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Old 05-04-2017, 03:57 PM   #1
2097
 
Join Date: Sep 2012
Default GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

Follow these rules strictly if you want! Or, you know, do something completely different with the game, that's cool too. It's a toolbox etc etc.

1. Everyone needs stats! Everyone. Just use GURPS Ultra Lite for most people. If you want more fully statted NPC:s in there too, to be more specifically flavorful movers and shakers, that's just grand, put some in. Take from GURPS books or build your own, from scratch or from templates. Maybe you have a favorite monster book. But everyone needs stats. That hot dog salesman in the streets that gets in the crossfire when you're fighting aliens? He's, in Ultra Lite terms, a Hot Dog Salesman 2.

2. Develop shorthands for all your prep! For example, for Ultra Lite characters, you can put in the profession levels, any non-default Capabilities, any non-default Wealth. You might have an NPC who's a Strong, Agile, Dull, Hardy Werewolf 2/Straight-A-Student 1. (That would cost 5 levels to create but that part you don't need to record, if you need it you can reverse-engineer that number.) It was a stroke of genius by Kromm to put in unique names for every capability level that was specific to that capability type; except normal but you don't need to write normal. For example Hot Dog Salesman 2, all the capabilities are normal. Make a Wealthy Businessperson 1 and boom, you have all the stats you need for her too.

3. Develop defaults! For example, everyone not defined, they have "Their thing, 2". Say they meet a random mugger? He's "Mugger 2". A random journalist? "Journalist 2." Boom! (If this default isn't to your liking, work out a default that works for your game.) Look, when your PCs clash with these "standard" NPCs, there are going to be four numbers going on. The PCs skill level, the PCs roll, the NPCs roll, and finally the NPCs skill level. It's OK if they meet row after row of Skill 4, Skill 8, skill 12, Skill 16 (which are some common derived skills from Ultra-Lite's Profession Levels), the other three numbers in that equation will provide variety and veracity enough, I promise.

4. This doesn't just apply to people! For example, if you often need to know how thick a wall is, set a default that every wall, unless otherwise specified, is. Then your prep can always override it. "This house has 2 feet thick walls" yeah why not? "This village has a Genius Orc Baker 3", sure! Specific overrides general, but put in some general stuff as a fallback! You can even put in specific skills when you prep "This village has a Genius Orc Baker 3, needlepoint skill level 12, katana 13" or whatever you want.

5. Understand what's salient! If you're running a game where there are Gaki (GURPS Japan) that eat specific smells or colors, then you need to prep that. You have to write "red house" instead of "house". If colors haven't become salient in the game, then you can improvise. You can just write "house". If colors suddenly become salient through some unexpected thing happening, then create or find a random color table and start using that. As a rule of thumb, everything that can sting or cut or hurt the PCs is very salient (again, everyone needs stats), but names, hair color, the color of their t-shirt etc you can wing. Edit: and having too many salience categories is a quick way to burn out. Just because wallpaper color somehow got salient in the last campaign doesn't mean it has to be in this one, too. This style is about 'In a cloud, bones of steel', and if you make the whole cloud into steel it's going to be too heavy for you to carry

6. Have oracles! Take a leaf from OSR D&D and have random profession lists, random encounter lists, random all sorts of things! Nothing works better at pacing a game than a random encounter check. Also, this makes the setting come alive like an ant farm for you as GM and it makes it exciting for you! For every region, determine how often to check (and have a default). Also, keep working "fractally". You might have a list for "City Encounters: 1-15", then a list for "Vegas Encounters: 16-20" and another for "Paris Encounters: 16-20", and on top of that maybe you have "Rive Gauche Encounters: 20-25" and you just combine the lists and roll on them. And the "encounters" isn't just things you meet. A similar mechanic can be used for NPC behavior, like if the PCs talk to their boss weekly you can have a list of boss topics/missions/complaints and roll for it every in-game week. Oracles doesn't have to be random, some good name lists can be a great help for this style of campaign.

