03-30-2023, 06:18 AM | #161 | |
Join Date: Oct 2007
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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"4E Revised" is more likely to make previously apprehensive players go "It's probably just the same cumbersome rules with a few text updates". If it is labelled "5E" you get a larger chance to have those people go "I wonder what they changed" instead. With Lite (or Lite+) as the core rules, you would obviously need to rework books like Fantasy, Supers and Martial Arts so any skills, advantages and disadvantages relevant to the books are present in the books. The amount of work this represents is definitely enough to be worthy of a new edition label in my opinion. |
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03-30-2023, 09:22 AM | #162 |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Rome, Italy
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
Casting aside the defensiveness of some comments I think that the main problem that holds back GURPS (and any possible future iteration on the same system) is its morbid fetish with "realism".
Yes i know I sound like a broken record... But my impression is that for some users (and some writers) GURPS is not just a series of guidelines to play "pretend" but some scientific method to measure real world phenomena, and this way of thinking generated a lot of complex, complicated, math heavy, and frictional rule bloat. But Realism should not be the goal... Fun should be. Think of how many rules and variants are there that, in game practice, only covert to a modest bonus/penalty to skill checks. Do you really need hundreds of pages and multiple manuals of advantages, disadvantages, talents, familiarity, adaptation, dabbler, defaults and whatnot only to ask a player to do a skill check -2? In 2023 I personally cannot understand anymore this friction between rule "lore" and gaming practice, to me it's just an unnecessary superstructure used to justify what? That your game of choice is more "valid" because more realistic? That your game is "scientifically sound"? What this fetish really brings to the table? To me it only holds back the game: GURPS at its core is a remarkably elegant, sleek and easy to teach system. Unfortunately when it is played at a level just above Lite it quickly spirals to a monster bloat of rule wrinkles that makes difficult to run any adventure that do not adhere to its version of "realism". Generic? Absolutely! Universal? Not so much...
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03-30-2023, 09:49 AM | #163 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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There's also the problem that, if you want your base to be highly-cinematic, you've got to decide what kind of highly-cinematic you want. Four Color Supers? Space Opera? Low Tech Fantasy? Shounen Anime? Noir? Wuxia? Spaghetti Western? 80's-era American martial arts movies? Each of those are fairly distinct, and the more you lean toward one over the others, the less generic and universal your system is. That said, there are some cinematic options I feel GURPS is sorely missing. As unrealistic as it is, the "subdual damage" concept from DnD is simple and works well in a lot of cinematic genres (you often see it in play in just about all of the above), yet GURPS refuses to officially have such an option in a form other than using special abilities (or techniques, like the blood choke) to inflict FP damage or just knock out a foe outright, which ultimately work far differently (and feel rather different) from portrayals of such in fiction.
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03-30-2023, 09:54 AM | #164 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
Good old 'what I like is the universal axis of fun, what you like is dead weight'?
I buy GURPS rulebooks for reality-oriented information and mechanics, and sometimes for gearheaded rules extension. That is, I would have no reason to buy any part of your version of GURPS. I mean, as a marketing strategy dumping some of your current customers is certainly an option. (If there were going to be a next edition at all.) But it'd certainly happen if you define your update around less crunch.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
03-30-2023, 10:26 AM | #165 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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If I had to point to a book that I think caused the most problems for GURPS, it would be high tech for 3rd edition... because that's where they introduced the current way of scaling firearms damage, prior to that it was something like 3d damage for a rifle. |
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03-30-2023, 11:04 AM | #166 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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Maybe I'm wrong, and there's a different starting point that would work much better for adapting into just about everything. But I think GURPS defaults to a good point for that. I can see benefits and drawbacks to this approach. One of the big benefits is that you can pretty readily adapt an existing weapon (or in many cases a fictional one) into the system, simply by looking at its penetration in RHA (the fictional ones might say something like "can burn through up to an inch of durasteel plating," so you'll need to figure out how durasteel compares to RHA to assign overall penetration, but that's typically not terribly difficult). The drawback, of course, is that while many authors will quote their technology as having a given performance, a lot of the time they won't actually behave anything like that in the story, so basing their performance on such will result in them functioning quite differently in the campaign than the GM and players will expect from the story - not a weapon per se, but giving X-Wings in your GURPS Star Wars game the quoted acceleration of 3,700 G's is going to result in space battles that look absolutely nothing like those in the movies). But then, a lot of game systems are going to have difficulty correctly matching such performances, where weapons have a range of PLOT, a damage of PLOT, can fire up to PLOT times a second with a standard magazine/energy cell holding PLOT shots, etc.
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03-30-2023, 11:12 AM | #167 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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03-30-2023, 11:42 AM | #168 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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Nothing springs to mind for 'tanking rifles is normal' except supers who are bullet-proof. Quote:
Though for literary emulation, in most cases 'does damage like a pistol or rifle firing hollow points or maybe frangibles' may be all you need, with the occasional 'makes people explode and shoots through buildings'.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. Last edited by Ulzgoroth; 03-30-2023 at 11:51 AM. |
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03-30-2023, 12:05 PM | #169 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
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*Of course, this means you'll have to decide if your wonder material is 1/3rd as dense as steel, or the same density and armor made from it is often extremely thin, or something else... but that's a good idea anyway, so you know what someone walking around in such armor looks like, allowing you to describe it better (do they look as armored as they are - "She looks to be wearing an ornate full plate harness, but the metal catches the light beautifully and seems to have a bit of a green sheen to it - is it perhaps Adamant Steel?" - or is the metal noticeably thinner - "Her plate armor looks almost paper-thin, like a costume rather than anything protective, but you notice it catches the light differently from mundane steel, and indeed your eye catches a hint of green - you realize she's wearing Adamant Steel, and is as well-armored - possibly even more so - than a knight ready for a joust").
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03-30-2023, 12:07 PM | #170 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Math, GURPS, and its reputation for complexity
In an RPG, you have to assume that people's decision making will be influenced by the effectiveness of the weapon. The reality of cinematic genres is that guns just don't get used much by the heroes (and are generally ineffective when used by the bad guys), and if you want to emulate that in an RPG, you have to make guns ineffective. That doesn't have to be low damage, it could be low accuracy (though we have the separate problem of armor; it should be possible to punch out someone wearing tactical armor).
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