I never played that much GURPS.
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@AndreasDavour @Taskerland the gm also made use of Google Streetview so we could see the real world locations that we were travelling through which added to the immersion
@satsuma nice! @Taskerland
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@Taskerland OK so big GURPS fan here… but yes, character generation is not only too long, it's generally the most complex thing you'll have to do in the game, and it's the thing you have to do first. GURPS is a product of mid 80s gaming in which campaigns tended to be long so it didn't matter as much if you took a while to get a character ready for play.
In play? Dead simple, 3d6 roll low and tell me the margin, job done.
And I do genuinely like the _result_ of character generation, in which my occult detective doesn't just have an Occult Detective Trait but rather stuff they're better at and stuff they're worse at, so they're not just like every other occult detective. (And all that stuff is right there on the character sheet, I don't have to keep it all in my head from session to session.)@RogerBW @Taskerland yes, very much this. I've run it for people who didn't even know they were playing GURPS (not girls, autocorrect, though that suggests new campaign ideas) because they had pregens and were running 3d6 and roleplaying a handful of character traits with me handling the mechanics as necessary.
Templates were… a good idea, stymied by implementation.
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@Printdevil @Taskerland The joy of character creation is rolling up some mechanically terrible dude and figuring out how to play that.
@sbszine @Printdevil @Taskerland POW 3 Cthulhu character remains probably my favourite, though in hindsight a little close to home at that point in my life
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@RogerBW @Taskerland yes, very much this. I've run it for people who didn't even know they were playing GURPS (not girls, autocorrect, though that suggests new campaign ideas) because they had pregens and were running 3d6 and roleplaying a handful of character traits with me handling the mechanics as necessary.
Templates were… a good idea, stymied by implementation.
@shimminbeg @Taskerland A minor innovation which I think would make templates much more usable: turn every instance of "choose X from among" to "here's the standard set of traits, and if you want to tweak it a bit, drop this and put in one of those instead". So that you can have a bog-standard ready to play whatever instantly, _and_ leave it tweakable for those who want to tweak.
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@sbszine @Printdevil @Taskerland POW 3 Cthulhu character remains probably my favourite, though in hindsight a little close to home at that point in my life
I rolled a natural 18 once for Strength in AD&D and made the character a Magic-User and the DM just tortured me about for the handful of sessions it ran.
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@shimminbeg @Taskerland A minor innovation which I think would make templates much more usable: turn every instance of "choose X from among" to "here's the standard set of traits, and if you want to tweak it a bit, drop this and put in one of those instead". So that you can have a bog-standard ready to play whatever instantly, _and_ leave it tweakable for those who want to tweak.
@RogerBW @shimminbeg @Taskerland 'the default is X, but you can swap it for Y or Z' is wayyyy better than 'choose from X, Y or Z'
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@SJohnRoss @Taskerland I think one of the big challenges with point buy systems is that making characters is a skill the player has to exercise before they can play. Not everybody is going to be interested in that kind of investment up front.
GURPS and HERO can turn into an exercise in quantifying everything in a very genre-breaking way, IME.
One of the things I like about Unknown Armies is it's kind of free-form BRP -- a mash up of BRP and Over the Edge.
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@SJohnRoss @Taskerland I think I tended to end up gaming with engineers more than actors, and the giant bricks of HERO 5 books makes me think things tended towards minutia there.
But there definitely were both camps around. I remember a GM being very grumpy with my champions character who had a crime detector. 'What's the mechanism? Is it telepathy?'
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@SJohnRoss @Taskerland I think I tended to end up gaming with engineers more than actors, and the giant bricks of HERO 5 books makes me think things tended towards minutia there.
But there definitely were both camps around. I remember a GM being very grumpy with my champions character who had a crime detector. 'What's the mechanism? Is it telepathy?'
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