@satsuma @Taskerland you might be onto something. Eyesight issues are definitely a thing as you age...

@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 i…

Kehaar's Blog (clarkythecruel.wordpress.com)

@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!

@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.

@satsuma @Taskerland in that kind of setting I can see a VTT as quite useful, indeed.

@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!!

@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.

🧵 ️

@Taskerland That's when I realized that GURPS character points attempt to model nothing except how much your character costs in GURPS character points.

🧵 ️

@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.)

@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.

@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

@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.

@sbszine @Taskerland

@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.