Musings – Mailanka's Musing

The Remixed Hero

This is an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for awhile. I don’t have a clear system in mind yet, this is more of an observation of something I’d like to see, and something I appreciate when it works well, and it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see implemented well in a game like GURPS, but I’m not yet sure how.

What is a Remixed Hero?

Have you ever noticed that in fiction, especially comic books or long-running movie franchises, TV shows or book series, that the characters change? A lot of this change is simply growth. I’ve been revisiting One Piece, and you can track their growth over the series, which goes to great lengths to justify each power-up the characters get. But, generally speaking, these power-ups are either additive (Luffy gains Haki abilities in addition to his Devil Fruit powers) or they replace existing abilities (Usopp functionally replaces his dials with the green shots from the Boin archipelago).

But sometimes, the change is a major shift of the character, and temporary, and becomes a sort of alternate mode. It’s not that the character adds a new set of abilities so much as adopts a new mode, a new set of themes that are at least tangentially related to their original themes. This change is temporary and often explores a distinct aspect of the character in more detail, and then once that particular story is done, the character “forgets” those abilities or, at least, swaps back into their more standard “power-set.” They might at a later time return to this alternate mode if the story warrants it.

This sort of “power swap” is most common in comic books, often accompanied by “palette” swap as the character changes costumes. I’ve included Iron Man above because he can simply swap out suits and thus is perhaps the most memorable example, but he’s hardly alone. Spider-Man and Spawn are both pretty notorious for costume changes (Spider-Man, especially, has his symbiote/black suit) that come with power changes, or at least thematic changes.

This formula allows the comic book writers to “change up” a tired formula. We may have “classic spider-man,” the character we fell in love with, and then some sort of “cyber spider-man” that more deeply explores the technological aspects of the character. The “black suit” allowed us a darker, edgier spider-man that explored both his angst and his sci-fi themes. We might have a “man-spider” variant where we explore how far we can take the mutation and so on. If a particular theme proves popular, we may bring it back in future stories, but we can also simply remove the theme and “forget about it” for awhile, returning to our classic theme.

These don’t represent incremental power-improvements, or at least they don’t have to. It’s not necessarily so that cyber-spider is stronger or weaker than symbiote spider-man. What matters is that these represent lateral, thematic changes. In a tabletop RPG, these would’t reflect “level up” so much as a re-imagining of the character. We’re playing the same character, but differently

Why Do You Want This?

One thing I regularly run into when playing an RPG is that I get bored of my character. Half the fun in an RPG for me is imagining my build, working out how the character will play, and then seeing that character in play. The fun of “leveling up” is moving closer to a fully realized vision of the character, but also about getting new toys to play with. As you play the same character over and over again, you eventually settle into a strategy that works the vast majority of the time, and so you play that same strategy over and over again. A lot of GMs focus on testing you by throwing you against unusual enemies. To use Psi-Wars as an example, your space knight will get used to fighting imperial troopers pretty quick, but the tactics necessary to fight a satemo or space dragon, or a sorcerer, are quite different, which means you must re-interpret how your character and their toolbox works given the new situation.

But what if they had a different toolbox to play with? The idea here isn’t that you’re playing a new character. The character should feel similar, but what if your space knight pivoted from their focus on martial arts to a deeper focus on their psychic abilities, or explored their genetic legacy more deeply, or explored what it would be like to have some sort of advanced cyber-suit? This would prevent gameplay from getting stale, as we explored alternate modes for how the character could fight and interact with the world?

A Darker Remix

Most of this focuses on how to take the hero’s advantages and remix them, but what about disadvantages? Hill Folk, inspired by Hamlet’s Hitpoints, tries to emulate TV show procedurals by giving every character a dramatic pole: two different aspects of their character that pull in tension with one another, and every session, the GM is encouraged to focus on one pole or another, or to put those poles in tension.

For example, Luke Skywalker is driven to escape his mundane life. He wants to get away from Tatooine, to become a great jedi, and to be the Big Damn Hero. But at the same time, he is deeply driven by family. When he gets his chance to escape, he hesitates and is drawn back to his home, and it is only the death of his family that liberates him to escape the confines of his childish banality. He wants to become a great jedi like his father, and he is driven to rage by the threat against his family in RotJ. These are two different aspects to his character, and in a given “episode” or “session” we could explore one or the other, or put both into tension. But it’s not the idea that every aspect of a character is always in effect all the time: not every “episode” about Luke Skywalker needs to be about ambition and family. One or the other could be the primary driver of the drama. Both should exist, as they define the character, but only one needs to be the focus at any given time.

So How Would This Work?

Okay, I think we’ve explored the concept enough. We have a character, but instead of imagining them as a “hard” set of fixed values, we can imagine them as something fuzzier. Certainly, they are built around a core of ideas, but at any given moment, only some aspect of the character is essential to the story or conflict. But how does this work in practice?

A lot of RPGs impelement something like this, though rarely overtly. Some of them are so good at it that when you look closely, you realize it must be intentional, but it’s hidden under the surface, so it needs to be drawn out.

D&D Remixed

D&D is famous for its hard “class” structure: a fighter is a fighter, and a wizard is a wizard, so it would seem to be a strange candidate for this sort of “flexible character” but if you look close, it’s clearly present and there, it’s just not necessarily obvious.

The case for a wizard is clearer, because they had modularity built into their design. A wizard has spell slots, but nothing is defined about what spells they must have. It is generally possible to specialize, to be a Necromancer or an Enchanter, but this is not strictly necessary. A wizard is, by their nature, defined by their grimoire and how flexible they are within that space. They may have, for example, 6 spell slots, but 18 spells, so for any given adventure, they can have three completely different “loadouts.” When they level up, they expand the number of spell slots, and their consistency is defined by what feats or class features they elect to take as they level up: one wizard might focus on maximizing their damage, becoming an “artillery wizard” while another might focus on maximizing their flexibility, so they can tailor their wizardry to any situation, even swapping out a limited number of spell slots on the fly if necessary. But how they actually play from session to session is necessarily unique and different every time, making them less boring. They can also adapt dynamically without leveling up, as the DM grants them new spells for their grimoire, or gives them scrolls or enchanted wands to grant them temporary new powers to explore, and see if they like these new options or new modes, and if so, gives them the option to integrate them into their character. One of my major goals with Psi-Wars Sorcery was emulating this “modular wizard” approach to achieve a similar character flexibilty.