7. Freeform text! For a player making their character, it's important to know that, for example, the disadvantage is called "Lecherousness" and is worth -15 character points and that it has specific game rules for how to resist it. But you can just put in "Annoyingly flirty" in freefrom on your NPC and use it as you wish. Take a leaf from Fate and put in "aspects" on everything and everyone. These are just freeform tags. On in a mansion you can write "Giant Staircase", "Glorious Piano", "Fragile Vase", in the garden you can put "Raining Intensely" etc etc. Don't use Fate's rules for the aspects, just use the basic idea of sticking freefrom text "tags" on everything. This isn't something that your players need to see or interact with, these tags are for you, to keep you honest. When they come into play, see if some GURPS rule applies, maybe if it's raining then lower visibility as per B547. Or they're just there you know, in the fiction, to help you spin a description. Can also really help define NPCs. You don't have to worry if "Always chews gum, and loudly" is an Advantage, Disadvantage, Quirk or Perk. Put all of that out of your mind, and prep with freeform text! You don't have to know how many character points it costs to speak different languages etc. (This might look like cheating. But it's not like you have no rules to follow when making your game world -- you have these Sandbox manifesto rules!)

8. Use your PC:s character sheets! If they have dependants, patrons, disadvantages etc; use them, always roll for them, let that stuff come in play as it should.

9. What all the above means: You have the answer to most questions! Let's say the players are on a mission in Boston and then they just get it into their heads that they want to go to Paris. They go in to a pastry shop and mug the proprietor there. You know from your oracular practice that you should roll dice to determine how many guests and how many workers there are, and use their stats in case there's a fight. You know from your defaults that the proprietor is a Pastry Shop Proprietor 2. Let's say the PCs at gunpoint force the proprietor to drive out to the country side and dig a shallow grave for himself. In GURPS, all the secondary stats are derivable so you can see in the GURPS Basic Set Campaigns book that he can dig 40 cubic feet of soft soil per hour since he has Normal strength. You then know how long time it takes to dig so you know whether or not to roll for random encounters. You know he has 10 HP in case he gets in the crossfire against the vampires. Etc etc.

9. Facts vs Plot: Never ever ever prep outcomes or plot. Do prep loaded situations, both at campaign start, and at session start, and on your random tables, but then let your players completely loose in how they handle that situation. With your prep in points 1-7 above, you should be able to put the PCs in the driver's seat. Have there be some conflict or problem or risk or danger ("The PCs are hunted by byakhee and vampires in a loose alliance, and the PCs are also being hunted by dusklords but the dusklords hate the vampires") but don't have a pre-planned story or even a pre-planned sequence of scenes or a sequence of events. Let the PC:s loose in the world, it won't be boring.

10. Facts vs Impro: The point of the prep isn't to be a support for you if you have a hard time improvising. I ran impro-only for 15 years before I discovered prepped sandbox play, I don't need the support, I could just pull it out of my ear. No, the point of the prep is to keep you honest, to provide a hard landscape for the players to play their detailed GURPS characters in, interact with each other and with NPCs and make real choices. If they tear down a house in Bordeaux, well, now they have torn down a house in Bordeaux. This sort of play can be really cool and feel solid and genuine. If they've put in the character points to speak French, well, now that became relevant because they drove the play there.

Edit: 11. Facts vs Mystery: I forgot this one, hopefully it would be understood from the rest, but I'll add it in explicitly anyway. If there are any mysteries in the game, you've got to commit to the facts about them. You better have written down who killed Ascher, Barnard and Clarke if that's a riddle in your game. That's?part of the "hard landscape" idea. And if the players don't figure it out, well, they don't figure it out. That's why you have a big world with a tangle of mysteries, urgent problems, dangers, monsters or what have you. There are other things to do in it. I've played in games where I still don't know what that set of three pull levers was for. If the players are curious, you can tell them OOC when the campaign is over. Having failure be a possibility makes the victories sweeter, and in the sandbox there's gonna be a mix of victories and failure.

