Undertale Monster Template?

[Tiggurix]

I only bought Undertale at the beginning of the week, but I'm already loving it dearly, and have completed two extensive pacifist runs of it already.

Now, I'm not saying that it's necessarily a good idea to try to translate this game into a traditional tabletop RPG, especially since it is heavy on the narrative and light on the world-building, but there's one aspect of the background that I found interesting in terms of a translation excercise: The relative strengths and weaknesses of humans vs. monsters in that setting.

The game makes it very clear that monsters lack physicality; they're apparently primarily composed of pure magic, in contrast to humans, which are described as primarily being composed of water, I.E. physical matter. From this, we can probably infer that humans are generally vastly stronger in terms of ST than monsters, which would mean that, if the baseline for humans is ST 10, the general baseline for monsters would probably be about 4 to 6, regardless of size.

That's one of the more banal differences though. There are far more interesting ways humans and monsters differ. For example, one of the strengths of monsters is that they all, with no exceptions, seem to be highly proficient in the magical arts, with the game at multiple points making it clear that stoves are a largely unnecessary luxury, with monsters generally prefering to use "fire magic" to cook their food, which perfectly with GURPS Magic's Cook spell and the fact that it requires Create Fire as a prerequisite, which probably establishes that monsters universally possess a Magery of at least base level, if not much higher, since monsters also generally only attack at all with magical attacks.

However, one of the most important ways monsters and humans differ in this game is in the nature of their souls. Monsters generally have "weak" and impermanent souls, with their souls dissipating almost immediately after death, while human souls linger on after death probably indefinitely, through something described only as "determination". Monsters apparently completely lack this "determination", and at its most basic, it could be described as humans' sometimes extreme will to live and persevere. In game terms, I think this is best handled as monsters having low Will scores in comparison to humans, as this also weakens their ability to excert themselves through Extra Effort.

However, one of the more extreme effects of this "determination" is that apperently, in certain cases, this basically allows humans to travel back into time through their sheer force of will alone, which is neatly represented through the Save feature that is ubiquitous to computer RPGs. I'm not really sure how to translate this feature at all into GURPS terms, as apparently this is not necessarily universal of humans, since the monsters in the story have already collected six human souls from humans that fell into the underground which they killed, and who apparently didn't possess this ability, or they would just continously travel back in time and manipulate fate until they escaped, so I believe that a human requires a certain level of "soul power" to be able to do this, probably the equivalent of the quite significant level of one monster soul and one human soul.

Which leads us neatly into one of the final and most important features of the setting: Humans can absorb monster souls, which presumably are represented as EXP and LVL, and gain more and more power in general from this. However, monsters can absorb human souls back, and since a single human soul is much more powerful than a single monster soul, they gain far more from this, to the point that it is said that a monster with the power of seven human souls is literally godlike. How would this be represented? I guess that a character would simply gain character points from killing a member of the rival species and absorbing their soul.

All in all, here's an extremely basic baseline for monsters from me:

Monster
-15 points
ST-6 [-60]; HT-2 [-20].
Will-6 [-30].
Energy Reserve 20 (Magical) [60]; Magery 3 [35].

[Pseudonym]

Humans probably coincidentally have a Monstrous reputation... but it is probably tempered to a pretty small point value because most monsters are deathly afraid of humans, but don't really recognize them immediately.

Monsters have, as a culture, a fixation on obscenely complicated architecture and puzzles that might be tied to an obsession disadvantage, or some kind of talent that involves architecture and traps.

Unlike the dungeon fantasy type monsters, they are very open to negotiation and peaceful compromise, so they probably don't give the normal large penalties to peaceful negotiation strategies.

It is built into the lore that monster food is different than human food, and is a lampshading of the ability to recover quickly from eating food even quickly. I feel like it is a neat detail, but I don't know if it really fits into a template.

Another culture note, they are, during the events of the game, very curious about humans but absolutely wrong on a lot of fundamentals; that's probably less of a template thing though, and more of a setting thing where monsters might require unusual backgrounds for skills like Hidden Lore(Human History) or Hidden Lore(Popular Culture)

[Tiggurix]

Thank you for your response, Pseudonym! Yes, those are all good details to remember. Another thing about monsters that I remembered is that monsters apparently take damage proportional to the attackers "killing intent", which most definitely means that they take more damage if their attacker possesses disadvantages like Callous and Bloodlust, and in proportion to how many and how strong such disadvantages. Conversely, this probably means that they take less damage from characters with the Charitable disadvantage, and are even safer from characters with Pacifist (Reluctant Killer). I'm not sure if this should just be a feature, or a full out disadvantage, since I guess that if someone is trying to hurt them, they already have a certain "will to kill". Perhaps it would be something like Vulnerable to "Will to kill" (Common, times X, where "X" is proportional to certain traits in the attacker) [-45], and Injury Tolerance /2 (No will to kill [common] -40%,) [30]. I don't know if there has been made a more elegant way to treat this kind of thing in GURPS.

[Pseudonym]

Might be easier to put it in the human template as a lot of striking strength and energy reserve that has an accessibility modifier of: only available when "determined" whatever that would translate into in GURPS... Maybe berserk or "emergencies only"

[Tiggurix]

Nah, I don't think that would work. First of all, "determination" probably has more to do with time travel (saving) and defying death rather than hurting something else.

Secondly, this would mean that other humans would be vulnerable to a human's "killing intent", which I get the feeling they're not. A human takes the same amount of damage whether a bullet was meant to kill or was accidentally shot.

Thirdly, I think that the very reason monsters know this is because other monsters' "killing intent" makes attacks against a monster more effective. A monster psychopath is probably more deadly against other monsters than a regular monster guard or soldier.

[Justin_Bedard]

Huh, Neat.

Uh. So...

Input. UM I GUESS THAT...

Well... given the monsters in undertale... I'd like to point out that they're pretty strong, if only for lifting Strength.

I mean.

uh. The monsters... seem to be able to carry quite a bit of weight? (I mean, undyne, papyrus and Asgore are all in a full freaking suits of armor, and... they seem to at least be able to walk at the same pace as a non-armored child... at the least.)

ANYWAYS. I'D ADD LIKE... LIFTING ST 2 TO 4 OR SOMETHING. MAYBE. OR DECREASE ENERGY RESERVE BY 5 AND REPLACE THAT WITH LIFTING STRENGTH.

Okay. done... Blugh.