| johndallman |
01-14-2017 06:56 AM |
Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thrasher92
(Post 2070114)
Well, it's 2017... Any new answer now?
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Purely as an outside observer and fan, a new edition doesn't seem to be needed.
The current trend in the business seems to be towards GURPS 4e as a game engine that can be customised for specific settings, like the Discworld Roleplaying Game or the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game. The latter apparently has some rules tweaks that have been referred to as a lightly revised 4e, but we won't see how significant those are until it is published. SJG has also mentioned the possibility of doing other packaged customised versions of GURPS, but has not announced any plans.
Meanwhile, the fanbase continues to buy incremental supplements in PDF and develop writers to create them, plus Pyramid articles. This gives SJG a fairly low-cost way of developing the game, matched with its fairly low sales. The fanbase's play is spread over a very wide range of genres and settings, and wouldn't respond well to GURPS becoming more tightly focussed, in my opinion. However, that tight focus would be necessary for a new edition to be publishable at a reasonable cost.
Sometime in the past decade, Kromm said that the most likely cause of a new edition would be some new publishing technology. The idea of something computerised that lets you add rules modules and fold them into a single reference cleanly is quite attractive, but it would not be simple to implement, and SJG isn't in the publishing software development business. So until someone else invents something applicable, this probably won't go anywhere.
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