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Old 11-20-2017, 07:23 AM   #11
Andrew Hackard
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Default Re: Tips for a GURPS Newbie GM?

If it looks like this thread has a bit of a reboot halfway through, it's because a spammer copied the initial post verbatim and started an entirely new thread with it. I've merged the threads (because the replies to the spammer had some decent advice) and deleted the spam post (because SPAM POST).
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Old 11-20-2017, 04:07 PM   #12
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Default Re: Tips for a GURPS Newbie GM?

Be up-front with your players. If all you have prepared is a linear adventure, the following sentence will grant you a lot more latitude and buy-in, especially over the long-term: "Guys, I'm new at this, and all I have is a linear adventure" than "sure, you can try anything you want (but all roads lead to Gnomesville)"

If you don't want to kill PCs, tell your players that, and let them trade CP/permanent wounds/whatever instead of death. It'll be a lot more fun than rolling behind the screen all the time and saying "uh, yeah, sure, Ragdar survived getting hit by a 50-lb club held by a 60-foot giant..."

If your players are discussing things and come up with an idea that's better than what you have, tell them: "Hey, one of those ideas you mentioned is really good. I'll be using that." Not only will this give them a real sense of accomplishment, they'll have some ideas about what the solution might be, rather than playing "guess the GM's hidden number."

Don't treat the game-world as a perfect space that must have a rational explanation for everything. If you mapped nothing beyond the valley containing the Homlett Troubled by Goblins, and the players try to explore outside...Listen, this is not high theatre. Just say "You are enveloped by thick fog. A few feet later, you come to a sign saying 'World under construction; reality ends 20 feet." Then ask the players to either bite the tasty plot hooks back in the valley, or give you some time (never more than a half-hour) to come up with something.

Make some random encounters. If both you and the players are caught with no real idea of what's going on, drop a random encounter on them. The players will inevitably try to figure out what's going on, in the context of what's already happened. See above...

And remember: It's a game, not high theatre. Humour is not only encouraged, it's essential.
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Old 11-20-2017, 05:13 PM   #13
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Default Re: Tips for a GURPS Newbie GM?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc Sammy View Post
So, I'm new to GURPS but I'd figure I'd get into it. I recently purchased hard copies of GURPS 3e Basic Set and GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade off of Amazon lately, and I'm thinking of GM'ing a game, but I'm not sure how to go about it.

It all seems so vast, and I'm not sure if I should run a Vampire game or do a game in a different genre. I'm thinking of buying some extra GURPS 3e books to give me ideas as most of them can be bought second-hand off of Amazon for fairly cheap.

I did have a few ideas for an Army Men-themed game where the PC's are living toy soldiers, sort of like Toy Story or the Army Men video games for the original Playstation. However, I have many other ideas as well and very little GM experience.

My biggest problem seems to be that I have so many ideas and no idea which one to start with.
First, if you have GURPS Basic Set, you don't actually need any other books to run a game (with a few caveats). You have more ideas than you can handle at the moment, so getting more GURPS books for ideas isn't a good idea for right now. If you must get additional books right now, I'll echo getting How to be a GURPS GM, and add Robin D. Laws Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering, also by Steve Jackson Games but out of print, to the recommendations.

You don't need to use everything in the Basic Set, indeed you probably shouldn't. Starting out, I'd recommend reading Quick Start (P. B9 [this is a common reference form in GURPS, B indicates the book, in this case Basic Set, and 9 is the page number in the book]) and then running one of the pre-generated characters (pp. B214-B217) through All in a Night's Work (pp. B218-231). You might do this several times using different characters before writing up your own character and running it through.

