Here are the character sheets we used for Back to the Future 2.
Man, episode 1. Very different show back then…
“Roll ST:” In general, GURPS doesn’t use a lot of ST rolls. This is for a variety of reasons, including the fact that ST doesn’t scale the same way the other attributes do. What really happened (the first time, when Doc grabs Marty jr by the jacket) is that Paulo either didn’t want to roll a grappling contest, or didn’t remember the rules. The second time, with Doc trying to lift Marty jr into the DeLorean, Paulo didn’t know the appropriate rules (check the lifting character’s lift on the encumbrance table, possibly a Lifting roll, or if you end up having to use extra effort an HT roll to avoid injury). The HT roll wouldn’t have been any easier for Doc than the ST roll, and possibly Paulo’s “you throw out your back” was a little harsh, but eh. Most problems end up resolved with sufficient application of a taser.
[Paulo’s note: Yeah, ST rolls were a shorthand I used early on, when I was trying to be as rules light as possible assuming our audience didn’t really know RPGs and just wanted to hear a fun story. People complained about that as not-proper-GURPS so I cut that out. As for the throwing out Doc’s back. I believe there was an HT roll that got cut in the edit for some reason (back then, most things that got cut in the edit were for bad sound; this was before we got mic stands.)]
Why does Jennifer have Archery? No one knows. What she doesn’t have is any interpersonal skills whatsoever. The truth is, the movie really doesn’t give Jennifer much characterization… Joz’s insatiable blood-lust notwithstanding (and she does go straight for “knock the dude out,” doesn’t she?), Jennifer should probably have Diplomacy, or Sex Appeal, or something… So instead she “has” to assault Biff with a hoverboard.
“Does beautiful do anything for me right now?” It does, in GURPS as written – it’s a pretty sizable bonus to reaction rolls. Jennifer also has a level of Charisma, so getting what she wants from Biff (who likely doesn’t have super high Will) shouldn’t be too hard. Social rules in GURPS aren’t just skill rolls – and people (our group, anyway) often forget the Reaction Roll. The GM rolls this in secret (3d, higher is better), determining how well an NPC reacts to any given interaction, conversational gambit, or request. Beautiful gives Jennifer +4 to reactions from anyone potentially attracted to you, which definitely includes Biff – and Charisma gives her another +1. This essentially increases reactions by two levels – an average reaction becomes a very good one, a good one becomes excellent, etc. Pretty powerful!
[Paulo’s note: I kind of disagree. I don’t think of reaction rolls as a test for what happens in that second, rather its a roll for what kind of person the NPC is, and therefore how they react to the person in front of them. For instance, if two characters meet and fall in love-at-first-sight, the game is telling us that’s who they were. They were destined to fall in love. It’s not saying that they had some probability of falling in love; they were always going to fall in love in this universe, even if in reality it required a dice roll to get there. So for me the reaction roll is part of the “premise” of the movie, and not part of the immediate gameplay. Thus if the interaction between two characters is shown in the movie, I don’t give them a fresh reaction roll unless they do something vastly different towards this character. I treat it like the movie has already made that roll for us. Old Biff should get a reaction roll towards Jennifer because they don’t meet in the movie, but I think I decided that based on the movie Old Biff reacts negatively towards everyone and didn’t give him reaction rolls to change that (or maybe I did give him one and he didn’t do well. I don’t really remember.)]
“Impulse-based Compulsions:” Marty has got Compulsion (Nobody calls you a chicken), for [-15]. I think I might have built this with a Code of Honor… But Compulsion has a self-control roll, so it works out easily for a podcast – roll for it!
Reputation (slacker): Marty only got [-3] for this, but it’s literally the only thing any of the NPCs say about him. I just noticed that on re-listening – every single person in this city leads with “he’s a real slacker.” Take that, Marty.
Wow, those paradox rules! Punishing! But that’s the way with untested house rules, sometimes they wipe the party… Makes for a great one-shot for the podcast, though. Jennifer’s Mundane Background turned out to be pretty critical for these rules, though it was infuriating during play. Kudos to Joz for playing the character instead of the game.
