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I've always like GURPS more for the sourcebooks than for the actual rules, because they were always very nicely researched and compactly presented versions of their subject matter and 3rd edition had an absolute ton of them. It feels like the 4th Edition range is a bit thinner on that front and I kind of feel like SJG are leaving money on the table by not providing POD options for the GURPS Classic like on DTRPG.
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Jan 17, 2021 16:33
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aldantefax posted:1-die systems: d20, Basic Roleplaying (d100 counts as one die) Unless I'm misreading the SRD, FATE should be 4-die.
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Jan 17, 2021 19:02
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Oh, duh, because it's FUDGE dice, right, and you always roll 4dF. Brain need coffee. Anyway, I should talk about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy because it is one of GURPS' strongest interpretations and, emphasis mine, I think it's one of the best throwback/OSR/whatever engines that can be used for its very specific kind of play, hands down. I will go into why in a little bit but I need that coffee.
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Jan 17, 2021 19:25
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PawParole posted:the fact that they were so different physically and psychologically and yet they ended up having an identical society to Georgian England in every way seemed indefensible to me. For example, there’s a part about how goblins are incapable of religion, then you have Goblin Disraeli as prime minister, who’s Jewish somehow?? You're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Yes, the fact that their biology is completely different from human means they should't have the same exact someciety as Georgian England. But that doesn't matter because GUPRS Goblins isn't going for something that makes sociological sense, it's going for an hilarious satire of that society (and of society in general). Like, come on, the rule saying that people of better Status have a huge numerical advantage over their lessers isn't exactly subtle.
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Jan 17, 2021 21:22
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I had coffee but I was still sleepy, so now here's the Dungeon Fantasy stuff. About GURPS Dungeon Fantasy GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (abbrev. DF), as previously noted, is a specific interpretation of GURPS which attempts to frame up what most people would consider a "classic dungeon crawling experience". You might want to call it "Old School Renaissance" or something similar, but as it is not related to D&D that's just a possibly misleading label. It originally released in a Pyramid zine issue to suggest how this kind of game might be played before being spun off into its own series of splatbooks. The core of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy has to do with extensive use of templates, or prebuilt character packages which make most of the hard decisions for someone with some limited but important customization. It focuses primarily on the "dungeon crawling" concepts and removes or changes the way some things work in GURPS in favor of streamlined heroic combat usage that was still very crunchy (more on this in a minute), while also retaining skills based around dungeon exploration. Niche protection is designed into this interpretation and strictly enforced. This means no two characters should occupy the same set of powers or function, and each template is designed to have an outstanding function or combination of functions in order to allow for a wide variety of play and structured skill sets that complement other characters in your group nicely. By default, GURPS DF starts with 250 points, 245 of which is dedicated to the template and 5 of which are made up for discretionary points for spending on other stuff. These are the following core templates that are designed to represent a character's profession and role in such a game, similar to how classes work in D&D and other related games. Each template has a specific role in and out of combat that is designed to fill a gap in the party. In an average group, about 70 to 80% of skills that are normally in use in the dungeon are covered. I will provide a five word description for each template because I lost the full descriptions for each. - Barbarian: Meat miracle naturalist, frontline fighter. - Bard: Support socialite with Bard-Song. - Cleric: Healer, divine caster, reliable friend. - Druid: Shapeshifting nature caster, elemental focus. - Holy Warrior: Paladin. Holy Might provides miracles. - Knight: Heavy fighter. Combat captain, overgeared. - Scout: Grumpy Legolas, for bows only. - Swashbuckler: Fencing duelist, massive damage dealer. - Thief: Dungeon explorer first, combat nah. - Wizard: Arcane spellcaster. Makes, solves problems. DF also has an extensive product line at this point and all the books feature well-integrated stuff with new options for people. Core: Use this to play a game of DF. Basic - Characters Basic - Campaigns 01 - Adventurers 02 - Dungeons Magic Nice to Have Extensions: Monsters 1, 2, 3 03 - The Next Level 05 - Allies 06 - 40 Artifacts 08 - Treasure Tables 11 - Power-Ups 13 - Loadouts 18 - Power Items Martial Arts Low Tech Thaumatology As Needed: 15 - Henchmen 16 - Wilderness Adventures 17 - Guilds 21 - Megadungeons Treasures 1 - Glittering Prizes (specific callout for many pages on exotic coinage and weight) Treasures 2 - Epic Treasures New Character Options: 04 - Sages 07 - Clerics 09 - Summoners 10 - Taverns 12 - Ninjas 14 - Psi 19 - Incantation Magic 20 - Slayers Denizens - Barbarians Pyramid 36, 50, 60, 76, 98 - Dungeon Fantasy specific zines Pyramid 29, 41, 72, 89, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105 Pyramid 104, 106 - Dungeon Fantasy RPG Powered by GURPS, the successor/fork of GURPS DF --- DF has a few things about it that people like, dislike, or fall somewhere between: - Curated point-buy. Gain experience points and spend them on things to get better. You don't just "get" everything, you get to specialize further in the things you want to do. - Crunchy combat. Tactical combat options including using a hex grid, positioning, combat maneuvers, called shots and location damage, and that's just the beginning. Want to take out an ogre running your way? Tell your scout and wizard to shoot out the legs! Demon wielding a flaming chain? The knight can shield rush to push it off the side of a cliff, or just chop off its head with a well placed blow! - Customizable with other GURPS things. Consistent framework to port other things into it from the rest of the GURPS diaspora. - "A New System." This helps to reset and subvert expectations because it has a very different set of rules and framework from other popular fantasy RPG systems out there, but narratively is similar enough that players with an open mind will be welcome here. - Highly regimented skill system. GURPS DF2 very clearly lays out what people can do with their skills in a variety of situations that would normally be hand waved. This allows characters to flex their individual strengths or to improvise when they find they don't know what the Death Note does. - Detail oriented. Encumbrance and movement is important, especially when the wizard needs to drag the barbarian's buddy that just went down behind a rock so you can pour a healing potion into their ear. --- I should note what I use for my Megadungeon game that I have oft talked about in the Megadungeon thread. I use all books available listed above and whatever my players can find in the Pyramid books, but do not use the updated DFRPG ruleset. Designing the original concept for the game started with a one page campaign concept and combining a few sources of inspiration starting with DF21: Megadungeons, and then doing an extended treatment from there. In the game, we use tactical combat with all the trimmings, abstracted travel with challenge points, as well as a good old fashioned dungeon crawl that I make the players generally document however they like. Also, the game features free resurrection if you get back to town and other escape/safety tools, so the monsters that the players fight are mean. They know they can typically run or otherwise get out of a fight, and they gain experience by looting rather than fighting. --- I'm sure there's more to add but the tl;dr is that it's a crunchy system that has enough realism built into it to allow for people to have a gritty dungeon crawling game where every decision matters and preparing carefully is just as much a part of the game as fighting, as well as exploring the game world by leveraging each character. This scratches that very specific itch for when I find other systems lacking for this kind of experience, and as long as you are patient with your players and yourself, the game is great. Sadly, like other GURPSin' it does not lend itself well to pick up and play very easily, but you could wing it for awhile until people start doing edge cases in your game that do have rules, but you'll need to take some time to soak it in. It is common for me to have DF1, DF2, Campaigns, Characters, and a GM screen all at the ready to answer questions or tell the players to go look it up themselves -- which they would, if they only knew where to look.
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Jan 18, 2021 04:55
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The Oldest Man posted:Like having to use Shape Earth to mine two tons of basalt for a randomly generated fetch quest Or using Prepare Game to render all of the once-big-and-nasty critters you just fought into their component parts, preventing them from being raised as even harder to take down zombies. aldantefax posted:Want to take out an ogre running your way? Tell your scout and wizard to shoot out the legs! Demon wielding a flaming chain? The knight can shield rush to push it off the side of a cliff, or just chop off its head with a well placed blow! As the party's wizard, I found that "death by massive numbers" generally worked as well. Especially if you can hide for three rounds building up your Kamehameha while the rest of your party unknowingly provides a distraction. No matter how big, 70 damage to the torso will probably trigger a death check.
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Jan 18, 2021 15:03
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Warthur posted:I've always like GURPS more for the sourcebooks than for the actual rules, because they were always very nicely researched and compactly presented versions of their subject matter and 3rd edition had an absolute ton of them. It feels like the 4th Edition range is a bit thinner on that front and I kind of feel like SJG are leaving money on the table by not providing POD options for the GURPS Classic like on DTRPG. They're actually doing GURPS PoD through Amazon, for 4th and 3rd edition, and they have quite a bit available: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ondemand/ This is how I got my collection of 4th edition GURPS in print, and I'm thinking about getting some of 3rd edition too.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:24
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What's the main difference between 3rd and 4th edition?
