I never played that much GURPS.
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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".
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@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.
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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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@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.@RogerBW I've seldom had that option, but I guess handy when available! @Taskerland
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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 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.)@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 wereโฆ 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 wereโฆ 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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