Last edited by 2097; 05-05-2017 at 12:09 AM.
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Old 05-04-2017, 03:58 PM   #2
2097
 
Join Date: Sep 2012
Default Re: GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

Part of the spirit of this manifesto is to not make decisions once you've hit "play". The best decisions are those made before campaign start, before you've even seen the characters. Adding stuff to the sandbox between sessions is a fact of life because otherwise you're never going to get ready for that first session. Let me clarify this. As a GM in a tabletop roleplaying game, it's your job to glue the rules together, and to make up rules for completely unforeseen and strange situations. You are the referee, and in that capacity you're making decisions. It's also your job to run the NPCs the players talk to, argue with, and sometimes fight. You are the game world. No matter how good you think you are at compartmentalizing, or juggling your "hats" on the fly, the spirit of this manifesto is to formally divide your roles into "prepper" of the game world and "runner" of the game world. As a "prepper" you can put in a 20 foot wide chasm between two castles or whatever, but as a "runner", once the PCs have spent 20 character points per HT and 20 character points per DX and 20 character points per level Extra Basic Speed (which you normally buy in fourths, at 5 per) and 5 character points yard of per Extra Basic Move to then be able to jump min(((2ื([yards ran before the jump]+(HT+DX)/4+[Extra Basic Speed]+[Extra Basic Move]))-3), (2ื(2ื((HT+DX)/4+[Extra Basic Speed]+[Extra Basic Move])-3))) feet over a chasm, it's too late for the DM to just invent a chasm width post-hoc. Hence the role separation; when you're a prepper you can put in any old chasms you want -- and the PCs are free to just go somewhere else in the world if that suits them better. You as prepper has got the freedom to make any world, you as runner got to give them the freedom to wreck it if the rules say they can, or get wrecked by it if they make mistakes.

Appendix A: Gaps in the prep! These will always happen no matter how good you are. The fallback order is: A. Established facts -- and what you've established in your prep is as real as anything established at the table. If you write "the diskettes are hidden in the fridge", well, stick to that fact no matter how well the players are looking in the desk drawers. B. Oracular mechanics like "random pocket contents" table. C. Common sense, try to be boring, that makes the world more real.

Appendix B: No quantum keeps! Don't use the trick where if the players go left they come to the keep, if they go to the right the keep suddenly is there. It's OK to have a "random building table" to use when the players go to some un-prepped place (this is "Use defaults", this is "Use oracles", this is kosher), but don't have an encounter so cool that you just have to force it on the players. This includes "reskinning" it, that's still quantuming it. Give them real choice. The point is to offer real choice as much as you can. This is also why established facts trump random lists (because all random quickly feels meaningless), and why random lists trump your arbitrary common sense (because you should avoid making decisions). If you find yourself wanting to quantumly force a particular thing on them, just prep even more stuff elsewhere. It's a sign that you don't have enough shorthands, enough tools, enough things to paste and mix and make it easy on you. Maybe you're overdescribing, overbalancing, overcalculating. Make the prep "lazier", more skeletal, only do what's salient. E.g. you want a keep? Bottom floor big 40x40 dining room, top floor a 10x10 room, two 20x20 chambers, 10x40 hallway, 2 foot thick stone walls, there are six Strong Medieval Soldier 3 here, their leader is "Disturbingly coy and bashful", keep your name list and pocket-contents-table at hand, done! That took me like one minute. Throw tons of stuff at the wall and let the players determine what sticks. This goes back to knowing the difference between "salient" and "wingable". You can now riff on the exact decorative stone patterns on the little gravel road up to the keep etc etc, but when push comes to getting spears in the head you know that these soldiers fight at 16 with 2d6 spears.

Appendix C: Characters: It's completely kosher to put very strict limitations on what sort of characters are appropriate for the campaign. Decide together with your players what's on and off the table.

Appendix D: Start small! Don't get scared about the "They said they were going to go to Boston but now all of a sudden I have to have both Paris and Bordeaux ready?" talk. When you are just starting out, it's completely fine to just have a couple of buildings and explicitly say to the players: "You can not leave the island. I am a new GM, or new to this technique." Be honest, don't use quantum techniques or trickery. Just say "these are the parameters of the game". Let them complain -- the honesty is better for them than tricks in the long run, because that means that once you've gotten good at the technique, they can know how solid everything is. Tangibility and hard landscape is the positive consequence of this style of campaign. This is why dungeons are great (especially non-linear ones with intelligent NPCs); they're naturally limited locations that can be prepped out without prepping outcomes.

Appendix E: Perfect is the enemy of good! We all mess up sometimes, and accidentally break one of the above rules, and the best prep is the prep that actually gets done.

