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

[Sam Baughn]

Originally Posted by weevis

Now if only I had a good podcast GURPS example to go with it.

While they aren't too concerned with the rules, Film Reroll is a fun podcast of people playing GURPS combined with material which a lot of people will likely be familiar with.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Sam Baughn

While they aren't too concerned with the rules, Film Reroll is a fun podcast of people playing GURPS combined with material which a lot of people will likely be familiar with.

Thanks, this is a great find!! I can't believe I didn't know about it before. I really like the podcast.

However, for the reason you mention I'm not sure I would use it for onboarding. I'll listen to more episodes to see how much they vary, but the ones I tried are more like improv comedy. I thought I was rules-light but the style there is lighter than mine.

They do a great job of making GURPS sound fun though, which is important.

[Black Leviathan]

It really depends on where my players are coming from. Generally if it's your first time at the table you get the discussion about 3d6-under stat and little bit about crits and margin of success, and the rest we go over when it comes up.

From now on I think I'm doing Template characters for new players. It's taken me a long time to recognize that 4th Edition is really intimidating in Character Generation if you're not already a GURPS player and even if you are the analysis paralysis of all of those choices is tough.

I've started giving my new players the combat action flashcards, even if you've been doing very complex RPGs they help solidify the "What can I do in combat" idea very effectively.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

From now on I think I'm doing Template characters for new players. It's taken me a long time to recognize that 4th Edition is really intimidating in Character Generation

I completely agree!

As for the combat cards, I do not like them that well. If the players are very new 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.

[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.