[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Jumper

[johndallman]

Jumper [100] is an exotic mental advantage that gives you the ability to “jump” through time, or between worlds. These are separate abilities, and if you want to do both, you need to buy Jumper twice. This trait first appeared in GURPS Time Travel for 3e.

Most of the mechanics of this advantage apply to all its forms. To make a jump, visualise your destination with ten seconds of concentration, pay 1FP, and make an IQ roll. You can try to jump sooner, but you are at ‑1 for each second skipped, and a roll of 14+ always fails. On a success you vanish from your starting point and re-appear at your destination. On a failure, you don’t go anywhere, but on a critical failure you go somewhere else, of the GM’s choice. There is no rule for critical success, but I’d waive the 1FP cost. Machine characters with no FP don’t pay that cost, but if they have passengers, each passenger must pay. You need to make a Body Sense roll after Jumping to be able to act immediately.

If you would appear somewhere you’d fall, or inside something solid, you’ll be automatically displaced if there’s somewhere within 100 yards of your destination that would be safe on those grounds. If not, you don’t go, and you know that was because there was nowhere to appear. This doesn’t keep you from appearing in places that are unsafe for other reasons, although if you have Danger Sense, the GM should roll it before you make a jump to somewhere dangerous, and if it works, warn you.

You can carry your Basic Lift, plus any Payload, with you. If you want to carry more, that’s +10% to +50% by encumbrance level. It’s far more cost-effective to take the Tunnel enhancement (+40%) which means you create and walk through a tunnel, which lasts 3d seconds. With that, others can follow you, both friend and foe. If you’re short on points, you can opt to arrive naked (‑30%) and/or stunned (‑10%).

Time-jumpers seem to be able to name their desired date and time, but world-jumpers need to “know” their target worlds. Neither kind can move in space during a jump, unless they also have Warp and the right +10% enhancement on both Jumper and Warp to use them together. Show-offs who are both time- and world-jumpers can take a different +10% enhancement on both to use them together.

If two Jumpers of the same kind are in physical contact, and one jumps, the other can “hitch a ride” and go where the first went automatically, without rolling. There are limitations that mean that other Jumpers can’t hitch a ride with you (‑10%), or that you can’t hitch with another jumper (‑20%). This is one way that world-jumpers can learn new worlds; another is a +50% enhancement that lets you try to reach other worlds that you’ve imagined or been told about, at ‑3 to your roll, and double FP cost. Once you’ve reached a new world, you can spend an hour getting the “feel” of it, and buy it as an IQ/Easy skill, which allows you to improve your roll to target it. If you don’t do this, your roll to get back there is IQ‑3. Another way to reach new worlds is the Tracking (+20%) enhancement, which lets you Jump to the world, or time, where an artifact originated. This is an IQ‑2 roll, and you only get one try.

There are more special limitations. Drift (-15%) means that you don’t arrive exactly where you aimed, but may be up to ten miles away, depending on how well you made your roll. You can also have a limited range through time or parallel worlds for each jump, and/or a maximum range you can reach from some origin point. These limitations’ values depend on the setting, and must be set by the GM, and might plausibly imply a range-based FP cost.

Powers adds a good deal to this advantage. It has Jumper (Spirit) which lets you bodily travel to the spirit world, becoming a spirit, and acquiring the default abilities of a spirit in the setting. If you fail the roll to switch worlds, you stay where you are, and are at ‑5 to try again within 10 minutes. Critical failures might attract hostile spirits, or send you to other spirit planes, such as Hell. You can also buy the ability to reach higher planes with (Spirit) or (World), which is +100% as an addition, or +0% if you can only go to higher planes. You can limit yourself to jumping between two worlds, to projecting your mind rather than moving your body, to needing to move to jump, and to needing some kind of environment or portal, all at variable costs.

Other modifiers that are useful with Jumper include Limited Use and Gadget limitations to drag the cost down, and Reliable to improve the odds. A Talent is valuable, if you can justify it.

Clearly, Jumper isn’t something that should be bought unless the campaign is going to be about it. Campaigns has guidance on world-hopping campaigns, and DF9 on Jumper (Spirit). Fantasy: Portal Realms doesn’t usually use this advantage as such, but references it for portal details, and Horror has much of Powers’ material. Infinite Worlds, naturally, makes a lot of use of Jumper, with a variety of horrible Nazi ways of gaining it, new modifiers including Mass Jump (+100%), No Concentration (+15%), No Fatigue (+20%), Uncertain Encumbrance (+25%, and not worth it), Attunement Required (‑20%), Jumps that take time (variable), Quantum-limited jumping for Infinite Worlds, and several special limitations for time-Jumpers (Only to the Past, ‑20%, limited by the Recency Effect, ‑10%, and only to times you know enough about, ‑25%). Power-Ups 5 Impulse Buys has rules for one-off Jumps, and making tunnels permanent. Powers: The Weird has a strange way of skipping forwards in time, and Psionic Powers provides Faster Concentration (+5% for each two seconds less concentration), and Improved (+10%), where you don’t auto-fail on a 14+, but use standard success rules.

Having all of the forms of Jumper, (World), (Time) and (Spirit) in the same campaign might make things too complicated. The only one that I’ve used is (World), which was extensively used in my Infinite Cabal campaign. That started off with one PC who had a sword, with mysterious origins, that could cut between worlds. It only worked four times a day, which required some pre-planning, but had Tunnel, so that the party could move together. Another PC joined later who had a Jumper gadget he’d built himself that also had Tunnel, and a third PC developed Jumper as a psionic power, built up over a long period until he, too, had Tunnel. New worlds were mostly found by travelling to them on the Astral Plane, and “cutting” down to enter the world, which could then be learned. While another PC learned Gate spells, Jumper with Tunnel was far more useful. I seem to have largely neglected the fail-on-14+ rule, but at least I did that for everyone.

How has Jumper played in your games?