Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (
More info?)
Gregory L. Hansen wrote:
> In article <42449a0c.170365057@news.telusplanet.net>,
> David Johnston <rgorman@telusplanet.net> wrote:
> >This time you are looking to adjust your population so as to
optimise
> >their performance on the battlefield. Let's give you a budget so
you
> >won't go hog-wild. You have 150 points. You can give them as many
> >genetically based psychological limitations as you want, but none of
> >them count against that total.
>
>
> Extra Fatigue. Night Vision. An acute sense of smell. I've
sometimes
> wondered what the effect would be if the average soldier could smell
as
> well as a dog. They could smell an ambush ahead-- the people,
> lubricants, food. They could track infiltrators by scent. They
would
> have to practice scent discipline to stay safe.
>
Alertness might be useful, or Acute Hearing.
Being able to get by on less sleep would be _very_ useful over the long
haul. Give everyone 1 or 2 levels of Less Sleep (3 pts/lvl!), and
you've effectively leveraged your manpower by a huge margin.
Disease Resistance (take a look at the casualty rates from direct enemy
action and compare it to diseases in various wars) and its only 5 pts.
Give it to everyone in your army, and you've got a significant edge
over an enemy that does not have it.
A non-cinematic Cast Iron Stomach would be very useful. Make if a 10
pt version in which you can tolerate foods that are mildly spoiled, and
your sense of taste is selectively adjustable so you can stand to eat
almost anything reasonable.
Temperature tolerance would be nice. Even 1 level of it would increase
the fighting efficiency of your forces somewhat.
Little advantages add up over time and in large groups.
For example, Less Sleep is somewhat useful to an individual, giving him
an extra hour a day to work. If everyone in a 100-person military unit
has it, 100 extra man-hours/day, the equivalent of 8 to 12 extra people
working! Multiply that by an entire army, and it's a killer of an edge
if the other side doesn't have it.
An army that needs an hour less sleep per day on average, is Disease
Resistant, is naturally Sharp Eyed/Night Visioned and Sharp Eared, Fit,
Alert, 1 lvl of Temperature Tolerance, and has Cast Iron Stomach in
_all_ its troops is now possessed of a _huge_ collective edge of its
opponents, all else being equal. All for under 45 pts(!).
One on one, these advantages are modest or irrelevant, but they make
one army incredibly dangerous to an opponent collectively lacking them.
The advantaged army can work longer and more effectively in harsher
climates, can do more work in a day, can march further and fight
longer, can 'live off the land' more effectively, etc.
We've still got over 100 pts left, too.
Some things that would at least be potentially useful:
Peripheral vision just might come in handy, though I'd rather have
Alertness or Less Sleep if I had to choose.
Manual dexterity would be handy (no pun intended).
For a stretch:
If you can engineer it in, Danger Sense would obviously be useful, as
would Intuition. (It's not the utility that's a stretch, it's the
genegineering of them, IMO).
Eiditic Memory is hardly indispensable, but it might make training a
lot faster and easier.
Absolute Direction would be a nice luxury for everyone to have, if it
can be engineered in.
Some of the things you could theoretically do with your remaining 100+
pts wouldn't make a lot of sense as individual advantages, but could be
very useful for an army. Pheromone control, for ex, could give an army
the equivalent of crude Secret Communication and a perfect recognition
system.
"How did I know Julian was an imposter? I just knew."
A genetic engineer might theoretically knock out a lot of _disads_,
lack hemophilia, allergies, genetic unFitness or nearsightedness or the
lack, from the populace. This would mean that otherwise useful
personnel would have a much lower chance of being disqualified by some
common disad.
Shermanlee
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