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Jan 18, 2021 18:01
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Absurd Alhazred posted:What's the main difference between 3rd and 4th edition? The 4e core book is in many ways a compendium of all the building blocks of 3e, with some minor changes to the rules to make things run smoother. The major ruleswise changes included lifting capacity moving to a quadratic scale from a linear scale, attribute costs moving to a linear scale, the distinction between mental and physical skills was removed, and PD was removed.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:46
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SJG just launched a Kickstarter for new Pyramid content: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/warehouse23/steve-jackson-games-gurps-pyramid-scheme
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Jan 19, 2021 17:18
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LatwPIAT posted:The 4e core book is in many ways a compendium of all the building blocks of 3e, with some minor changes to the rules to make things run smoother. The major ruleswise changes included lifting capacity moving to a quadratic scale from a linear scale, attribute costs moving to a linear scale, the distinction between mental and physical skills was removed, and PD was removed. How hard is it to adapt 3e expansions to 4e, or vice versa? Hypnobeard posted:SJG just launched a Kickstarter for new Pyramid content: Is it worth it if you're not all in on GURPS? Is any of the content more general than that?
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Jan 19, 2021 20:38
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is it worth it if you're not all in on GURPS? Is any of the content more general than that? Sure, but it depends on what you're into. There are maps, encounters to mine, theorycrafting about world building, and other things of that nature. There are articles which are specifically systemless as well. Certainly, the zines will be more useful if you are in on GURPS, but one need not be all in. Absurd Alhazred posted:How hard is it to adapt 3e expansions to 4e, or vice versa? Generally speaking, 3e to 4e means that some skills are different but the stats are the same. There's no DC that isn't the same between editions because difficulty of success is calculated based off your character sheet rather than from an arbitrary number elsewhere. There's a few guides online that tell you explicitly what the differences from 3e to 4e are, and I think even SJGames has a system conversion kit to use. Going from 4e to 3e theoretically should be doable but I'm not sure I know of anybody that does it. People do 3e to 4e conversions all the time since a lot of splatbooks never refreshed to 4e, nor is there much need to do so.
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Jan 19, 2021 21:06
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Awesome! I might just support that one for the cheap 90s Pyramids tier, that should be an interesting time capsule.
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Jan 19, 2021 21:08
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Wow, quite a ninja. I put some work into this so I'll leave it unchanged for posterity.Absurd Alhazred posted:Is it worth it if you're not all in on GURPS? Is any of the content more general than that? I did a bit of counting. All stretch goals but one are unlocked. Eight articles are devoted to GURPS products (new monsters, magic, character options, guidelines for using two products together). Fourteen articles are devoted to stuff that sounds more generic - planets/places to explore, adventures, alternate Earths, generic encounters, campaign frameworks, new frameworks for space races and sci-fi games/sports. Some would obviously require conversion if you want to use them with another system but I don't think it would be too onerous. Four articles seem like they'll be infodumps on the real world - two on Vietnam, one devoted to "real-world lost locales", and one about Fraxinetum. Assuming the campaign raises another $6000 (it's hour 4-ish on day one so... all signs point to yes), there'll be three more articles in the "GURPS product" bucket.
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Jan 19, 2021 21:23
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Flail Snail posted:Wow, quite a ninja. I put some work into this so I'll leave it unchanged for posterity. That does sound terrific!
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Jan 19, 2021 21:35
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Most if not all SJGames Kickstarters are preorder-type Kickstarters these days with a high chance of success. Their most ambitious thing that they probably did was the OGRE kickstarter with the big box offering, and that went unexpectedly well. I never bought into it but it seemed cool. Does anybody have it in them to talk in greater detail about GURPS Transhuman Space, Infinite Worlds, Banestorm, or some of the other flagship settings? I only have a little experience with THS and practically none with IW or Banestorm.
