Quote:
Originally Posted by Piperdog
You know, I have played Gurps since the 80's, and it has been our groups mainstay for many years. But in recent years, I really wanted to lighten the rules, and the Gurps Lite really isn't what I mean. I ended up going to Savage Worlds and Cortex, because it is just faster and less cumbersome. In the end, though, I miss the simple concept of rolling 3d6 under my skill.
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In my experience, Savage Worlds and Cortex aren't really any faster or less cumbersome than GURPS to play. In many ways they're simpler, but that turns out to be not such a good thing, as it easily becomes less flexible.
(And don't get me started on the holes in the Savage Worlds dice mechanics)
3d6 (with Nd6 for damage) is much easier than 2 dice of different sizes, with re-rolls, and then calculating the number of 4 point steps you are over the target number. (much slower!)
Most of the complexity of GURPS is in the character generation, but this is one of the main reasons why it is just way more flexible than those other games.
Templates make this much quicker and easier, Character from a DF template (10 minutes if you're not too indecisive) - and when the up coming DF:Loadouts is available, equiping the character should be as easy too!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Piperdog
...I was hoping for truncated advantages as well; broader strokes across the board, stuff like that. I wanted to see 100 - 125 pt character templates and have them work their way up to 250 pnt characters, not start there. I hate the laundry list included in character generation and was hoping for an abbreviated version in DF.
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Eric B. Smith wrote an article (
here) with modified templates to allow DF at 100, 150 or 200 point levels
The Knight! (etc) Bang! Skills don't just replace the templates whole skill list - most replace less than a dozen skill per template for the primary skills, which means characters will roll on their Template! skill for their Niche activities, but use standard skills for other tasks.
It would also be easy enough to combine Advantages into Meta-Traits for compactness; e.g. Combat Ready [25] = Combat Reflexes + High Pain Threshold ?
You'd have to do some work, but far less than building your own game (I've been down that road too, GURPS 4e save me from that!); and you might find an outlet for such things as articles for Pyramid or e23 PDFs too.
As is often said, GURPS is a toolkit; DF is a worked example of a specific genre with specific assumptions. If your assumptions are different, you can use the toolkit to tinker a bit - and it doesn't sound like what you want is actually too far from what DF gives you as a starting point!