Appendix F: Roll openly and never fudge. That goes for numbers on the dice and on things like HP too. Whatever subset of GURPS rules you use, stick to it. That's a canonical part of this particular technique. (Just to reiterate -- this manifesto is one way to play, and though it's designed to fit together in one coherent and principled style, there are many other ways to have fun with GURPS.) If they die, have them make new characters. Conversely, if they wreck your world with their lucky rolls, accept it. They one-shotted Dracula? Well, that's amazing and just go with it. Don't bring in a "But the real boss was Frankenstein, Dracula was just his sidekick" post-hoc story. Just "OK, you killed Dracula. What do you do?" (Yeah, ask "What do you do?" a lot, that's a great key phrase.) Stick to the facts honestly and let them drive. If they want to wrap the campaign up, you have a lot of tools and techniques and lists and oracles you can use for the next campaign. Don't fight any outcome because you had another outcome in mind -- your attitude when engaging with the system should be of curiosity. You're rolling the dice to see what they have to say, not to ignore them.
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Old 05-04-2017, 03:59 PM   #3
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Default Re: GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

Appendix G: Combat systems. I think GURPS Ultra Lite is great for characters but its combat system is a little broken. I hear GURPS Action has a good easy one but I haven't tried it. What's so great about Ultra Lite is that you get solid numbers for everything; everything can be derived or be default and plain.

Appendix H: No balance. Prep "naturalistically" and don't block your PCs when they try to scout or make decisions. Since you're never forcing them into an encounter that needs to happen because of plots or planning or prepped set pieces. For example I didn't have "the PCs must fight the soldiers" in mind when I made the keep above. If they do, or if they lead a farmer's militia there or whatever, well, you have the stats for them and stick to it. Don't hide hit points or strength. "Yeah, they look like they'll probably roll at 16 and they look strong too, they probably deal 2d6 damage" [or if you don't want to use the Ultra-Lite damages, you know that their strength is 14 and you can calculate thrust etc from that. (It's thrust 1d, swing 2d, right?)

Appendix I: Don't be afraid to look things up in your books at the table. Since your prep is so skeletal, you instead can refer to and rely on your books a lot. After all, you never had it in your mind that the players necessarily go to the keep so why should you calculate move, basic lift, thrust etc for those soldiers? Of course, once you've used these sort of default NPCs a lot, you'll have a lot of them to refer to. You'll know that a Strong Ultra-Lite character has basic lift 39 or whatever. And, use the seeds in your books, use the NPCs straight up and the monsters and weird characters in them. Not every NPC has to be Ultra-Lite, if you have ready-mades you can just use them.

Appendix J: "Reskinning" or modding, when not used to push a quantum encounter, is a great tool. Take a detailed NPC and change a couple of things and you can have a person with a completely different outlook on life, appearance etc but you can use a lot of the same stat work. But don't be afraid of "carbon copies". Let's say you build out a detailed vampire character with disadvantages etc from some books' template. You can use those same stats for ten, for 20 vampires, and give them different freefrom text "tags" to differentiate them. Again, you're using "defaults" thinking.

Appendix K: Think "flat", think "map" rather than "flowchart" or "sequence". Don't prep it out as if it was a scripted video game or a movie. You bring a place and you bring trouble, a setup, to the table, and they bring characters. One great book that shows what I mean by this is the original 3e GURPS Creatures of the Night which has great open-ended setups and seeds.


Let me know if you try it! Especially if you've ran games in other styles before and committing to all of these peculiar principles might've been very counter-intuitive to you but you tried it anyway.
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Old 05-04-2017, 06:25 PM   #4
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Default Re: GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

Quote:
Originally Posted by 2097 View Post
... The best decisions are those made before campaign start, before you've even seen the characters. ...
I can't agree with that. The game is all about the player characters. If you've made any but the most general decisions about the game before knowing what the PCs are like, then you run a huge risk of needing to take the spotlight away from the PCs - and that usually leads to the players not having fun, which can lead to players abandoning the game.
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Old 05-04-2017, 11:56 PM   #5
2097
 
Join Date: Sep 2012
Default Re: GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

Thank you for bringing this up, I should've clarified.

First, absolutely know the "genre" of the game when you (alone or with the group) make the world and the setups; are they Sandman agents, 1920:s dilettante investigators, vampires, monster hunters, ghosts, action heroes etc? This I tried to be clear about in Appendix C, but, I see now that it's not so clear. Thank you, once more, for bringing it up again.

(Sidenote: a lot of the tools you find or make for modern day games will be usable across genre.)

