Necropolitans, episode 40: More like rapidly-travelling bike

Follow me now through the glowing void-portal under the forgotten city of a long-dead species, and discover what became of Makoa, in Episode 040: More like rapidly-travelling bike.

Necropolitans, episode 39: I am going through a midlife crisis; I cannot fight a Hound of Tindalos

Roleplaying illuminates the human experience, echoing the real-life situations we encounter or the unfamiliar lives of other people, and allowing us to explore and play with them safely, and I think it's fair to say everyone will find something deeply relatable in Episode 039: I am going through a midlife crisis; I cannot fight a Hound of Tindalos.

GURPS Ranges

For various reasons, I've been messing about with GURPS abilities, and finding the multiple, incompatible types of range a bit of a pain. There's standard ranges, spell ranges, scrying ranges, scanning sense ranges, melee ranges, hard-cutoff ranges, and of course, Warp. They all work differently, too. Sometimes - especially for linked abilities, or alternate abilities - you want to make things with one type of range work like another. So let's give that a try.

Let's say we want to reduce our range to 10 - the same as Telekinesis and a convenient range for other fixed-range modifications. For a generic ability, range is 100 and 1/2D is 10. We need these to be the same. Reduced Range (p. B115) bans us from reducing Max independently for some reason, while Increased Range is happy to let us increase 1/2D alone at half cost. This will cost us +15%. We also reduce range overall to 10 yards, for -30%. Thus, switching from a standard range to a flat 10-yard range is a net +0%.

If we ignore the "no reducing Max" rule, we could simply reduce Max at half cost, for an overall -15% modifier. So it works out the same. Nice.

What about Maledictions and spells, the other common pattern? These have no maximum range, but a -1 penalty per yard. For this, we can add Long-Range (+50%) to switch it to using the standard range modifiers. This gives a net +35% for switching to a 10-yard range.

Those spells that use the Long-Range Modifiers instead get Short-Range, which at -10% will give us a net -25%.

....okay, so what about Warp? Warp has its own unique range table, because of course it does! On closer inspection, the first few steps of each table are wildly different, but they end up virtually the same.

• Long-Range Modifiers begin at 200 yards, then go 1/2 mile (880 yards), 1 mile, 3 miles, 10 miles, 30 miles, 100 miles, 300 miles, 1000 miles, and then in multiples of 10.
• Warp goes 10, 20, 100, 500, then 2 miles, 10 miles, and then im multiples of 10.

We hit 1,000 miles at -7 for the Warp table, and -8 for the Long-Range table. After that it's plain sailing. So... Warp has a steeper initial curve, but flattens out sooner than Long-Range. It's more challenging at short ranges, but less challenging at long ranges. Honestly, I'm inclined to say these are functionally equal. In theory allowing someone to switch to the Warp ranges would make very long-range activity slightly easier. Realistically speaking, though, I'd be far more worried about better accuracy for short-to-mid-range abilities, especially attacks - which would be a case of switching from the Warp table to the Long-Range table. Since no attack abilities use the Warp modifiers, that's not a concern. The fact that someone could switch to be better at (say) scrying on someone from 10,000 miles away, at the cost of being much worse at doing so from any lesser distance, doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

The only real issue I can see is that allowing Warp to switch to Long-Range modifiers would open the door to adding Long-Range 1 (from Power-Ups 4: Enhancements) and removing the range penalties altogether. Is that really a problem, though? It'll cost you +50%, which is generally 50 points. For the same price, you could buy a +10 to your rolls, or +5 and No Strain to avoid the risk of critical failures. We could also simply forbid the use of Long-Range on Warp, if we're that worried.

But there's an easier way to deal with our actual challenge here, which is the range limits. Range Limit lets us cap our Warp. It's -50% for a 10-yard range. Perfect.

So, we conclude that you can make a standard Innate Attack or Affliction into a 10-yard effect at -15%, a Malediction or spell for -+35%, and a Long-Range ability for -25%, while Warp gets -50%.

If we want a fixed radius with no range penalties, we can add Reliable 4 (Only to cancel range penalties, -50%) for +10%.

If we'd like to use something like the Psionic Range Table (GURPS Psionic Powers, p. 22) we can adjust the multipliers.