B-Scale at the Table
If you’ve ever looked at the Size and Speed/Range Table in GURPS and appreciated how cleanly it can be used to scale an entire game world, Mission X takes that same elegant and useful progression and applies it directly to damage, armor, and a lot of other things. It embraces the notion that the Size and Speed/Range table (SSRT) is critical to the universality required in Powered by GURPS games.
If you’ve ever heard me interacting on the forums, you’ll see I’ve been known to joke (well, not really joke) that “if your answer isn’t the Size and Speed/Range Table, you’re asking the wrong question.”
Mission X takes this quip to heart, picks up the SSRT like a dropped Infinity Gauntlet and runs straight down the field to the busted-up van. Wait, that didn’t end so well. It runs for the goal line and implements the scaling factor seen there wherever it makes sense. The place you notice it first is that the SSRT is effectively implemented as the damage, armor, and injury scale, taking some of the logic from Conditional Injury (Pyramid 3/120) a few steps further. Conditional Injury had to ride on top of existing games and rules; Mission X allows me to embed it into the core mechanics…and that’s what I did.
The result is the “B-scale” logarithmic progression system. “B” stands for Basic. +1B ≈ ×1.5 incapacitation potential and just like the SSRT suggests, +6B = exactly ×10: Every six steps equals one full order of magnitude. All input values stay integers. Players never see decimals – the GM handles any final rounding behind the screen.
Instead of four or five multiplicative steps that might involve fractions, you now add or subtract small integers to modify a result that is often then directly applied: No further lookups required. Firearms get a fixed base Penetration B plus a cartridge-specific modifier to a universal and unified Damage Variability roll. Instead of a .30-06 being listed as 7d+1 pi, it will show as 8B+2 … a typical Severity 8 (a mortal wound), but the Damage Variability Roll gets a +2 bonus. The outcome will tend to “lean” between Severity 8 and Severity 9.
This means that when the GM says “roll for damage,” the players will always be rolling 3d versus that Damage Variability table; it provides approximately the same range of values as any number of d6, but the compression one gets around rolling scads of dice (the Central Limit Theorem combined with the Law of Large Numbers for statistics afficionados) is removed regardless of the scale of the damage.
It also provides that same spread whether the incoming destructive energy is measured in picojoules or terajoules.
Melee adds positive skill modifiers straight to the DVR. This is, in effect, saying if you drop 15 or more points into a skill (which is required to get that first +1), you achieve better results when you smack someone. Those who love (or hate) the per-die adjustments you get from Weapon Master will recognize the approach; it is similar as well to Trained Strength from Technical Grappling. All PCs (and of course NPCs!) get this benefit as part of the package deal you get from buying Close Combat (the universal unarmed and close-combat fighting skill in Mission X) at 15 points or higher. For what it’s worth: +2 to the DVR is approximately equal to +1 per 2d, adding +3 to the DVR is +1 per die, and because +2 per die is actually 157% more than average, the whopping bonus one gets at the high end for Weapon Master is equivalent to +1B+1. Since a ST 10 person starts with an unarmed combat damage score of 2B…that’s a lot.
Armor is effected via a simple Severity Adjustment Table in a manner reminiscent of Injury Tolerance. One of the tricky design decisions when dealing with logarithmic damage – which excels at multiplication and division and is much more awkward with straight addition and subtraction – was how to resolve things that legitimately need to be adds/subtracts. With luck, the solution will appeal. The table is short and easy to understand. And I’ll probably wind up putting it on a character sheet somewhere, come down to it.
Robustness, Size Modifier, hit location, and injury type all subtract directly from penetrating damage with integer adjustments (piercing +0, cutting +1, impaling +2, small piercing –1 or –2). Another interesting side note: injury modifiers and armor piercing have mostly avoided fractional divisors. Cutting and large piercing both get ×1.5 multipliers, which can be awkward at the table, and the sensible-but-obnoxious 1.5 armor divisor as first step went away hard with the transition from Third to Fourth Edition – if I recall the (1.5) armor divisor was mentioned in some Third Edition works, and stealthily present for some types of projectiles in high tech…but in the form of “reduce damage dice by x0.7 but give the result a (2) armor divisor.
In Mission X, that can just be an Armor Modifier of (–1). Whatever the armor is, it’s now one level lower. An armor divisor of (2) is just (–2), and that given to HEAT, which is (10), becomes an Armor Modifier of (–6).
The outcome is fast, intuitive combat that still feels like GURPS. Guns feel like guns – reliable, penetrating, and dominant at range. Melee stays threatening up close…but you’re going to have to work for it.
Thanks to the implicit log scale, the entire system scales cleanly from a housecat’s swipe to a space-kraken or orbital strike. One unified scale. One simple calculation. Believable consequences that keep the table moving at the high-speed pace modern action demands.
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!