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Jan 19, 2021 21:36
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Hey GURPns! Glad to see a new thread, because I'm trying to learn GURPS again and will invariably Have Questions. As it is, I'm running a CYOA to try to crash test the rules, using 4th ed and trying to convert the WW2 classic items to that end: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3956203
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Jan 20, 2021 12:53
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I've started my RP career on an afterschool GURPS game in 5th grade. I played in a handful of old TG games here, too. I like it a lot for being a system you can use each part of at your discretion, so you can build a custom system for a specific game. I've managed to get one complete game as a PC under my belt with it, and two complete games of it GMd. I just finished a pretty long homebrew GURPS campaign that was a weekly roll20 game. I've been messing around with a GURPS Superlite concept, something between Ultralite and regular Lite for a more loose and arcadey take on the system.
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Jan 23, 2021 05:07
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I ran a mostly-vertical encounter for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy tonight with a group of brand new players and it was ridiculous because it involved falling giant spiders and someone leaping heroically on top of a giant spider, meanwhile everybody was in a very cramped and hastily drawn cave with a sheer cliff next to it. - Party deliberates and ends up going into a cave in a zone they know as the "Antlion's Den". They don't know much else about it but they're on the way to a place simply called "Mushrooms" hunting a myconid. - Arrive at a cliff with lots of handholds and a ledge up top. They can't see what's on the ledge but they can see the ceiling above it. Someone uses a grapnel so they can begin scaling the cliff face. - Swashbuckler goes up first. Everybody fails perception checks for stationary and hidden acid spiders. Swashbuckler comes face to face with acid spiders and immediately nopes out. - Spiders give chase and climb down the walls back down to the party. Swashbuckler left dangling in midair fending off one spider while on a rope. Decides to jump at the other spider, slamming into it (rules for falling and collision come in!) and then proceeding to stand on the SM+2 spider's back whaling on it with his saber, before leaping back to the rope to avoid a disastrously longer fall. - Wizard crits spellcasting, creates a 6d stone missile. Misses his shot against a spider but manages to blow a massive chunk off the side of the cliff made out of sandstone. We figured it was somewhere on the low end of non-reinforced concrete. - Mystic Archer goes buck wild and peppers one of the falling spiders. The Knight in the party eats a humongous acid bite and starts frantically bashing the remaining one to a pulp. - Wizard decides instead of casting another spell he's just going to whack the other spider with his staff, knocking it out. - Knight continues to bash the falling dead remaining spider as it falls on top of him, but he is consumed by bloodlust and bashes it out of the way with his shield. All in all, not a bad way to spend 7 seconds of combat! Everybody had a blast grappling with new rules (only me and one other player had familiarity). That GURPS had models for jumping, colliding with other creatures, as well as DR values that we could use to approximate how much collateral damage happened to the quickly-winged environment the players were in meant that fight was tense, surprising, and engaging for everybody involved.
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Jan 23, 2021 08:43
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This took longer than anticipated. Now presenting, an  post on IW and Banestorm.Infinite Worlds Overview This is all based on obsessive reading years ago and a quick refresher as I write out what came to mind. I'll also be using "timeline" and "world" interchangeably because that's pretty much what the whole series does. Infinite Worlds (and, by extension, Banestorm) is the in-built setting in GURPS 4e. It provides an easy way to have highly-disparate characters get together and form a party - it's because they're part of ISWAT, or Interworld Special Weapons and Tactics, an organization that ships people to other timelines to research them, determine if they constitute a threat to Mainline, recruit locals, and thwart Centrum. It's the excuse given for the sample characters being a futuretech-in-the-2000s Buddhist combat robot, a Crusades-era teleporting thief, a 1700s-era Martian Guard equipped with a light-rapier and laser pistol, a Call of Cthulhu professor of eccentricities, an elf (no personality needed - she's Legolas), a Filipino lady from an alt-world Manila, a centuries-old Hungarian vampire, and a Chinese rescuee omni-pilot from one of our local hellworlds. O-kay. Let's pull back a bit. Homeline is the protagonist of this story, despite trapising through the multiverse turning prehistoric worlds into hunting grounds and undesirable worlds into waste dumps. It exists on Q5, or quanta 5. Quanta are basically "bands" of timelines. I don't believe there's an explanation for why things are in the band that they are so this will probably only