Review: Five Easy Pieces, from Pyramid #3/113

I was recently posting about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy / Dungeon Fantasy RPG character generation options, and a couple of people suggested the recent article Five Easy Pieces, by Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch, from Pyramid 3/113.  So let's take a close look.

The basic templates in both GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and Dungeon Fantasy RPG are 250 points plus 50 points of disadvantages.  (Plus another 5 points of quirks, but the quirk points are not spent in the templates, so those are available for the player to spend elsewhere.)  The basic idea of Five Easy Pieces is that instead of picking one 250-point template, you pick 5 50-point modules and combine them to make your own template.

All of the modules cost 50 points.  Most of them are just 50 points of positive abilities: attributes and advantages and skills.  A couple (the Priest and the Monk) are instead 60 points of positive abilities and a 10-point disadvantage.  None of the modules are exact lists canned of abilities; they all have choices, like "+1 to this attribute plus 30 points distributed among this list of abilities."  So they're very similar to the DFRPG templates, just smaller.

Some of the modules can only be taken once, some twice, and one (the Rogue) can be taken three times.  (Levels 2 and 3 of templates are not exactly the same as level 1; they're similar in flavor and sometimes reuse some of the optional abilties, but sometimes level 2 adds new abilities.)

So if you grab the right 5 modules, you can mostly (but not exactly) rebuild the DFRPG templates.  Like, Brute Warrior 2 plus Leader 1 plus Physical 2 gets you pretty close to the Knight template.  Not quite there, because the DFRPG templates spend your 50 disad points, where the modules (mostly) do not.  So if you choose modules with no disads, you can take 50 disad points and have another 50 points to spend.  You're only supposed to spend those on abilties already in your 5 modules, not on other things.

DFRPG gives some special privileges only to certain templates, like Knights being able to spend character points on melee weapon skills at any time, and doesn't charge points for those special privileges.  The article makes it clear that if you build your character using modules, you do not get any of those special privileges, only the normal abilities you actually pay points for.  You're a Cerebral Lore-Master Mage, not a real Wizard, so you can't buy IQ past 20, sorry.  (Don't worry; you'll never have enough points to buy your IQ past 20 anyway before you get eaten by a Purple Worm, so this is mostly academic.)

Finally, the idea of "lenses" to add 50 points of another template's abilities, first seen in Dungeon Fantasy 3, is repeated here, saying that if you save up 50 points, you can add another module.  So rather than needing to make special lenses for every combination of templates, it's a bit simpler this way.

So, do I like it?  Well, it looks mechanically sound.  (It's from Kromm.  Kromm is the GURPS Line Editor.  Of course it's sound.)  And it's certainly more flexible than the base DFRPG templates.  If you've always wanted to play an AD&D-style cleric/fighter/magic-user, you can do it.  (Of course you might not be very effective at any of those things, compared to a specialist, because you're spreading your points so thin.  Life is tradeoffs.)

And the other cool thing that the article doesn't directly mention is that it lets you easily modify the starting power level of your campaign in increments of 50 points, without redesigning all the templates, or throwing away templates entirely and going freeform.  I wrote previously about maybe going with 150 points + 25 disads + 5 quirks for the Whiterock campaign.  It would be pretty easy to do that power level with this system, just use 3 modules per PC instead of 5.  ("Three Easy Pieces.")  Then spend your 25 disad points (minus any that were already used in your modules) on more abilities from those 3 modules.  Done.

The thing I don't like is that the modules kind of throw away the idea of strict templates for niche protection, but then turn around and impose strict modules instead.  You can be a crazy mismatch like Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue, but you'd better only spend your points from disads within those modules, because a Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue is fine but a Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue with Magery 1 is crazy talk.  You obviously need to be a Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue Mage to have Magery 1.  I can see the argument for niche protection, especially in a large party.  I can see the argument for flexibility.  I don't think you can argue for both at the same time out of opposite sides of your mouth, like this article is doing.  So, if I were to use this more flexible system, I'd take it a bit further.  Spend your starting module points within those modules, but spend your other points on whatever, as long as it makes some sense.  You want to take Swimming without buying the entire 50-point Outdoorsy module?  Go right ahead.

Fortunately, even if you don't agree with every single thing in this article, you can take the parts you like and change the parts you don't and be happy.  Kromm will probably not come to your house and yell at you for playing wrong.  So, I think this article was worth the $8 the Pyramid cost, and the Pyramid has a bunch of other good stuff too.

Do I think Five Three Easy Pieces is a good fit for Whiterock?  Kinda.  I like the idea of having players build their own templates using these pre-written modules more than I like scaling down all the DFRPG templates to 150 points.  But I think I also like the idea of making templates optional and letting players just build characters.  So, I think I won't make a final decision until Session Zero, so players can weigh in.  I do plan on making some pregen characters / NPCs for the game though, and will use this system for those to get some real experience with it.