[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Maintenance

[johndallman]

Maintenance [-2 or more] is a mundane physical disadvantage. You require some form of skilled attention regularly or you will suffer loss of HT, and eventually die. This disadvantage appeared at GURPS 4e, having been split out of Dependency.

This disadvantage is rather general: it applies to gods who depend on their worshippers’ prayers, humans in intensive care, and robots that need a mechanic’s attention regularly. The kind of attention you need must be specified, as a skill or skills, an advantage or a disadvantage (e.g., Disciplines of Faith), but the things that control the value of the disadvantage are the number of people required and the frequency of maintenance. By default, each session takes an hour, and one person daily is worth [-10]. Your maintainers must have appropriate facilities (a hospital, temple, or toolkit), and are not required to make skill rolls, just spend the time. No supplies or other resources are used up, unless you take a relevant Dependency. There’s no obvious limit on the value of this disadvantage: 20,000 worshippers praying for an hour three times daily is [-420].

If you miss a maintenance period, you lose a level of HT, and must roll vs. your reduced HT. If you fail this roll, you suffer some additional problem of the GM’s choice; if the roll was a critical failure, this is potentially fatal. Recovering from missed maintenance requires, at minimum, resuming maintenance and successful skill rolls for the maintenance, but more may be required, depending on your nature and the problems that have occurred.

The Basic Set explains the distinction between Dependency, Life Support and Maintenance, and the required maintenance for machines, tools and weapons, which uses many of the rules of this disadvantage. Discworld Small Gods need worshippers and have this disadvantage (as do larger ones), though Bio-Tech creations normally don’t, unless things went wrong. Fantasy uses this disadvantage for gods, and for ancestor spirits; Horror does likewise for androids, brains in jars, ghosts and tulpa. Mars Attacks has mecha that need quite a lot of maintenance, as do humans who’ve taken the wrong vitals injuries on Martial Arts’ realistic injury tables. There’s a quirk-level version in Power-Ups 3, and Powers bases an “only with assistants” limitation on Maintenance’s number of people. Powers also has Maintenance for cyberware, and almost everything in Reign of Steel: Will to Live requires maintenance. Supers technological equipment generally has this disadvantage, as does most of the kit from Transhuman Space: Changing Times and Ultra-Tech. And Zombies can require maintenance, especially if they’re technological, or rotting.

My 3e steampunk campaign could have made good use of this, for an NPC who’d been uploaded into a mechanical computer. Hiram Maxim made sure she got proper maintenance, and she had an awesome moment when emissaries of the Martian invaders were frightened by her. They were several TLs ahead, but had nothing like her.

Has Maintenance kept your games running?

[Rupert]

One of the NPCs in my SF game will probably have this disad, because she'll be wanting to move into an android body once she realises just how good the ones available where they currently are are. Of course, she'll need to find the money first, or something else the creators of such bodies want.

As someone who was originally an AI, but who is now inhabiting a (borrowed) human body, she really wants a body that's been designed by competent engineers.

[Rysith]

One of the PCs in my Supers game has it, since they are an alien robot. It hasn't come up that much (it's only once a week, and their alien car can handle all of it), but it might become relevant that they have been trapped away from said car, where I'm hoping that it will serve as a nice contrast to the rest of the characters temporarily losing access to their superpowers.

[awesomenessofme1]

Are there specific rules for creatures that need multiple forms of Maintenance? So far, I've just operated under the assumption that separate types of Maintenance are treated completely separately.

The specific example I'm talking about are stone golems, which I'm thinking about introducing into my game. They require infusions of magic (Maintenance, Magery 1 or above, weekly) [-5] and an occasional checkup by a skilled stonemason (Maintenance, Masonry, bi-weekly) [-3]. Does this seem like the right way to treat it?

[David Johnston2]

Maintenance bothers me. I tend to think it should be a limitation rather than a Disadvantage.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Maintenance bothers me. I tend to think it should be a limitation rather than a Disadvantage.

It can be used as a Limitation (as seen with the cybernetics in Ultra-Tech). If it was only a Limitation, applying it to things that require maintenance to function at all (robots, trucks, etc.) would be clumsy.

[khorboth]

I GMd for a DF PC who had this. He was a spirit inhabiting a Terra cotta warrior. He needed weekly Pottery maintenance. It was not a big deal and pretty much just offset the doesn't eat/drink.

Overall, I think it's a good add and fills an important niche.