Seeking Lower-Powered Fantasy

Starting to play GURPS has revealed an issue that a lot of roleplaying games take away from the players: you have to choose a power level.

In GURPS terms, this is the starting number of Character Points the GM gives to players when they are making their characters. For neophytes, GURPS Basic Set seems to point towards a middling level of power:

The GM decides how many character points the player characters (PCs)
– the heroes – start with. This depends on how capable he wants them to be, and can range from under 25 points (small children) to 1,000 points or more (godlike beings), with 100-200 points being typical for career adventurers.

GURPS Basic Set: Characters, p.10

The default level of play for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is 250 points. This is what GURPS Basic Set says about this level of power:

Larger-than-Life (200-300 points): Leading roles in kung fu movies, fantasy novels, etc. Typical of the professional adventurer who has already made a name for himself.

Basic Set: Campaigns, p.487

I think that this is reflective of the trends within the wider gaming market: looking at building a character that will feel a bit more like a Dungeons & Dragons hero from 3e or 5e? You’re gonna need a lot of points.

What’s The Problem?

If you like high-power games then there isn’t a problem. The high-power default and the general trend in gaming towards super-heroic gaming becomes a problem for me in three ways:

1. High-powered characters have fewer limitations and thus can easily despatch high-powered foes and challenges. Yawn.
2. High power levels trend towards the “Super Hero Problem”: you have a set of individuals who can do amazing things and it’s harder to form a team. “Come on, work together!”
3. Power tends to corrupt, so you end up with players ignoring the fictional authorities with little concern for morality. “You did what?”

Of course, those are fairly weak objections: from the player perspective, power fantasies are popular. Running around toasting the opposition, dealing with apocalyptic danger, and becoming the authority in the world is all good fun. I imagine there are many GMs who are content to throw some “cool” situations in front of their players and let them blow through it all. It’s a rich escape from a world in which most of us feel powerless.

But, yeah, that bores me.

What makes roleplaying interesting for me is the challenge. It’s seeing characters become heroes that makes me want to play. If you’ve got it all on a plate, what’s the point of playing?

Lower the power level and three things happen that I find appealing:

1. Even mundane challenges become challenging, driving ingenuity and creativity at the table.
2. Mundane characters have to stick together and work as a team if they want to survive.
3. It’s much easier to hold on to high moral standards, to create interesting moral dilemmas, when the characters can’t just blast the evil away.

This is why I want to lower the power level in my campaign.

Choosing Power Wisely

GURPS Basic Set suggests that ordinary folk top-out at 50 points:

Average (25-50 points): Ordinary folks, such as accountants and cab drivers.

Basic Set: Campaigns, p.487

To my mind, I’ve got three power levels that are pre-written and ready to go, out of the books (so to speak) using the Dungeon Fantasy templates: 250 points; 125 points; or 62 points.

Yes, there are options for using +50 point lenses (bonus templates that help focus a character in a specific way), so that would allow for 300 points, 175 points, and 112 points as additional options, but let’s not over-complicate things to begin with. (Isn’t GURPS wonderfully flexible, though?)

Intended as notable characters in the vein of fantasy novel heroes and movie protagonists, the 250-point default templates offer the most-rounded experience. Characters are accomplished and already fit to purpose for their niche within a party. This fits the modern Dungeons & Dragons assumptions, ready to go. Primary skills seem to be up in the 15-16 range – to the d20-rolling player this might not seems too impressive but remember that, on 3d6, a skill of 15 gives you a 95.4% chance of success; skill 16 is a 98.1% chance. These guys are impressive.

Dropping that by half to 125 points offers a different experience. Primarily intended as henchmen, NPCs who serve the main 250-point characters, the templates in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 15 give you a primary combat skill up in the 15-16 range but not much else. These make for less experienced adventurers who have 2.5 times the power of a regular villager but still have a bit to learn.

Once we drop to 62 points, what as-written are referred to as “bargain henchmen” in DF15, then we see top-end skills drop to the 12-13 range. That’s a 74.1% chance at skill 12, rising to 83.8% at skill 13. The kicker, of course, is that modifiers have a greater impact on low-powered characters: a 2-point penalty knocks skill 12 down to 10, a 50% chance; at 9 or less, you’ve got a mere 37.5% chance.

Low-power characters are susceptible to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: trying to do something really challenging becomes highly risky. But, and here’s the crux of things for me, when the risk is high then the reward is sweeter. At least, that’s how I feel about it.

What Kind Of Experience Do You Want?

If you’re playing infrequently, running one-shot dungeons at an open table in which people come and go, then high-power games can be a lot of fun. I think a lot of the populist GMs out there go along with this precisely because it is fun for players to blow off steam and crush the adventure.