The case for a fighter is far less intuitive. Fighters are generally considered “the most boring” of the classes, at least in a game mechanic sense, as they are the most consistent in tactics. Where the wizard can cast one of an entire collection of spells, the fighter just… attacks. And as they level, they can attack harder or more often. And that’s it. Except that ignores how fighters tend to interact with magic items and equipment in general. Fighters often have high Str and thus high encumbrance, which means they can carry a lot of gear. There is no need, often no ability, to specialize in a single weapon. You may imagine your fighter as a swordsman, but nothing actually prevents them from swinging an axe or using a spear. Furthermore, though people complain about it, D&D encourages the swapping of weapons when you find better gear. You may have a precious sword, but if you get a Mace of +1 Skeleton Slaying, you swap over to it, because it’s a better weapon. Furthermore, the game builds in vulnerabilities and damage types that encourage weapon swapping, so the GM can alter a fighter the same way Iron Man alters how they fight: by giving them a choice in gear. The fighter is always great at fighting, but they’ll fight different if stripped down and cast into a gladiatorial pit than if they can armor up and wage war on the open battlefield, or if they carry sacred relic-weapons into the crypt of the tomb-king.

Kung Fu Remixed

My favorite-game-you’ve-never-heard-of is Legends of the Wulin, which is a masterclass of the character remix. Characters have “external styles” which are different combat modes, similar to martial arts in most games, except a character can only use one at a time. The game is built around swapping styles for different situations, so if your Tiger Style isn’t working, you swap into Drunken Fist or the defensive Crane style, and so on. Characters advance in power, yes, but they are also expected to broaden, and explore alternate strategies.

The other central component of Legends of the Wulin are the Secret Arts, also known as “chi conditions.” These are conditions that if you embrace, you either gain a benefit, or avoid a penalty. These can be built into the character, or they can be inflicted and manipulated by other characters, and this is assumed to happen all the time, and to be central to the game.

So not only will your martial artist have to choose what style they need to use to fight an opponent, they have to handle the secret arts of their opponent. They may face a courtier who manipulates their passions and jealousy to mess with their chi. Perhaps your character is especially vulnerable to jealous anger or lonely depression, and she can tug on these heart strings to, yes, make you stronger, to empower your chi and let you use abilities at a higher level than every before, but only if you misbehave in ways that benefit her. Or perhaps you face a dark sorcerer who can degrade your chi by inflicting strange, occult requirements on you that can strip you from your chi and force you to rely on more mundane combat methods unless you can line up your behavior with their strange occult requirements.

The net result is every major encounter is always a unique experience, where the core of your character is preserved, but they will need to express their nature in a variety of ways depending on the nature of their encounter.

Remixing GURPS characters

So how would this work in GURPS or Psi-Wars? I’m not sure. If I have a good answer for that, I would work it in directly. GURPS tends to punish this sort of thing or, better said, deeply reward narrow specialization. The more finely you can define your character, the cheaper they get, and permanent investments tend to see more reward than temporary flexibility. I have a few ideas, though.

Modular Powers, Alternate Abilites, and similar traits

GURPS has a few traits that directly promote flexible characters. Modular abilities allow the character to directly swap out their abilities, and this is a central trait of my ongoing treatment of Deep Engine Sorcery, which expects that characters slot spells at least as often as they learn spells. Wild Talent and Wildcard skills allow characters to use whatever they need, at the time they need it. Alternate Abilities give a considerable discount on different combat modes, or different sets of abilities, and are also central to how Divine Favor and Sorcery work. Finally, Alternate Forms allow you to fully swap out your character build with another build, and is best used when it gives you two very different modes: a weak but cunning human with a dangerous and stupid werewolf form, for example.

The problem with these abilities is that they’re constant. If you have a modular power, you always have a modular power, and the flexibility of your character’s build is part of their build. It’s no worse than the D&D wizard, of course, or Hillfolk’s dramatic poles: perhaps some adventures focus on your human side, and others more on your werewolf side. But these don’t really encourage a remixed character.

Alternate Builds

What about entirely different character designs? You have your space knight, what about an entirely different design that remains true to the core of the character, but focuses on their psychic abilities or their genetic legacy, or invests deeply in their new relic sword?

There’s nothing inherent here that “breaks the rules” of GURPS. You could treat it like Troupe play, except all the characters you have are, actually, your character, and you swap them in and out as necessary, or with some narrative support.

The problem with this design is that you’d have to maintain several different characters at once. If you have, three modes, you’d have to build all three modes, and GURPS character creation is pretty grueling. When your GM gave you points, presumably you’d have to spend points on all three, which could be tedious.

A game where this was how everything worked could be pretty exhausting, maybe even off-putting, especially to players who weren’t interested in the idea of a remixed character. It is, after all, a rather advanced concept, only relevant after you’ve realized playing the same character tends to bore you. If it doesn’t bore you, it’s unnecessary make-work.

Still, an alien race that worked like this might be interesting. It was the core idea of the Herne. Maybe I should return to them.

A New Disadvantage Paradigm

The more I’ve played GURPS, the more I’ve come to love Quirks, not as an after thought, but the essential nature of a character. Yes, they have a negligible impact on your character, but they tend to have an outsized role in characterizing who your character is. They give your character their “voice,” and their narrative signature. The reason I think most people give them short shrift is that disadvantages tend to do this, but even more so. If your character is very into cute girls, you give them Lecherousness. But why not Desirous instead? It achieves the same narrative result, without necessarily forcing your character to behave in certain ways, and without added mental load to the GM.

The problem with disadvantages is that any disadvantage that isn’t “in play” is free points. If we imagine a character who is Lecherous but also has Bad Temper, then they must always be in love and also angry (so, presumably, yelling at the girls they like so much). If they are only in love or angry, then they have “stolen” 10 to 15 points from the GM, and this is bad, so we must enforce both at once.

What we’d want to do is treat disadvantages as a sort of “pool of narrative possibilities.” It would need to be okay that your character is either angry and picking fights or falling in love with every character they see. Sanji, from One Piece, is like this: quick to anger, quick to fall in love, but I’ve never seen him be angry with the girl he’s in love with!

The Ham Clause tries to get around this. It suggests imposing a penalty instead of character behavior strictures. So we could focus on our character being head over heels for a wicked woman who will manipulate them, thus justifying the -15 points for lecherousness that session, and imposing a -2 penalty on their roles for a particular scene do to them being “angry” about something, and thus justifying the -10 point bad temper.

But what if we instead treated all the disadvantages as a pool of potential disadvantages. You just get your disad budget for free, as a reward for articulating what sort of dramatic poles they represent in your character, and we treat them as quirks until such time we want them to be narratively meaningful: you are angry, yes, sure, and you fall in love at the drop of a hat, but that’s not necessarily important this session.

The problem with this approach is some disadvantages don’t work like this. If you are blind, you are always blind. If you have -1 ST, you always have -1 ST. It might not matter for a given session: perhaps you spend the whole time talking to people, or lost in dreams during a dream quest, or something else where your physical disadvantages aren’t relevant, which is no worse than saying your lecherousness doesn’t matter this session either because there are no cute girls, or the GM doesn’t want to focus on it this session.

