[Basic] Advantage of the Week: G-Experience and Improved G-Tolerance

[johndallman]

G-Experience [1 to 10] is a mundane mental advantage. You have experience of living in different gravity levels to your native level, and have reduced DX penalties in them. It costs [1] per gravity level you’re experienced with, and if you spend [10], you have this advantage for all gravity levels you’ll encounter.

Improved G-Tolerance [5 to 25] is a mundane physical advantage. You are more able to adapt to different gravity levels. Both of these advantages appeared in GURPS Space for 3e. G-Intolerance is the corresponding disadvantage, reducing your ability to adapt.

The gravity mechanics (p. B350) use both of these advantages. Everyone has a native gravity level, and some degree of tolerance for different levels before suffering penalties, their “G-Increment.” That is 0.2G by default, but you can buy it up with Improved G-Tolerance. Normal humans can’t have a G-Increment larger than 0.5G, which costs [10]. You suffer DX penalties per G-Increment you are away from your native gravity, halved if you have G-Experience for the gravity level. You also suffer IQ and HT penalties for being two or more G-Increments above your native gravity, and G-Experience does not help with those.

Let’s do some examples: Someone with native gravity of 1G, and a G-Increment of 0.2G, is 5 G-Increments away from their native gravity on Luna (0.165G), and suffers ‑5 to DX, reduced to -2 once they acquire G-Experience for lunar gravity. They don’t suffer IQ or HT penalties for being on Luna.

Someone native to Luna will be 5 G-Increments above their native gravity on Earth. This is painful: they are at -5 to DX and -2 to IQ and HT. With G-Experience for Earth gravity, they’re at -2 to DX, IQ and HT.

On Mars (0.38G), the Earth native is 3 G-increments away from native, and at ‑3 to DX, reduced to ‑1 with G-Experience. The Luna native is just 2 G-Increments above native, and at ‑2 to DX, reduced to ‑1 with G-Experience, and ‑1 to IQ and HT.

It is tempting to let characters spend [10] on G-Experience (All) and then stop worrying about these penalties. If the GM isn’t willing to do that, the trade-offs between buying G-Experience and Improved G-Tolerance can be interesting, depending on your native gravity and what gravity levels you can expect to encounter. The IQ and HT penalties make being from high gravity attractive as a character design decision, given that this doesn’t cost points.

Obviously, these advantages are mainly useful in space-going campaigns. Bio-Tech provides for them as individual or species modifications, and has a drug to reduce the effects of high gravity. Power-Ups 4 allows Improved G-Tolerance to be provided by a force field; Power-Ups 8 allows the Active Defence limitation on that advantage, but I don’t see how that could work for time spent on a planet. Back to School gives you 16 hours a day of free training in G-Experience for time spent in a new gravity level.

The characters I’ve played in space games have all been from Earth, and these advantages weren’t terribly important. I’m now running a Transhuman Space campaign, and I should have considered them more carefully in designing some NPCs.

Have these advantages entertained in your games?

[Rupert]

G-Experience is a very common advantage in my "It was Traveller once upon a time" game. To make life easier and to avoid people looking for the highest gravity world available for their characters' home world I declared that all PCs would count 1G as their 'home' gravity.

If I was doing the game over I would make the G-Experience be in fixed bands, rather than having G-Experience for 0.5G, 0.6G, etc.

Nobody has taken Improved G-Tolerance. I'm not sure why, as at 0.5G/band you can almost do without G-Experience and will still have reduced penalties. Perhaps it's because few worlds in the getting have more than 1.0G, and the players' preferred solution to DX penalties from gravity is to use lasers (because the only penalties they really care about are shooty ones).

[Flyndaran]

It's that Health/IQ penalty for higher than native gravity that always gave me pause. X above is not as problematic as X below.

In the examples, the Earthling won't be easier to kill off-world than Martians and Lunarians/Moonites/Lunatics, or whatever they would be called, on Earth.

(What would natives of the Moon be called?)

[RogerBW]

In my most recent space game I had as one of the players an enthusiastic biologist who was happy to play a light-worlder – he sometimes suffered a bit on higher-gravity worlds, but the ships in that didn't tend to boost at more than about 2G and not for very long.

I think Improved G-Tolerance (Active Defense) would be for a setting in which ships can routinely boost harder than their crews can stand – so the heroic space fighter pilot can use it to make high-G manoeuvres because they know just when their hand's going to push the throttle forward, and can brace for it.

I think that a lot of space settings (that deal with gravity at all) just assume that people can learn to be competent in all the gravities they visit; but that's not really practicable in GURPS. The best bet seems to be to come from 1G and buy your increment up to 0.5, so that you're within two increments of zero. It feels oddly constraining given how broad GURPS is in other respects.

Natives of the Moon are either Lunatics or Selenites depending on whether someone with a sense of humour got to pick.

[Phil Masters]

The gravity rules are one of the things that will get revised in my personal never-going-to-happen GURPS 4.5. Revised with extreme prejudice. The idea that it's impossible -- completely impossible -- ever to be fully, 100% effective in gravities other than one's native level... may be realistic for all I know, but offends my gamer instincts. And there's too much number-crunching.

My character in John's TS game represents their comprehensive space training by taking G-Experience 10 and Improved G-Tolerance (0.3G), and asserts that (thanks to the training) their native gravity level has been reset arbitrarily to 0.59G. That puts every gravity level between 0 and 1.19G within two increments of their native level, which means they are effectively unpenalised (thanks to rounding). As one effectively never has to run around in gravities higher than 1G in that setting, I can forget about worrying about the subject.

(The character is, incidentally, a hobbyist martial artist with a taste for low-gravity styles.)

Back when I was running Europe on Mars, I allowed the formerly-Terran characters to have reset their "native" gravity to Mars-normal, thanks to intensive VR-based training. It kept things simple.

[Flyndaran]

There's also that where you were born and raised shouldn't totally negate where your form of life evolved, IMO.
I don't believe humans raised on a 2 G world, for example, could ever fully adapt until and unless they've changed almost into another species.

I created a species that found out too late that the planet they traveled to colonize was higher gravity than expected. They did all the genetic engineering they could, but it wasn't quite enough. So they ended up biologically fitting 1.4 G but lived on a 1.6 G planet.

I have no idea how to manhandles Gurps' rules to model them.