View Single Post
Old 07-20-2020, 05:41 PM   #6
lordabdul
 
lordabdul's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Default Re: Alternatives to GURPS? Other tabletop RPGs to try?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Raekai View Post
I know that some of you play or have played or just occasionally play tabletop RPGs other than GURPS. I'd like to know what you liked and what you didn't like, especially in comparison to GURPS.

(...)

I think we're stereotyped as an eclectic bunch who won't play anything else, but I think that's not totally true.
I have never heard that... but I do hear it a lot about D&D players who only ever want to play D&D.

Anyway, maybe I'm not the stereotypical GURPS player but I play a whole lot of other games.

I play a lot of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green... I love the games, not so much the system (for a while I was running them with GURPS!), but the latest edition of CoC (7ed) is now good enough for me to run it "as is", so I dropped GURPS for that. I'll probably still use GURPS for some Delta Green games (not all... like, not for one-shots, I think).

I play a bunch of the new edition of RuneQuest, which is awesome, even though it's a bit too fiddly and I have to use some house rules to smooth it out. But it gives out a very different and visceral vibe that you wouldn't quite get with GURPS IMHO. HeroQuest (a rules light, narrative oriented system) is also an absolute blast to run games in Glorantha... I suppose it's comparable to FATE in some ways. It's a lot different from RQ and GURPS of course, and that's the whole point!

I did play a few Savage Worlds games, especially to introduce newbies to the hobby, but I don't really go back to it, as I don't find that it fills a particular need IMHO. I do like it for cinematic, light-hearted games -- there's a reason IPs like Sixth Gun or The Goon work decently well with it.

I ran a campaign of 7th Sea (2nd ed) and I loved it -- once you "get" the system, it's super fun to run cinematic, fast paced action scenes. In particular, it does action better IMHO than HeroQuest or Savage Worlds or FATE.

I ran some Gumshoe games like Trail of Cthulhu and Timewatch. Just like BRP (the system behind RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu), I don't care too much about Gumshoe either way, but I love the games themselves. The mechanics of time-travel in TimeWatch are in particular super fun. I see no need to try and port those games to another system, and the games are too good to pass on. Timewatch takes a bit of getting used to, because time-travel is tricky to handle, but it does it in a very clever and fun way.

....I could go on but really I'm not sure what to say. You're going to get a series of posts that recommend this and that, and the only information you'll get out of the thread is a slightly biased list of which games are the most popular after D&D and Pathfinder. It's not going to tell you much that you couldn't have figured out yourself otherwise. Now if you have specific questions about a specific system, we can help, of course. But I recommend really just going out and trying new things. There's more than 3 systems out there, and there's a lot of really good games. It's not a big deal to try out a new board game... it shouldn't be a much bigger deal to try out a new RPG either!
lordabdul is offline   Reply With Quote