What I seem to be aiming for is something similar to Chi Conditions or Fate Aspects, where disadvantages are relevant only when it’s nice that they’re relevant, and they act more like descriptors the rest of the time, but enforcing that is such a dramatic paradigm shift to GURPS that it would require a bottom-up rework of all the various templates. Regardless,something to take the mental load disadvantages impose on GMs would be nice, something that turns them from things the GM must enforce to tools they can use to create interesting scenarios would be welcome.

Out of Ideas

I don’t have any answers here. I’ve just been thinking about this sort of character for awhile, and how to integrate them into games, to keep games from getting stale, and to allow players to express different aspects of their character when it interests them, and downplay others when it suits them. I want gameplay to change without constant power escalation, and it’s been something that’s bugged me for awhile. While I note several games that do it well, I’ve found no games that really focus on it as essential. If you know of any, or have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

The Narrative Weight of Power

I really like the way Psi-Wars character power-ups have panned out. That’s hardly surprising, since I wrote it, you’d expect me to like it, but I hadn’t explicitly intended for it to work out this way, it was just the accumulation of various lessons I learned from RPGs I particularly enjoyed, especially Exalted and Weapons of the Gods (and to a lesser extent, 7th Sea) culminating in a shape I didn’t realize I liked so much. A recent discussion regarding the power levels of various shonen anime characters crystallized for me the principle I had been looking for in RPGs, and what I had unconsciously done in Psi-Wars, and how to generalize this lesson to other RPGs.

What triggered the discussion was people playing meme games with Grok on X, showing a picture of various Shonen anime characters and asking Grok to remove the strongest. The picture included both One Punch Man and Goku, and, to nobody’s surprise, it removed Goku. I thought about this, and I both disagreed, and understood what it was doing and why nobody else disagreed with it, and why people would disagree with me.

I am Aware of the Discord Situation

So, by now, I’m sure most people have heard that Discord plans to roll out age-verification, and the reactions I’ve seen so far have been decidedly mixed on this. I, of course, make heavy use of Discord for my Psi-Wars community, so it’s probably worth addressing.

I take privacy seriously. I sort of stumbled into it when I got tired of being advertised to by my email client and OS, and sought alternatives, and then was dragged down the privacy rabbithole, as that’s the only recourse to avoid having ads shoved in your face these days, it seems. I’ve also learned not to trust the platforms I use. They may mean well, currently, but if my time using Google taught me anything, it’s that your tech relationships have expiration dates. So I had been preparing for the downfall of Discord for years. Not that I expected Discord would fall, enshittify, or any of those other fancy terms for the general worsening of “free” internet services, but because I prefer to be prepared rather than caught flat-footed.

I’ve tried a few alternatives. I had Guilded for years, but then it went Roblox exclusive, and then collapsed. I currently have Stoat, and I’ve had it since it was called “Revolt.” And yes, there’s already a Psi-Wars server on it. I currently lean in its direction as it’s possible to self-host it, and it’s the most “discord-like” of the alternatives I’ve looked at. That said, it has some problems, most of which were caused by a massive upswing in users (I’m hearing numbers like “200,000 new users in one day”) that they weren’t prepared for, and if I read between the lines on their tech posts, weren’t designed for either. They seem more of a hobby project than The Next Big New Thing, but a lot of promising projects start like that, and I’m not averse to an acceptable degree of jank in my tech. That said, I keep eyeing Matrix as the Obviously Best Solution, but it takes a lot more work to set-up and would be a bigger ask to move people over.

I am also keenly aware that most people do not care nearly as much as I do about this sort of thing. Most people have other concerns that occupy them, and it is on this inertia that big tech companies often rely, when it comes to changes like this. Sure, a few activist types will get up in arms, but the average person will barely notice.

I’m not here today to advocate for privacy, or to tell you that you should dump or boycott Discord. Everyone has their own preferences, and I generally find it a pointless exercise to argue about these things online. In particular, I am 100% sure that if I closed my Psi-Wars discord in favor of a Stoat server, I would lose likely 80% of my community, so I’m not going to do that.

I will say I will not Age Verify to discord. They’ve begun making noises that maybe most of us won’t have to. There’s nothing “mature” going on in the Psi-Wars discord that needs age verification, and this has caused enough of a backlash that they’ve backpedaled a bit. But I also think the writing is on the wall: Discord is now a publicly traded company, your data is extremely valuable, so pressure is on from investors to get at that sweet, sweet biometric data, so at some point they might start to require it. In such a case, I’ll need a contingency plan for someone to maintain my community servers in such a case, and I’ll need a secondary channel for communication in case that sort of thing happens.

It’s also possible that you personally feel strongly about this and don’t want to support or use Discord anymore. I have a writing partner that bailed the instant this was announced, maybe you fee the same way. So having an alternative would be helpful.

One is coming. I’m not going to announce it yet, for a few reasons. First, my choice is currently Stoat, and my experience is that it’s not fully baked. It has a lot of little announces that can cause real issues, like failure to alert, inferior mobile app, and other headaches that will turn some people who want it to “just work” away. I know it’s only a few people doing this on their own time, but at the same time, I need my chat server to function roughly as reliably as Discord currently does before I’m going to sell it to people. Stoat might get over these current capacity issues, but we’ll see. Second, should there be a lot of interest in moving, unless that interest is the vast majority, it will split the community, and I don’t want to do that unless strictly necessary.

So, to summarize: I know about the problem, it’s an issue I’ve wrestled with for years, I have some plans, those plans are still in motion. If there is a change, it will almost certainly not result in the total closure of the server, but I might need to recruit a few hands to help manage things in case I lose access. There will be some sort of Discord alternative coming for the Psi-Wars server, but I cannot say, for sure, when. It will not result in the total closure of the Discord server, but act as a community alternative.

Thoughts on Racial Personality Traits

I’ve been so busy with Eldoth stuff behind the scenes, but a discussion popped up in my Discord that was so interesting I thought about posting one of my patented multi-post diatribes there, but then it occurred to me that I’m not posting to the blog enough, so I thought I would post it here. This is likely one of those “Things Mailanka always says” and I’m sure I’ve discussed it before, but it’s always fun to return to favorite old topics.

Context: Asrathi Impulsiveness

Someone pointed out that the Asrathi lack the appropriate Social Stigma that all aliens in Psi-Wars should have, due to the dominance of a xenophobic empire, which reduces their cost by 5 points to 15 points. While Psi-Wars has no specific set point value for the racial templates of their alien racial templates, but I do aim for 25 or less, as 25 points is the cost of a power-up, and I tend to treat racial templates as a power-up, as that fits the aesthetic of space opera. So, someone proposed removing their Impulsiveness disadvantage, and this triggered a discussion I found interesting.