If you are playing a long-running campaign in which the GM is trying to offer a deep, immersive experience over time… well, then high-power is a challenge. You are going to be tempted to set-up epic campaigns and containing the heroic power is going to be harder to do. Even though GURPS Dungeon Fantasy bars the obvious “campaign-breaking spells”, such as teleportation and suspending time, you are still going to have to throw more and more high-powered challenges at the heroes every session. In my experience, this gets old very quickly.

As an aside, I think high-power gaming is a big part of the reason why players and GMs alike flit from game to game rather than committing to one campaign. We use the excuses of limited spare time to cloak the real problem that high-power gaming gets boring quickly; this is hidden behind new genres, new worlds, new campaigns, and having new people at the table. But, I digress.

In contrast, low-powered adventuring sucks if you play one-shots. Well, it does after you’ve played once or twice. This was the oft-quoted “problem” with The Call of Cthulhu as a game – players moaned to me about how easy it was to die and go mad. I also hear it playing Basic D&D from the 1980s. On the other hand, in a long-running campaign in which players are asked to invest time and effort into their characters over many sessions, low starting power is desirable. I believe you get more exciting sessions and sweeter rewards because it truly matters how you approach every problem. It’s the how of our roleplaying that makes it interesting, long-term.

How You Play Matters

You enter a dungeon room where there are 10 Goblins off-duty from patrolling the area around their lair. Being underground, your light source has given your presence away. The room contains several bedrolls around the walls and a big brazier is burning near the middle of the room, giving off a warm light. What do you do?

In a high-powered game, the 10 Goblins are a minor nuisance and a small speed-bump in the adventure. In my experience, players will wade in and kill them. They won’t expect much treasure – if you had 1000gp in treasure in there, the players would quietly think you an over-generous GM. These are minor challenges, nothing more.

In a low-powered game, this is a problem that warrants caution. 10 Goblins outnumber the party significantly. The Goblins are probably about as powerful, maybe more so, than the individual characters. Players would be advised to retreat. Most players would probably either run or negotiate. Sneakier, more subtle, players would not have walked in with the torch burning; they would have sent a scout ahead, they would be moving more cautiously into the lair, and they would choose their approach with care. Oh, and 1000gp would make the fight worth it to them.

Suddenly, how the players deal with 10 Goblins matters much more. Run in, hacking and slashing? Nah, you’ll die. Of course, you might not mind because making a 62-point character from a template is easier than building as 250-point replacement. But, honestly, most players don’t like losing characters, no matter how new those characters are. Low power will force thought, planning, and clever play where higher power will allow you to bust your way through.

How you play matters. The power level will critically affect how people play the game. If that’s genre-supporting, that’s not a problem; but, for me, the kind of fantasy I want to play is ruined by high power levels.

My Type Of Fantasy

In the past, I have been accused of being too stingy and running too many tough encounters. That’s probably a fair criticism. The reason I did it was that I wanted to challenge the characters. Thus, within the conceits of Dungeons & Dragons-style gaming, I have upped the power level of the opposition while sticking to the treasure guidance in the rulebooks. I’ve been making a crucial mistake in trying to make high-powered characters feel like low-powered characters.

To add to this, I have players who regularly raise the question of why these characters are hanging out together. In the past, I’ve invented “adventurer’s guilds” to justify a mission-orientated approach to high-power adventures. And that can work. Consider this scenario instead, though: a bunch of 62-point village guards are sent to deal with a Goblin lair. Isn’t that a whole different flavour of fantasy?

You see, I prefer a fantasy world where magic is real and powerful but not available out of the gate. A world in which we meet a group of neophytes who choose to stand up and protect their village, their town, or their kingdom. They are exceptionally brave (or stupid, depending on your viewpoint) and they brave the dangers in spite of their limitations. In this fantasy world, a couple of guards team up with the local rogue and a wizard’s apprentice because that makes sense. They ask the local initiate priest to tag along because having divine favour is logical.

62-points is, in GURPS, a little better than average. The word used is “competent”:

Competent (50-75 points): Athletes, cops, wealthy gentry . . . anyone who would have a clear edge over “average” people on an adventure.

Basic Set: Campaigns, p.487

Honestly, I much prefer to aim for a long-running campaign with a bunch of friends in which we discover how Marcus and Pieter became heroes of legend. Yes, that does mean committing to coming every session for years on end. But it also means that the early sessions will be chock full of genuinely interesting challenges. When you find that magic sword, 1000gp, or a new piece of armour… well, it’ll matter.

Originally, D&D thrust this low-powered gaming upon an unsuspecting neophyte world of first-time roleplayers and (at the time) we loved it. Over time, the power levels have crept up. That may be a thing you enjoy, I dunno. But, here’s my point: with GURPS, we get to choose our power level. We can choose how complex the game becomes. Unlike with other games, those which force a set of assumptions on the players, we don’t have to default to super-heroes in medieval armour. We can take the time to discover who are characters will become and how they achieve it.

Game on!