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Old 10-28-2009, 09:54 AM   #271
DouglasCole
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by Nymdok View Post
His argument is not without merit. Tangibility is a marketable asset even if it is a misguided sentiment.

I think it might be best served if some one wrote an adventure using nothing but the Basic Set.

The genre itself is unimportant, but I think agreeing now that Getting an adventure to run with as few books as possible is one way to increase its appeal.

Nymdok
I had once proposed something I called "self-contained scenarios" which would have been adventures which could be run with GURPS Lite and ONE 128 page softcover (this was in 3e days).

That model doesn't work anymore, but Basic 4e is much expanded, and the genre books more fleshed out.

Anyway, I tried to make one of my own, and it got to the first draft stage (meaning draft submitted to SJG after outline and contract issuance) before it got lost (in my case literally) in business and org rearrangements and a shift in what the staff wanted from the draft.

Still, it was tens of thousands of words, with maps, NPCs, in a Special Ops or Black Ops setting.

Who would be interested in that?
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Old 10-28-2009, 09:56 AM   #272
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by Graham View Post
For example, if Brett, Carnifex and I each wrote two adventures of a linked six scenario campaign set against the backdrop of the Tales of the Solar Patrol, as an introduction to GURPS, would it engender enough interest to increase the sales of each adventure to a point that it would make it worth committing the time to?

If the answer is still 'no', then there's our dilemma.

Graham
i think the answer would be "yes". well, if that solar patrol stuff would be made available to a larger audience and not just the old gurps players who have a look at e23.
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Old 10-28-2009, 09:57 AM   #273
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by opposedToGravity View Post
the core story of gurps was meant to be infinite worlds, but they didnt finish it.
Yes, they did: GURPS Infinite Worlds is a very detailed expansion of the background, and there's even been a few e23 releases to back it up. (Plus, technically, EVERY background they release is part of the Infinite Worlds if you want it to be.) There's even a detailed adventure in the Britannica-6 supplement.

But even there, it's hard to release something that everyone will play. Group A may be doing a straight Infinity Patrol campaign, Group B may be guides for Time Tours, Inc., while Group C is playing a sympathetic Centrum that's only trying to save its timeline.

Even so, I wouldn't mind having a few more core adventures to help spark ideas and show a newcomer how it's done. But that runs up against what's been said many times here: Steve Jackson can only publish adventures if people write them. And right now, for most writers (and thus the company), it makes more sense to write supplements.

EDIT: That said, I wouldn't mind a basic, introductory adventure as part of a new supplement, the way that "Black Diamond:Episode 0" was folded into the first edition of GURPS Cliffhangers. But again, I don't know what the logistics of that are.
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:01 AM   #274
DouglasCole
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by mlangsdorf View Post
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.

As far as writing the combat scenes and adventure without knowing the party composition, that's simple. The writer estimates the range of abilities and plans for that. If the PCs include abilities beyond what the writer planned, he notes some contingencies to deal with it.
This seems exactly right to me. You go into the writing of the scenario assuming a "standard" party of five to seven people with certain roles and skill levels assumed OUT LOUD. "This adventure is written around six adventurers, and assumes a group fairly proficient at either direct combat with TL8 firearms, or the ability to avoid combat entirely through stealth and guile."


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PS - I've submitted a proposal for a Dungeon Fantasy adventure to SJGames, and I fully expect to not make anywhere enough money to justify spending time writing it.
This is a key point. At least for me, it wasn't ever about the money. It was more about the invested time in writing, rewriting, interacting with the changing staff (this seems less an issue than before). The money is an afterthought, not likely to remotely recoup the months to years required to complete the process.
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:15 AM   #275
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by Gigermann View Post
In lieu of actual "published" material, I think a good start would be for these forums to have a sectioned-off area where folks can post their ongoing campaign synopses and whatnot; not for comment, necessarily, but for a repository of existing campaigns that less-industrious GMs can pirate to their hearts' glee. I've seen talk of several, here, that would be good fodder for others' use.