For additional context, the Asrathi are the “Catfolk” race of Psi-Wars. Their template is largely cribbed from various “Cat-folk” sources, including Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Basic and GURPS Bio-Tech, and given that this is a moving target, their traits have changed a lot over time, as I settle on what they should look like. However, they have become increasingly unique to Psi-Wars and the particulars of design and philosophy has begun to turn them from something generically “GURPS” to something specific to Psi-Wars, which is part of where this discussion comes from.

This post is mostly me musing on whether Impulsiveness belongs on the template (Spoiler: my conclusion in the end is that it does, but feel free to follow me on the journey)

10 Years of Psi-Wars

It’s 2026. Happy New Year! I wanted, originally, for this post to just be a one year retrospective, but I double checked and, in fact, we’re now officially 10 years into Psi-Wars, so I can’t let that go unremarked. In retrospect, I should have had something cool planned for this moment, but Psi-Wars remains a side-hobby I do when I’m not working or parenting, so alas, I have nothing special planned for this year, other than to carry forward with what I’ve been doing.

Traders Revisted

So, the goal for this month is to work out the cybernetics for the Traders. With luck, I can have them finished in a single month; the last batch took three months, but involved a lot of revisions, and this batch likely won’t need that. On the other hand, this is an opportunity to think my way through aliens and cybernetics, which is honestly not something we see that often in sci-fi RPGs, and I’m not sure why. I suppose most of the time the RPGs just sort of ignore the alternate biologies of aliens, and particularly don’t put that much detail in their cybernetics. We, thus, have a unique opportunity to make something a little special here. So perhaps we can take our time, at least a little.

The Derrick White Armor Rebalance

Derrick has been running playtests on the Discord, random fights and events where he wrestles with the rules to better understand them, similar to the playtests I used to write out, but more persistent, exhaustive and narrative. A lot of useful information comes out, and sometimes we tussle over it. I tend to give a lot of pushback if the problem is GURPS itself. No open ruleset can be perfect, and 4e is certainly starting to get on in years and is struggling under the strain, but to be frank, I’ve seen many systems that handle it worse. Regardless, my job is not to write you a great new system, but as good an implementation of a good system as I can.

But some things I can definitely change, especially when it comes to certain interpretations of mechanics, and especially to how custom technology is interpreted. See, Damage and DR comes up a lot in Derrick’s games, and he argues that the DR of Psi-Wars is insufficient. Now, in some ways, this is a GURPS problem, because GURPS vastly overvalues the utility of DR. But I have largely resolved this problem because innate attack is 1/3 the cost of GURPS standard, but DR is 1/5, which means DR has a greater reduction than Innate Attack, so we’ve already rebalanced DR in GURPS to some extent. But the problem I notice in his games aren’t “powers.” High powered characters with extreme DR are already tough enough, but they pay points for it. The question is how tough should armor me.

How Tough Should Psi-Wars Armor Be?

The GURPS standard is that armor is built to withstand a particular attack when it cancels out the average attack. If a pistol deals 3d damage, then a “pistol-proof vest” has DR 10. If we follow this logic, we must first determine what our “damage thresholds” are, and that’s simple enough:

Pistols: 3d (5)
Rifles: 6d (5)
“Heavy” (Force Sword, Heavy Blasters): 8d (5)

This means, per GURPS logic, DR 50, DR 100, and DR 140 for the “armor tiers.” If you pay close attention, you’ll notice a lot of my armor tends to hover in these thresholds, though a little on the low side.

There are two problems with this approach, though. The first is that a “lucky” shot can still kill you if you wear “proof” armor. That’s not necessarily unrealistic, but it’s pretty unsatisfying. One of the reasons Active Defense is so popular is that it prevents any damage, while “proof” armor has about a 50% chance of still inflicting at least some shock, and often some stun, which is potentially fight-ending. The second is that these numbers only really apply to NPCs: PCs will use heavier pistols that average closer to 4d damage, hot-shot their rifles to do closer to 7d damage, and take Weapon Master to inflict 8d+16 damage with their force sword. This isn’t necessarily a problem, at least in terms of PC vs NPC: it’s fine that PCs are using their 4d pistol to zip through NPCs wearing “bulletproof” armor, but it’s not as nice when PCs seek a DR-focused build. I often discuss the “Anastasia problem” which is not really Anastasia’s fault (Shay Sabine had a similar build), but is a nice term for the fact that GURPS tends to push you away from DR by making it too unreliable a defense when compared to active defense solutions, to the point where wearing DR in many GURPS campaigns is actively detrimental, because the encumbrance’s penalty to active defense is too dangerous to compensate for the middling protection offered by the DR.

So what if we bumped it up by about 10%? Instead of protecting 50% of the time, we protected fully 60% of the time? This comes to about 4 DR per expected die of damage. This means our DR would need to be 60, 120, and 160. If we look at the absolute maximum damage in each case, we get something like this:

Damage Type	Damage Dice	Average Damage	Max Damage	Max Damage Standard DR	Max Damage Boosted DR
Pistol	3d (5)	10 (50)	18 (90)	8	6
Rifle	6d (5)	20 (100)	36 (180)	16	12
Heavy	8d (5)	28 (140)	48 (240)	20	16

It’s, perhaps, not much of change, but it actually makes a big statistical difference, because the higher results are harder and harder to achieve a the top level. If I run the odds on taking any damage at all, or taking a major wound (Defined as 6+ damage her), we get the following probabilities.

Damage Type	Damage Dice	Chance of 1 damage Standard DR	Chance of Stun Standard DR	Chance of 1 damage Boosted DR	Chance of Stun Boosted DR
Pistol	3d (5)	50%	5%	25%	1%
Rifle	6d (5)	55%	15%	20%	2%
Heavy	8d (5)	45%	13%	18%	2%

That seems more satisfyingly reliable. It’s still possible to be crippled by damage your armor was advertised as “proof” against, but it’s approximately the same chances as critically failing, while normal DR will only protect you against a stun on something like a 13 or less: most GURPS players would accept 13 as a “reasonable” skill, but would hardly consider it a sure thing.

Is Proof Practical?

How much DR is too much? Well, practically speaking, it has to do with weight. Weight is what pushed Battleweave down from DR 20 to DR 10, because it was meant to go under other armor as a persistent layer. What sort of weight do we expect our armor to have if it is “proof” against various attacks? For that, we need to check this against other forms of armor.

A TL 8 Assault Vest is 8 lbs and has DR 12 (interesting!) against bullets. If we run these numbers through Cutting Edge Armor Design assuming DR 12 on Kevlar, we get about 7 lbs. If we do Battleweave at exactly the same values, we get 7 lbs for DR 60. So, it’s quite reasonable!

