Why GURPS gets TL 5 wrong, like every single other RPG

[BraselC5048]

Simply put, every single RPG system I've seen put the "industrial" TL at some point in the middle of the 18th century. To be blunt, that's flat out wrong, evidenced by every single time they actually have to deal with technology in that gap.

Really, why should exactly how coal mines are kept dry have anything to do with tech levels designed for adventurers? The standard British Army musket at the end of TL 4 was still use through 1815, mid TL 5! The entire Napoleononic Wars take place at TL 5 in GURPS, despite using the same technology as TL 4.

Instead, the tech levels should be designed around anything an adventurer would actually be likely to come across. The first "industrial" thing in that category in the caplock gun. The second one is railroad, 1830 or so, coupled with an exploding number of factories and other industrial technology.

Really, the whole age of sail tech levels are off as well. There should be one tech level that starts around 1650-1700 or so, when there really were some changes; besides weapons technology, this also was the start of the Scientific Revolution. Call it the "Scientific Age," or alternately, by a name that already exists for that period, "The Age of Reason." This covers the height of the age of sail.

It should last through the Napoleononic Wars, which really could deserve the name "the last European war." It was last war of an age, flintlock rifle and sailing ships, in a century full of warfare, before industrialization took over.

It should end at either 1820 or 1830, as the products of the industrial revolution actually appear. The next tech level, the Industrial Age, is one of caplocks and Minie balls, rifling and black powder, factories, trains and revolvers. It should last until 1880, where current GURPS tech levels are fine from there on out.

[RGTraynor]

(shrugs)

Your post doesn't really explain WHY tech levels are consistently bollixed, just that they are. Of course we're going to disagree about what tech belongs to which date. The whole concept derives from our deep-set need to slap labels and dates on things, and it suits the notion of technological advancement poorly.

Truth be told, I've never once bothered with TL. The technology in my game setting is the technology in my game setting. In some areas it's more advanced than in others. A player doesn't need to know (for instance) where weapons technology falls on some arbitrary continuum: she needs to know that my world's entering the Gunpowder Age, and that effective battlefield and shipboard culverins exist, but that arquebuses are still very rare, very cranky and very expensive.

[Cybren]

TL is an abstraction for worldbuilding, and it's one that's pretty hard to visualize before the modern era (where you get things like steam engines and transistors and the internet to very visibly demarcate TL transitions). It's not even particularly necessary for the average campaign.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Cybren

TL is an abstraction for worldbuilding,

Yes, this. It's not like you're running GURPS Napoleon and you need to include everything TL 5 and nothing else. You do your homework, you include what was there and you don't include what wasn't. Looking up TL 5 in GURPS High Tech is a good place to start, but that's just it: It's only a start.

World-Building is, quite frankly, no different. If you're going to run a fantasy Ruritanian game set in TL 5 with some fun Steampunk leanings, then you start with TL 5 as your base, and you do your homework and you pepper it with interesting technologies appropriate to your game ("Of course this game needs rapiers and steam-automata!"). TL 5 in GURPS High Tech (and the Steamtech book) is a good place to start, but it's only a start.

This seems more obvious when people run, say, TL 3 games. TL 3 Europe is different from TL 3 China or TL 3 Japan or TL 3 Empire of the Dragon King or whatever. Everyone understands that. But it's no different when fussing with any other TL. Just look at modern militaries. TL 8 American forces are not the same as TL 8 Russian forces, TL 8 Chinese forces, or TL 8 Ethiopian forces, or TL 8 terrorists.

[Agemegos]

RPGs are a bit inclined to base their distinctions of technology on the basis of the sorts of things that matter to historians of technology, such as energy sources, or production methods. Whether energy comes from human muscle, or the muscle of domesticated animals, wind, water wheels, from solid fuels burning in steam engines, liquid and gaseous fuels in internal combustion engines, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, matter-to-antimatter conversion etc., whether it is basically non-transmissible, transmitted through mechanical linkages, transmitted electrically, beamed etc. seemed terribly important to the designer of ForeSight, but it doesn't actually make a difference to the way that characters play, the way that fights go, or the way that adventures go.

It seems to me that the features of tech level that matter to player characters are principally:

• Personal weapons
• Personal armour
• Communications, and
• Transport.

The importance of personal weapons and armour seems obvious. Matchlock firearms give you certain tactical abilities, and they have characteristic limitations. The characters in The Three Musketeers just wouldn't be the same before firearms nor (less obviously) after the prevalence of flintlocks. Fighting is an important part of high-stakes adventure, and personal weapons rather than naval of siege weapons are the ones that PCs far more often use.

How messages get about has a huge impact on the courses of many adventures. Consider, for example, the Affair of the Diamond Studs in The Three Musketeers. The Queen of France has to get her diamond studs back from her admirer in England, the Duke of Buckingham, on a deadline. She does not Skype him, nor send a PGP e-mail. Even though she is desperately pressed for time she recruits the protagonist and his friends to ride horses and sailing-boats from Paris to London and back, taking a message one way and bringing back the studs. Their vicissitudes in doing so are the adventure, and it would not be possible in, not even translatable to, a world of unbreakably-enciphered anonymously-rerouted emails and small delivery drones.