[Paulo’s note: Sadly the original Paradox rules were written long hand before it occurred to me the show might be popular, and are lost to history. Here’s how they worked: Every time there was a failed Paradox roll, the degree of failure would be looked up in the consequence table (consequences were in families, so a failure by 1-4 was one set, 4-8 another, etc.) each consequence group had 6 possible consequences so we rolled a d6 to pick one. Every time there was a failed paradox roll, the penalty was increased by one, pushing us slowly into more serious consequences. The very serious consequences were only possible once you’d failed many times.
As for the balance, I don’t think they were as punitive as Jon makes them out to be. The party had several opportunities to get out in which they failed to take proper action (not criticizing, I think of it as good RPing rather than poor gameplay.) And they got pretty unlucky that once they had managed to calm Jennifer down and explain the issue to her, they rolled a consequence that wiped her memory. But in general, I agree that these are not rules I would use on a long-term campaign. For me, though, that’s why these one-shots are more appealing. To make a long campaign work you kinda have to treat your PCs with kid-gloves: It’s a bad thing if this character that they’ve spent all this time and energy on were to die. Therefore you either have to put them in situations where the probability of death is actually low, or you have to be ok with fudging the numbers from time to time. Neither of those sounds as satisfying to me. I like putting the players in difficult situations in which there is an actual high-probability of death. And that’s what the movies are usually doing (except the movies fudge the numbers.)]
That’s all from me – what do you think of the builds?
I guess we’ll agree to disagree on reaction rolls, Paulo – I don’t think they’re meant to be permanent. There are lots of things that call for reaction rolls – requests for assistance, requests for information, headhunting/job seeking rolls, mercantile negotiations… And sometimes they take different modifiers. I’m pretty sure that the RAW implies reaction rolls should be re-done for new situations.
Even if this wasn’t the case, I’m not sure I like the precedent that every named character in the movies necessarily react in the same way to the PCs that they do in the movie – we’re generally in pretty different circumstances… maybe the characters would react differently?
Even if the same reaction as the film would seem plausible, isn’t it the spirit of the game that things could turn out differently? If PCs can miss a shot they’d have made in the movie, or succeed some other roll the would have failed, why can’t they make different impressions on people in a social setting? It kind of cheapens things like Charisma and Handsome, I think.
That said, it does make perfect sense that Biff just reacts negatively to everyone. The GM is totally allowed to dictate NPC reactions if he wants. But I don’t have to like it!
For the paradox rules, I’m a fan of keeping the movies shorter or ending them in more catastrophic ways faster. I preferred things like Speed and Bttf2 over Oz.
So, putting in rules that wipe the party is perfectly ok with me!
-SirBB
Agreed Richie, 100%! Paulo may protest that the rules weren’t meant to be that punishing, but they did result in a TPK.. TUK, actually. For a long-running campaign that might get you some salty players (unless character death is a regular feature of the campaign), but for this kind of one-shot it works really well.
Ok, so it sounds like what Paulo did with the paradox rules was not standard gurps. I don’t know a ton about RPG’s. Can you explain how you would have run it, or what the normal way of doing it is? I mean, I know gurps is supposed to have rules for everything, but it can’t possibly have time-paradox rules, right?
Hi Jeff – yeah those paradox rules are definitely not GURPS rules-as-written. GURPS has rules for just about everything (including time travel, and even a few paradox-ish rules!), but they’re not always perfect for the application you have in mind. To play GURPS successfully you need a GM who isn’t afraid to use the GURPS toolkit as a set of guidelines in making up his own rules, which is what Paulo did in this case.
In this case, Paulo didn’t have much from the movie to work with – Doc Brown doesn’t say much about how paradox mechanics work in his world, and when I think about the movies I can’t remember anything I would think of as being a result of the “run into your other self”-type paradox. The Jennifers fainting I always thought of as being due to the shock of it (rather than the universe knocking them out), and all the other paradox-things that happen in the movies are a result of characters changing the timeline (again, not to do with the seeing-yourself paradox). So if I was running BTTF2 I would probably have ended up with a different flavor for these… but I actually quite like what Paulo worked up – especially for a one-shot game, where you want the risk curve to be a little steeper.
So I guess the short version (too late for that…) is that there isn’t a “normal” way to run temporal paradoxes, really. It’s up to the GM to decide what flavor of universe he’s in – BTTF rules are different from Terminator rules, are different from Timeline rules, are different from Quantum Leap rules. So GURPS can guide, but can’t be the ultimate arbiter of everything – it has to be flexible enough to be Universal!