What about trauma plates? High Tech lists trauma plates as providing +23 DR (putting us up to 25 DR which is, once again, really interesting!), and weighs 8 lbs. I can’t get the same results from Cutting Edge, as the best I can find is “Improved Ceramic” and 23 DR comes to 18 lbs, giving us a total of 25 lbs, rather than 16 lbs. But if that’s our measure, another 60 DR from straight carbide plates comes to 12 lbs, for a total of 19. So if we go this route, a soldier with DR 120/72 on the torso only clocks in at about 20 lbs. That’s not bad!

How Heavy is Heavy?

This is another topic I’ve wrestled with. If I have an ST 15 or 20 race with a given material, how much “mass” is reasonable for given levels of protection? The only books that give full armor values are UT, whose assumptions this post challenges, and Low Tech, but LT is rather complicated, so let’s look at Dungeon Fantasy instead. LT makes armor pretty light, and that’s not unrealistic, but when you ask a GURPS fan what “light,” “medium,” “heavy” or “super-heavy” armor is, they’ll answer based more on GURPS Basic or DF, rather than fine-grained LT builds.

So, here’s some DF armor suits (From DFRPG) in encumbrance values, assuming ST 10

Armor	Class	Weight	Encumbrance
Light Cloth	“Light”	18	None
Leather	“Light”	36	Light
Light Mail	“Light”	36	Light
Light Scale	“Light”	48	Medium
Light Plate	“Light”	48	Medium
Mail	“Medium”	45	Medium
Plate	“Medium”	60	Medium
Heavy Mail	“Heavy”	54	Medium
Heavy Plate	“Heavy”	72	Heavy
Heavy Scale	“Heavy”	120	Heavy
X Heavy Plate	“Super Heavy”	84	Heavy
Epic Plate	“Super Heavy”	96	Heavy

It seems clear that the most informative category is encumbrance, and the numbers are a bit all over the place. I think I would put 25 lbs as probably the heaviest for “light” armor, 50 for “Medium” armor, and 75 lbs for “Heavy” armor, and 100 lbs for “Super-Heavy” armor.

Where does this put us for Psi-Wars armor? For “pure carbide” across the entire body, 25 lbs gives us 25 DR, 50 lbs gives us 50 DR, 75 lbs gives us DR 75 and, this may surprise you, but 100 lbs gives us 100 DR.

This means if we want to really hit those levels of 60, 120 and 160, we have to optimize in some way, such as layering cloth, focusing the armor on specific spots (such as the torso, neglecting the hands, etc), but it does give us some insights: “Light” armor isn’t stopping anything, but it might save your life. Pistol stopping power is probably medium without optimization. Rifle stopping power is heavy. You’re not stopping a force sword with anything less than power-armor or a super-strong race in extra heavy armor.

Do Force Swords Do Too Much Damage?

The core of the “Anastasia problem” is that in most of GURPS, if you want good defense bonuses, good damage and good DR, you pay the price of encumbrance. The advantage of a high ST character is that they can bring all of these to bear: an extra lethal weapon paired with a huge shield and massive armor to tank his way through damage; the downside is that they must give up points somewhere, so they give up DX. A high DX character must find ways to turn their DX into superior damage (attacking vulnerable points) and defense (Can’t hurt what you can’t hit), but they still give up a lot of advantage to remain agile. This is arguably a good deal, but not really the point of my concern here.

The problem with Ultra-Tech is a force buckler weighs almost nothing, cerablate armor weighs almost nothing, and a force sword weighs almost nothing, and all three of these things can provide you with maxed out advantage. A Krokuta with 50 points of ST and associated advantages struggles to keep up with the damage output Anastasia has. That’s a problem.

I’ve seen some argument that I should remove Force Swords and Force Bucklers from Psi-Wars. As compelling and interesting as those are, I think those concepts are so integral to the image of Psi-Wars that we need to accept that they exist. I’ve compensated by instead allowing high ST characters to leverage superior advantages in other areas, such as superior armor divisors, or special effects from unobtanium metals. Force swords remain at the pinnacle, but this is a game that emphasizes space knights and, remember, the real competition is the commando with a gatling blaster rattling off autofire bursts of 6d damage at long ranges while wearing 100 DR whose mobility penalties don’t matter because he’s 100 yards away from you and you have a glowstick that can’t hurt him if you can’t reach him, so I think it’s fair to give force swords an edge to keep up with the missiles rapid fire, military grade blasters, rather than worrying about how weak vibro swords are compared to them.

So, the 8d super weapon stays. But does it need to be an 8d+16 super weapon? I don’t think so. Fun Fact: This is a Psi-Wars special rule, because Weapon Master’s damage bonus is limited to muscle-powered weapons. So we can safely remove it. But then is it even worth the points anymore? Well, yes. Weapon Master gives you access to cinematic skills, and it gives you reduced rapid strike or repeated parry penalties, oh and Psi-Wars generously uses Chambara combat, allowing the character to retreat multiple times, apply the acrobatics bonus to parries, and the full +3 retreat bonus to parry, so I think there is incentive enough to buy Weapon Master. This also gives ST-based weapons, like the ceramic katana, an extra benefit.

But Kalzazz, who will no doubt be saddened by this change, did make a suggestion that I found really interesting: if a weapon is used 2-handed, it gets a damage bonus of +1/die. This actually comes from Bruno, but I think we can adjust it slightly. Any force sword wielded 2-handed (Grand force swords or normal force swords in Defensive Grip) get +1 per 2 dice if at DX+1, and +1/die if at DX+2 or better. But I might make this a Destructive Form perk. It’s plausible, controlled, and makes Destructive even more dangerous (and it needs a little help here and there, as it’s a well-liked, but rarely taken force sword style).

What about Fine and Very Fine force swords? I’m fine leaving them where they are. You can get a Very Fine gatling blaster, or hotshot a ranged weapon, so it’s reasonable to get +8 damage to your force sword. That’s pretty good, but not necessarily going to break the game as badly as layering all three to get 8d+24 damage.

What about Power-Blow? Well, I still like the idea of space knights pulling off improbable feats, such as carving off the cannon of a tank, and Power-Blow takes time to activate, which means it works best against slow targets like tanks or Matra-ogres, rather than (relatively) lightly armored humanoid targets.