GURPS is front-end loaded, i.e. the really hard part of running in the game as a player all occurs during character creation. Character creation is covered in Chapters 1-10, the sidebars Example of Character Creation will help you get through the basic how-to. You'll need to go through Chapters 4, 5 and 7 and pare the choices down to what you need for the game you'll actually be playing. If there's no magic, you don't need the Advantages: Magical Ability (Magery); and Magic Resistance, and if there is no psionics, you don't need the Advantage: Psionic Resistance. In both cases, you should wall those Advantages off, telling your players they're useless in the current game. Other Advantages and Disadvantages may be inappropriate to your game or your sensibilities, you'll have to make your own decisions about those. Skills can also be pared away to fit your game. Looking at Combat/Weapon skills; Battlesuit, Beam Weapons, Force Shield and Force Sword probably aren't appropriate for a game that isn't set in the future (and might not be appropriate even then). If you were to restrict the Combat Weapon skills to those likeliest to show up in a modern setting, you'd likely reduce the list to: Blackjack; Bow (maybe); Brawling; Fast-Draw; Fencing (maybe); Gunner/TL; Guns/TL; Judo; Karate; Knife; Knife Throwing; Lasso (maybe); and Speed-Load.

Making an optimal character requires having a strong idea of the role the character will play in the game and then designing it accordingly. For example, a skilled doctor is usually built by taking a high enough skill level in Physician that the defaults for Diagnosis; First Aid; and Surgery are respectable and then topping up those skills as needed for fine tuning. More generally, a character should have some skill at combat, some non-combat skills and some skill to help him get from one place to another. If you cover those basics, you should be golden.

Just because a weapon or armor is listed as available, doesn't mean that it should be available to a given character. Military weapons should only be available to military characters (some exceptions might be made based on setting, for example, they're more likely to be available to civilians in the U.S., but even so most people won't have their own private machine gun and nobody should have their own private howitzer). Combat is usually deadly in GURPS, so armor is a good idea, but most people don't own any modern armor. Police and military do get it issued but characters outside those professions should have a good backstory for why they have it.

You might want to get your feet wet with Basic Combat (Chapter 13); and move on to Advanced Combat (Chapter 14) later, when you're more comfortable with the system. You can ignore Mounted and Vehicular Combat (Chapter 16) and Flight (Chapter 17) at first, if you set up your adventure so there's no need for them. I'd suggest skipping Magic (Chapter 19) and Psionics (Chapter 20), the first few times out.

The last three chapters will help you learn to gamemaster.

There are some practical aids you should take advantage of as a GM.

The NPC Record Card in the back of the book is very useful. Not every NPC needs a full character sheet, though the main villain does and maybe his lieutenants as well. I'd suggest cramming as many copies of the NPC record Card on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 as you can manage. I think it worked out to five per page. Take that sheet to your local printer and have them run off a hundred copies on cardstock and cut the cards apart for you. That'll give you 500 NPC Record Cards, enough to list most animals and monsters with more left over for NPCs that can be recycled.

You'll also want double-sided Character Sheets. Initially, you want enough for at least eight character sheets per player, with some overage for spoiled sheets. I suggest eight character sheets per player on the basis that each player makes two copies of each character, one to keep and one for the GM, who can refer to it when planning out an adventure. That gives three characters for three one-shot adventures and then one regular campaign character. You can adjust the mix as necessary.

The GM Control Sheet is your friend. I suggest several copies per adventure. One master list for the whole adventure and a shorter listing for each scene with just the NPCs for that scene.

You can save on your NPC records if you add a few 3 x 5 index cards to use as scratch paper. Say you have a pack of wolves. The NPC Record Card has all the data you need to run a wolf in the game. Instead of making up a record card for each of the 13 (arbitrary number) wolves in the pack, you use one NPC Record Card and two index cards. Say there are 4 characters and 2 wolves/character with an additional wolf joining the fight every five seconds. Draw a line separating the index card into two sections. In one section. you put 8 lines of 11 to 13 zeroes (one zero for each HT that wolf has). Each point of damage to that wolf is a zero crossed off. In the other section you make a tally mark each turn, at five tally marks, you add another line for another wolf's HT as it enters the fray. When a wolf dies you can cross that line off. You can note which wolf is attacking which character and note when a wolf has run off. When the combat is over, your NPC Record Card can go back in the pile (or file box).

