Suggestion for someone returning to GURPS

[FrackingBiscuit]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

It would be more straightforward to determine the planet’s size and mass and surface gravity first, then do all the atmospheric characteristics together afterwards, but there is a very good reason not to: you’d often end up with an uninhabitable or implausible planet unless you chose type (temperature and atmospheric composition) first. The order of the steps in basic worldbuilding makes it possible to design the kind of world you want, starting with its world types and surface conditions and then working out what physical characteristics you need to get those, and then working out what orbit the planet needs to be in to get what you want. This is the very mechanism that saves you from randomly generating scads and scads of boring empty systems.

Space 3e does exactly that, determining size/mass/gravity first and atmosphere second. It works just fine. As it stands, splitting atmosphere into two different sections is just obnoxious. Especially when the book doesn't tell you that you can't determine atmospheric pressure until after explaining the concept to you...

Seriously, it should be intuitive that information about a planet's atmosphere is under the step labeled "Atmosphere" and not the step labeled "World Size." If world size has to be worked out first, I say work it out first instead of in the middle of some other step. This is a gaming supplement, not a textbook.

If you're worried about randomly generating too many boring star systems, then just tweak the systems you generate to make them less boring. Or design them to be interesting from the get-go. Plenty of settings and resources - including Space 4e - assume that most systems aren't going to have a habitable planet, and hence are going to be pretty boring to most players.

It seems reasonable to me to leave the boring details we don't care about to random dice rolls. If we need something to be interesting, either we just decide that it is, or we ignore dice rolls that we don't like. I do both all the time.