come up if one side or the other decides to force a timeline to shift quanta. If you're playing Infinite Worlds, you'll probably be a member (or soon-to-be member) of ISWAT or Infinity Patrol, both part of Infinity Unlimited, the company that holds a monopoly on parachronic tech in Homeline. Centrum is the Big Bad. They're on Q8 and developed parachronics, the technology that lets you move to another world, at about the same time as us. They're an extreme scientific meritocracy that has eradicated all language from their timeline but an unnamed English dialect (which makes it easy for the PCs to communicate with and interrogate their agents, I suppose). Their goal is to assume control of all worlds (often by overthrowing the world's governments as inexpensively as possible) and, when a world is "ready", its citizens may become citizens of the Centrum. None have ever been ready. They have an analogue to Infinity Patrol in Interworld. Homeline and Centrum don't like one another but, due to timey wimey stuff, can't use parachronic tech to attack one another's timeline directly. Conflicts do occur on Q6 and Q7, however. Our timeline is out there somewhere but is specifically not Homeline. Worlds Empty worlds are those that contain no intelligent life. These are free from exploitation and are a big part of how Infinity Unlimited funds itself - good worlds go to the colonization effort, bad worlds to industry, worlds with animal life become hunting grounds, and truly bad worlds may become waste dumps. Echoes seem to track known history. You can find stuff out of the history books here. Parallels are Earths that have diverged from "known" history at some point. Infinity guides them away from war involving WMDs and discovering parachronic travel. Anchor worlds are like stable echoes. Major changes in an echo can make it switch quanta. Anchors don't change quanta so Homeline and Centrum are both interested in these worlds. Three close parallels are presented at this point. They're interesting as thought exercises but they're not all that gamably interesting. There's Earth-Beta, the first parallel. It's just Homeline minus parachronic stuff. Cherokee is basically Earth but the Cherokee Nation was stronger and now controls Big Oil. Holly is a timeline in which Buddy Holly's plane didn't crash. It's 1989 and Holly and Ritchie Valens are still alive and The Big Bopper is in Congress, amongst other music-related shenanigans. More worlds are mentioned offhand in some of the sample characters' bios. Core doesn't dive into this too much but new timelines are what make up most of the IW products. Traveling Between Timelines The most reliable way to travel to another timeline would be to use a conveyor, a technological device that can move people and things up to two quanta away. Aside from that, you're likely to meet, know, or be a jumper, a person who can "jump" to another timeline without parachronic tech. This requires a roll and, unless the owner of the advantage spends a boatload of points, can't be used to find new worlds or take others along for the ride but otherwise doesn't have the hard two quanta limit. Certain spells can accomplish this but they're hard to cast, hard to learn, and come with some limitations. Banestorm Banestorms (the meteorological events) are introduced in Campaigns. These seem like particularly bad storms but, once they end, you find yourself somewhere else. In the context of Banestorm (the setting), these can occur anywhere. To make several products' worth of info a bit shorter, elves wanted to magic away orcs in the timeline known as Yrth (Q5, same as Homeline) around year 1050. This backfired and, instead of sending the orcs away, caused banestorms on several other timelines (generally from years 1050-1200 and ~1551 but lesser banestorms occur at other times, allowing you to insert whatever type of character you want), sucking humans and members of all of the other fantastical races (centaurs, merpeople, kobolds, all of the other Tolkienian races minus the already-present dwarves, and more) out of their timelines and into Yrth. Yrth is forcefully kept at a roughly pre-gunpower level of technology by a secretive cabal out of fear that future knowledge would destabilize things. Once on Yrth via whichever method brought you (jump, conveyor, banestorm, etc), you can only leave via banestorm, magic, or nexus portal. The Banestorm and Banestorm Abydos books don't contain the word "nexus" so there aren't any GM-facing guidelines on where one may be and gate magic on Yrth gets a massive -25 penalty to the roll so good luck. There's a special term for this type of world - quantum sargasso. Yrth is a complete quantum sargasso (my term) meaning those rules apply to everyone. Other timelines may be a quantum sargasso (minus the magic penalty thing, which is unique to Yrth) for certain people - say you're in Homeline and conveyor to a timeline in Q7 before Centrum causes it to shift to Q8. Centrum can still conveyor to and from it but you've got to find a way to magic yourself away. If it's a no-magic timeline, better get comfy. The Crusades-era teleporting thief sample character is from here. Outro There's more than that. The Infinite Worlds series has books and books on new and interesting parallels. Yrth has a whole bunch of setting info that I intentionally didn't touch on. This should be enough info to let you decide if you want to read more yourself, however.
