Reviewer gives GURPS Space substance 3 out of 5

[Paul]

Originally Posted by Luther

Personally I think that SJG should use Web-Enhancement for such things.

Would it suprise anyone to learn such an item was in the works?

[DryaUnda]

Originally Posted by jahn

I bet people like Reid would have preferred a simpler treatment that takes half the space and use that space for charts of weapons, tech and spaceships along with a simple space combat system).

Funny you should mention that...

Originally Posted by Britt Reid

The bad part of gurps space 4e isn't anything that's in it, it's what's not in it that hurts. In a book about space and technology, not one single piece of equipmwent is statted out in 4e terms. Not one single weapon, ship or even a spacesuit appears in stat form, and that hurts the book a lot.

What made it worse is that I dug up my gurps space 3e book to compare the two. GS3e was 175 pages and had several useful lists of weapons, equipment and gear taking up a few pages. It also had a basic modular starship construction system and a spaceship combat system. Lastly, it was softcover, flat paper, B&W and more affordable.

Originally Posted by Britt Reid

The bad part of gurps space 4e isn't anything that's in it, it's what's not in it that hurts. In a book about space and technology, not one single piece of equipmwent is statted out in 4e terms. Not one single weapon, ship or even a spacesuit appears in stat form, and that hurts the book a lot.

What made it worse is that I dug up my gurps space 3e book to compare the two. GS3e was 175 pages and had several useful lists of weapons, equipment and gear taking up a few pages. It also had a basic modular starship construction system and a spaceship combat system.

The thing is that they seem to be trying to avoid repeating content. So to look for spacecraft (or any other vehicles) you need only look in GURPS Vehicles 4e, once it is out. Although the fact that Fantasy does not follow this guideline is odd.

You can do space campaigns using the equipment and ships in the basic set. Ultra-Tech and Vehicles 4e of course will help those who want even more. But it is a trade off. If you don't want to repeat content then GURPSers may need to buy more books. I for one am OK with that trade off because I am likely to buy the "catalog" books anyway and would rather not have repeated pages.

The complaint about hardcover, color editions is silly though. I think the prices are pretty reasonable for what you get. A lot of other games are pricier than the GURPS 4e line. I think the reviewer is simply biased against SJG for some reason (the stab at forum moderators makes this obvious).

[Mark Skarr]

Hmm, I think his final paragraph is quite telling:

Originally Posted by Britt Reid

It also shows why getting "Star Hero" might be a better buy if you want gaming material foor a gaming system as opposed to a refference book for a budding SF writer, especially since one of the authors of GS4e worked on star hero.

Hmmm . . . cross purposes or innocent suggestion?
You decide.

Edit:
The only reason I bought GURPS Fantasy is because of the Author. I hate fantasy, but I'll pretty much buy anything that has William H. Stoddard's name on it.

[Luther]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

The only reason I bought GURPS Fantasy is because of the Author. I hate fantasy, but I'll pretty much buy anything that has William H. Stoddard's name on it.

WhsWhs rocks.

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

... but I'll pretty much buy anything that has William H. Stoddard's name on it.

Having interacted with William H. Stoddard on at least one playtest, and as a fan of GURPS Fantasy I would certainly have to agree!!

On the actual question of Substance 3/5 (for the purposes of disclosing my potential biases to the project, I was a playtester on GURPS Space...) I would have this to say:

There is a lot of Substance to this product. Depending upon what you want to do with the material, there is ample material for designing the things that you are likely to find *in* space, like alien races and new worlds...

While there are some discussions of government types and campaign types and even a large set of templates of character types that show up in SF campaigns, there are not a lot of materials that provide in depth discussions of what a GM would do *downstream* of a set of technological assumptions. This is on purpose and was part of the design of this product...

Specifically, there are discussions in general of how communications and travel technologies differ. Depending upon the combination of any one 'setting' for communications and any other 'setting' for travel work you could potentially have a huge set of resulting society types...

High speed communication + low speed FTL travel, for example would make piracy among the stars much more difficult. On the other hand, if FTL Travel is the limit for communication--Poof! Traveller!

There are so many combinations of assumptions that one could make that conceptually, it made a lot of sense to discuss in concept what impact technology has, and then go into a lot of detail on any one axis of technological development in downstream books.

Ultra Tech, for example, will have a lot of indepth discussion of what each technology *means* and along the genetic engineering/medical axis, Bio-Tech will have a great deal of discussion as well. (I was a playtester on GURPS Biotech too, incidentally)

The point that I'm making is that there is so much material out there for writing and running Space adventures, that complaining that everything isn't in one book (as this review appears to do) simply isn't fair to the scope of the project.

I don't know if it is permissible or appropriate for a playtester to also write a review, but I just might...

In any case, this reviewer appears to have penalized the work for not placing the substance that he would envision, but it's really unfair to say that there *isn't* substance in the work, to my mind.

There is a lot of discussion about star systems and world types... The material that 3e crammed into First In is much more appropriate (being that it's not just a subset of Traveller assumptions) in a book entitled "Space"

-Paraj Mandrekar

[Matuku]

Thanks for that.

Personally I like Space. Its true that it probably would be disappointing in actually providing stuff for use in the campaign, but its excellent in providing an insight into how to design the setting which is what I expected of it. The System generation rules are excellent and the alien ones look so too (though I haven't read them all yet). It gives me what I wanted, info on how to make a believable world, how it all works in real life and how literary SF compares to it. Personally I would just wait for the ultra-tech and vehicle books (Campaigns already contains vehicle combat rules which work well for space) and if I don't want to take the entire books with me when I GM I just copy out the stats of the important weapons/items/vehicles. If you want gadgets then this book isn't for you; if you want to create Space then its perfect (just like Fantasy was for fantasy settings it explores all the different ideas).

[Sam Cade]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I'll pretty much buy anything that has William H. Stoddard's name on it.

Stoddard and Wiseman here.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by synistar

You can do space campaigns using the equipment and ships in the basic set. Ultra-Tech and Vehicles 4e of course will help those who want even more. But it is a trade off. If you don't want to repeat content then GURPSers may need to buy more books. I for one am OK with that trade off because I am likely to buy the "catalog" books anyway and would rather not have repeated pages.

OTOH, repeated material means, in theory, fewer books one has to carry around to gaming sessions or have at the table. I didn't mind Cyberpunk repeating the TL8 chapter from Ultra-Tech -- it means I didn't have to carry Cyberpunk *and* Ultra-Tech with me. In general, I don't like to carry more than 3-4 books with me as GM.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by copeab

OTOH, repeated material means, in theory, fewer books one has to carry around to gaming sessions or have at the table. I didn't mind Cyberpunk repeating the TL8 chapter from Ultra-Tech -- it means I didn't have to carry Cyberpunk *and* Ultra-Tech with me. In general, I don't like to carry more than 3-4 books with me as GM.

Bah! Carrying books builds character. I remember in the old days we had to lug around all these stone tablets that the first RPGs were inscribed on. AND we had to make our own dice from painstakingly carved ivory wrested from the mighty mammoths...the youth of today...