I never played that much GURPS.
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@satsuma @Taskerland your tolerance of complexity might differ, but I found play quite pleasant comparen to making characters.
What makes my stop for a second is the insight we used to be able to play GURPS, Rolemaster and Phoenix Command when younger. VTT tools are amazing, but where we smarter when we where kids?
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@AndreasDavour @Taskerland maybe we just had more tolerance for complicated calculations and better eyesight- I really struggle with A4 paper character sheets that have a lot of information in small fonts.
@satsuma @Taskerland you might be onto something. Eyesight issues are definitely a thing as you age...
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@Taskerland I've started to connect the dots a bit, related to this insight about myself and what I like.
I have never managed to have fun with Ars Magica, and the building and managing a covenant never seemed to click for me.
Considering your feelings about "builds", what's your relationship with Ars Magica?
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@Taskerland @AndreasDavour we were playing a post apocalyptic mega game set on Tenerife with lots of different guns and modifiers - just being able to click a button to make the shooting roll was a big help.
White Hounds Holocaust: Aftermath style roleplaying in Tenerife
This page pulls together background posts and session write ups (including music numbers, poems & radio news reports) for my 2021-22 roleplaying project. A GURPS powered series of campaigns set in Tenerife in 2051 thirty one years after solar flares, meteor strikes, limited nuclear strikes and Covid have destroyed civilisation. i have to say iโฆ
Kehaar's Blog (clarkythecruel.wordpress.com)
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@satsuma @Taskerland you might be onto something. Eyesight issues are definitely a thing as you age...
@AndreasDavour @Taskerland the last time I played Dragonbane at a con the GM had printed the character sheets on an A3 colour printer which made a huge difference!
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@Taskerland huh, an all grog group sounds intriguing!
It sounds like our tolerances for the complexities of the game are quite similar. I kind of wish I could play in a game where the GM takes care of everything.
I did recently buy the 2nd ed, which was the one I first encountered. I skimmed it, and it did look more tolerable. Is it the TFT to my Ars Magica? Maybe one day.
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@Taskerland @AndreasDavour we were playing a post apocalyptic mega game set on Tenerife with lots of different guns and modifiers - just being able to click a button to make the shooting roll was a big help.
White Hounds Holocaust: Aftermath style roleplaying in Tenerife
This page pulls together background posts and session write ups (including music numbers, poems & radio news reports) for my 2021-22 roleplaying project. A GURPS powered series of campaigns set in Tenerife in 2051 thirty one years after solar flares, meteor strikes, limited nuclear strikes and Covid have destroyed civilisation. i have to say iโฆ
Kehaar's Blog (clarkythecruel.wordpress.com)
@satsuma @Taskerland in that kind of setting I can see a VTT as quite useful, indeed.
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@Taskerland huh, an all grog group sounds intriguing!
It sounds like our tolerances for the complexities of the game are quite similar. I kind of wish I could play in a game where the GM takes care of everything.
I did recently buy the 2nd ed, which was the one I first encountered. I skimmed it, and it did look more tolerable. Is it the TFT to my Ars Magica? Maybe one day.
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@Taskerland I didn't mention it, but I have the same love/hate relationship with Traveller as I have with Ars Magica.

Accountants in space... Bluergh!
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@Taskerland I didn't mention it, but I have the same love/hate relationship with Traveller as I have with Ars Magica.

Accountants in space... Bluergh!
@Taskerland... and I own *so* many Traveller books!!
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I never played that much GURPS. I used to buy the books for the way that they would look at their subject matter through a variety of lenses.
It's very much RPG-as-toolkit which I like but I always felt that GURPS was geared towards trope-wrangling like 'What if it's a western but with mechs?' or 'What if the British empire has super heroes?' and my mind doesn't really work that way.
I also played it at a club and we played in 5 game blocks and the entire first session was characters.
@Taskerland My problem with GURPS was that it very much rewarded number crunchers over people who just wanted to make a character and move on. I played in an SF game of GURPS3 where I made a navigator, someone made a captain, someone made an engineer, someone made a marine, and the final person, an old GURPS hand to our neophyte status, made the helmsman.
Who was better at literally every job on the ship than anybody else who'd made specialists.
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@Taskerland My problem with GURPS was that it very much rewarded number crunchers over people who just wanted to make a character and move on. I played in an SF game of GURPS3 where I made a navigator, someone made a captain, someone made an engineer, someone made a marine, and the final person, an old GURPS hand to our neophyte status, made the helmsman.
Who was better at literally every job on the ship than anybody else who'd made specialists.
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๏ธ@Taskerland That's when I realized that GURPS character points attempt to model nothing except how much your character costs in GURPS character points.
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I never played that much GURPS. I used to buy the books for the way that they would look at their subject matter through a variety of lenses.
It's very much RPG-as-toolkit which I like but I always felt that GURPS was geared towards trope-wrangling like 'What if it's a western but with mechs?' or 'What if the British empire has super heroes?' and my mind doesn't really work that way.
I also played it at a club and we played in 5 game blocks and the entire first session was characters.
@Taskerland OK so big GURPS fan hereโฆ 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.) -
@Taskerland I didn't mention it, but I have the same love/hate relationship with Traveller as I have with Ars Magica.

Accountants in space... Bluergh!
@AndreasDavour @Taskerland If you have one player who enjoys space accountancy, you can hand it all off to them and just ask them "which planet should we go to next".
Often that player is me. -
@satsuma @Taskerland in that kind of setting I can see a VTT as quite useful, indeed.
@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
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@Taskerland I played lots of GURPS and it never saved me from years of RPG Kit Bashes. I just learnt from it and Hero how much I despise points based systems and their "fairness"
@Printdevil @Taskerland The joy of character creation is rolling up some mechanically terrible dude and figuring out how to play that.
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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.
I don't particularly like the mechanically terrible, as much as I enjoy the weirdness..
"You've rolled a fallen angel with cybernetics, who lives on human blood"
I played that character for about thirty years after rolling it up.