Oh, really ? My bad.John Magnum wrote:The point, silva, is that you said no one mentioned how good the source books are. Except someone did mention how good the source books are, you illiterate boob. And then you claimed other people aren't reading the thread! Holy shit.
Quoted for truth. I use GURPS books all the time for non-GURPS games. The planet/tech/civ generating engine in GURPS space is one of the best I've ever encountered.RadiantPhoenix wrote:http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54384:FrankTrollman wrote:But I would go beyond even what AncientHistory said about book quality. It isn't that the books are individually "not bad", they are individually great. Steve Jackson brought in consultants, experts, and focus groups for these books. If there was a GURPS Asparagus, it would be written by someone who knew Asparagus backwards and forwards and not only liked Asparagus, but really cared about Asparagus and "doing it right". The irony of course, is that these people often don't know GURPS from a hole in the ground, so the presented GURPS mechanics are generally much clunkier and less lovingly crafted than the setting information. GURPS Asparagus is probably one of, if not the best Asparagus sourcebooks for Dungeons and Dragons. Or any other Asparagus related campaign you intended to run with any system.
-Username17
So the lack of setting makes for a lack of traction? Makes sense.Mask_De_H wrote:Nobody really talks about GURPS because it's not worth the effort to grok or mock for a lot of people. It's a solid 3d6 bell curve system with a lot of fiddly bullshit that, as has been mentioned earlier, has no absolute meaning attached to it. So you have the setting and splat books, which are loosely related and don't create stylistic cohesion.
I never got that impression from FATE and haven't played HERO. Hm.Mask_De_H wrote:In trying to be everything, GURPS is nothing. At least HERO and FATE tell you what kind of genre they're supposed to emulate. They have a brand identity.
I was once invited to play RIFTS on the premise that "It's a crazy unbalanced mess, but it's fun because you can play anything you want! So I looked over the setting, decided on a character (iirc, a lizard-man raised to be a shaman who broke with proper spiritual tradition and wanted to be scientific about it), and after an ungodly amount of searching, determined that I could not, in fact, play anything I wanted. The game may be unbalanced, the math may be puzzling, the setting may be nonsensical, but I don't care because I am offended by the stupidity of trying to make every option available by writing infinite classes rather than by not having classes. And even if they did succeed in making an infinite number of classes, and even if I did manage to look through all of them, there's still no guarantee I'd find what I wanted to play just like there's no guarantee that you'll ever find a given string of digits in an irrational number. It would take a truly impressive offer to get me to consider that again.Mask_De_H wrote:RIFTS' setting and gameplay is predicated on being a weird technomagical kitchen sink. GURPS is just a very intricate, decently crafted series of dials.
I don't think people are claiming it has no flavour. LAGO pointed out that it has a very specific feel due to the mechanics, regardless of the setting you're in. That can be adjusted a bit, with things like the cinematic trigger, but without changing the underlying mechanics entirely (and thus the system itself), you're gonna have things like internal consistency taking precedence over narrative direction, and that's a definite limiter on the games you can play with the system.silva wrote:I dont agree with those saying Gurps has no flavour. It has a innate realism, naturalism and sobriety that gives it a strong mundane, scientific, flavour to me, which fits in realistic/contemporary/historic/sci-fi settings and themes well, in my opinion. In fact, the Cyberpunk and Transhuman Space games I played did run well.
Yeah. The lack of average time no a lot of skills has bothered me, especially because one of the more common modifiers is time spent - +1 per doubling of base time, which can be a huge deal... if you know what the base time is. I haven't yet played a game, though, that had more detailed rules for anything else than it did for combat. And the only time it's been even equal is in rules-light, narrative games where the same mechanic is used for everything. I was actually considering starting another thread on this because I was wondering what TTRPGs would be like as a whole if they hadn't grown out of wargaming. But I think GURPS has a pretty impressive amount of skills that are directly usable, compared to a lot of systems. The invention system may be baroque and out of the reach of most players, but it's at least there, as opposed to "you don't get to even try to conjure and mix those chemicals because that information could change the world."Hey_I_Can_Chan wrote:The skills issue in GURPS is even bigger than this. Many skills, although they exist, have no guidelines as to their use. While there's a skill for cooking, for instance, it says, "A successful skill roll allows you to prepare a pleasing meal." And that's all. That's fine, actually, because the skill is fucking Cooking and who gives a shit, but most noncombat skills are like this (e.g. "A successful Prospecting roll lets you locate minerals, judge good or from a small sample..., and find water..."; "Roll against [Research] to find a useful piece of data in an appropriate place of research"), so unless you scour the book for the skills with actual associated rules (e.g. Panhandling, Merchant), the game involves a lot of bullshitting the GM that some random skill you have applies in some random situation and bullshit how much time it would take to perform such a skill and bullshit the materials needed to perform the skill and bullshit the difficulty of using the skill for the proposed purpose.