Robots, Cyborgs, the Gaunt, Extra-Effort and Fatigue

Lacking Heroic Charge and Feverish Dodge for having bionic legs would really give me pause before taking them — Derrick White

Derrick has been running numerous Psi-Wars playtests, particularly combat against the Flesh Monstrosities and he’s come out of it extremely opinionated about Extra Effort, especially in Psi-Wars, for good reasons, and going over his experience has left me with some questions about fatigue and machines, and if it’s actually worth it or not. I’ve gone over the material, and the results are very scattered. GURPS mostly seems to have assumed “Fatigue N/A” applies to your car or your gun, and hasn’t seriously dealt with it applying to you. I want to investigate this in more detail, as it becomes more and more pertinent. I wanted to collect up all the information I could find on the subject and then ponder their implications when it comes to the unique set-up of Psi-Wars, whether or not Not Affected By Fatigue is fairly priced at 0 points, if the rule makes sense in the context of characters like cyborgs and the Gaunt, and what are some means by which we can mitigate the worst of it, if necessary.

Let’s Build Meta-Tech: Bloodshot Armor

Christopher Rice has been very kind to me and knows of my interest in his Meta-Tech rules, so managed to get me into the playtest. It was a disaster though: I was unprepared for the sheer speed of the playtest, and the format/design of it (I never got the mailing group working correctly, and there was no onboarding process that I could find), so I never sat down to write up some Meta-Tech ideas I had, or really dig into the whole system, as this would have taken me more time than the entire playtest had. But I still want to make some Meta-Tech, and so I thought I’d make the Meta-Tech I had wanted to make then, now.

“Wytchwerks” is a bit of a joke term I use, though the more I play with it, the more I like the idea. The premise is that, in the Psi-Wars galaxy, a certain company, Wyrmwerks, set up a short-lived division in the Umbral Rim, and made psychotronic technology based on the physiology and powers of the aliens in that part of the Galaxy. I have the Zodiac armor for Vithanni, and I wanted to create Bloodshot Armor for the Ranathim.

Ranathim, as sexy psychic vampires with energy reserves they can use for psychics powers or physical extra effort, are already really good melee fighters and have entire traditions and armor sets built around this. I figured Wytchwerks, being a human-driven (and Mogwai-driven?) endeavor, would be more interested in ranged attacks, and that technology that made Ranathim better at ranged attacks would be unique. Plus, I have players constantly asking for Extra Effort for skill, which is just not allowed; but, of course, we can offer an attack bonus advantage, make it cost fatigue, and treat it as psychotronics! Integrate the idea of the psychotronics of the armor interfacing with the wearer’s natural psychic vampirism, and we have the core idea of the Bloodshot Armor.

So, how would I build it, using GURPS Meta-Tech?

How Common Are Space Knights?

A reader, AutumnRaine, asked how common particular archetypes were. In particular, if we encounter someone carrying a force sword, how many points on average do we actually expect them to be? Are they really 300 points, or are 125 point versions of them more common? And how does this generalize to other templates?

I thought this might be a fun question to address in what I hope is a brief post. This will be focused on Psi-Wars specifically, but I think some of the thought process might apply to other games too, depending on how you look at them.

The Boring Answer

The obvious answer is “It’s up to the GM!” I’m sure most readers will groan, so I’ll attempt to address this more cleanly in a moment, but there’s a reason I lead with it. See, even if I give you a realistic, plausible answer, there’s a good chance you’ll disagree with it, and that’s fine.

But more importantly, I think we have to be honest about our ignorance when it comes to questions of logistics, demographics, economics and so on. These are extremely complicated concepts that I think even world level experts often struggle with; for example, consider the question of how much a loaf of bread and a sword should cost in a “realistic” fantasy setting. Doing something like using real world numbers isn’t going to be accurate, because a fantasy setting has different setting conceits (how does nature magic impact the supply and thus cost of bread?), and because there’s no “right” answer for an entire era; “medieval Europe” covers as much as a thousand years (depending on your definitions) and an entire continent. The price of 5th century french bread and swords is totally different from 13th century Polish bread and swords. There’s no real way to answer these questions, so we eyeball some numbers and make it up.

This gets even worse when we ask “How many knights were there? Like the real ones, with like 200+ points of combat abilities!” The answer could be anywhere from a hard number based on detailed surveys of jousting tournaments and battlefield results, all the way to “That question doesn’t even make sense!” Now try to answer it in a sci-fi setting with no historical basis!

We also run into a problem when it comes to scale, because most Psi-Wars games (or SF games in general) tends to compactify the setting a lot. Most players and GMs can’t really handle the actual scale of a world, never mind multiple fully developed star systems, never mind a whole galaxy. Psi-Wars offers some lip service to explain the compactification, but even with that explanation, we’re still handwaving away the sheer scale of locations like Kronos or how large the fleets of the galactic empire should realistically be.

So the best solution is to tackle this narratively. How many such characters do you need? When we delve into fiction, there’s rarely a hard set of numbers. For example, how common are super heroes in Marvel? Do the comics reveal to us the exploits of literally every super-hero, or are we to understand that we’re seeing a slice of a larger set of heroes, and if so, how many? Most settings don’t really give us an idea of what the actual numbers are. In My Hero Academia, we’re given the sense that Class 1A is unusually powerful and competent, despite the fact that several members of the class are particularly unimpressive, but we also see that most opponents they go up against are a close match for them. Is that because most characters in My Hero Academia are almost as powerful as 1A? Or is it because 1A is unusually unlucky and challenged by a higher caliber of villain than is normal? Or is it because we’re only seeing some of what 1A deals with and they’re regularly putting away lesser villains? Dragon Ball Z does a better idea of giving you a sense of the scale of the Z fighters compared to the average person, though it strains believability that the average person is unaware of an entire cadre of world-smashing martial artists just under their nose. Sometimes, it gets downright inconsistent: in Demon Slayer, we are shown “Final Selection” which is so grueling, that of the 20 or so entrants, only 5 survive, and all 5 are “named characters,” yet when we see the rest of the Demon Slayer corps, we’re treated to impressions of what are essentially incompetent minions.

So in the end, it doesn’t really matter, you can have them as common or as rare as you want, using any of the above as your inspiration. After all, we expect player characters to encounter more heroic-scale opponents than the average person as they have unlikely adventures galavanting across the galaxy, experiencing something the average character in the setting will never experience. Still, I understand the spirit in which the question was asked. Autumn isn’t asking for a character budget of how many space knights they can include in their campaign. We’re trying to get a sense of the setting, to gauge the reaction of the average character, or if we drop a PC group on some particular planet, what sort of opposition should we expect?

A Psi-Wars Breakdown

I can’t give a true, definitive answer to the question, but I can try to give some order-of-magntitude estimates as broad guidelines as to how I see the setting. After all, the answer could be anywhere between “There’s a space knight on every street corner and the average character is 150+ points!” or to the other extreme of being able to put all the space knights in the galaxy into a single room. These are just my answers, on how I see the setting, and are based on imperfect demographic understanding.

