The Inside Scoop on Gaming

(see also the attached story by another author)

It's all true. The Greys are kidnapping our women and performing insidious experiments on them. Strange creatures live in the sewers. Vampires stalk the streets at night. Dinosaurs roam in the isolated parts of the world. As a Black Op, it's your job to hunt these things down and kill them (well, sometimes you might try to capture one for study).

I've been anxiously awaiting GURPS Black Ops since it was first announced. After reading the book, the best way I could think of to describe it is part "GURPS Special Ops", part "Men In Black", and part "Paranoia".

Players take the part of the "best of the best of the best", recruited by a super-secret organization known as the Company. The Company was created decades ago by conspirators in the US government, but answers to no laws but its own. Comparisons to WEG's Paranoia come into play because the Company has five Directorates: Combat, Intelligence, Security, Science, and Technology. Each Directorate has different goals and agendas, which supporting the overall goal of protecting humanity. Science, for instance, often wants to capture the beasties to study them--to find out more effective ways to kill them, mostly. Combat has orders to kill the target at the slightest provocation. Security is charged with protecting Black Ops and the conspiracy, and is despised by nearly everyone else for being able to veto any plan of action if they deem it too dangerous. The tone of the game is surprisingly serious, but the rules are far from it.

Recently it seems that cinematic action has become the order of the day for RPG companies. Anyone who isn't releasing a game based on action movies seems to be releasing one based on anime. GURPS, as a reasonably realistic system, doesn't seem particularly suited to the cinematic action genre. Black Ops is a good effort at changing that. Optional rules abound. "Scrubs" take on the role that Feng Shui players know as "Mooks"--if you succeed in your skill roll against a Scrub, you win. Characters are trained to a ridiculous level: they can identify cigar brands by smell, cars by the sound of their engine. A Black Op can move quickly and silently, moving into air vents and around obstacles as fast as across flat ground.

For all the optional rules, this still gets a bit unwieldy. Characters are built on 700 points (more than most GURPS Supers characters). Having tried my hand at creating GURPS Special Ops characters, done on fewer points, I can safely say that it's a pain. GURPS is a good system for a certain style of gameplay: quick and dirty and lethal. It's best when you want to play something somewhat realistic and expect combat to be dangerous. Worrying about ecumbrance and exact movement rates and careful spending of points to buy heaps of skills detracts from the game. In the defense of the authors, templates for Ops from each of the Directorates are provided (although they're a bit stereotyped). Each takes up a page, mostly a list of skills taking up nearly three columns of 10-point type. It's a bit daunting.

To play Black Ops as it's intended, I'd move a great deal of the background over to another system with a quicker and more cinematic rule-set: Feng Shui. I'd have to patch together some psionics rules, but overall it'd be worth it.

As a GURPS sourcebook, Black Ops completes a trilogy (whether SJG intended it or not): Illuminati, Warehouse 23, & Black Ops. If I were running a GURPS campaign around conspiracies, I'd either use the Black Ops as "bad" guys--the Men in Black, or have my investigators get recruited by the Company and trained as Black Ops. Either way, playing Black Ops with GURPS rules, I'd ditch the cinematic options.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

GURPS Black Ops
Author: Jeff Koke & S. John Ross Category: game Company/Publisher: Steve Jackson Games Cost: $17.95 US Page count: 128 ISBN: 1-55634-333-7 Capsule Review by Kevin Mowery on 10/24/97. Genre tags: none	(see also the attached story by another author) It's all true. The Greys are kidnapping our women and performing insidious experiments on them. Strange creatures live in the sewers. Vampires stalk the streets at night. Dinosaurs roam in the isolated parts of the world. As a Black Op, it's your job to hunt these things down and kill them (well, sometimes you might try to capture one for study). I've been anxiously awaiting GURPS Black Ops since it was first announced. After reading the book, the best way I could think of to describe it is part "GURPS Special Ops", part "Men In Black", and part "Paranoia". Players take the part of the "best of the best of the best", recruited by a super-secret organization known as the Company. The Company was created decades ago by conspirators in the US government, but answers to no laws but its own. Comparisons to WEG's Paranoia come into play because the Company has five Directorates: Combat, Intelligence, Security, Science, and Technology. Each Directorate has different goals and agendas, which supporting the overall goal of protecting humanity. Science, for instance, often wants to capture the beasties to study them--to find out more effective ways to kill them, mostly. Combat has orders to kill the target at the slightest provocation. Security is charged with protecting Black Ops and the conspiracy, and is despised by nearly everyone else for being able to veto any plan of action if they deem it too dangerous. The tone of the game is surprisingly serious, but the rules are far from it. Recently it seems that cinematic action has become the order of the day for RPG companies. Anyone who isn't releasing a game based on action movies seems to be releasing one based on anime. GURPS, as a reasonably realistic system, doesn't seem particularly suited to the cinematic action genre. Black Ops is a good effort at changing that. Optional rules abound. "Scrubs" take on the role that Feng Shui players know as "Mooks"--if you succeed in your skill roll against a Scrub, you win. Characters are trained to a ridiculous level: they can identify cigar brands by smell, cars by the sound of their engine. A Black Op can move quickly and silently, moving into air vents and around obstacles as fast as across flat ground. For all the optional rules, this still gets a bit unwieldy. Characters are built on 700 points (more than most GURPS Supers characters). Having tried my hand at creating GURPS Special Ops characters, done on fewer points, I can safely say that it's a pain. GURPS is a good system for a certain style of gameplay: quick and dirty and lethal. It's best when you want to play something somewhat realistic and expect combat to be dangerous. Worrying about ecumbrance and exact movement rates and careful spending of points to buy heaps of skills detracts from the game. In the defense of the authors, templates for Ops from each of the Directorates are provided (although they're a bit stereotyped). Each takes up a page, mostly a list of skills taking up nearly three columns of 10-point type. It's a bit daunting. To play Black Ops as it's intended, I'd move a great deal of the background over to another system with a quicker and more cinematic rule-set: Feng Shui. I'd have to patch together some psionics rules, but overall it'd be worth it. As a GURPS sourcebook, Black Ops completes a trilogy (whether SJG intended it or not): Illuminati, Warehouse 23, & Black Ops. If I were running a GURPS campaign around conspiracies, I'd either use the Black Ops as "bad" guys--the Men in Black, or have my investigators get recruited by the Company and trained as Black Ops. Either way, playing Black Ops with GURPS rules, I'd ditch the cinematic options. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)