Second, any patrons, dependents, contacts etc that the players make (on their own, in conjunction with you, or given by you—most likely a mix) absolutely exist in the world. That's rule number 8.

Third, since there's no pre-planned sequence of events or setpieces, the character's skills, disadvantages, advantages etc will affect significantly what happens in the game, who they ally with, how they solve the open-ended problems, how they get along with each other. The players are in the driver's seat. Do they have a safecracker? Well, then they're gonna try to crack safes! Do they have a weirdness magnet? Well, they're gonna get stuff from the random Weird table! Do they have a karate master? Well, they're gonna fight people!

Why not look at the sheet? Because let's say you're making a custom safe cracking experience where the Safecracker character can shine. You might think, deliberately or subconsciously, "Ooh, they put an 18 in, better make it as extra tough safe" or "Ok, they only spent one skillpoint, going to make this one extra easy".

Now, that 18 might mean one of four things to the player when they bought it:
• "Wow, hope there are lots of safes so I get to shine!"
• "Ugh, hope we don't have to deal with any safes, better put in 18 so I'm sure to get in."
• "I'm making a bet that there are safes and that this is useful."
The fourth one can stand on its own, or combine with any of those three:
• "It's so thematic that my character used to be a safecracker but now I'm on the straight and narrow" or some other story reason for the 18.

But let's talk about that 'bet'. One of the joys of playing according to this manifesto is being able to make such bets, and have the consequences of making them. This manifesto is about letting the players loose in a hard landscape, instead of creating a custom experience. And the results can surprise you in a good way. "I can't believe you managed to get that much use out of needlepoint embroidery!"

And it's not just skills, it's things like appearance, contacts, social advantages and disadvantages, status, emotional demons the characters are battling through etc. If your prep is wide, and oracular, these things will become relevant.
Take the needlepoint embroidery again. You're using various random profession tables, contacts rules etc etc. Maybe those oracular mechanics that the company president's son is a needlepoint connaisseur and will take the PC under their wing. Sound unlikely? Well, some rando the PC has met or can meet through their needlepointing ways has some random chance to have some Nth-degree connection to the company leadership. And if they don't, well, then the player's bet didn't pay off. Having a chance of failure is what validates it as a bet. But then again, if they can't get connected to this company, the world is big and there are so many other things they can do!

This manifesto is unusual because unlike typical prepped games, there's no sequence of events, no "First they've got to get in with the company leadership, then they've got to figure out where the blueprints are hidden" stuff. But unlike improvised games, the hard facts of the world around them are as they are and having their characters interact with that solidly defined world brings a lot of fairness, buy-in and fun to the game.

Make sure your player knows that the game is run according to this manifesto and that these things can happen!

Again: GURPS can be used for many types of games, including a tightly knit chamber drama tailored around specific characters. But, I've found that all that character building, dice rolling etc isn't really necessary for such tailored games. Since the opposition would be tailor made anyway, that exact Safecracking number wouldn't matter, the player could just write 'Former safecracker' in freeform; for any situation where you wanted risk or unceirtainty you could ask for 5+ on a single die. Sure, the detailed character building and the detailed rules add verisimilitude, but if you can learn this manifesto's style instead of tailor-made adventures, you can go from verisimilitude to veracity. Try it!
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Old 05-05-2017, 01:09 AM   #6
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Join Date: Sep 2012
Default Re: GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

Let's again use that safecracking as an example. I looked it up and it's called Lockpicking/TL. It says safes "can take more time, at the GM's discretion". Well, GM's discretion is what we're trying to minimize, and the solution to that is this: the first time safecracking comes up in the game, make a rule and then stick with it. As an example, let's say I change the 1 minute to 10 and the 5 seconds to 1 minute, and from now on that's going to be the rule (again, for every new campaign, don't overload your brain with rulings such as this from previous campaigns).

So you can roll any number of times until you succeed, spending ten minutes for every roll, but gaining back one minute for every point of success.

So they're pretty much garanteed to sooner or later get through, even if they didn't pick Lockpicking/TL and are rolling at the default (IQ-5). That's also why we have mechanics in place (such as a random chance of random events happening when time passes) that make time important. (Again, does not have to be "wandering monster" (though in this case it's appropriate -- the table could have "nosy neighbor", "security guards", "owner comes home early from vacation", "police happened to drive by and got suspicious" etc), it could be more things like "Get fired from bureau for not solving the mysteries in time", "the annunakkis' evil plan advances one step" etc.)

