What GURPS needs... now

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Interesting. Because for me GURPS character creation is one of the highlights of GURPS for me. I love it. A lot.

I do, too, as an individual player. But as a GM it is unpleasant, because most of the time I'm playing with people who don't know GURPS very well.

Originally Posted by trooper6

But, that Session 0 has become so crucial to making sure everyone is on the same page, we have the same expectations. Doing it makes the subsequent campaign so much better. It has become so crucial that I do it regardless of the system I'm running.

I think part of my perspective comes from the fact that I'm having to do a lot of the groundwork to make my players comfortable with the buy-in to GURPS. As I say above, most of my players tend to be GURPS newbies or novices. They know D&D or some other much simpler system, and I convince them to try GURPS.

One of the great things about GURPS is that you can do just about anything, so using super generic templates is counter-evidence. Which means creating characters out of whole cloth is (currently) a necessity.

But every second that passes in character creation is one more second where my players might wonder what they're going to be having for dinner, or whether they left the stove on, or why oh god why did they agree to this. Now if I were one of the players, I'd be having the time of my life. But I can't assume that I'm typical in that regard. As an advocate for the system I have to *assume* my new players are a hard sell, until I'm shown otherwise.

I can run a one-off in GURPS using pre-gen characters, and sometimes I do, but that's not what I'm after. I'm not trying to evangelize GURPS more generally (i.e., by running a demo), I'm trying to evangelize the use of GURPS long-term for the group.

The way around the problem that I used most recently was to do a one-off with mostly pre-gen characters, and then start over with a proper campaign and new, whole cloth characters. That sort of worked. But it begged the question: why should I have to do this in the first place?

Originally Posted by trooper6

Now, I don't tend to run Supers, so that might be part of it.

I run into this problem when players try to make *wizards.* Skill and spell selection becomes a slog. In fact, it's because of the wizards that I tend to start my groups at 100 points rather than a more comfortable 200. Because giving a wizard 200 points at the starting line is like throwing him into a sack full of bees.