25 Points: The Average Man

Let’s discuss what most people in Psi-Wars are like. GURPS suggests that 25 points is about an “average person” and I see no reason Psi-Wars wouldn’t be the same. That means most people amount to 5 to 10 points of character traits and a Background Lens and nothing else. These are the blue collar factory workers, the farmer’s son, the teen school girl, the gawking interstellar tourist on a discount ticket, and so on. There’s likely a bit of a bell curve around this point value: there are probably sub 25 point characters: children, invalids and so on. But most people probably fit into the 25 point level, which means if you grab someone off the street to fight, you’d have a pretty easy time defeating them, which is hardly surprising. Most people are 25 points or less.

50 Points: The Competent Man

I think we have an inflated idea of what the “average” person is capable of. When we imagine the average cop, or the average computer programmer, or the average person we’d want to have a conversation with, we tend to imagine someone on the upper end of the competence curve: we want to imagine a store clerk as interesting, a local cop as competent, a local goon or the soldiers of a garrison as at least a basic threat. This tends towards the 50 point level.

While the 50 point character probably isn’t a majority, they are quite common. You might expect 1 50 point character for every 2 25 or less point characters, or it might even be close to parity. But almost all characters we meet should be at the 50 points or less mark.

When it comes to combat characters, I tend to imagine this level as the minimal level. It’s not that the average criminal thug or planetary militiaman are so much better than the average person, it’s that GURPS places a much higher premium of combat competence than other fields. For example, a character can have 20 points in Math (IQ+4) and Intuitive Mathematician, making him a uniquely competent mathematician, or you can have Combat Reflexes and a single Beam Weapons skill at DX+2, which is quite a modest soldier.

125 to 150 points: The 1%

GURPS rates 100 to 200 points as “Heroic,” though that feels more like a 3e conceit, as that was the standard basis for characters back then. Today, these feel like “low power” characters, not that they’re especially weak. They tend to be quite competent at what they do, but that competence tends to be in a narrow field, and often isn’t combat-focused. When it is combat focused, these characters tend to be either high quality mooks, or low level henchmen. This is the level at which I find characters become interesting enough that we expect them to be named: our 50 point soldiers are probably a faceless mass, but the 125 points soldiers will often have a name and a heroic edge to them.

It’s hard to say how common such characters are, but I tend towards the idea of 1 out of 100. If we have a high school class of 400 kids, these are the 4 kids who go on to really make a name for themselves, and touch greatness: the ones who become successful musicians or high powered lawyers, or the sort of police officer who is very good at their job. I suspect 1% might be too rare, though, but 10% is probably too high. I also think they tend to be overrepresented in combat professions: i would expect a company of 200 soldiers to field 5 to 10 of these guys, not 2.

The 125 to 150 point character should be common enough that we expect to encounter them in our daily life. Perhaps your next door neighbor or your coworker isn’t one, but you probably know one or two in your area, and your company employs a few. I think it’s fair to elevate nearly any specific NPC to this level, even though I think most NPCs wouldn’t be at this level; it’s just that most of them not at this level aren’t worth talking about, except as interesting background characters, dependents or cute-but-useless love interests.

250 to 300 Points: 1 in a Million!

It’s hard to say how rare true PCs in Psi-Wars are, but my rule of thumb has been “one in a million.” I usually cite this number for psychics, but I think it can apply to most Psi-Wars characters, with some modification.

High Skill characters

Characters whose prowess comes primarily from skill, like the:

Commando
Diplomat
Officer
Fighter Ace
Security Agent
Spy
Assassin
Bounty Hunter
Scavenger
Smuggler

Tend towards the more common end; they might be as common as one in 100k or one in 10k, especially the combat-focused ones within the context of a highly specialized group. That is, on a planet of 7 billion, there may only be 7000 300 point security agents, but if you look just at cops, there might be millions of cops, but still 7000 security agents, which might be one in a thousand. We might expect in an army of 200k to have 2 to 20 “hero level” commandos. Even so, we can expect to have more like 3, 5 or 10 in a million rather than just 1 in a million.

This makes them sound really rare, but realize how many people there are in the galaxy. There are a lot of 7 billion people planets, many of which may lack any 300 point characters entirely, while Kronos likely has an overrepresentation of powerful characters.

So, for context, a planetary security force is mostly made up of 50 point cops with 25 point schlubs doing janitor work, or filing their nails while answering the holocomm, while the “good cops” and the elite guys, like Space SWAT, are 125 points. But you’ve got one or two rogue/elite cops who are 300+ characters, whom the other cops hold in high regard (or in jealous exasperation).

Psychics, Mystics and Space Knights

The psychic groups tend to be the rarer groups, but like the high skill characters, they tend to have some flex in their power level.

Psions tend towards the exact one-in-a-million number, though they might be rarer than that. But by “Psion” we mean characters with 50+ points in psionic abilities. We might have 5 to 10 times as many characters with 15 or less psychic abilities, and 5 to 10 time as many characters with a perk or mere untrained latency. Maradonian nobility push this number a little higher, as eugenics makes psychic powers 3 to 5 times as common, but we still expect characters with Blood Purity 2+ to be at one-in-a-million or less

Mystics and Sorcerers are probably even rarer, closer to 1-in-10-million. They represent either a cultivation in a rare power (sorcery) or an expansion on psychic power in general. The number increases by 5 to 10 amount if we discuss latent sorcerers or characters with Unconscious Communion.

Space Knights are probably close to the one-in-a-million mark too. Space Knights as represented in Psi-Wars tend towards the low end of Space Knight power. I say this not to say that Space Knights are soooo powerful, but given what people mean by a space knight, it’s hard to describe them any weaker: a typical space knight needs about 25 points of force sword training, 25 points of psychic powers, 25 points of additional space knight training, and then 125 points of the sort of competence to make one worthy of training as a space knight, which puts the floor at around 200+ for the most minimal possible space knight; we might go lower, perhaps a barely-trained apprentice (a “Luke Skywalker”), or defining a space knight “down,” such as a nobleman with a perk level psychic power and a couple of points of force sword skill.

I will note a lack of 125 point templates in this area. I think I have the Apprentice Chiva side-kick template. It might be interesting to have an apprentice Space Knight or the kid with more power, but as a general rule, if you’re coming across a psychic character, it’s reasonable to assume they’re in the 300 point range.

500+ points: A Conspiracy of the Elite

Even more powerful characters are arbitrarily rare. They exist, but we might expect only a few per given planet, but enough to fill the needs of a story. They might be almost as common as 300 point character, or they might be vanishingly rare. At this level, we cannot escape the arbitrariness of what amount to between one in 10 million to 1 in a billion.

