Has SJGames been working on GURPS 5th edition for 2 years, or is Steve just trolling?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Some of this must be that distributors bought books when they had these large print runs, and people would end up actually buying the book at a retailer years later.

That was a print industry wide phenomenon until they changed the tax laws to make unsold inventory be taxable.

John M. Ford explained it a while ago. I think it must have been in the 90s when it happened and I'm pretty sure that late 3e books were still getting that 5000 book print run.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That was a print industry wide phenomenon until they changed the tax laws to make unsold inventory be taxable.

John M. Ford explained it a while ago. I think it must have been in the 90s when it happened and I'm pretty sure that late 3e books were still getting that 5000 book print run.

Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner (of Internal Revenue; basically, Thor v IRS), 1979. So, considerably pre-GURPS.

[Anders]

Thor vs. the IRS would be a Marvel Movie I'd be willing to watch.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That was a print industry wide phenomenon until they changed the tax laws to make unsold inventory be taxable.

As well, Texas is one of the few states to have its own inventory taxes.

Originally Posted by Anders

Thor vs. the IRS would be a Marvel Movie I'd be willing to watch.

It's a whole spinoff Disney+ series, "Agents of I.R.S.", fanning out on missions to try and calculate the fair market value of Asgard and all its contents, so Thor can be properly charged estate tax after Odin dies. I don't know what Asgard is worth, but it's got to be more than USD $13 million. Tom Hiddleston guest stars as Thor's tax lawyer.

[Harald387]

Originally Posted by Varyon

DtG is, quite frankly, an amazing product, and I'd love to see the same approach applied to other genres. It takes the complexity of character generation and simplifies it to something more akin to the "Pointless Slaying and Looting" concept Kromm published in Pyramid a few years back, but all the components are still there so you can easily modify it and add back on whatever complexity you need.

Another supplement you'll want to look at is Action 4: Specialists, which is honestly what gave me the framework for Delvers to Grow in the first place.

[sir_pudding]

There still seems a bit of qpples-to-oranges comparison to print book runs that mostly went to retailers and sat on shelves or were special orders in-store versus crowd funded PDFs. Shouldn't the comparison at least be to copies of the pdf sold over a period of years, as that 5000 book run did, rather than just to the (effectively) pre-order sales?

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Anders

Thor vs. the IRS would be a Marvel Movie I'd be willing to watch.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

It's a whole spinoff Disney+ series, "Agents of I.R.S.", fanning out on missions to try and calculate the fair market value of Asgard and all its contents, so Thor can be properly charged estate tax after Odin dies. I don't know what Asgard is worth, but it's got to be more than USD $13 million. Tom Hiddleston guest stars as Thor's tax lawyer.

I'm waiting for the Guardians of the Galaxy crossover when they raid Knowhere because the Collector won't document the provenance of his inventory.

[Opellulo]

I think that expecting a 5th edition in 2023 is just wishful thinking if not completely delusional: 4th edition is 20 years old and to put it into perspective it come out around the same time as D&D 3.5... Since then there was enough time for Pathfinder to born, have 2 complete editions, multiple expansions, some videogames and to become the 2nd most played fantasy RPG out there.

The only thing left to hope is that someone would licence the GURPS system to put out something a bit more in line with modern tastes and mechanics. For other publishers this aspect was revolutionized few months ago between the whole OGL and ORC debacle; i don't know if SJGames has in mind to put out a similar move.

P.S. 50 pages GURPS-like rule system ditching the realism fetish in favor of streamlined gameplay and modular setting supplements? Take my money already!

[Rolando]

A name change perhaps?

You can't really ditch the realism and the realistic measures (using real world measures as a base) and still call it Generic and Universal. It will be an RPG sure, like a hundred independently published systems already out there though.

[zoncxs]

I would not buy any GURPS 5th edition if they did that.

GURPS as it is, is capable of both realism (to the extent that a game can do) and high cinematic, with everything inbetween.

People who claim it does not do that, haven't spent enough time learning the system. I have ran gritty realistic mystery games and High action super hero games and DF games of several flavors. My most current one is a Martial Arts game that has chi powers with unlimited scaling, that is the players start at "Street Fighter" level (the game) and are capable of going full Dragon Ball Z. This is only possible with a system that has rules in place that allows this shift without needing a different set of rules for going from one end to the other.