Adapting Third Edition Templates To Fourth Edition

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Otaku

Keeping with the spirit of GURPS Warriors, I'm thinking the Heroic Knight template should reasonably accommodate a historical knight or your stereotypical fantasy knight.

A historical knight could be anything from a mounted man-at-arms to a minor, untitled landlord who wouldn't think of fighting. Sir William Lucas from Pride and Prejudice is a fictional knight drawn from Jane Austen's early 19th century acquaintances, but he's not a warrior of any kind.

Even historical knights who are warriors vary from William the Conqueror's mounted spearmen in heavy mail to zweihander wielding infantrymen in Maximillian plate. It's not a precise term and it covers over 1000 years of history.

Originally Posted by Otaku

I wasn't worrying about Dungeon Fantasy, as I thought those books already contained templates for these kinds of things.

I was mostly referencing DFRG to deal with slayer training and to illustrate that there are a bunch of different "Knight" templates in GURPS canon of wildly different abilities and concept.

Originally Posted by Otaku

Given my lack of knowledge when it comes to how historical knights were trained, even if some unarmed combat training won't do them much good, I'll still include it in the template. I would like to know what unarmed combat Skills and/or Combat Techniques seem like the best approximation of the unarmed combat training knights underwent.

See Martials Arts 4e, pp 175-177. It goes from Brawling and Wrestling, to Wrestling, to what is effectively Judo, depending on the time period and the weapons and armor in use.

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

A historical knight could be anything from a mounted man-at-arms to a minor, untitled landlord who wouldn't think of fighting.

My apologies, for I have made a mistake. GURPS Rogues, GURPS Warriors, and GURPS Wizards* aren't meant to give us one template to rule them all, even within their named category. In GURPS Warriors, the Heroic Knight template is the example entry at the beginning of the book. So I can just quote from there to explain it's purpose:

Originally Posted by GURPS Warriors, page 5

A template is really a “generic character.” You will need a “concept” – a unified vision of what it represents and where it fits in – just as for any other character. To develop this, decide on the type of template you are designing and what general role it will fill. Now visualize which character traits will be needed to meet the demands of that role in your campaign. Template design is one of the last steps of campaign preparation, so use everything you know about the campaign world to help you here.

Example: We plan to construct a “heroic knight” template, suitable for a fantasy campaign. We decide he’s strong, honorable, a wise leader and a skilled warrior. This is both an archetype (the “heroic” part) and an institutional template (the “knight” part). One could create separate templates for each aspect, or treat them as “lenses” (see Lenses and Filters, p. 9), but we have chosen to keep things simple for now.

If you're thinking "That isn't what you asked for in previous posts" then you are exactly right. I asked for what was unneeded and never intended, hence the need to apologize! I am hoping I can reference the three examples for the next template (Archer, GURPS Warriors pages 11-15) to help clarify what it is I'm looking for. Not a template to cover anyone and everyone who has ever been referred to as an "archer", but something that could be used to build as diverse of options as:

• Koji Inabe, a for a cinematic GURPS Japan set in that country's past.
• Andrew Leadflinger, a halfling from GURPS Fantasy, for a pseudo-medieval/fantasy kind of game.
• Dwayne Wilson (Nightshade), a Green Arrow-style superhero for a (at the time of publishing) modern day GURPS Supers game.

This also addresses a general question I had earlier: yes, it is perfectly fine to use traits from outside of the Basic Set. Koji Inabe makes use of cinematic Skills that - in Third Edition - would be found in GURPS Martial Arts or Compendium I. Andrew Leadflinger is using the Racial Template from GURPS Fantasy Folk (GURPS Fantasy Folk), while Nightshade has "super equipment" that I believe required GURPS Supers (for Third Edition) to design (I don't think Compendium I and Compendium II's rules would have been enough).

So, again, thanks for all the help you've already given me, mlangsdorf. I wouldn't have realized my mistakes if you hadn't, and that is on top of things like details about knightly training, and where to look in GURPS Martial Arts for Fourth Edition (which I even have handy!). :D

*I don't own currently GURPS Wizards, and unlike GURPS Rogues and GURPS Warriors I barely read and used that one back in the day. I'm not sure if I ever owned it; I think I just glanced through a friend's copy over 20 years ago. XD Unless someone else wants to tackle it, I won't be including GURPS Wizard's templates along with the others. Given how many Magic Systems were available back then and are available now in GURPS, updating the templates for GURPS Wizards to Fourth Edition might require its own thread.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Even historical knights who are warriors vary from William the Conqueror's mounted spearmen in heavy mail to zweihander wielding infantrymen in Maximillian plate. It's not a precise term and it covers over 1000 years of history.

And you sometimes see the term knight used as a broad "cultural translation" for heavy cavalry going back an extra thousand years before that - which isn't entirely unjustified, as the cost of maintaining a warhorse means such a warrior is almost always a landlord or a sworn officer thereof (i.e. the equivalent of a European knight).