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Jan 23, 2021 18:05
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That's a great overview of IW and Banestorm, thank you so much! Since I've been running GURPS online, one of its biggest hurdles is that SJGames is very strict with what you can and can't do in an online format without their express permission for rules usage. This means you can't readily do things like say your virtual tabletop "officially" supports GURPS, so things you see that are modern conveniences for other popular systems fall flat on GURPS. This has been their stance as a company for the longest time, but after FnordCon 3 Steve Jackson himself implied he is starting to come around on the usage of online as a medium for running games, so support might be forthcoming in the future. Right now I'm running GURPS in a mix of Tabletop Simulator and Roll20. Roll20 is kind of dreadful because it does not handle facing well at all, or even hex grids for that matter (it's actually imposed over an invisible square grid, which causes weirdness in and of itself). I often have to fight Roll20 to actually do things with facing because the UI gets in the way or other difficulties with its handling. The only downside to Tabletop Simulator is that it melts computers, so not everybody can reliably use it. I figured out last night how to make tokens with proper facing demarcations since we use tactical grid combat:  Using TokenStamp2 and a flipped transparent mask from the Mook's website as a custom mask, I was able to mock up tokens to import to Tabletop Simulator. Turning and movement is easy along with hex grid snapping. I also put chances of success in the "always on" note display on the bottom right of the screen, as well as labeled + color coded dice so that new players had an easier time to know what dice to pick up when. Streamlining play in an online environment is always kind of tough, but the only times we had to really pump the brakes was to consult rules for very silly things like trying to figure out relative velocity of falling acid spiders and such. I wish there was an elegant way to present all the tidbits of information in a digestible format, and I think GURPS Combat Cards have the right idea, just that you could push that concept further somewhat for players. I'm not sure how to make reference card decks for Tabletop Simulator at the moment but when I do, I think I'll probably try to make a "player facing screen" that has these kinds of cards available for them to use and fill out.
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Jan 23, 2021 20:58
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My meagre advice for GURPS: If you're planning on playing a "gritty" game like low fantasy, western, detectives, military, space pirates, etc. where things are deadly if the players don't plan ahead and stack things in their favor, the default assumptions and content of the basic set work very well. You don't need to go on a buying spree for that kind of stuff. Mainly you may want the appropriate 3E book (if any, but there are a fuckton of them) that you can loot for ideas and condensed real-life historical context. Also, one of the "Tech" books will help if you want more gear appropriate to your time period, which is a nice thing to have for those sorts of games.Absurd Alhazred posted:How hard is it to adapt 3e expansions to 4e, or vice versa? Here's the official conversion guide BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Jan 24, 2021 |
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Jan 24, 2021 03:40
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BattleMaster posted:My meagre advice for GURPS: If you're planning on playing a "gritty" game like low fantasy, western, detectives, military, space pirates, etc. where things are deadly if the players don't plan ahead and stack things in their favor, the default assumptions and content of the basic set work very well. You don't need to go on a buying spree for that kind of stuff. Mainly you may want the appropriate 3E book (if any, but there are a fuckton of them) that you can loot for ideas and condensed real-life historical context. Also, one of the "Tech" books will help if you want more gear appropriate to your time period, which is a nice thing to have for those sorts of games. Awesome! Pushed me to actually look what other free stuff they have there.
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Jan 24, 2021 04:29
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I'm happy to see a new thread. Reading through lots of the games in this forum ~ 14 years ago was what got me excited again about TTRPGs as a hobby. I bought a bunch of GURPS books at the time, but I've never really played it. I was really excited to run a GURPS Vorkosigan Saga game at gencon this year, but then that didn't happen. My plan was to try to get some friends to run through with me a few times so I could get the hang of the rules. However, reading this thread has given me some trepidation—is it really necessary to have a ton of reference materials on hand and/or have encyclopedic knowledge to make GURPS games run smoothly? Most of my GMing experience is in other systems (FF Star Wars, Chronicles of Darkness), but I've never been the GM that has internalized all the rules, and I tend to favor what's interesting in terms of the fiction rather than falling back on the rules if its slowing things down. Maybe GURPS isnt' for me? I do really like the idea of having something closer to a simulation-style TTRPG experience, but I guess I worry that it would be like jumping up a cliff to try to make this work well. Or is it more a case of doing a ton of up-front prep. work, but then the actual game-to-game experience is pretty light in terms of prep (outside of story beats, etc)?