It's not a bad idea to hand a number of index cards out to the player's during character creation. What you want them to record is the text for each Advantage, Disadvantage or Skill their character takes, one card per item. Then you're not constantly having to look up that item for them, to remind them what it does/allows.

An article in Roleplayer suggested giving extra points to the players for streamlining their characters. I've had success with it. The suggested bonuses were: up to 5 points for a physical description of the character (what they look like, typical dress, typical environment [what's on their bookshelf, what drinks do they stock in their personal bar, etc.]; up to 10 points for a personal history [about a page, explaining why/how they know the Skills they do, why they have the Advantages and Disadvantages they do, etc.]; 5 points for worked abilities (Running; Jumping; Lifting/Carrying; Climbing; Digging [all from Chapter 12]); and 15 points for an ongoing character log [a summary of your adventures from that character's viewpoint].

As a GM, expect the players to follow your lead. If your NPCs fight to the death and never surrender, rather than getting out of Dodge when things go south, don't expect the player's' characters to do differently. Balancing combat is hard. An NPC with a combat skill equal to a character will take that character about half of the time. An NPC whose combat skill is three higher than the highest PC's is probably capable of taking on a party of 4 single-handed. Combat skill is more important than damage/hit in GURPS, if a character can do even 1 point of damage at skill 15-, that character is deadly.

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Last edited by Curmudgeon; 11-20-2017 at 08:21 PM.
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Old 11-20-2017, 05:15 PM   #14
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Default Re: Tips for a GURPS Newbie GM?

As for book recommendations:

I'd suggest getting Compendium I and II early on as they pull in rules that were repeated across multiple worldbooks after Basic Set came out.

Bestiary is useful for expanding the animals your characters encounter. Dinosaurs; Monsters; Undead; Spirits; Faeries; Shapeshifters; Creatures of the Night; Dragons; and Blood Types [vampires], do the same for their subjects. Aliens and Fantasy Folk are similar but can be played as character races, so they have more detailed write-ups (about 4 pages/race as opposed to two or three paragraphs/animal).

Magic and Psionics expand on those systems.

Martial Arts; Supers; and Time Travel are required for those genres, adding martial arts styles; combat maneuvers; super-powers and time-related character abilities to the rules.

General genre books are helpful: Fantasy; Space; Horror; and Espionage.

The tech books High Tech; Ultra-Tech; Low Tech; and Bio-Tech are useful aids for what you can do/find at a given tech level.

I like Vehicles, but it's not to everyone's taste. It'll give you a fairly reasonable build for say a flying car, but you can just wing it.

Generally speaking, worldbooks should be picked up according to your taste, but some of them had rules systems that are generally applicable outside that world. Uplift had an excellent system for creating potentially sapient animals and then turning them into alien races. Traveller: First In had a detailed world generation system. Traveller: First Contact had a system that laid out alien civilizations (modified by the social parameters from the Uplift system). Traveller: Ground Forces had a system for figuring out what troops a planet could field and Traveller: Far Trader had a system for creating an interstellar economy that could be used for a planetary economy (with a few modifications).

If you have more questions, please ask.

Addendum: I wouldn't start off with a full-blown campaign. I'd suggest doing one-shots while you find your feet. You might have your players modify their previous character to fit the next one-shot rather than make a completely new character. Even with completely new characters, you could let them spend their previous character's earned experience points on their new character, if the old character isn't likely to ever be used again. And remember Campaign Advantages and Disadvantages. If everybody needs to be a knight or have a vow to the Boy Scouts, you can let them have that without it counting against the basic point cost you gave them for character creation. (That may want get out of hand if they don't actually need it, though.)
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Last edited by Curmudgeon; 11-20-2017 at 08:25 PM. Reason: clean-up; formatting
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