The GURPSICLE, and: how you do GURPS "onboarding"?

[Black Leviathan]

Originally Posted by weevis

I completely agree!
I just ask them to tell me what they want to do in plain language, then I translate that to rules. If they aren't sure what to do, I say "what would you do if someone was attacking you in real life?" This has worked so far.

This hasn't worked as well for me. My new players often forget options available t them and get frustrated when they don't plan things in a way that benefits them the most. Having the flash cards out lets players flip through them to make sure they can do what they think they can on their turn.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

This hasn't worked as well for me. My new players often forget options available t them and get frustrated when they don't plan things in a way that benefits them the most. Having the flash cards out lets players flip through them to make sure they can do what they think they can on their turn.

When I free-form interpret the rules for new players I always give them suggestions and the benefit of the doubt. If they should have crouched but did not know that I'll say, "you'll want to crouch to make yourself harder to hit." Or if they ask to crouch I won't worry about whether it is at the beginning of the turn or not. I should add that it helps a lot that I now use map-less combat with new players -- that was a big win for me. So I can kind of GM-fudge a lot of things to benefit them. My rule of thumb is that it is not fun for the new player to have their character maimed or killed during their first GURPS combat experience, so I cut a lot of slack.

Perhaps a smaller set of flash cards or a different design would work for me. I wrote a short blog post about this a while ago suggesting a different categorization for the combat cards.

I found that the cards intimidated new players because it seemed like a lot of choices (28 options!!!!), but many of the implications of the choices weren't immediately clear to them (e.g., the "Attack" card has three paragraphs of tiny text on it). Many of the cards turned out to be not relevant to their situation (do nothing: stunned), so they found this frustrating.

Maybe I could improve this by only showing them the relevant cards (I just gave them the cards) but this seems like more work.

[Gollum]

Personally, when I run a game for newcomers, I avoid all combat options. They can just attack or do something else (move, draw a weapon, aim, cast a spell...). Thus we don't need any card or maneuver table, and things remain very simple for players.

Of course, it limits their options a lot, but the game remains balanced because NPCs' options have exactly the same limitations.

Then, after a while, once they are used to the three rolls (attack, defense and damage), I introduce some maneuvers, starting with all-out attack and all-out defense, just by saying: you can now abandon your defense to get a better attack (+4) or abandon your defense to get a better attack (+2) ...

And so on.

That way, everything remains very easy to understand and nobody ever told me that GURPS was hard to play, because they learned it step by step.

[Tomsdad]

Yep, on the few occasions I've run GURPS for new gamers instead of telling them the combat options in play and watching their eyes glaze over and derail the fight scene. I tend instead ask them to describe* what kind of action they'd like to do and interpret that as a GURPS option telling them the effects. I then explain what I did within the rules after the session.



*often encouraging them to get detailed & elaborate in their description in order make the choice interesting to them and to make the point later that GURPS is capable of supporting that if they want.

[CeeDub]

I love the cheat sheet!

However:

"onboarding"
"recruiting pitches"
"100% committed to X"

Are you trying to sound like a multi-level marketer or Pointy Haired Boss? :)

[thalcos]

I love onboarding new GURPS players, especially at conventions. My rules of thumb are:

1) Keep the first session around the GURPS Lite level of detail. Maybe 10-20% more if I'm playing with experienced RPG'ers who like a bit more crunch, but I try to be hyper-aware that just because a player is familiar with the crunch of one system (e.g. Pathfinder) doesn't mean they'll grok and enjoy the crunch of another.

2) Explain the game in stages. Don't try to explain all the rules upfront, eyes will glaze over. The beauty of GURPS is that you can start playing knowing only one rule -- roll under your skill. You can then explain how criticals work later, as they come up, etc.

3) Spend time on the character sheets. In convention games, with pregenerated characters, I always make sure I simply notate what some non-obvious advantages/disadvantages do, use the simpler range/speed chart, etc. You can see examples of how I've done this in the adventures on my blog, which include lots of pregenerated characters: www.1shotadventures.com

4) Run genres that are unique. I love GURPS fantasy, but I rarely onboard new players in an overly-familiar genre like fantasy. I find players spend too much time comparing it to what they know, and then GURPS loses ties due lack of familiarity. At conventions, I run genres that are slightly unusual (but not too bonkers!) and don't require a ton of extra rules. Recently, I've had a lot of luck with Old West horror, Harry Potter, 1930s pulp adventure, etc.

Hope that helps!

-J.C.

[Brandy]

Here's a resource I created to explain what combat options are useful when. It's an alternative to the combat cards, which organizes the options in what I hope is a useful way.

It's primarily meant as a teaching tool, but it works well enough as an at-the-table reference too. The fact that it is not dense and has lots white space (and thus requires two sheets front and back instead of one) is a feature, not a bug. My players found it useful.