The Self-Selection of Interstellar Politics

These numbers make heroic characters seem extremely rare. In a city of 300,000 people we might expect to see zero heroic characters. How realistic is it, then, to have a group of 20+ heroes all fighting one another in a space port? I say it’s highly realistic. The more powerful a character is, the more in demand they become. Interstellar corporations will pay a considerable amount for their services, interstellar factions will employ their services, and as their value and wealth rises, the plausibility of purchasing a ship to go off-world to seek greater opportunity will be. Just like airports have a much higher number of CEOs per capita than the general population, we would expect starships, starports and interstellar politics in general to have a concentrating effect on the power level of characters.

Likewise, we would expect “worlds of adventure,” which tend to attract more interstellar attention and/or has sufficiently challenging living circumstances requiring more heroism just to survive, to have a higher per capita number of heroic characters than uninteresting and safe worlds. We might expect that a simple, Westerly farming world, even one of billions, to have no space knights or high powered bounty hunters, but we might expect both to be overrepresented on Wilwatikta, Kronos or the Orochi Belt.

Complicating Factors

Some factors might complicate how common a particular power level is.

Aliens

Aliens often have positive point values. Do the 25 point Asrathi or Keleni templates, or the 30 point Ranathim templates throw off these numbers?

I think we see the largest difference at the lowest point total. If we imagine a Space High School with 25 point students, I think it’s reasonable to expect that a Ranathim student is just more powerful than the average student. Both have essentially average traits, a handful of academic and life skills and a few quirks of personality, but the Ranathim student has at least 5 psychic energy reserves, improved HT, a tougher skull, and they’re prettier. We might expect that a fight between a generic, average Ranathim student and a generic, average human student to heavily favor the Ranathim.

As characters ramp up the power levels, though, I think alien templates matter less and less. Asrathi assassins and Ranathim space knights tend to rely on their template to “make up the difference” and achieve the necessary power level to compete at a particular power-level, while humans or low point level races need to train and work harder to “catch up.” Thus, I expect at the 300 point level, the “average space knight” to be essentially the same point total regardless of race. We might expect high point total characters to be more common among higher powered races, but I think it would only be marginal: 1.25, 1.5 or maybe 2, per million, rather than 1 per million. That is, they’re more common, but not especially noticeably so.

Cybernetics and Robotics

Cybernetic characters can easily rack up another 25 to 100 points. What if we take a 25 point high school student and give him a few bionic parts and a few powerful modules. Doesn’t that shoot him up the power ladder quite quickly, and all it takes is money?

This is true, but I don’t think it’ll have nearly as large an effect as we might expect. First of all, cybernetic parts are expensive. The average blue collar worker can’t afford to “cyber-up.” Rich Shinjurai corporate brats would totally get a bionic spine with a reflex booster to beat down upstart street punks with hardworking moms trying to put them through prep school, but I don’t think it would be so common that it would throw the power scaling out of whack. Remember, most bionic parts, such as basic Stellar Dynamics or Grand Federal, cybernetics aren’t that powerful. The average kid can’t afford and doesn’t need a Syntech Sensei bionic spine. Furthemore, there are social and legal implications to bionic parts. If local factory workers or soccer moms start integrating cyber-cannons and strength augmentation modules, the local security forces might start to get nervous. Most people rarely need the sort of cybernetics that an adventurer finds interesting. Even a rich corporate CEO doesn’t need cyber-eyes capable of advanced targeting. Finally, wealth and power level have something of a synergistic effect in Psi-Wars. We expect powerful characters to quickly accumulate wealth, and wealthy characters to quickly accumulate power. Is it really so weird if a wealthy, interstellar corporate CEO has 50 points of cybernetics? He’s already an extremely rare sort of character, so it doesn’t really alter the power scaling much to note that very wealthy and powerful individuals are, you know, powerful.

So certainly, cybernetics pushes the average pushes point totals up, but not so much that the numbers substantially change. The introduction of cybernetics doesn’t push the average character up to 125 or 300 points.

But Robots do. Even low power robots tend to be 50+ points. A world full of robots is necessarily more dangerous than a world full of animals and people, at least if they had no safeguard protocols, but they do, so for the most part, this has no real impact. It is a major issue behind some of the “robot rights” debates: if factories can mass-produce 125+ point “super citizens” with no safety protocols, they would absolutely, rapidly replace the existing population, or at least pose enough plausible risk of doing so that it makes people nervous. Still, a human with access to ultra-tech is usually comparable to a robot.

Implications of Power-Scaling

When I run games, when it comes to NPCs, I tend to assume the following:

Unstatted characters probably have 10s in their stats, and they might have between 9 and 11. They might have some quirks, and they typically have skill 12 to 14 in something relevant to their life. This might be, for example an unnamed waiter or shopper in a market.
Most “non-combat” NPCs tend towards 25 to 50 points, though alien characters tended towards a bit on the high side: 60 points wasn’t uncommon. This is where characters tended to land when, for example, I stat up a librarian or a local shop keeper
If I intend for a named and interesting NPC, I tend to default them towards 125 to 150 points. This might be a local gang leader, or a competent love interest, or a teen with untapped, uncontrolled psychic potential, etc.
If I intended a rival or a threat to the PCs, or a major character, they tended to the 300+ point range. This was a rival space knight, a dangerous assassin, a helpful sorceress,etc.
If I intended the character to be the “Big Bad” or a major mover and shaker, someone known across the world, they tended to be 500+.

What I’ve noticed in my games is that most characters don’t hold a candle to the PCs. Even local security forces will fall like chaff before the scythe when a basic, 300-point space knight ignites his force sword. I noticed this most strongly in my Umbral Rim chronicles, because local forces were disorganized and weak enough that player characters could simply walk in and take over small towns with little resistance, and what kept cities safe was less the presence of security and more the presence of other heroic characters:dangerous bounty hunters, nefarious sorcerers and rival satemo. In Imperial or Alliance chronicles, I noticed the stability of society and the threat of drawing down serious fire power was usually enough to keep the more nefarious impulses of murder-hobos to a minimum. But that threat is there.

We tend to forget how powerful 250 to 300 points is. I’ve quite a few people in my community who consider that much too weak, the sort of person who think that any skill less than 20 isn’t worth your time. But 100-200 point games in GURPS are, in my experience, quite satisfying, and still heroic by GURPS standards. Heroic “everymen” to be sure, but still heroic. So when 300-point rogues show up, then even a squad of 125 point soldiers backed up by some 50 point militia may well struggle to keep them contained. If we take that to its ultimate conclusion, then the moment a 300 point character steps off their ship, realistically, they are already a force to be reckoned with on the planet, and only really checked by the fact that there are, in fact, other, bigger “hero” characters somewhere. The 300-point satemo doesn’t really fear local security: they fear drawing down the wrath of an Imperial Knight, or earning the attention of a piqued Maradonian noble.