Extended contests of skill

[MagiMaster]

It just occured to me that there are some similarities to hacking, racing, research races, and several other contests that IRL take lots of time and can make exiting TV, but in GURPS gets abstracted to rolls against one or two skills and doesn't make for exiting gaming.

I know that there's a lot of side story and secondary work to be done in all of these cases (social interactions and the like), but while the main contest gets a lot of detail in fiction, it doesn't in GURPS.

I don't actually have any suggestions though. I just though I'd bring up the similarities and see if we can't brainstorm some generally applicable ideas for spicing these kind of situations up.

[trooper6]

Those are, for me, in GURPS terms, classic Regular Contests of Skill (rather then Quick Contests). Players/NPCs, in these instances work hard to come up with some circumstantial bonuses...this may necessitate some secondary skill roll.

For example, there was a hover car chase. Cops chasing our PC Heroes. They heroes weren't getting away...we'd done a few rounds of the Contests and they weren't pulling ahead. The Pilot PC decided to use Area Knowledge to know where there might be a tricky alley to pull into...he made that skill roll and got a bonus to his next Piloting skill check. Unfortunately the cops rolled really well and caught their tricky maneuver! So then the Pilot decides to make a really tricky maneuver...he turns sideways and goes through a gap that is really small...taking a -4 to his Piloting skill. The cops can either also take the -4, or they can give up the chase...they take the -4...but they fail! And they go careening out of control! The heroes escape and there is an exciting explosion!

I tend to do thinks like this with any sort of extended Regular Contests of Skill...and usually it is my players who start looking for ways to get the edge. Sex Appeal during the Arm Wrestling contest, you name it.

[vierasmarius]

The Chase rules in Action! go into this for your example of a race, including different maneuvers and stunts you can perform to widen or narrow the distance. I could see a similar mechanic being developed for other "Long" Contests of Skill.

For instance, a hacker tries to break into a computer system while the sys-admin runs security protocols to block him. Assuming the admin is skilled, the hacker will have to take risks (stunts or unusual maneuvers) to get by the security. The hacker needs to accumulate successes to get closer to "cracking" the system, while the admin accumulates successes to get a trace on the hacker.

[Black Rose]

I don't have any suggestions either, but I will say that one of the few things I liked about the Storyteller system was was the whole "extended skill test" deal. You have a certain number of successes you are trying to reach, and you roll your Stat+Skill once every Storyteller-determined time amount. Each roll results in

• Critical Successes - a 0 on the d10, meaning either two successes added to the total, or one success and a reroll of that die, or
• Normal Successes - a roll at or above the Target Number (usually 6), meaning one success added to the total, or
• Normal Failure - a roll below the Target number, meaning no success added to the total, or
• Botches - a roll of 1 on the d10, meaning one of your previous Successes is canceled out.

You keep doing it until you run out of time, meet the target number of successes (and succeed), or get so many Botches you cancel all your successes (and fail).

[Refplace]

An idea I thought of after reading Thaumatology was to use the rules for Energy accumulation magic under Path/Book magic.
Each roll takes a predetermined amount of time based on the type of skill and circumstances.
10 minutes, hour or a day or even a week for example.
Set a difficulty and each roll gets you margin of success in points towards that goal.
Each roll reperesents an action or some kind of activity.

[Victor Maxus]

Oh, I do dozens of these all the time, and I wish I could describe to you how I make them work, but I can't. I just make a lot of them up on the spot. My areas are pretty open, my players are allowed to solve problems in a variety of ways. If they come up with something I did not think of, then I let it go, and very often it is something that does not involve combat.

One example is that they were facing an army of semi-clones. They had certain genetic attributes pumped into them, thus they were very much alike, but had differences as well. The players were from a spaceship and were stranded on the planet. To get the help they needed to get off, they needed to defend a certain city being surrounded by this clonish army. My plan was, they use use ultra tech gear in creative ways to defend the city. Then, one of the players came up with a genius idea... "we have this master psycho genetics NPC guy on our ship. Can we make a virus that is tailored made for them only and kill them?"

Creative thought, I could have said "I am GM, NO, because I did not think of that." Instead, I sort of comprimised. "All right, lethal disease hard to find on short notice, but a good flu can be gotten. Then changed to match the clonish guys DNA. Won't kill them, but a bunch of sick guys will be easier to fight."

Then the rolls began. The average soldier skill of the army to get their troops in place and set up for the seige versus the doctor and his science type skills to isolate a flu, getting a sample of clone DNA and figuring that out, changing the flu to effect only them, and then making enough of it to get it started spreading around. So, using the rushing to get down rules in GURPS, the doctor worked hard, got help form the player who was a doctor as well, and who ever had the largest marging of success after a about a half dozen rolls won. The doctor pulled it off, and it helped alot in the battle.

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but other things like this can be done. Remember, you are the GM, it is your world, modify the rules as you want to get the effect you are looking for.

[PencilBoy99]

Has anyone come up w/ a set of generic test rules for GURPS since the posting?

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

The Chase rules in Action! go into this for your example of a race... I could see a similar mechanic being developed for other "Long" Contests of Skill.

It wouldn't even need much in the way of development; mostly a matter of renaming the chase maneuvers for flavor.

[Refplace]

I love the Control Point rules that first appeared in Technical Grappling.
They work with little effort for many types of extended contests and provide a dramatic feel.
Pyramid published them for Mind Control, Posession and Hacking.
Ive worked on them for a legal contest and a Bard Lore Duel as well.
Really Douglas can and IMHO should write a supplement on the mechanic and cover a variety of types.