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Jan 24, 2021 23:08
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Nah. It's all just 3d6 vs a skill. Maybe have a list of the skills your players have in front of you, or just ask. Combat options aren't too bad, and there's plenty of cheat sheets out there to pull everything into one place. Make your players help out, too. If you don't know how something works in the rules, ask them to look it up.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:47
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Oh man, Vorkosigan Saga, I forgot that GURPS had that as a worldbook. When it comes to running GURPS smoothly, there are lots of ways to do it. The way that I'm onboarding new players (of which I have many) to the system is as follows: - Give everybody a set of color coded dice for skill tests, attack dice, defense dice, and damage dice. Even though it's all 3d6 they can associate based on what they're doing. - The GM screen is actually solid gold. Curate from that for the things you use the most. - Put the odds of success up somewhere. Some players are very conservative because they forget the odds are on a curve and if they're playing a hero, a 12 is still really good for chance of success. - For tactical combat, use tokens with clear facing. Online VTTs you can use a hex token with the facing put on it. Also, use a range ruler (free) to help measure distances and penalties as needed. - Similar to d20 etc. when in doubt just throw the dice if it sounds reasonable enough that a character has a skill, then make a note of it to review for later to see what the skill really ought to have been. You can then use that to set a precedent for future play. "GURPS is/isn't for me" is subject to how you want to tune it because it's a toolkit. If you prefer rules-light highly cinematic play with a lot of open interpretation at the table and the conversation is moving, GURPS can do that, just like most other systems; however, if you are trying to use as many rules as possible, then GURPS will support it instead of having you make an arbitrary roll. For the most part GURPS is set up pretty logically and sensibly, but there is a lot of small simple bits that when you add all of them up together it gets complicated in interpreting what happens. Some people like this, others not so much.
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Jan 25, 2021 02:42
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Pangaea Ultima posted:However, reading this thread has given me some trepidation—is it really necessary to have a ton of reference materials on hand and/or have encyclopedic knowledge to make GURPS games run smoothly? I mean no, you can always wing a roll on a skill and almost everything a PC will try to do can be adjudicated from the two core books. It's just that if you're not already a grog you should invest in some cheat sheets/ the GM screen or you will be forced to choose between winging or page flipping in Campaigns pretty frequently.
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Jan 25, 2021 06:59
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Pangaea Ultima posted:However, reading this thread has given me some trepidation—is it really necessary to have a ton of reference materials on hand and/or have encyclopedic knowledge to make GURPS games run smoothly? Most of my GMing experience is in other systems (FF Star Wars, Chronicles of Darkness), but I've never been the GM that has internalized all the rules, and I tend to favor what's interesting in terms of the fiction rather than falling back on the rules if its slowing things down. Maybe GURPS isnt' for me? Speaking from a place of very limited GURPS play experience and much more theory crafting: no, GURPS collapses pretty gracefully. You could theoretically pare it down to "the basic 4 stats, roll under stat to succeed" and still play the game just fine - combat introduces a slightly higher lower bound of rules to play RAW, but that's just a couple additional stats to track. Everything else can build on it, but if you don't have or don't want "the official answer" it can always fall back a level of rules detail and work fine. Unrelated poll: the official magic systems. I rarely see most of them mentioned. What do people actually use? I'm mostly amenable to RPM or "magic as powers" but the game has a lot of packaged magic systems with varying approaches.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:21
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For GURPS Dungeon Fantasy I use the standard magic system but swap out Powerstones (from GURPS Magic) for Power Items (in GURPS DF1). Spells have pre-reqs and generally speaking any 'caster' type characters have the ability to build their own spell libraries. They must spend character points to gain new spells. There's other interesting magic systems but I haven't come up with a game idea except maybe "wizard school where all wizards have guns" where I'd go through the trouble of sussing it out. GURPS Monster Hunters I believe has an interpreted form of freeform magic that is close to RPM.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:29
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Thanks for all the feedback. I'm going to check it out. I've had some runs of frustration with the CofD Storytelling system that have led me to realize most of my attraction to those games is the setting and not the rules, and I think it would be cool to learn and start using a more extensible rule system like GURPS that I could adapt to lots of different settings. Is there a place online you all know about where people organize GURPS games? It would be nice to learn by playing a bit (rather than running). I vastly prefer voice to play-by-post, if that's an important criterion. Roll20 doesn't appear to have a lot of GURPS activity at the moment (unsurprisingly). That was the same for WoD/CofD a few years ago, though, and finding the Discord communities was pretty key for me finding regular games in those systems, so I was hoping maybe someone would have the inside tip on place like that I should look?