Back in the early to mid 1970s I was an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes stories, Saint stories, and James Bond stories. These were set and written in about 1890–1910, 1925–1945, and 1955–1965. Holmes and the Saint were obviously living and working in different tech levels: Holmes and Watson used revolvers, the Saint an automatic, Homes got about in trains and horse-drawn vehicles, the Saint in motor-cars. Holmes sent telegrams and letters, the Saint used the telephone. In fact I wasn't really conscious of the Saint stories being set in a bygone era until I read an adventure in which the new experimental warplane stolen from the Hawker factory was a cloth-covered biplane and the Saint, an RFC veteran of WWI, out-flew it in a de Havilland tiger moth. And the point of that wasn't that the tiger moth was archaic, but that it was a trainer.

In Holmes stories people are deceived by telegrams with false names as the "signatures". In Saint stories they are deceived by people mimicking voices on low-fidelity telephones. Now all phones have caller ID, so you have to spoof that or get someone's phone to fake a message from them. Before the telephone it was very easy to set and adventure or put a Macguffin or set someone who needed to be rescued in a place where they could not send for help, be warned, etc. After the phone you had to have villains cut the phone line. With mobiles it has become hard to make anyone isolated anywhere. About 1990 I felt that I had was going to have to replace about half of my GMing bag of tricks just because of the mobile phone.

In Holmes stories movement is dominated by the schedules of trains and ships. The Saint and Bond could hop into their cars anywhere and go anywhere, any time. The privacy of cars contrasted with trains, too, so that it was a lot easier (for instance) to smuggle kidnap victims and bulky loot — and large weapons — about the place. On the other hand, there were a lot of possibilities to misdirect and waylay private automobiles that wouldn't have worked with trains, which reintroduced possibilities that went out with coach travel.

I find it interesting that a lot of these adventure-shaping possibilities depend a great deal on the qualitative abilities of transport and communications and not so much on their quantitative abilities. The Saint's cars weren't faster than Holmes' trains. The same is true of weapons to some extent: the Saint's automatics were probably 6-shot or 7-shot Webley .32s, not really much more capable than Watson's .455 revolver. But on the page they seemed modern for the same reason that I usually couldn't see that the Saint's Hirondel had running-boards or, until the tiger moth was mentions, that the "new warplane from the Hawker factory" was a fifty-year-old museum piece.




I'd call the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars "The Second World War", the First having been the Seven Years' War of 1758–1765. Significant campaigns of both took place in India, others in Africa and the Americas.

[Agemegos]

Even taking the point that it's about world-building, it seems to me that for RPGs or adventure stories it is much more fruitful to focus your attention on personal weapons and armour, private communications, and means of personal transport than on factories and steam-engines. The industrial revolution was profoundly important and I find it and its social effects fascinating. But PCs aren't profound, they are superficial, and the railways and revolvers matter far more to them than water frames and cotton gins.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

Simply put, every single RPG system I've seen put the "industrial" TL at some point in the middle of the 18th century. To be blunt, that's flat out wrong, evidenced by every single time they actually have to deal with technology in that gap.

Really, why should exactly how coal mines are kept dry have anything to do with tech levels designed for adventurers? The standard British Army musket at the end of TL 4 was still use through 1815, mid TL 5! The entire Napoleononic Wars take place at TL 5 in GURPS, despite using the same technology as TL 4.

Instead, the tech levels should be designed around anything an adventurer would actually be likely to come across. The first "industrial" thing in that category in the caplock gun. The second one is railroad, 1830 or so, coupled with an exploding number of factories and other industrial technology. .

I disagree. I don't think tech levels breakpoints should be set at the point when technologies are in general distribution that adventurers are likely to be using because a tech level breakpoint is the point at which someone is penalised when studying or starting to duplicate the technologies of that tech level. If you could use or reverse engineer an item of a given technology, then you probably don't have that penalty and you are of that tech level yourself. But well before they actually had railroads in play they had people who could have fairly easily figured out a train engine if they were given an example of one. The breakpoint that bugs me is the one between 6 and 7. The middle of World War II? Really?

[Agemegos]

It is very weird that in GURPS a character in 2014 who uses a Colt M1911A1, a Walther PP, or a Browning Hi-Power gets a -3 penalty to hit for tech level mismatch — unless he or she learns a separate skill (Pistols/TL6) that gives a -10 to hit penalty with a Glock or Walther P99. But that's a problem with what /TL does, not a problem with what the TL boundaries are.

<edited to add> My mistake, the penalty is only -2 either way. Still bizarre, though.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

It is very weird that in GURPS a character in 2014 who uses a Colt M1911A1, a Walther PP, or a Browning Hi-Power gets a -3 penalty to hit for tech level mismatch — e.

No they don't. Those weapons are available at TL 8. Also knives. The penalty is less when applied to DX skills, and secondly only comes into play if the technology in question is actually obsolete, no longer still being manufactured in significant quantities.

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

It is very weird that in GURPS a character in 2014 who uses a Colt M1911A1, a Walther PP, or a Browning Hi-Power gets a -3 penalty to hit for tech level mismatch — unless he or she learns a separate skill (Pistols/TL6) that gives a -10 to hit penalty with a Glock or Walther P99. But that's a problem with what /TL does, not a problem with what the TL boundaries are.

<edited to add> My mistake, the penalty is only -2 either way. Still bizarre, though.

Tl 8 artisans don't auto crit fail from a TL penalty when they use an hammer to drive a nail, or use a needle and thread...
They should get one, and definitively will get a tool quality penalty if they use the TL0 actual tools (one round piece of rock and one pointy one).
Likewise, a TL 8 trained shooter shouldn't in my opinion get a penalty using TL6 weapon functionally equal to TL8.
But he may get a penalty because those guns lack some of the TL8 refinements he trained with, not sure about that, I don't know enough about gun.
Celjabbe