[AP] 9,401: An Introduction to GURPS

[Mercator]

This is the report of our first GURPS game (at last!), which took place last Saturday. It went well, and we had a great time. I hope the experience can be useful to newbies who feel intimidated by the rules, by showing that that one can prepare a good GURPS adventure quickly and without too much effort.

This thread is also posted at the FLAT BLACK Wikidot site.

The Mechanics

There were 5 players, with me as the GM. I chose the scenario 9,401, written by Brett for his superb setting FLAT BLACK and GMd by him in these forums. Besides being a very good scenario, I chose it because it consisted mainly on research and roleplaying, and with relatively little action scenes that would require complex rules and many die rolls. This being a one-shot with a new ruleset, I wanted to keep rules and prep overhead to a minimum for everybody, and I think I succeeded.

The rules used were those in GURPS Lite 4th Edition, with a few extras from the Basic Set that I consider important:

1. Rules for autofire;
2. rules for hit locations;
3. rules for grappling and pinning (specially for Ashbless and Lethe).

I created a Google group to discuss the setting about a week before play and make all relevant material available to the players. Everybody who read the rules found them easy to understand and there were no game-mechanics problems; however, on reflection, I should have done this much earlier to address possible complications. I posted the URL to the scenario website (or rather, to a previous version that does not refer to the already played-out game), where players picked their preferred characters on a first-come, first-served basis. Enough people was interested (or wanted me to shut up about the game) that all five characters were taken: Ashbless and Lethe were the most popular choices, with Ishikawa and -surprisingly- Thorrson left last. A few days before the game, I sent them the Prelude so that they could get a better feeling for the atmosphere and to reduce the need for descriptions, so once everybody was ready, we could jump straight to the glacis in Scene 1.

Since 9,401 was originally written for another game system, I had to convert the pre-made characters, equipment, etc. to GURPS:

For the characters, Brett had kindly sent me the original character sheets and conversion guidelines, so the GURPS versions were easy to write. Icelander wrote some very detailed conversions himself, but I wanted to keep the sheets simple and without rules outside Basic (or Lite, if possible), so I choose to do my own, much simpler versions. Incidentally, lack of prep time made me ignore some vital skills that I had to adjudicate in mid-game; nobody seemed to mind much.

For the equipment, I used Icelander's large-caliber Gauss guns in the FB equipment thread (I could easily have taken the worked examples in Ultra-Tech, but the 4mm silliness bothered me too much), and standard APHEX grenades from p. UT152 for Naiooka's rifle. I also gave them TL10 nanoweave armors (p. UT172) and tactical helmets (p. UT180), along with Compact Targeting Scopes (p.UT149).

As an aside, I played with the idea of substituting the original explosive rounds the characters used (filled with a superscience explosive based on chelated antimatter) with a new, slightly less superscience ammunition with ultra-fast shape memory --which would be aerodynamic to pierce through armor but would expand inside the target as a hollow-point, therefore having both an armor divisor and a higher damage type. In the end I kept them as strictly military ammunition, available only for Naiooka's rifle; the DoJ pistols were beginning to get a bit too scary . . .

I rounded up the equipment list with some first-aid material from p. UT196-200 and treating Lethe's Superhacker and Ashbless' forensic swarms (the players liked the imagery of these) as infodump-granting gizmos that gave them the right clues on any success rolls in the relevant Skills (Forensics/Criminology for Ashbless, Research for Lethe).

We used no miniatures. There are only two fights in the scenario, so I didn't bother with hex grids, etc. The situation at Hesiod's was played out with a hand-drawn sketch of the place and rough distance estimates, and for the von Bork villa I borrowed the Isolated Estate from the old Merc:2000 corebook, which we used just for visual reference and not for detailed tactical combat.

And that was everything I had to do rules-wise. I could've prepared all this in a few hours; actually, it took many fragments of an hour scattered over more than a week, but that was due to me having little free time, not to the process being difficult. The point is: you can prepare a complex, very rewarding GURPS adventure with just Lite, a few bits from the Basic Set, and a suitable equipment catalog. Of course, having Brett answering all my questions about FLAT BLACK in exhaustive detail helped to get me and the players in the right mood (which was a big part of the fun), but the purely mechanical part was easy to do myself.

In the next posts (hopefully in a few days, as time allows) I will describe the game itself.