02-20-2018, 08:28 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: New England
|
Cultivating New Players
This afternoon I ran a GURPS conversion of Frederick Foulds's The Keepers of the Woods at my local library for a group of seven teenagers. None save me had played GURPS before, but all had played in D&D dungeon crawls. Today's game presented a marked departure from the hack-and-slash adventures they were used to, but they rose to the occasion, quickly understanding that this was an investigative game involving social skills more than combat. They loved it. Particularly satisfying for me, as a GURPS fan, was that the players all came away from the session with the experience that GURPS is easy to grasp and that it "got out of the way" of the story. They are all eager to explore the system more. Two signed out the library's copies of the Basic Set, and the group animatedly discussed how the system gives such fine control over character details.
The Keepers of the Woods makes an excellent introduction to RPGs, with its wicked plot and heavy emphasis on characters with drives and investigative skills. The players were all engaged right up to the end when three characters were killed by a yeth-hound, one resigned herself to join the cult responsible for keeping an ancient horror under wraps, two reduced to madness (one a gibbering husk of a person, the other dangerously obsessed with liberating the old god from bondage), and another who escaped but now knows too much to be allowed to live and must now flee from his former friend and her new associates. A relatively happy ending, considering the possibilities. The conversions from Trail of Cthulhu to GURPS took some time and involved fair bit of interpretation (read: guess work), but was worth the effort. I'd be happy to share my conversion notes by private message to anyone interested. Please share your stories of introducing new players to GURPS. |
Tags |
cthulhu, new players |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|