Adding safes to houses can happen in three ways and it's strictly dependent on the "salience level". In a game where you know there's going to be a lot of breaking and entering, you better have jotted down for any prepped items whether or not they're in a safe etc, and you better have good defaults and oracles for any other random houses that the players might mistakenly red-herring-themselves into (or if they decide to augment their work at the bureau with a life of crime).

In a game where you don't think there's going to be a lot of stealing stuff from safes, safes can just be color, part of what you can use as flavor. "The wallpaper has a giant yellow floral print, the cheap Mondrian print is hanging crooked from a mismounted wallsafe behind it" etc etc. [OK, OK, bad example, because safes are so chekovianly "loaded" that players will probably want to get in. But I'm explaining the general concept of salience here.]

And, most tricky of all: in a game where safecracking suddenly has become a big deal, this is when you need to develop oracle tools even though you might not have had them. It's too late to prep them, you need to consult a "second brain", i.e. dice. Let's say that you discover that you need a general rule of whether or not a particular house has safes. At first, you can just use whatever seems reasonable as long as it's got some randomness involved; for example you decide that "Hmm, maybe 1/3 random chance that a given house has a safe". Then (if it's on earth) you can do some research, maybe make rule that uses wealth level of the house, maybe you find statistics that it's only 1/20 chance that a house in that area has a safe (I've got no idea, I'm just pulling these numbers out of my ear at this point) -- or, probably better, you just stick with the 1/3 rule, keep it simple. It's more important that there is a rule, than how good the rule the rule is. Also, everything you've added before it became salient, when it was "just color", that you've got to stick with. Those safes are grandfathered in. And everything you can derive from your freeform text tags in your prep, that's also something you've committed too.


Anyway, according to this manifesto's principles, at prep time before you know your characters' exact capabilities, you can just add anything. You can write "Delicate Mechanism Safe, roll until you make both a successful DX roll and a successful Lockpicking roll at the same time" or whatever you decide. You can draw a map that happens to show a 14 foot gap between buildings, or whatever you like. The fact that you don't know the capabilities is what makes it fair to just write down anything, without having to spend any "GM-side Character Points", you can just prep completely freely.

But once you've hit that "play" button, that tool of "add things freely" is no longer available to you (again: according to this manifesto's principles; again: there are other valid and worthwhile ways to play the game) and you should figure out some oracular tools.

Needlepoint embroideries are probably a much better example than safes. (It's a Hobby Skill, page 200.) When needlepoint embroidery is not salient, you can freely add it or neglect to add it as color as you wish while you're winging your descriptions. When it is salient (what a weird campaign set up that would be), it's a vital part of prep. "Oh, an amazign needlepoint picture created with degree of success -5 hangs here! Can you trump that, sir?" And if suddenly becomes salient, you come up with an oracular solution then and there.

(See, needlepoint embroideries on walls are hard to imagine as particularly salient, and safes are hard to imagine as not being salient. That's as it should be and that's good thing, makes it more likely that your first guesses about salience will be in the right ballpark.)

To repeat myself:
• Prep skeletally
• Figure out what you can wing vs what should be pre-committed
• One oracular mechanic is worth a thousand solid facts, so create mechanics (random tables etc) rather than content
• But you also can benefit from some solid facts lest the whole world becomes random white noise. This especially goes for mysteries
• Always put in loaded setups, dangers, problems, attacks, riddles or whatever -- don't make the world empty and plain (unless that's the campaign setup you're going for, could be fun to just explore)
• But don't put in plan any outcome.
• They're going to see a fraction of the prep you do -- that's what makes it a choice for them, seeing everything isn't exploring; selecting everything isn't making a selection. So, prep lightly and easily and stick to defaults.
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Old 05-05-2017, 11:52 AM   #7
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Join Date: Sep 2012
Default Re: GURPS Sandbox Manifesto!

(PS: to all GURPS GMs who already play like this, hope you didn't mind. You should've known by now that there are other ways to play GURPS, e.g. "How to Be a GURPS GM", so I wanted to instead give the advice I wish I had gotten back in 1998 when I got my first GURPS book.)
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