Giving Mental Stats the Spotlight They Deserve
GURPS veterans will notice the first big change the instant you look at a character sheet: there are “officially” six Basic Attributes instead of four, representing the game’s core stats.
Physical side is still ST (strength), DX (agility & coordination), and HT (health & grit). But the mental side finally gets the same love: IQ (raw brainpower, creativity, and reasoning), Perception (alertness and senses), and Will (mental fortitude and force of personality).
This isn’t entirely new. Will and Perception have always been adjustable, but IQ included those, which made it even better of a good deal than stats already were, and there have been no small end of shenanigans related to optimization.
Even beyond that, in a modern-action game full of clue-hunting, situational awareness, and holding your nerve, this split feels right. Perception now directly feeds your ability to spot threats, but keen senses doesn’t automatically mean towering intellect. Will powers resistance to fear and influence; it’s also a measure of mental grit (HT rolls still drive your body’s structure and fitness). IQ still handles knowledge and problem-solving.
It’s exactly the kind of focus Dungeon Fantasy RPG brought to fantasy characters, but taken one step further for operators clearing hostile planets or negotiating with shady contacts. Back-porting to other games would certainly be a thing; GURPS Power-Ups 9: Alternate Attributes paves the way with a whole lot of “maybe you could…” and for many of these, Mission X says “…why yes, we will.”
Which ones? I’ll chat more in detail about this later, but obviously Will and Perception made the cut. We have what is effectively “hit points” being instead divorced from ST and only really adjustable by Size Modifier and a new trait called Robustness, which under the hood is effectively Injury Tolerance (Damage Reduction), helpfully re-named Injury Reduction in the DFRPG. The fact that the entire wounding system in the game is based around the Size and Speed/Range Table baked right in made this somewhat inevitable.
Costs are balanced and mirrored: 20 pts/level for DX or IQ, 10 pts/level for HT or Per, 5 pts/level for ST or Will. No more lumping “being smart,” “noticing the ambush,” and “staring down an alien horror” into a single stat. Being equally good at “all things physical” and “all things mental” costs the same for each half: 35 points per +1 to all of them.
If you’ve ever played a Savage Worlds game where one Edge tried to do too many things at once, you’ll appreciate how clean and modular this feels at the table.
And when we start talking about Skills, you’ll see how “floating” to one attribute or another is firmly etched into the core of the game. It prevents attribute bloat, keeps the focus on training, and helps preserve niches being overshadowed by stats rather than skills. More on that later!
But I’ll give a glimpse for now, in that you might see, in a future example:
Close Combat +1 (Unarmed Grappling +3) [20]
This covers unarmed grappling, striking, and any weapon used with Reach C; the specialization is “free,” in that this character paid for an overall level of skill of “+2” which uniformly costs 20 points, and then picked a single aspect of that skill, in this case grappling, to be better at by +1 (one can go to +2, or +3 with the GM nod) at the cost of -1 in all other aspects. It assumes broad competence, and allows for differentiation; it doesn’t force it.
Over the next weeks I’ll be making posts talking about the different chapters, the game development, what MX is … and what it’s not. Please stay tuned! If you want to follow on Kickstarter so that you will be on board immediately when it launches, please click here to jump over to the promo page!