Note to forum gods ;)
I second the motion.
I would like that... out there are similar projects, they usually start well but people drop posting after a short time…
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:16 AM   #276
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Steve Jackson has been in the business thirty years, has tried nearly everything, and surely watches his competitor as well as we do. It is absurd to suppose that he needs a bloke with a pseudonym on the Internet to point out the possibilities to him. His considered answer is that producing such material looks like a good idea provided that the writers take a risk on the royalties. He has looked at the sales figures. He has looked at the other companies in the industry. He's certainly aware that he could get the material written if he paid 5˘ per word or even 4˘ per word up front. $4,500 up front would get him the copy written for a series of six adventures in a line of his choice. The other investments he figures on making anyway, as is evidenced by the presence of "Adventures" on the wish list.
i dont know what steve jackson needs.

i guess we all write what we think would work and what we would want to see. we write about what we as customers perceive as current faults of the gurps line. things that it lacks.
some of us think that these notions are unrealistic.

somewhere there is error.

however the fact that -as far as i know- no world book was supported by a full fledged campaign lets us only speculate about the outcome of such a product.
apparently SJG was unwilling to take the risk of such a product whereas other companies had huge success with such products. in fact i dont know any world book that was successful without such campaigns.

those of us who think that such a product would fail only argue that the gurps audience is too diverse for such a product.
who knows? we can only know if we try it. or if SJG tries it at least once.
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:20 AM   #277
DouglasCole
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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on the whole i think we see two sides.

one view is that it is impossible to design any supporting ready to use scenarios for gurps because campaigns can be so different and that the future of gurps should be yet more genre books.
I would perhaps state it differently. "it is impossible to design any supporting ready to use scenarios for gurps" because the slice of people who would buy any one scenario makes it not worthwhile for SJG to choose to commit the editing and layout resources to that small scenario rather than an equivalent time on a tech, setting, or genre book. It's not that the scenarios aren't desired, it's that they're less desired and less profitable (based on the existing marketing experience and data over the last two or three decades) than other things to which the limited resources can be applied.

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the other view is that 150+ genre books are enough and supporting ready to use scenarios are exactly what gurps is lacking.
Even if GURPS is definitively lacking this (I tend to agree, but as others have pointed out, there are lots of either ready or close-to-ready templates for adventures and mini-campaigns out there), it still doesn't follow that it's a good business decision to alter the primary business model.

Doug
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:20 AM   #278
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by Rocket Man View Post
Yes, they did: GURPS Infinite Worlds is a very detailed expansion of the background, and there's even been a few e23 releases to back it up. (Plus, technically, EVERY background they release is part of the Infinite Worlds if you want it to be.) There's even a detailed adventure in the Britannica-6 supplement.

But even there, it's hard to release something that everyone will play. Group A may be doing a straight Infinity Patrol campaign, Group B may be guides for Time Tours, Inc., while Group C is playing a sympathetic Centrum that's only trying to save its timeline.

Even so, I wouldn't mind having a few more core adventures to help spark ideas and show a newcomer how it's done. But that runs up against what's been said many times here: Steve Jackson can only publish adventures if people write them. And right now, for most writers (and thus the company), it makes more sense to write supplements.

EDIT: That said, I wouldn't mind a basic, introductory adventure as part of a new supplement, the way that "Black Diamond:Episode 0" was folded into the first edition of GURPS Cliffhangers. But again, I don't know what the logistics of that are.
if there would be a campaign for infinite worlds i think people would play it and maybe even generate characters for this campaign (if it promises to be good). the more flexible the plot the better the chances. maybe there could be a hook that might work for characters from different power groups. these things might require some thought but they are far from imposible.
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:24 AM   #279
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by opposedToGravity View Post
if there would be a campaign for infinite worlds i think people would play it and maybe even generate characters for this campaign (if it promises to be good). the more flexible the plot the better the chances. maybe there could be a hook that might work for characters from different power groups. these things might require some thought but they are far from imposible.
Maybe it's the lack of sleep talking, but I could swear that even just the information in the Basic Set offers plenty of plot hook ideas for the IW campaign.
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Old 10-28-2009, 10:24 AM   #280
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Default Re: GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

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Originally Posted by opposedToGravity View Post
the core story of gurps was meant to be infinite worlds, but they didnt finish it.
That's not an accurate use of the term "core story." Infinite Worlds is a setting in itself, and a frame for other, more specific settings. But there is not a single prototype IW adventure comparable to a dungeon crawl or superhero/supervillain fight. There is not a single standard party of IW adventurers to become involved in such an adventure.

Really, what IW is is a frame, into which all the GURPS campaign settings can be fitted. So a GM who wants to run a campaign that brings together people from radically different backgrounds, or that spends one session in a medieval fantasy world and the next in a classic cyberpunk or space opera milieu, has a standard rationalization for why this works. And a GM who, like me, finds that sort of thing a bore is free to ignore it (which was not the case, for example, in TORG's variant on multigenre gaming).

Bill Stoddard
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