GURPS OLD WEST: Intimidation and the Movies

[hal]

Originally Posted by safisher

The Unforgiven is a western masquerading as an anti-western (so is Lonesome Dove; Appaloosa is just a western, without the fake out). It's turning the genre upside down -- the white hats are bad guys, the black hats good guys, etc. So naturally the idea that a gunman would stand in a saloon and kill everyone while they all missed would look silly, except, of course, it doesn't in Unforgiven because its an homage to westerns.

My point, though, is that for PCs GURPS Tactical Shooting and Gun-Fu don't mix. You can't easily put them in GF situations and then use TS without the whole thing coming off badly for the PCs. It's fine to make the targets use TS and the PCs use Gun-Fu. Or at least have the PCs invest heavily in Thumbing, Fanning, or Fast-Firing, and Quick Shot. If your "guman" had put the points in those, he could have used Fast-Draw, then fired several times before his opponents had a chance to shoot. Hopefully he'll heal up, and then invest some off-screen time in a couple of techniques. If he's ever in a stand up fight like that again, he'll plug the lot of them.

As GM for this, most of the non-professionals are rarely ever going to have a gun skill higher than 11. While I have a copy of GUN-FU, I don't expect to be using it for the campaign due to its decidedly cinematic flavoring. The idea here is to try for a gritty feel if possible. The Tactical Shooting book has some good things in it and I'm using some of the rules from there - but the problem from the last game run was the intimidation aspect.

For the player in question - using a simple "threat" of his pistol and gun hand implying an invitation to a gunfight, and then rolling against Intimidation, kinda misses his intended target.

Investigating the rules more closely, I see that the proceedure I should be following is:

Roll versus Player Character's intimidation skill, minus -1 per five (or fraction thereof) targets he's trying to intimidate if more than one target, and then roll versus Highest Will rating of any of the NPC's being intimidated. Success by the person trying to intimidate results in the others thinking he's too good to handle and find some way to back down, while a failure on the part of the PC results in a contrary position.

Using Social Engineering, I see that in order to invite someone to do a rash thing, the PC has to engage in what amounts to fast talk (with perhaps a bonus point or or two for implying the other is a coward, etc).

The reason I brought up the "movies" aspect of examples of Intimidation, was to see how GURPS would handle some classic scenes in the movies. Two sides facing each other, with one side nervous or even fightened, but still in the fight, would be good for some penalties to accuracy, speed, etc. Having one side with Fast draw and the other side not have said skill, should give the edge to the one with the fast draw (providing he's accurate enough!). My hope here, is that others who read this thread later down the road, can get ideas for their own campaigns - as well as my self benefitting sufficiently to bring it in line with...

A) those who watch specific moments in those classic westerns
B) Those who are playing in a gritty campaign, knowing what to expect

Either way, I'm going to have to be prepared to spell things out for my players who haven't played much outside of TL 3 environements, or relatively peaceful TL 8 environments with little gun-play.