Sunday Review: GURPS Action 2: Exploits

A final call-out here in this chapter for Providing Security, which is a fairly in-depth look at what happens when it’s the PCs that are in charge of trying to prevent a team just like them from doing unto them the things that PCs usually do unto others. That can be pretty cool – think about the Helicarrier scene from the first Avengers movie. It’s basically an extended security scene from the perspective of “what do we do when security’s already been breached?”

Part of me feels bad for skirting over keeping watch, or Bomb Disposal, or Sabotage, or Setting Traps. But each one contains a simple set of advice for what skill to roll against, the consequences of success or failure, and enough variation to keep it interesting. 

Important box-text that hasn’t yet been mentioned here: an action-movie treatment of High-Tech Challenges such as computer hacking and code cracking. Advice on how to fit in with various genre staples such as blending in with cops, soldiers, or criminals. Advice on how to keep fact-finding from being an exercise in boring bonus-fishing. Tables on hardware DR and HP, including doors and gates. A note on how visual style can trump common sense in this genre. A short box on opening safe and vault locks. WMDs as plot devices rather than real threats (you are all vaporized in a nuclear explosion is not how most action movies end). A quick rundown on gadgets used to provide and break security.

This entire chapter is a giant worked example of how to apply GURPS skills to the action-adventure genre, and the experiences of the writer and playtesters in running these campaigns is on full display. An incredibly useful how-to reference manual.

Chapter Four: Ultra-Violence

This chapter is divided into two sections, Chases and Combat. Each has the same goal, which is to take what potentially could devolve into a second-by-second modifier-driven crunchfest and abstract it into something more suitable to the sliver screen: the only thing that you see is the action, and maybe some scene-chewing, and clever tactical planning.

Of the two, the Chases subsystem accomplishes the goal better, in that it splits a chase into actions of “less than a minute.” This might be a few seconds or much longer (the two cars streak down the busy road dodging traffic for two or three miles), but it excludes certain tasks that in no way could fit into the allotted time. It’s a GM’s call whether characters with extreme skill can use the time rules to execute long tasks within those turns, but to keep the focus on the chase, my feeling would be no.

Chases are divided into abstract rounds, then, and into Pursuer and Quarry. Each round, the two parties select from some pre-determined maneuvers (14 of them) such as Move (the generic try-and-catch-up maneuver), Hide, or Attack. The victory conditions are assessed in a Chase roll that accounts for the starting (and again, abstract) distance between pursuer and quarry, with the goal being to close or extend the distance, and then force the chase to end (this happens automatically if the range band of the chase extends past extreme).

Range bands? Yes. The same concept I borrowed for Zoned Mapless Combat and Quick and Dirty Guns Combat was invented for chases, and is also used in the condensed combat rules.

GURPS has so many rules for combat that it’s easy to get bogged in the details, and loving attention to combat is part of the genre – but it’s supposed to be fast-paced action.

The first section offers a section on simplified shooting. It’s in the vein of my Q&D Guns above, but a bit less so. The highest utility comes from the use of the range band table to set the overall range penalties for the fight, which tends to be the fiddly-bit that, especially at close range, can slow the game down because the penalties tend to move around a lot within the reach of a Move or Step.

The bulk of the chapter offers some mild simplifications to combat, and also enables some cinematic rules as switches to allow a bit more in the way of Awesome. They borrow liberally from the wealth of mechanics available to the GURPS GM, but put the info in easy reach – for example, there are several variants of the Martial Arts rule “Shoving People Around” that are critical for Action movies. 

There are rules – similar to or borrowed from Thieves in Dungeon Fantasy – to let those with high sneakitude get the most of their abilties to disappear and reappear from combat by blending in with shadows or striking suddenly from within them.

Cinematic combat options and Extra Effort get blown out for more ways to be cool and exhaust yourself doing so on ways that provide more heroic opportunity. And a nifty set of rules for “pulling aggro” in order to taunt people into focusing their ire on you rather than the non-combat-oriented hacker.

Chapter Five: When Things Go Wrong


This chapter is essentially a list of skill tests, with appropriate description. How to use each skill to execute typical tasks for healing, diseases, and toxins. There’s a quick section on vehicular repairs that follows the same pattern.

The vehicular repair rules are a very simple way of tracking damage and function, and also restoring it with the proper rolls. Unlike characters, who can continue to be not-dead from -HP down to -5xHP, vehicles just die at -HP, which is a good way to keep things simple. A few special-case situations that commonly call for skill rolls (“Scotty, I need more power for the shields!”) are also treated.