For all its ability to build characters from any genre, once those characters are built what they really know, can do, and how they can do it involves a lot of GM calls.
As a detailed character-building engine, GURPS is pretty awesome. As a for-reals playable low-combat game in which noncombat skills are supposed to many solve problems because combat's fucking deadly, it falls well short of expectations because it's up to the GM to determine what many of the skills do by the goddam skills' names.
I'm playing a GURPS Mage game right now, actually. And the thing where the MC was like "Yeah, we'll use 4th and use the 3rd ed book as-is and convert what we need to on the fly" is... baffling. But the game itself is still more playable (so far, at least) than the game of Mage that I'm also in, which consists entirely of mother-may-I.silva wrote:I heard similar things of Gurps Falkenstein and Gurps Mage the Ascension.
Thing is, GURPS has problems and Mage has problems.momothefiddler wrote:I'm playing a GURPS Mage game right now, actually. And the thing where the MC was like "Yeah, we'll use 4th and use the 3rd ed book as-is and convert what we need to on the fly" is... baffling. But the game itself is still more playable (so far, at least) than the game of Mage that I'm also in, which consists entirely of mother-may-I.
Well, I exaggerated a bit. We did use a very barebones variant (basically, not a lot more than Gurps lite (http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG31-0004)), and the game was very roleplay heavy, with little fights and other situations that required dice rolls. It felt meaningfully different from both SR 3rd Edition and AD&D, which I had played before.momothefiddler wrote:I am having a hard time even imagining GURPS with mostly just ability checks. How did that work? Was it meaningfully different from any other system with mostly just ability checks? Was it meaningfully different from RISUS?Aharon wrote:I played in a GURPS group that lasted for about 10 months (8 or 9 sessions). We only had access to the basic rulebook. I was the only one who cared to learn most rules, we had changing DMs and they mostly just used ability checks for everything.
So basically, we used it as rules light to allow for the concept we had in mind (playing in Tad Williams Otherland) - we had a cowboy, a 14th century knight, a time traveller from 2400, and some other guys in the same group.
It allowed for a combination of those concepts, and would even have allowed for this combination if we had sticked closer to the rules.
d20 benefits greatly from classes and levels. Once you pick a class, most of the options just aren't for you any more, and even with the big ones like full casters you start at lower levels as a newb and still have very few spells you're allowed to choose from.momothefiddler wrote:Is it actually less workload, though, or is there some reason it feels that way? D20 chargen is a daunting prospect for me, even without the need to look through a bunch of books that aren't named coherently for rules that aren't sorted in any reasonable fashion. It's at least better than WoD, where even the chapter names require a Decipher Script roll, but....tussock wrote:I can't start a GURPS game for trying. People just don't like the workload. d20? No trouble.
Part of the fun of GURPS is fiddling with every little knob on the great machine. Not just every last point in a tight character build, but every last dollar (from points) for gear, and all the numbers on it and how it interacts with your build and the expected challenges, and picking from all the different tactical options in response to the circumstances in every second of combat. Constant fiddling for that next +1.So I'm biased if I think it's not fiddly, but you're saying the fiddly bits do their jobs? Whether they're worth the effort is, I suppose, a separate question.
I use a gentlemen's agreement for open point-buy games. You need to be able to participate in the proposed scenes: which is getting to them, doing something useful, and surviving the process. You also need to let everyone else at the table do the same, no cock-blocking the other PCs. Lastly, if you make yourself invulnerable to enemy action, that's your problem, I will not change things up to challenge you.I significantly prefer point-buy games to level-based games, and point-buy games with non-point-buy chargen (lookin at you WoD) make me sad. But I can see how it makes it easier to obtain power chains, yeah.... Is there a way to avoid that, short of keeping the total number of options small enough to combinatorics-crunch it all? Because a system with four options is not one I want, but point-buy is nice and being able to get better at swordmakin without getting better at swordswingin is a big deal for me.
