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Japan is so weird in how they like to just read about other random groups playing tabletop games! Hey, hold on, let me finish downloading my Adventure Zone podcast... Honestly, the replays thing would've always been super popular in the US - they just needed a different form of media, since the US does everything in it's power to crush the idea of reading for pleasure.
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Nov 13, 2017 22:07
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8one6 posted:I love that this is a thing that really exists, but much like twitch streams of people playing D&D I will likely never understand the appeal. Kinda funny you mention this because there has literally been a demand for my D&D group to start streaming their sessions since we'll be transitioning to online games. It's probably because the DM makes KSBD, but still.
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Nov 13, 2017 22:10
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Evil Mastermind posted:I can't wait to see the paid D&D GM market saturate itself in less than a day. 
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Nov 13, 2017 22:48
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I'm going to start a service where I can come hang out with you and watch football. I'll charge $20 per person attending, per football game. No one-on-ones, that's too creepy. Oh and if you're in a different town from me, then we'll set up a laptop and I'll Skype in. It's totally worth it because I am very knowledgeable about football (ask me about my fantasy football teams!) and so I will enhance your football watching experience compared to the normal "volunteer" friends you usually hang out to watch football with. You provide the snacks. Oh and I only watch 49ers and Raiders games, and you have to agree to record the game in advance so we can fast forward through any commercials that I don't like, and you need to have a minimum 50" TV.
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Nov 13, 2017 22:58
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Leperflesh posted:I'm going to start a service where I can come hang out with you and watch football. I'll charge $20 per person attending, per football game. No one-on-ones, that's too creepy. Oh and if you're in a different town from me, then we'll set up a laptop and I'll Skype in. It's totally worth it because I am very knowledgeable about football (ask me about my fantasy football teams!) and so I will enhance your football watching experience compared to the normal "volunteer" friends you usually hang out to watch football with. The Japanese pay for that already
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Nov 13, 2017 23:00
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i seriously do not see what's wrong with GMs as a service if no one wants to do it
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Nov 13, 2017 23:04
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Countblanc posted:i seriously do not see what's wrong with GMs as a service if no one wants to do it There's nothing wrong with it in general, people who do it in dumb or weird ways aside.
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Nov 13, 2017 23:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:I can't wait to see the paid D&D GM market saturate itself in less than a day. More business for the non-D&D GMs then! Right guys? Guys? Hello? Where y'all going?
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Nov 13, 2017 23:21
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Haystack posted:Fun fact: The Japanese edition of CoC 7e outsells the English edition.
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Nov 13, 2017 23:54
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communism but for GMs
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Nov 13, 2017 23:55
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Serf posted:communism but for GMs  All GM's should starve to death in gulag, and we should embrace freeform roleplaying.
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Nov 14, 2017 01:17
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We should ditch structured RPGs and just all get on RP forums. I hear Sailor Moon RPs are still in vogue.
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Nov 14, 2017 01:20
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Bedlamdan posted:
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Nov 14, 2017 01:25
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Nov 14, 2017 01:30
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If anything he's right
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Nov 14, 2017 01:34
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GURPS is now on DrivethruRPG as PDFs
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Nov 14, 2017 02:30
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Plutonis posted:If anything he's right absolutely damning gradenko_2000 posted:GURPS is now on DrivethruRPG as PDFs oh poo poo, really? i thought sj was totally against this
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Nov 14, 2017 02:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:GURPS is now on DrivethruRPG as PDFs Is it worth buying? Serf posted:absolutely damning Why?
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Nov 14, 2017 02:45
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Can't speak for anyone else, but personally I just assume by default that all old hat RPG dudes are totally against anything that's convenient or modern forever.
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Nov 14, 2017 02:46
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Covok posted:Is it worth buying? Allen Varney posted:Steve Jackson and Steve Wieck, then of White Wolf Game Studio, had a very public, very bitter falling-out in the early '90s over the licensed GURPS versions of the World of Darkness games. Wieck later started the company that eventually became OneBookShelf, owner of DriveThru. SJG's contracts with licensors, such as with Marc Miller for the GURPS Traveller line, pointedly forbade the licensor ever to post SJG material on DriveThru even after rights reverted to the licensor. That longtime rivalry is what makes this new development remarkable.
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Nov 14, 2017 02:53
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Covok posted:Is it worth buying? 24 bucks (for HALF the corebook) is a bit too rich for my blood, so I still use GURPS Lite, which is free, but GURPS in general is a good, if generic system. The worst I'll say about it is that you have to pick-and-choose which rules you want to use, but that's not nearly as bad a problem as a game that lacks rules that you actually want. GURPS also has a very special place in my heart, because it was the GURPS megathread in this very forum that got me started on the hobby.