There’s also a half-page box on how and when to use the various metagame Luck advantages – or buying successes with character points – in genre. This includes Daredevil and Serendipity.

Finally, there are a few notes about the skills to roll for restraints and escaping them.

Chapter Six: Directing the Action


The final chapter consists on five pages that are aimed straight at the GM, rather than both the players and the GM. It also has a statement that works well here, but would be equally a home (and perhaps usefully repeated) in the book’s introduction. 

“The ultimate outcome of an action story is predictable, after all: The heroes will win, like in the movies. This is a key difference between action gaming and genres such as fantasy and horror, where challenges are often confusing, weird, and unknowable.”

The first section on Campaign types lists challenges found in Exploits that are best-fits to the campaign types listed in Action 1: Heroes (which also lists the characters best suited to tackle that campaign). It tells you what tasks are good, and what types of help or equipment might be suitable or not-so-suitable for a game (mercenaries for a secret mission are likely to be disavowed, rather than being supported by a company of Rangers if things get tight).

In the same vein as “not appropriate for a campaign style,” a half-page box gives ten rules to avoid or eliminate from Action-Adventure games. Such as Regular Contests (boring!) detailed tracking of fatigue for uses other than Extra Effort (roll that into BAD), or Fright Checks (these are bad-asses, not mooks; they don’t got time to scream). And magic, because Action-Adventure, not sword-and-sorcery . . . though if magical spells replaces or supplements guns, you have The Dresden Files, which would be a fine Action-Adventure/Mystery crossover.

Much like many parts of the book talk about skill tasks and how they face the player, the chapter also hits some details on Assistance Rolls – possible requests, the rolls required to get that effect, and the resolution of such. 

And since the primary foes in action adventure movies are either other humans or the clock, three “classes” of enemies are provided: Mooks, Henchmen, and Bosses, with brief potential write-ups for each. Given the generalities involved, these are high level, with advice such as “one to three scenario-relevant skills at level 10-15” instead of a detailed blow-by-blow for each type of potential adversary.

The book ends with utility – what can happen after the action dies down and it’s time for the wrap-up, and a long 3/4-page box on how to ensure that, unlike the typical action movie (which is usually only one or two protagonists), that every character is kept relevant to the game without dominating a campaign or even a scene to the exclusion of all others. A character can be the brightest light in the room while still not losing the rest of the party in the glare.

Ballistic’s Report

I don’t mean to short-change any particular chapter, or indeed the huge swaths of the book that are “little more” than a set of tasks, the skills needed to accomplish them, and then any skills or modifiers that are used to resist or oppose that action. That is the lion’s share of improv and lookup a GM has to do during a game, and this book has taken nearly every Action trope and done the work for you, in advance.

Between Action  1 and Action 2, you have a compact (but not that compact – the two together run 85 pages) genre distillation that gives you fast-start character templates, another “template” for putting together adventures and looking for work, a “template” in Act, Assess, Analyze, etc. for the important components of an action-adventure story, and a giant list of prefabricated tasks and modifiers for executing these. 

The only thing I could wish for, because of the need to actually find the task at hand, would be to reduce all of those tasks to a tabular format. Perhaps a list that might include:

• Skill: the key skill being used as a primary condition
• Task: The particular job being accomplished here. Each skill might have several tasks that might have been described, and each would get a separate line. Page reference for details.
• Type: Skill roll, Quick Contest, Regular Contest, Reaction Roll, Effect Roll.
• Modifiers: Either the actual modifiers or types of modifiers (apply, range, target location, and lighting penalties to the Guns roll) would work.
• Opposed By: If there’s active resistance possible, this gives the options.

I’d leave complimentary skills out, and special effects or conditions can be handled in depth by the page reference under Tasks, though things like “Take margin of success as damage” might be worth a reference. A similar table could be created for Assistance Rolls from Chapter Six.

All in all, I still maintain that this book in particular is one of the most under-appreciated books published for GURPS, because while it makes for dense reading, there are something like a half-dozen to a dozen key simplifications and concepts that take a lot of the “what modifiers do I look for now” slog out of the game. The rest of the book represents a distilled list of a bloody ton of adventuring tasks that the Line Editor must have run across in his own long-running Action/Adventure campaign, packaged up nice and neatly for consumption – but you’ll want to be facile with using FIND for skills here in your PDF, because that’s probably the best way to turn this excellent book into a highly usable quick-reference guide.