GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

[mikeejimbo]

Originally Posted by Cybren

Points of Light is more their tagline for it than a name.

Oh, I stand corrected. I just thought I'd heard that in association with its name.

Well, it's beyond the point anyway. The point is that there is indeed a presumed setting, as you said.

[opposedToGravity]

Originally Posted by mikeejimbo

'Standard' Fantasy doesn't appeal to ALL gamers. Perhaps the largest group, but by no means all.

And what do you mean by 'Standard', anyway?

i didnt say all, i said most. if i indeed said all, then i meant most.

standard: world with wizards, pantheon, good gods, bad gods, elves, dwarves, orcs. you get the idea?

[mikeejimbo]

Originally Posted by opposedToGravity

i didnt say all, i said most. if i indeed said all, then i meant most.

standard: world with wizards, pantheon, good gods, bad gods, elves, dwarves, orcs. you get the idea?

But even a world with wizards, a pantheon, good gods, bad gods, elves, dwarves and orcs can vary greatly. Discworld has most of that, but it's much different from Banestorm, which also has all of that. On the other hand, you might be able to write an adventure that would fit in both.

[opposedToGravity]

Originally Posted by mikeejimbo

But even a world with wizards, a pantheon, good gods, bad gods, elves, dwarves and orcs can vary greatly. Discworld has most of that, but it's much different from Banestorm, which also has all of that. On the other hand, you might be able to write an adventure that would fit in both.

what do you think that a large audience can identify with? that is standard.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by PrinceYyrkoon

For example, players could search for an ancient abandoned temple complex on a desolate world where it rains constantly. Only to find that a race of hostile aliens is searching the ruins for the same artifact. I dont know, thats just off the top of my head. But that kind of scenario is surely 'generic' enough for lots of Gurps players to be able to adapt to their own campaigns succesfully.

Oh, but it's not ready to run, is it?

I mean, wasn't that the point of this thread? You think that running GURPS is too much work for the GM, because you have to come up with everything yourself.. and converting other settings and adventures is too much work for the GM as well. You want people to write things for you so you won't have to do any work. But when someone points out that ready-to-run adventures aren't very portable between different sets of setting and genre assumptions, you counter with an example that utterly fails to accomplish the thing you asked for.

But then, that's what we've been hearing from you all thread, isn't it? You want GURPS adventures written for you, you're convinced that you should be able to have what you want, and you'll say anything as long as you get to keep insisting you're right:

"SJG should make setting support!" (But they do.)
"If they did, it would sell tons of books! I guarantee it!" (But they don't sell, and the sales figures prove it.)
"But everyone would buy a good setting if it had proper support!" (Even leaving aside the fact that there's no way to guarantee that a setting will be good, this is patently false.)
"SJG will go out of business if they don't give me what I want!" (Never mind that they're one of the longest-lived RPG publishers around.)
"Other companies with generic games have setting support!" (Other games are not GURPS; they're generally more abstract, and support a particular play style, such as Savage Worlds with its two-fisted pulp action bias.)

And then the above example, where you try to prove that it's easy to make a ready-to-run adventure with broad appeal by doing nothing of the sort.

In short, your entire contribution to the thread after its inception could probably be summarized as "Nuh-uh!" I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting a little tired of reading this. If you can't come up with more convincing arguments than you have done, maybe you should stop assuming you're right about everything and consider what other people are saying instead of flatly contradicting them all the time.

For instance: you keep saying that Savage Worlds is able to support a setting, so GURPS should be able to. Okay. But what evidence do you have that SW's settings are successful? And if they are, why do you think people are willing to buy SW setting material but not the existing GURPS setting material?

Also, consider that SJG has limited financial resources. How do you propose they entice writers to create more adventures without paying them more money?

[opposedToGravity]

Originally Posted by Brett

Well, what GURPS settings are on the shelves in bookstores? Banestorm. Interstellar Wars. Vorkosigan? Even Transhuman Space isn't properly in print.

Two of those are licensed properties and basically out of the question. Banestorm is probably a good idea for most of the reasons I gave for Tales of the Solar Patrol, but it is competing in the crowded fantasy market. Personally, I don't like the sound of Yrth, so I won't be voting for an adventure set there.

i agree. dont like yrth either. but under the circumstances it would seem the better choice because it is in the stores.

it just doesnt feel right to support something you are afraid to actually print. if it sells well enough on e23 to see print, then by all means, solar patrol.

however (as i discovered today) there already exist some scenarios for THS then it might be a good choice too. provided it would be available again.
a larger campaign might be nice. or a series of losely connected scenarios. something that introduces new players to most parts of the setting.