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Nov 14, 2017 02:53
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8one6 posted:I love that this is a thing that really exists, but much like twitch streams of people playing D&D I will likely never understand the appeal. There's a significant percentage of the population that would rather watch other people experience things than experience it themselves.
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Nov 14, 2017 04:20
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So if we wanted to try GURPS, what books can be not lived without that are on DTRPG? I'm a sucka for RPG PDFs that I will fondly look at with a "one day" but never have the chance to touch
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Nov 14, 2017 04:32
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Spiteski posted:So if we wanted to try GURPS, what books can be not lived without that are on DTRPG? I'm a sucka for RPG PDFs that I will fondly look at with a "one day" but never have the chance to touch Temper this with the fact that I haven't really been "into" GURPS for quite some time, and I never really placed much personal value into the "tech" books. Basic: Characters and Basic: Campaigns are, of course, required. (The latter isn't 100% required, but, yeah, it's still largely half of the "core" experience.) Powers is a pretty good early-line supplement about messing around with the basics to make new things. Fantasy is fairly okay, and it's got a ton of mini-supplements for everything from monsters, little magic items, and mass battles. Magic is an, eh, okay-ish expansion of the magic system they plop into the core rules. But those rules themselves already aren't that great, and this book didn't do very much to improve it. On the other hand, Thaumatology did a lot of interesting different things for magic in GURPS. The more focused genre guides like Martial Arts and Horror are pretty good guides for what they are, but sometimes they're really hindered by being tied to GURPS specifically. This is the kind of stuff that encourages the moderately accurate "GURPS is a game nobody plays full of books everyone should read."
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Nov 14, 2017 05:31
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Spiteski posted:So if we wanted to try GURPS, what books can be not lived without that are on DTRPG? I'm a sucka for RPG PDFs that I will fondly look at with a "one day" but never have the chance to touch I would start with looking through the GURPS Lite document that I linked to, to get a feel for how the game works. You could even definitely play a game with just that. Outside of the core books, I would heavily recommend picking up How to Be a GURPS GM (which unfortunately isn't currently part of what's offered in DTRPG). It breaks down a lot of the things you need to think about before starting a game of GURPS, notably how pick-and-choose which supplements and rules you'll want to use, and how to flesh-out NPCs and enemies. "GURPS Action 2 - Exploits" also has a lot of valuable advice in this regard. The whole GURPS Fantasy line is supposed to let you play a D&D-esque high fantasy game, and is valuable because it comes with pregen characters, which skips through some of the most time-consuming parts of setting up a game of GURPS.
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Nov 14, 2017 05:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:Outside of the core books, I would heavily recommend picking up How to Be a GURPS GM (which unfortunately isn't currently part of what's offered in DTRPG). It breaks down a lot of the things you need to think about before starting a game of GURPS, notably how pick-and-choose which supplements and rules you'll want to use, and how to flesh-out NPCs and enemies. And seconding your suggestion to start with the (free!) light version of the rules. It really does give you the basics of the game system and lets you decide if it's something you want to invest time and money into or if it's just not a good match for what you're looking for in an RPG system.
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Nov 14, 2017 05:50
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I would personally peg GMing to skilled performances like a magician or musician for a party, which I am sure is a thing. I have no idea what rate that IS, but that's my own experience of the field. It's performance art.
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Nov 14, 2017 06:09
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Evil Mastermind posted:The answer, as always, is beef. I'm guessing SJ decided to let the beef go in the wake of Wieck's passing away this year, then.
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Nov 14, 2017 06:11
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Sweet I'll check out the GURPS lite and see how that goes. Thanks
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Nov 14, 2017 06:29
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One thing to keep in mind is that GURPS is modular. It's easy to look at every sub-system and get overwhelmed. Don't do that. GURPS is meant to be a toolbox and almost everything except skills can be treated as an optional rule.
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Nov 14, 2017 06:33
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Countblanc posted:i seriously do not see what's wrong with GMs as a service if no one wants to do it There's nothing wrong with it, it's just that nobody's really come up with a way of doing it that's feasible or sensible. Also roleplayers as a demographic seem to be notoriously stingy and unwilling to pay premium prices for things that aren't giant faux-leather tomes or mystery boxes with plastic hands, so I feel like one of the biggest obstacles to any attempt to monetize GMing as a service is going to be convincing people to pay for something that they're going to argue is readily attainable for free, regardless of how few of them actually want to GM themselves.
