forward. You're just moving your feet in the motion of a few steps while trying to cancel as little of your sideways velocity as you can. Meanwhile, you're pushing down a bit to reduce the amount of fall, rather than propelling yourself forward along the wall. The wallrunning ends when you use up the momentum from the jump and wind up pushing yourself away from the wall.

Here's a parkour guy saying exactly the same thing in his demonstration video. He thinks two or three steps is good. (And notice his wall is made of a lot of little horizontal ledges; it's practically ideal for the technique.)

[Donny Brook]

The Guinness record holder manages a distance of about 5 yards, involving three steps and a sort of side-kick at the end to mark a final distance. I can't find anything anywhere showing more than three real steps. In GURPS terms it looks to me like Move-2.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Maz

A player ask how far his super fast alien can run along a wall. I have Martial Arts and Action and have read up o nthe parkour rules but I find no mention of vertical wall running (mirrors edge style).
So are there any benchmarks I can work with? For a normal Move:6 human, and a cat-like alien race with Move 11?

If it were me I'd look to Action 2: Exploits (p. 19) for guidence. Specifically Running Climb.

If you look at Tic Tacs (GURPS Martial Arts, p. 106) says that you can push off another surface if you want with an extra -2 to the roll per tic-tac. Doesn't say you have to. I'd use those rules to figure your step or the simplified rules from Action 2.