That was good. Splitting a post is ... not really done here, unless they're truely epic and header/spoiler breaks no longer get the job done.So what's the etiquette on splitting posts? Responding one at a time seems spammy, but this got pretty long.
Fair enough. Reminds me of the M&M game I played, though, where I put all my points into abilities and skills and gear and none into powers and ended up being the most effective guy on the team. Obviously, like GURPS, that stops being viable after a certain power level.Sakuya Izayoi wrote:Here's my genre impression from each game:
Hero classifies it as being more dramatic when The Hulk lifts a buss than when Superman lifts a bus, because The Hulk has to put his groin into it, where other games might say lifting a bus is interesting no matter who does it.
GURPS is about making it fun to be Nick Fury or The Punisher, even if the enemies have more interesting powers than "dude with a gun"
Fate is about Tony Stark not having to beg for Tea Party Points because he got drunk before getting in the suit, since there's a mechanic for that.
What's wrong with you? Mage has a cool setting. Settings are easy to port. Mage has utter shit for mechanics, and that's way harder to fix. Like I said there, even with an unwise mash of editions, GURPS Mage is more playable than Mage Mage. And while I grant that not all fixes are necessarily the same difficulty, the fact that various games has problems is in itself a reason to want to fix one generic system rather than fix a new system for every setting you wanna play.ishy wrote:Thing is, GURPS has problems and Mage has problems.momothefiddler wrote:I'm playing a GURPS Mage game right now, actually. And the thing where the MC was like "Yeah, we'll use 4th and use the 3rd ed book as-is and convert what we need to on the fly" is... baffling. But the game itself is still more playable (so far, at least) than the game of Mage that I'm also in, which consists entirely of mother-may-I.
GURPS is more of a universal game with problems, there is no reason to try and fix GURPS because I'm better off creating something specific for the game I want to play.
If I wanted to create a better mage game, I probably want to create something specifically for mage. Since that is easier, less likely to have unforseen problems and you can do some cool specific stuff etc.
Ah. Sorry for my earlier overreaction, then. I misunderstood. This makes more sense.Aharon wrote:Well, I exaggerated a bit. We did use a very barebones variant (basically, not a lot more than Gurps lite (http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG31-0004)), and the game was very roleplay heavy, with little fights and other situations that required dice rolls. It felt meaningfully different from both SR 3rd Edition and AD&D, which I had played before.momothefiddler wrote:I am having a hard time even imagining GURPS with mostly just ability checks. How did that work? Was it meaningfully different from any other system with mostly just ability checks? Was it meaningfully different from RISUS?Aharon wrote:I played in a GURPS group that lasted for about 10 months (8 or 9 sessions). We only had access to the basic rulebook. I was the only one who cared to learn most rules, we had changing DMs and they mostly just used ability checks for everything.
So basically, we used it as rules light to allow for the concept we had in mind (playing in Tad Williams Otherland) - we had a cowboy, a 14th century knight, a time traveller from 2400, and some other guys in the same group.
It allowed for a combination of those concepts, and would even have allowed for this combination if we had sticked closer to the rules.
I'd recommend in the future you actually READ the first page (or maybe 2) before posting in a Thread perhaps? Going by that, and your prior post, you really did seem rather confrontational (I.E. Picking a fight w/Denners,least in this thread), which was unneeded in a discussion like this.silva wrote:Oh, really ? My bad.
