What is your favorite genre and how well does GURPS handle it?

[Kaslak]

Genres coming to my mind are Hard sci-fi, noir/hardboiled modern mystery with a bit of political twist in the cold war era.

From direct experience I think Mystery works well for the great variability of skills, and the system support to non heroic characters, low player count (down to 1 in fact) - with advantages to represent social assets as allies and contacts, and the many available skills to keep realistic and low/no combat adventures interesting

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

So what about the Sci-fi genre do you find hard for GURPS, the cartography or the tech-treeing?

The maps hands down. I am a terrible mapmaker. I have a mental hang-up - I always need to know where I am. Luckily, I have a good sense of direction. Unluckily, if the place is made up I need to see a drawing of it or I just run circles in my head. I can do tech-trees - I hate it, but I can do it - and I can do races (the easiest of the three for me). But in sci-fi (except for cyberpunk) those three just hit me hard as a triple threat and I'm done.

Originally Posted by mburr0003

Intriguing that you've never run a game in the setting your heroes are in, but use it to inform your games nonetheless.

Oh, I've run one-shots and the like. But never a full campaign. As you note, it tends to inform what I do run though and that's good enough for me.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Dungeon-crawling fantasy, cliffhanging pulp adventure, and bug hunting space opera. I find GURPS quite good for the first (and all the better for the GURPS DF line), very good indeed for the second (very little direct support in 4e but all the pieces are there), and...OK for the third but could be better. The problem I'm having is survivability. The higher the TL, the more it's a rock-paper-scissors contest between technologies with the human element being less and less important. If your armor is this good or better relative to weapons, you'll be unharmed, and if it's not, you're dead, no matter what your stats are. That's absolutely realistic, but I don't want realistic. That said, I don't necessarily want the more blatant kinds of unrealistic I use for cliffhangers. It's a tough niche for me.

A partial solution is to follow the path Ultra-Tech took, and have increasing TLs improve weapons' penetration rather than raw damage. So a 'rifle' always does 6d (for example), but at the TL increases, so does the penetration modifier.

The problem I have is one that applies to cliffhanger games set in the 20s and 30s as well - a rifle doing 5d to 6d is quite capable of killing someone, so the baseline is already set on 'don't get hit'. At least in pre-modern games high damage fully-automatic weapons are scarce.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rupert

The problem I have is one that applies to cliffhanger games set in the 20s and 30s as well - a rifle doing 5d to 6d is quite capable of killing someone, so the baseline is already set on 'don't get hit'. At least in pre-modern games high damage fully-automatic weapons are scarce.

The reality is, there's no TL at which just soaking the hit was a good plan; get stabbed with a TL 0 spear and there's a pretty good chance of death or permanent disability, particularly if you also have TL 0 medicine.

A lot of the problem with damage in GURPS is that there are actually two different damage models that only sort of pretend to be compatible. The rules for strength-based damage are essentially unchanged since Man to Man (1985), the rules for firearms come from High Tech (1988) and again have only fairly minimal changes since. The rules from Man to Man were tuned towards producing a good tabletop wargame. The rules from High Tech were tuned towards simulation.

[ericthered]

My favorite Genre is probably "Alternate Fantasy". Which is to say Fantasy with magic systems and races that are a little less than generic, and have a strong flavor in and of themselves, taking its underlying premises quite seriously.

Gurps supports custom races beautifully. I don't know of any system that does it better.

Gurps support for custom magic systems is a little shakier, but its usually possible with some work, and any system I've learned that does a better job is using some very flexible, abstract, and high-adjudication mechanics, like Pool or Fate, which have their own drawbacks.

[binn05]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

I tried to run a "hyper gritty noir with high cinematic narrative control" in a Fallout/Horror game... and it was working... mostly*. But I lost the time (and mental stamina) to keep running it.

Could you elaborate a bit more on how you were GMing this?

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

The maps hands down. I am a terrible mapmaker. I have a mental hang-up - I always need to know where I am. Luckily, I have a good sense of direction. Unluckily, if the place is made up I need to see a drawing of it or I just run circles in my head. I can do tech-trees - I hate it, but I can do it - and I can do races (the easiest of the three for me). But in sci-fi (except for cyberpunk) those three just hit me hard as a triple threat and I'm done.

What do you mean by tech trees? Are you talking about what techs are available for the campaign?


Now about the topic.
I've had only run DF, for now, stripping magic and using psionics. It runs really well.
I'm preparing a Fallout-esque After the End campaign using low points characters (around 75 points), and the little playtest I've made with my players, seems to run pretty smoothly.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by binn05

What do you mean by tech trees? Are you talking about what techs are available for the campaign?

I use the term tech-tree because in my mind that exemplifies what I mean and I totally magpied it from the Civ games. That said, basically, the common available technology in the setting must be fully mapped out for me. If not...problems.

[binn05]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

I use the term tech-tree because in my mind that exemplifies what I mean and I totally magpied it from the Civ games. That said, basically, the common available technology in the setting must be fully mapped out for me. If not...problems.

I was imagining something like Civ and Stellaris tech trees, but couldn't understand how that would be gamified on a campaign. Thank you for clarifying.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by binn05

I was imagining something like Civ and Stellaris tech trees, but couldn't understand how that would be gamified on a campaign. Thank you for clarifying.

Yeah, I have some additional guidelines I use that I've never put out into the wild that make it feel more like that. Wanted to put them in Realm Management, but too much of my wordcount was et up and it didn't really make all that much sense for them to be there. Maybe eventually.

To add on a bit, the issue compounds for me when it comes to groups with different tech in addition to the baseline. So say there are 4 groups with differing tech and tech levels. That's FOUR times as much work for me to do in addition to the base "everyone can access this tech" tech tree. It burns me out fast.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by binn05

I was imagining something like Civ and Stellaris tech trees, but couldn't understand how that would be gamified on a campaign. Thank you for clarifying.

Yeah its a common trope of empire building games, I think I first saw it in Masters of Orion, but maybe Civilization.
I suggested the concept awhile back in a 5E thread and David Pulver said he thought he could do it. But we haven't seen anything GURPS from him in quite some time, think he is mostly tied into TFT now.