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Jan 25, 2021 18:54
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Pangaea Ultima posted:Thanks for all the feedback. I'm going to check it out. I've had some runs of frustration with the CofD Storytelling system that have led me to realize most of my attraction to those games is the setting and not the rules, and I think it would be cool to learn and start using a more extensible rule system like GURPS that I could adapt to lots of different settings. If you are free on Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday I currently run GURPS games live in the later evenings (US Central time). Generally speaking, GURPS has a semi-active community of folks and there's an unofficial Discord, but most people will give you funny looks on most of the popular looking for group type places. Shoot me a PM if you're interested in spectating (not sure if there's room in the actual games themselves but there might be somewhere in the future).
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Jan 25, 2021 19:11
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If you're on Reddit, people occasionally post GURPS games to /r/lfg and /r/lfgmisc.
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Jan 25, 2021 19:37
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This is my mostly-complete beta for GURPS Superlite, which tries to hybrid the Ultralite concept with a more gamey/arcade design.
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Jan 25, 2021 20:50
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I love the formatting and under the hood it's the same ol' GURPS that I know so if it makes things easier for players and still gives them that customizability then it is great. I especially like the variety of templates that you made available. Fright checks in this seem like they are much more impactful compared to the 40+ outcomes in full GURPS too, so it must be pretty spooky to run into something that causes such a check. I think you could probably put most if not all of the things that players need to readily reference into cards or other ready reference sheets, since I imagine that players who are using this system will need the status details, of which there are a lot of. Using the poster character of Dai Blackthorn but translated to Superlite is also a good move. All in all, I approve of this and applaud the effort. A treasure of the universe!
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Jan 26, 2021 07:56
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One of the other things I completely forget all the time until I have a page open with it is a lot of the "main" GURPS books (Characters, Campaigns, Magic) have a tendency to use this kind of odd art style from what I think are 3D models from Maya or something, because they are kind of just barely not stock models that have that very clip-art feel to them: This is a small clip from GURPS Magic to provide some examples. The lineart and such in the books is actually pretty passable. However, I think this is likely part of the kind of very silly sense of humor that the GURPS team has:   If anybody actually knows the deal about the art team behind these things or the respective artists I would love to read about the deep lore that motivates the book art to be the way it is. Perhaps it's something that came from the SJGames side? Or maybe it is the way that they just do art and Dr Kromm and Steve went "Yeah, let's roll with that"???
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Jan 28, 2021 09:29
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Magic for 4E and some of the Transhuman Space setting books for 3E like Broken Dreams use a lot of art that is obviously (to my eye at least) painted-over (or in a few cases, just Photoshop filtered) art from Poser or something similar. I haven't seen anything like that in Characters or Campaigns though - it looked like they actually put in an earnest attempt to have decent art in those.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:27
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They didn’t care to spend the money to justify the cool art they had in the 80s and 90s so they went with the cheapest and worst possible alternative, painting over poser models
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Jan 28, 2021 21:12
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Black August posted:They didn’t care to spend the money to justify the cool art they had in the 80s and 90s so they went with the cheapest and worst possible alternative, painting over poser models Honestly it's so much on the janky side that it has its own appeal to it, kind of like stumbling on a CD full of just random fantasy clip art and 90% of it is skeletons. I do like all the black and white lineart for the Dungeon Fantasy line and what not, it does help with the whole theme of kind of serious but not that serious dungeon crawling.
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Jan 29, 2021 08:19
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At least it isn't SMIF, who discovered photoshop filters and then steadily degraded into blobby mush
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Jan 29, 2021 15:24
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One of my favorite features of GURPS in its modularity is the fact that you can use the rules you don't install into your game as a special/unique power or technique that can be earned in gameplay. Not advantages, but actual rules, like the cinematic options or Flesh Wounds, and other special system modifiers that don't have a point value. It also makes it easier to create better defined alternate realities, when you can slap down a sheet with three optional rules that always apply when in the alt. Though advantages can be used in that way too- a jRPG world might mean everything has Homogenous and Unliving, which makes someone who operates on the normal 'can go into negative HP' rules seem like a monster. It's very fun to tinker around like that.
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Jan 29, 2021 15:46
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