It occurs to me that this is probably why it's so daunting to me. I have some idea of what a Scout or a Cleric or an Artificer can do, because I've made those characters, but if I want to make a Wizard, that's a completely new set of options to poke through. And every time I have to go through all the stuff to find out if it's relevant to me because it's not actually sorted or tagged, except, like metamagic feats, but I don't examine it in enough detail to know it when I wanna play a Wizard. But this isn't actually a point in favor of GURPS or anything - GURPS just front-loads all of the rules learning and, because I've already done it, I mistakenly thought it was less. But at least with GURPS the rules toggles are clearly marked. Magic and Thaumatology are where you get rules for games with magic and Ultra-Tech and Bio-Tech are for sci-fi games and while it's certainly possible to run games using all of them, in most settings it'll be pretty clear which are relevant. The fact that I have to read through Races of the Wild for any game that allows it to see if there's something that might be relevant to my character concept seems unpleasant (e.g. is there reason to believe from the name that a dex-oriented fighter with high crit chance gets at least one really impressive option here? Not until you at least figure out the subtitle of the book is Elves Are Better Than You.)tussock wrote:d20 benefits greatly from classes and levels. Once you pick a class, most of the options just aren't for you any more, and even with the big ones like full casters you start at lower levels as a newb and still have very few spells you're allowed to choose from.
Then each level or two gets you a small number of additional choices. Each new book carries only a handful of things that suit your current character. Even choosing your equipment is quite limited and inflexible.
Huh. While I have experienced some of that during play, it's less important for me during char creation and certainly less so than you're mentioning. Gear, for one - I'll happily figure out appropriate gear that's an important part of the concept, and I'll worry about gear in-game in a post-apocalyptic game, where that's the point, but you're making it sound like the point of GURPS character creation is to be like Shadowrun gear selection and I can't play Shadowrun because looking at a reasonable character's gear list is like gazing into the abyss and my characters end up pathetically useless because I didn't want to constantly fiddle for the +1.tussock wrote:Part of the fun of GURPS is fiddling with every little knob on the great machine. Not just every last point in a tight character build, but every last dollar (from points) for gear, and all the numbers on it and how it interacts with your build and the expected challenges, and picking from all the different tactical options in response to the circumstances in every second of combat. Constant fiddling for that next +1.
"You need to participate in the game at hand without keeping anyone else from having fun, and if you go out of your way to keep yourself from having fun, that's not my job to fix."tussock wrote:I use a gentlemen's agreement for open point-buy games. You need to be able to participate in the proposed scenes: which is getting to them, doing something useful, and surviving the process. You also need to let everyone else at the table do the same, no cock-blocking the other PCs. Lastly, if you make yourself invulnerable to enemy action, that's your problem, I will not change things up to challenge you.
I've read that a couple times now. Here are some quotes from the first page that describe the game I've played.TheFlatline wrote:Homework on Mage. There's problems with the setting, but it was generally a goofy fun time.
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54524
FrankT wrote:But while oMage is less incoherent than nMage (as all game books are), it's still an insane rambling diatribe that was already the clear result of too many chiefs and not enough indians.
You, in fact wrote:and thus was born the eternal storm of omniscient vs limited 3rd person perspective for determining what kind of magic your'e doing.
This isn't everything by a long shot - the mechanics discussion isn't on the first page, after all. For instance, nobody discusses the fact that there are skills on the character sheet, which you'll take, there are skills on different versions of the character sheet that may or may not be the same skill that your MC is gonna call for because he used an old printout from a different version, there are special secret skills for each splat that mages are gonna be expected to have AND there are secondary skills with a different cost that exist only to A) break your character upwards by making it stupid cheap to specialize in your shtick, or B) break your character downwards as your MC levies arbitrary penalties on you for only using Expression instead of Singing.vagrant wrote:Fuck MtA. Every session I ever played on that bullshit GM fellatio fest was 70% 'Can I do this thing with my magic?' 'No.' 'Can I /do/ anything with my magic?' 'Not until I let you.'
And if the GM liked you, they would go out of their way to give you awesome shit. 'Oh, your motorcycle turns into a robot? That's totally coincidental because sleepers saw Transformers.'
Even without clearly biased GMs, I spent less time playing and more time playing Mother May I. Fuck that game.
If you're just standing there taking minigun fire for sixty rounds, you're basically either immune to it or you're dead. I guess there's the weird edge case where you take 1 point from a max damage roll and you have $TEXAS HP or something.Aryxbez wrote:As for GURPS, it's a good reminder that I should perhaps consider reading some of its supplements for interesting reads. Otherwise, as I recall, it's a game that mainly supports the "Human-level REALIZARM skirmishes". Trying to go beyond that tends to bring disappointing results (I've heard tussock made example once where Brick-Supers would eventually succumb to Minigun fire within a minute/and-or their fiat damage soak resource runs out).
