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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ
Has this been your experience?
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Yes, because I do what I said in my post: I talk to the players before they ever create their characters. We decide what will and won't matter. We establish our contract. Then they create their characters with my help, and I ensure that the adventures I offer suit those characters and their abilities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ
One of the design decisions GURPS makes is that it prices all traits the same regardless of game. This allows for easy character creation, but in my experience it means that some of the time the prices leave much to be desired, which creates the incentives problem I've mentioned early, or leaves players who haven't yet mastered the game with poorly adapted characters.
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There seems to be a hidden assumption here that the players are off alone in several places creating their PCs with little or no GM guidance or input from the other players, relying entirely on the rules – point costs above all else – to guide their hands, while the GM is off in some other place creating a campaign that will run the same way no matter what PCs turn up. I guess you could game that way, but
GURPS isn't the right system for that.
GURPS is a strong Rule Zero system that absolutely requires a GM. It consists of countless supplements for the GM to use or not, it is filled with optional rules (which are often mutually exclusive or contradictory!) for the GM to switch "on" or not, and it is laced at the line-and- paragraph level with "the GM could," "the GM may," "the GM might," "if the GM desires," "the GM decides," "at the GM's whim," "in the GM's opinion," "at the GM's option," "in the GM's judgment," etc. Player-GM communication about all these choices and decisions long before anybody invests any work in creating anything is simply assumed. Provided that exists, nobody should find themselves paying too much for too little – whether because the GM tells them not to, lowers the price, or ups the importance of the thing to make it worth having.
I consider this a necessary evil for a generic system. It isn't a game but a toolkit for building games, and the GM needs to use it intelligently, and then communicate their selected subset of stats, rules, and options to the players. Games build around specific settings and genres can do a pretty good job of offering closed-form solutions because they can do this selecting and communicating ahead of time. They're a better choice for people who don't want to kitbash and houserule.