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Nov 14, 2017 06:44
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8one6 posted:One thing to keep in mind is that GURPS is modular. It's easy to look at every sub-system and get overwhelmed. Don't do that. GURPS is meant to be a toolbox and almost everything except skills can be treated as an optional rule. Very much this. The heart of GURPS is 3d6-roll-under, with a success if you get a result equal to or less than your skill. This means that anyone with a 16 or higher is going to succeed more often than not, which further translates to the game being a tug-of-war between the GM trying to impose penalties to bring that skill lower, versus players trying to increase skills (and engineering diegetic situations) to where they can overpower those penalties. All the other rules and books and supplements are about implementing consistent and reasoned-out penalties, but the Action - Exploits supplement that I mentioned even goes as far as to say that the GM can just as easily implement a global, generic penalty representing a billion other specific things, and simply adjust that one big penalty up and down depending on the course of the plot.
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Nov 14, 2017 07:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:Very much this. The heart of GURPS is 3d6-roll-under, with a success if you get a result equal to or less than your skill. Does it make for good playing in practice? Or does make it hard for the DM to challenge players who utilise skilk stacking to try hard-shouldering any obstacle with the same or similar skills? (Intimidate comes to mind from 4e for example)
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Nov 14, 2017 07:27
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Spiteski posted:Does it make for good playing in practice? Or does make it hard for the DM to challenge players who utilise skilk stacking to try hard-shouldering any obstacle with the same or similar skills? (Intimidate comes to mind from 4e for example) It can be expensive to get a skill to 16, and you're going to need a lot more than that to overcome whatever penalties the DM throws at you. GURPS is built with that model in mind, so it doesn't break down over people trying to brute-force it. For example, if you were playing a Saving Private Ryan scenario, it would cost you 60 points to get your Dex to 13, and another 8 points to get your Guns skill to Dex+3, or 16. That's out of a usual starting 100 points. But then if you're trying to hit a machine gunner in a bunker, you'd have a penalty from smoke, a penalty from range, a penalty from cover (trying to shoot through a firing slit), and possibly a penalty from suppression. Getting in a position where you overcome all of that can take the better part of an entire scene.
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Nov 14, 2017 07:42
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Spiteski posted:Does it make for good playing in practice? Or does make it hard for the DM to challenge players who utilise skilk stacking to try hard-shouldering any obstacle with the same or similar skills? (Intimidate comes to mind from 4e for example) When I was running my GURPS Ghostbusters game it took a session or two but eventually I got the hang of those adjustments (ask me about learning the hard way how the bell curve works during the first game session when the ghost troll with a 14 dodge attacked the RV show). If you've GM'ed other games then GURPS should be easy enough to adapt to. You'll face some of the same player issues (the Combat guy will try to use Guns! on everything, the Face will try to charisma everything, etc) you just have to be willing to use the penalties as designed ("The hardened crook has been intimidated by scarier people than you. You'll be at -2 to your skill unless ...") The players will get into it as well like any game ("I have his grandma's number. If he doesn't let me in I'll call here and tell her what he's been up to!"") One thing you DON'T want to do is just say "We're playing GURPS next week. You have 150 points, no more than 70 points of disads, make a character." Char-Gen in GURPS is best done as a group activity to a) make sure everyone's on the same page as far as the campaign b) to make sure that people aren't overly gaming the system ("I took the one-armed disad for the points, but the setting has cyberware so I'll just buy a cyberarm!") and c) keeping things reasonable as far as skill point distribution. There is a rough guide in the books of what average looking skills should look like, but basically with the bell curve of 3d6 as long as people are around 12-14 they're going to be generally successful without being unstoppable gods.
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Nov 14, 2017 07:46
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Getsuya posted:We should ditch structured RPGs and just all get on RP forums. I hear Sailor Moon RPs are still in vogue. Oh god, freeform forum RPs are still hilariously terrible.
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Nov 14, 2017 09:42
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hyphz posted:Oh god, freeform forum RPs are still hilariously terrible. To be fair, most roleplaying of every form is hilari-terrible. Freeform forums games just have the problem of letting their idiocy hang out on the Internet for all to see.
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Nov 14, 2017 09:47
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hyphz posted:Oh god, freeform forum RPs are still hilariously terrible. The main issue I had back when I did public freeform RP is that once you get past poorly spelled half-catgirls half-demons, you get into the dickwaving contests of "I can type more words than you" and "I have a fancier html/bbcode/phpBB template I apply to all my posts". This was on Gaia Online. Still, I had some good times in my teens.
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Nov 14, 2017 10:30
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8one6 posted:I love that this is a thing that really exists, but much like twitch streams of people playing D&D I will likely never understand the appeal. I like the Twitch streams once they're archived on YouTube because I can listen to them like podcasts when I'm at work.
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Nov 14, 2017 11:13
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm always amazed at how much money seems to be moving around in an industry where virtually nobody can actually make a living. The printers are making their money, because they're smart enough to bill the heartbreakers up front.
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Nov 14, 2017 11:35
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