GMs -- Don't we all want to roll our own?

[Parody]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

So that's why the stormtroopers in the chasm couldn't hit Luke and Leia (and what the heck is a chasm doing in a space station, anyway??). Bummer about the one that fell down the hole, though. Or was that a real stormtrooper that you pushed down?

Right before that there's a bit where a group of stormtroopers runs away from Han and Chewie. When Han comes charging around a corner there's an ambush. That was us. We ran into an officer stormie who made us turn around and set up for said ambush.

After that failure, we were directed to the ventilation shaft or whatever the chasm was. Officer guy spent the time asking us if we'd had our weapons checked out lately, since we couldn't hit the broad side of a bantha with them. We asked if he would take the lead and show us how to do it right. Things kinda went downhill from there. (For him, especially.)

[knarf]

Until recently, I have subsisted on published settings. Every game I have successfully run before 2008 relied on a book or books to provide the world.

In the fall of last year, I gathered a group to try out the D6 System, just to see if it was as bad as people were saying. But I didn't have any settings for it. So I wound up "rolling my own" and am surprised with how well it has turned out.

[rlbeaver]

As a GM, I like to create my own, or just use any published one as a framework. As far as the latter, I don't bother with any type of conversion, don't see the point. I make up stats for people/things as I go along. However, admittedly, I have grown to love the Plot Point Campaigns by Pinnacle Entertainment.

Now, if using a published setting for a game system I'm using, my wish would be they publish a setting with the player's guide and GM's guide or use Pinnacle's model of setting book with Player's Guide PDF with license to print 5 for your players...

As a player, there are times I wish the GM would use a published setting. My most recent experience of someone running a "home built setting" resulted in being handed a manuscript of 150 pages, poorly written, boring...with your character creation rules spread throughout so you couldn't get out of reading it unscathed. They were deeply proud of their setting and the history they created, their wife regaled us with tales of previous adventures they had in the setting...so, I can support the idea of published settings.

[Irish Wolf]

On topic (which I haven't been before - sorry), I can run pregen adventures quite nicely. The players like the way I modify the flavor text to better suit whatever's supposed to be going on (come on, when you're seven floors beneath the surface of the world, and all the light you've got comes from two torches, are you really going to be able to make out the golden scrollwork at the tops of the thirty-foot-tall double doors?).

However, I found that most existing worlds, in both of the genres I've run games in (D&D and superhero), fall short of my desires in some ways. Accordingly, I've been creating worlds for both for some time. The fantasy world includes a pantheon of nine deities, one with no PC worshippers (because I don't let chaotic-evil types be PCs in my games), plus one whose worship is officially forbidden (Technos the Uncaring, God of the Machine, blamed in popular mythology for the Godswar that brought an end to the Old World, untold aeons ago....), as well as a number of "support groups", as it were, for various types of heroes - think of them as guilds. They're a wonderfully easy way to separate adventurers from their money - if you want the support of the Union of Shieldbrothers, you pay the 500 crown/lunar month membership fee.

The superhero one includes a rational for why the supers didn't win WWII all by their lonesomes (basically, each side had its own groups, which kept all the others busy; the only parahuman who made a real difference in the war was the US's Major Victory, who died delivering the first A-bomb to Hiroshima), and a legal structure enabling costumed parahumans who've chosen to register with the Bureau of Parahuman Affairs to testify in court without having to compromise their secret identities. (If you don't choose to register, it's your own affair - but you get no help from the government, and of course there's no secure way to establish your identity, so anyone you send to jail might not have to stay.)

[balzacq]

Originally Posted by obatron

As a player, there are times I wish the GM would use a published setting. My most recent experience of someone running a "home built setting" resulted in being handed a manuscript of 150 pages, poorly written, boring...with your character creation rules spread throughout so you couldn't get out of reading it unscathed. They were deeply proud of their setting and the history they created, their wife regaled us with tales of previous adventures they had in the setting...so, I can support the idea of published settings.

That's not a problem inherent to homebrew settings, that a problem inherent in disorganized GMs -- I won't say "bad" GMs, because presentation of information is a different skill than running combats and so forth, but it's a necessary one nevertheless.

