Game in the Brain

I was able to play GURPS Gladiators obsidian portal link +Vaclav Tofl and +Martin Davis. It is a combat focus game, but I still get thrilled about combat.

Combat games require accepting character death or losing, keeping characters at arms length while being able to bring out a lot personality… very much not like a Cinematic or Heroic combat. Reflexively you have to learn laugh at character death and defeat, and learn to look at the bright side of such failures. If anyone should scramble to keep your character alive its the GM and not you, because to fight back is economically diverting energy better spent enjoying the rest of your day.

Having been almost killed twice, I was already accepting getting killed when the crowd reaction enjoyed my exploits. It helped that I made a “better” character translating what I learned, if I got killed. Still I am reminded that I should be capable of letting go of my character.

I kinda hate detailing characters a bit, dramatic or story-telling details I mean. I don’t mind tactical details because I can cut and paste that into a new character. I realize when I was making characters for another game, where I could gain CP for details that I should be building the setting instead of my characters. Such “Infrastructure” can let me have a regular source of interesting characters and if the GM is willing create a “character stable” where I can change characters.

The downside of detailing characters is that I end up thinking I should be writing a novel (which reminds me). I think it should be organic, the GM making stuff up as well as the Player regarding the character’s history and background. So characters should be “very low mental overhead” and to encourage this, multiple characters or characters in other games helps divide all those urges so that they will be much weaker.

Personally I’d like to play a game where we play Skilled Grunts, where there is an “engine” that generates reasonable combat focused characters in GURPS. I guess that should be some project I should work on when I study programming (still looking for a class accessible).

My Gamers Meet is slowly becoming combat centered because Carl and I are combat gamers and attendance has been in just us in the past 3 meets. Despite it just being us, I still enjoy playing combat games I AM learning something. Its simulationist and I’ve put many Terrain Modifiers that gives me challenges how best to use terrain. A lot of my Airsoft tactics translate well into this.

I really should buy some acetate and print out some transparent trees and bad footing proprs which I can easily set up on the game board.

• Trees provide Hard Cover B407 BUT the roots make all adjacent hexes Very bad Footing (-4 to hit, -2 to defend). Bad Footing triggers DX checks when sprinting or Moving&attacking through. 
• Dotted Hexes are Bad Footing (-2 to hit, -1 to defend), Red Dotted is Very Bad Footing. 
• Bushes can provide Soft Cover and are obstacles that also give Very Bad Footing.