06-19-2017, 06:37 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Chagrin Falls
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
I would think that the campaign choice would be best informed by the aspect of GURPS you wish to display.
Are you looking to highlight the realism? (Hmm... a magical glaive, too bad I only use a guisarme, I guess we'll sell it at the next one-horse village for 1,000 g.p. in cash that the innkeeper happens to have) Are you more interested in the ability to mix genera? (Pirates! In Zeppelins! With Lasers! Fighting Air-Sharks! With Frikken Lasers!) Do you want to focus on the significantly freer character development? (Congratulations, you leveled up... roll a d10 for new HP... and you're done) Have the players been upset by insufficiently detailed social interaction options? (You encounter an X... do you fight it or run away?) Do your players want to explore morally ambiguous scenarios? (The Cleric is Evil, I kill him) Silly examples aside, there is no shortage of aspects you could choose to highlight. Similarly, tone can be an important determinant in campaign choice. Are you looking for a drama, or a comedy? If they just came out of Ravenloft perhaps GURPS Gothic Horror isn't the setting to choose... but maybe Illuminati University is. My one caution would be to not involve too many sets of rules at the start. It is really cool that GURPS has detailed rules for Tactical shooting, martial arts, several magic systems, psionics, &c. but dumping all of those onto the players in the beginning highlights the (potential, not essential) complexity of the system. Break them in slowly. Along those lines, low powered characters facing low powered challenges are easier to understand and play than complex polymaths with multiple specialties. KISS. If it were me, I'd do a modern adventure that touched on something ***strange***. I would give each PC one easy to define disadvantage and get my players used to roleplaying with them. I would run a few sessions of ***mystery*** before taking the temperature and seeing if it should be secret magic, aliens, demonic influences, elaborate hoax, whatever that is causing the weirdness and then develop the campaign from there. Heck, player speculation sometimes generates better plotlines than GM perspiration. Good Luck
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Benundefined Life has a funny way of making sure you decide to leave the party just a few minutes too late to avoid trouble. |
06-19-2017, 07:46 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
I'd also recommend a prospectus. I recommend sticking to genre they will be familiar with from other media. Zombie survival, superheroes, steampunk, etc. That way, you can show versatility just by having them as options then demonstrate one well by having it chosen.
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06-19-2017, 10:48 PM | #13 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
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You can also combine. Steampunk superheroes fighting the zombie apocalypse. You need to be careful there to avoid losing focus, though. A good balance is to take just two familiar things and mash them together: a caper story set in Ancient Rome, clashes between the heroes of the ancient gods in modern New York, or just about any story IN SPACE!
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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06-20-2017, 01:44 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Jun 2017
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
Wow, thanks everyone. It's gonna take me a while to read through all the suggestions you've linked. You've definitely given me a lot to think about. I'll post again with an update once I've settled on something.
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06-20-2017, 09:28 AM | #15 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
Quote:
Quote:
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My (ahem... hugely entertaining... ahem) GURPS blog: The Collaborative Gamer |
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06-20-2017, 10:09 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
I agree. When I introduced people to GURPS with supers, I had them make the 150 point characters and I built the powers. I then handed out each power on a card with both a GURPS description and a plain English description as it was discovered. It was a lot of work for me, but it was fun and totally paid off.
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06-21-2017, 12:23 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
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But on the gripping hand, this is because I've run more than a dozen GURPS campaigns and I'm fairly confident about using the character creation rules. I'm not sure how much experience Toman has with them, and it may be better to come up with a campaign idea that doesn't involve rescuing players further into the deep end than Toman's comfortable with.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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06-21-2017, 12:09 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
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I know Bill, here, does this, and it worked really well when I set up the Facets campaign, too. I did it, there, because I knew that if I just provided the campaign premise -- a wainscot magic setting where the secrets of magic and monsters were both terrifying and dangerous, which the characters learn about accidentally and then try to learn to survive and deal with -- someone would have come up with a fully-initiated mage with a crap-ton of points in Occultism. That is not what I wanted. I wanted a campaign based on discovery of the unknown, both wondrous and horrible. To have a fully-initiated mage who could get answers with a die-roll didn't fit into that concept, so I specifically forbade any such thing. Moreover, the one character who did have Occultism, I told couldn't use it until she had access to reliable research materials and expertise in the language to read them.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. |
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06-21-2017, 09:01 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Sacramento metro, California
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
I ruined many a GURPS game with supplement creep, so my advice is to figure out what the players would like to play and stick with a simple setting.
While GURPS can be great with mashups and many rules, it's a lot easier to learn by starting out with a slice of the tasty game pie. You can always change the campaign later if players want by adding on some new templates to reflect character growth. Something in our world, only slightly different makes finding maps and other source documents for game fun fairly easy. You can have the players discuss what they want and help them build the characters. Being able to describe in plain language some GURPS mechanics will be far more satisfying than having players try and run all the GURPS rules to build what they want. The campaign planning sheet is your friend.
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Currently Running: Without Number family games which use a lot of GURPS material for details when the players start asking(online, sporadically) Waiting For: Schedule Sanity to Play Car Wars and my Fnordcon special alt Car Wars cards! |
07-29-2017, 08:42 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Jun 2017
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Re: Requesting ideas for a new campaign.
Thank you everyone for the advice.
I ended up running a GURPS Zombies one-shot, where everyone played as themselves, just as a short introduction. They really enjoyed it, and then one of them said "You know what this system would be great for? FALLOUT!" And then they all got very excited so, we're gonna play fallout next. |
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