[Johnny Angel]

Personally, I love to create my own worlds. That is one of the main reasons I started playing GURPS - it seemed more friendly toward sandbox style/world building GMs.

However, as someone who is new to the system, I think it would be nice to have some sort of premade product to look at. (I picked up Banestorm for this reason.) In particular -as I've mentioned elsewhere on this very site- it would be nice to have a GURPS suppliment which goes into more detail about creating monsters and creatures. (There probably is a product like that, but, if so, I'm not aware of it.) I'd like to have something which is part monster manual and part "For Dummies" book. I don't consider myself to be stupid, but being completely new to a system tends to have the side effect of things not being quite as obvious as they are to people who are more familiar with the system.

For example: The product might have a centaur already statted out, and with a racial template ready to go and everything. It would then go into detail and explain how the centaur was put together using the GURPS rules. Be sure to note that the creatures in the product are only one possible vision of a creature and that GMs should feel free to create their own visions of creatures. The last part there might seem obvious to you and I, but that doesn't mean it's obvious to other people; sometimes it can be a little scary to step off the beaten path -especially for new GMs.

I don't think it would hurt for GURPS to incorporate a few more examples into some of their books. Many of the products contain a lot of information, and the information is great information, but sometimes -for someone new- it's like "well, ok, that sounds cool, but now what do I do with it?" or "what can I do with it?" The answer with GURPS is to do whatever you want with the information, but, again, I feel that a few examples would be nice in many cases.

Also, there are some topics which aren't exactly obvious to figure out because the information is in several different places. Trying to figure out how to train an animal took me looking at 3-4 different sections. Some of the sections such as Animal Handling skill were very obvious. If I were not familiar with the system, I would have never thought to look at the study rules to figure out how many skill points an animal earned.

I could have probably said all of this with less text, but I think what I'm trying to get at is that a nice product (in my opinion) for GURPS would be a premade setting which is part setting and part training wheels for people who are new to the system. Make the setting intentionally vague and leave room to expand upon the setting and add your own material. As I said with the MM idea, have a few sections which explain how certain things in the premade setting were built with GURPS' rules. "This is Lord Wutzit; this is how he was created... These are some of the creatures common in Lord Wutzit's realm; this is how they were created... etc; etc; etc"

[Michael Cule]

I have created my own worlds: I'm in the process of doing so right now with a REIGN campaign.

But I like to take other people's worlds and treat them as 'found art': here's something pretty I came across. Let's see what fun I can have with it.

Next week I'm starting a HEROQUEST game set in Glorantha. I'll have fun there too.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

as I've mentioned elsewhere on this very site- it would be nice to have a GURPS suppliment which goes into more detail about creating monsters and creatures. (There probably is a product like that, but, if so, I'm not aware of it.)

For 3rd ed., GURPS Bestiary has a four-page chapter on that, and GURPS Fantasy Bestiary has eleven pages. GURPS Space Bestiary only has a single page, but it includes one of my favorite lines about GURPS: "in GURPS, species is a special effect".

A 4th ed. Bestiary series is on the e23 Wish List, and a lot of players' personal wish lists.

[pawsplay]

I believe that there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. All the work I don't have to sink into world-building is energy I can be using to create characters, situations, stories, and such. If there is no world that suits my needs, I create one, but if there is, I'm happy to use it. I enjoy, also, experiencing other people's ideas.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

So that's why the stormtroopers in the chasm couldn't hit Luke and Leia

No, the real reason is that Darth Vader or Grand Moff Tarkin had got someone to plant a tracer on the Millennium Falcon, in the hope that Princess Leia would be rescued and lead the Death Star to the location of the rebels' secret base. And whaddyaknow: it worked. It would not have worked if Leia or the people with the keys to the ship had been killed or captured. So Vader and the Grand Moff, being cluey guys with more forethought than Prometheus, would naturally have ordered the storm troopers to make damned sure that they didn't shoot anybody.

It always amazes me that no-one gets this. It is an important plot point that the bad guys' plan was to let Leia escape and to follow her ship. Of course the storm troopers were all going to miss.