[mikeejimbo]

Originally Posted by opposedToGravity

what do you think that a large audience can identify with? that is standard.

I guess that would be something Tolkien-esque.

Originally Posted by Xplo

Also, consider that SJG has limited financial resources. How do you propose they entice writers to create more adventures without paying them more money?

Hm. Everything I can think of involves more money. Like, it'd be cheaper for SJG to give writers free PDFs, but it would still cost them, so it's essentially more money. Maybe they could pay in character points? I could use another level of IQ.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by opposedToGravity

you must be kidding me.
you are unable to create a dungeon fantasy combat encounter without knowing the party?!?

here is a hint:
you open a door and see 6 orcs sitting at a table playing cards. as they see you, they grab their weapons.

the actual setting is not essential. take a town in which a cult of an evil deity does bad things. then describe in some detail the nature of the bad things.
this is portable enough.

if you want to support banestorm and df, then yes, use banestorm.

Uh huh. That wouldn't work out so well for a lot of my campaigns, or campaigns I'd run...even Fantasy ones.

If the PCs in my game are: A foreign princess/ambassador, a courtier, a scholar, and drunken crown prince. That adventure is completely worthless to me. You have this assumption that adventures are going to be comprised of running around killing things and taking their stuff. GURPS offers so many different sorts of campaign frames. The THS campaign I was in that whswhs ran had virtually no combat in three years real time. It was a thrilling and tense and exciting sci-fi campaign I will always think on fondly. It was also a sci-fi campaign where we never left Earth. So a whole lot of what you imagine would work as "generic sci-fi" adventure would not work at all for a campaign that centered around detectives.

Are there ways around the challenges? Sure. It would involved providing a campaign frame, starting location, and a lot of information about what the campaign would need to be like as well as the adventures themselves.

And not everyone might want to play a combat heavy soldiers in the Army of the King of Caithness campaign, or a Dynasty style high-soap opera politics of young nobles campaign, or even a dungeon crawl fantasy...all of those things would be completely different campaigns with different sorts of adventures that would be appropriate for them, many of them mutually exclusive...and that is all in the world of Banestorm.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. Traditional D&D modules didn't assume a world setting and only vaguely assume a party composition. That's never been a problem.

The thing is that the party composition in Dungeons and Dragons, or in dungeon fantasy more generally, is fairly predictable in advance, because all the characters will be one of a fairly short list of options. But a lot of GURPS campaigns have worlds with more specific backgrounds, where the possible character types are implied by the nature of the background. Fantasy of this type has been around for a long time, at least since RuneQuest (it might go back to Empire of the Petal Throne . . . I haven't actually read any version of it, so I don't know): RuneQuest adventurers come from a background native to Glorantha, and develop along paths that make sense in that specific context. And it works differently from D&D fantasy.

And a lot of GURPS fantasy campaigns have options that are (a) not quite so standard and (b) setting-inspired.

Take my current high fantasy campaign. Its six pcs are

The spirit of Errol Flynn, given apotheosis as the god of swashbuckling adventure, and descended among mortals to command a privateer ship

A disinherited Atlantean nobleman who has built what he considers the perfect ship, mystically bonded to it, and now serves as a privateer entrepreneur in Atlantean pay

The exiled Greek god Aeolus, disguised as a mortal sailing master able to "whistle up the wind"

The exiled Irish god Miacha, serving as the ship's surgeon

A female rakshasa warrior with the ability to shapeshift into a tiger, having adventures among mortals as a way to prove herself as a warrior

A teenage Canadian métis girl with visionary powers who fled to the astral plane after attracting the attention of certain Lovecraftian entities

Trying to find published adventures for those six might be a bit more of a challenge.

Bill Stoddard

[Sydney]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Trying to find published adventures for those six might be a bit more of a challenge.

Bill Stoddard

Agreed, and my current fantasy game is heavily Celtic Inspired...with some modification, such as turning up the Wuxia level a bit to begin with, then cranking it up to really high levels...I'm sure the first adventure I'm working on for my group wouldn't work well for many other fantasy campaigns because it makes basic assumptions about the setting that don't exist as such in others.