That's reasonable. Have you avoided it for any specific reason or has it just never come up?fectin wrote:The person who gave me the Star Wars RPG (second edition; blue cover) when I was young did a bunch of writing for GURPS. Even separately from that group though, I've run into more GURPS players than Shadowrun players. For a long time, my then-local hobby store had GURPS, shatterzone, In Nomine, and Star Wars, but not DnD. So GURPS has always just been one of the games I assume is a major player in the market.
However, like Shadowrun, I never picked it up myself, so I avoid commenting on it.
Generic systems don't work though.momothefiddler wrote:What's wrong with you? Mage has a cool setting. Settings are easy to port. Mage has utter shit for mechanics, and that's way harder to fix. Like I said there, even with an unwise mash of editions, GURPS Mage is more playable than Mage Mage. And while I grant that not all fixes are necessarily the same difficulty, the fact that various games has problems is in itself a reason to want to fix one generic system rather than fix a new system for every setting you wanna play.
Like I mean GURPS has issues and Mage has cool things and I get that but none of the cool things about Mage are mechanical and none of the setting in any way arises from the mechanics, so I see no reason at all to try to build something on top of that foundation.
I don't see how trying to kludge Mage's mechanics gets you any of that, and I don't see why GURPS' mechanics are a limitation, but I'll grant that starting from scratch is probably going to get you closer to what you want than anyone else's system can, so I guess I get that.ishy wrote:Generic systems don't work though.
And if I want to fix a game, that usually means it needs a mechanics overhaul while trying to stay true to the spirit (setting/ flavour etc) of the game.
If I work from the GURPS rules, I'm limited by those and I'd be better off starting from scratch.
Fair. Thanks for the perspective.fectin wrote:It just never comes up as a game. I've read through some sourcebooks, which are good, but have no basis for opinion on the mechanical bits.
Seriously? You don't see how starting with a fixed system is a limitation? Limiting yourself to a single system that is already defined is pretty much the definition of a limitation.I don't see why GURPS' mechanics are a limitation
I think giving skills fixed meanings would go against the universal premise of the game, no ? It looks reasonable to me that an Administration 12 skill level should mean different things to a Bronze Age setting, a Victorian Age setting and a Hard-Sci Fi setting.FrankTrollman wrote:So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15... But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens? There really aren't even any guidelines for that
silva wrote:I think giving skills fixed meanings would go against the universal premise of the game, no ?
Okay, that's true. I should have said I don't see how GURPS keeps you from building functional Mage-setting mechanics any more than Mage does, or even nearly as much.FrankTrollman wrote:Seriously? You don't see how starting with a fixed system is a limitation? Limiting yourself to a single system that is already defined is pretty much the definition of a limitation.
What would you want points to mean that they don't? Matched point values don't make people equally able to handle a given challenge, but they don't do that in Shadowrun either.FrankTrollman wrote:Now GURPS as a system is pretty much pointless. It's a point based system, but the points don't actually mean anything.
Is your argument that the skills don't mean anything? Because percent chance of success seems like a pretty concrete meaning, and that's what GURPS skill values give you. WoD skill values don't even get that far, because outside of combat (and often in) the target number and threshold are MC whimsy.FrankTrollman wrote:And it's a skill based system, but the skill values don't mean anything either.
You get a +2 reaction bonus when dealing with a bureaucrat or you are able to predict the best way to deal with a bureaucracy, depending on the use you're using. It's not terribly specific on that, but it's no worse than Gather Information (roll some number greater than 14 to find out some information about something!)FrankTrollman wrote:So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15. As you know, depending on what I bought my IQ to, that will cost different amounts of points. But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens?
First Aid/TL3 and First Aid/TL11^ are going to involve your character doing some pretty drastically different stuff, but if the skill does something different, it needs to be a different skill. A skill needs to be sufficiently abstract to cover both situations or it needs to be split into multiple skills - Physician doesn't exist below TL5 for the most part, because Esoteric Medicine isn't the same and doesn't do the same thing.silva wrote:I think giving skills fixed meanings would go against the universal premise of the game, no ? It looks reasonable to me that an Administration 12 skill level should mean different things to a Bronze Age setting, a Victorian Age setting and a Hard-Sci Fi setting.FrankTrollman wrote:So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15... But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens? There really aren't even any guidelines for that