Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

I'm glad that someone else recognizes that there's no point in playing a game where you are guaranteed to survive, and gain in power and experience ad nauseum.

I'm going to try something where players don't level up quite as fast, but with a lot of action and adventure in GURPS. That's up next.

-P.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

It encourages them.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

I dunno, I've had some good times in games where setbacks are temporary and not disabling, but in which the party's final survival (if not victory) was pretty much assured.

I wouldn't call it quality roleplaying -- more like the books-and-dice-and-paper equivalent of Munchkin -- but everyone involved seemed to be having a good time.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

from what i see, even prejudised people, as soon as they try GURPS and work out the differences in their heads, they prefer it rather than d20, espessially now that d20 has become much of a "paper edition" of online games where all that counts is just the graphics and to point the mouce on the right spot.
Even gamers are not what they used to be

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

I should restate something. I have been in such campaigns, and they can be fun. But they aren't sustainable for most adults, just to kick in the doors, and take their stuff. At some point, I crave a plot line, story, and interesting NPC's to encounter.

I'm playing in a D&D 3.5 Dungeon Crawl now. We're playing over root beer and burritos at the local gaming store, with no other expectation than a nostalgic "Kick in the door, kill them all, take their stuff" campaign, And I am enjoying myself.

But I've encountered players who,perhaps by virtue of them having equated what D&D does to roleplaying, expect *all* roleplaying experiences to be the pen and paper equivalent of Munchkin, and in those cases, it has been very hard to communicate the importance of the build up of the story over the steady gain in power that they expect.

I've had very successful campaigns where people gained *maybe* a handful of character points. The story was engaging that people didn't notice that I kept forgetting to give them out (this is when I first started playing GURPS... we were playing 300-point Vampires in GURPS Vampire:The Masquerade, so nobody missed the 2-3 points that they would have gotten anyhow).

So, I'm not knocking the experience under all circumstances. Just knocking the experience to the exclusion of all others. The expectation of magic items, and lots of earth shattering power to be granted to characters simply isn't consistent with every story I'd like to tell.

-P.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

I don't agree with you there. How many people read the LotR for the first time and were surprised that Sauron was defeated? A real surprise in how a movie or a book ends is usually a disappointment (the one example I can think of for the moment is Rain Man, where I really expected them to let Raymond Babbit live in the real world and everything would be fine. They handled that very well). It's not that heros succeed that we are interested in, we are interested in how they succeed.

I do agree that when the answer to the "how" question is "DEATH-BY-FIREBALL" every time, it gets a little dull.

But this is probably a question for another sub-forum.

As for the 5th edition issue, don't. Please don't. And pen-and-papers roleplaying will be around in ten years, but it won't be avant-garde anymore. It will be a gang of fity-year old farts sitting around complaining about all the fancy stuff youngsters do nowadays.

"We didn't have dice, we had a pouch with notes in and drew the notes from it to see what the result was."

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

To be fair, however, the medium is different. Someone isn't going to ready a 1200 page novel, and then expect the evil cover the land and the heroes all be killed or imprisoned...

At the same time, I agree with some of the other posts that there is a lot to a temporary setback. The problem is that too many dungeon crawls have no room for a temporary setback. That is, once you commit yourself to clearing a room, there are basically two choices, to kill everything in the room, or for the whole party to die trying. I know very few players who stage probing attacks, then retreat to a pre-arranged safe position, and figure out what they've learned.

And as you brought up Lord of the Rings, how many temporary setbacks are there? How many times is something attempted, and the group has to decide to go a different way around the obstacle?

As to the question of 5th edition, I think that the original poster asked because D&D was rolling out a 4th edition. I don't see it happening any time soon. Current system is robust enough to handle a lot of different game types, from Supers to WWII, without significant modifications to the system to make it playable.

-P

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

As to temporary setbacks:

How many fantasy novels has an individual lost everything, to try to regain it all? To be honest, when I played D&D with some pretty good GMs, when we all lost all we had, the game got more and more fun. For instance, I would manage to get my way into a suit of decent armor that a guard was using, and then don it. Eventually, however, the armor would grow more and more dented and damaged, and eventually I lost it; as well as losing a lot of my other gear for one reason or another (Including a +1 magical sword in a world where such magical weapons were as rare as anything).

Sometimes recovering what you had is just as fun, naturally, but the setbacks, to me, are what really make the game.

Without kryptonite or equal opponents, Superman would just be "watch the Ubermensch cower the criminal empire and eventually grow boring".

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Its strange, but the other day, I found myself longing for GURPS 5th Edition - or actually, 4th Edition Revised.

Or perhaps, just a single GURPS 4th Edition reference, with all the rules collected - much like Compendium did for 3rd edition - heck you could even call it compendium.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

That's the theory, at any rate. I almost see Powers and Martial Arts as the "Characters" and "Combat" compendia; neither is particularly genre-specific though there are genres that will benefit more from them than others.