How do GURPS groups tend to work?

[Emerikol]

If a group were playing a more genre focused game, like some fantasy one we all know about, the group would generally just play epic fantasy and nothing else because changing to something else means finding another game. I think many such groups are held by inertia.


Now let's discuss GURPS groups. Some questions...
1. Do you tend to rotate who is GM more?
2. Do you "rest" one campaign and switch genres to another campaign only to return later to the original? or do you just run something like a series of adventures which climax like an adventure path, then the game is over?
3. Do you tend to run a lot of genres? Like how many? Do you play many and run one or run many and play in one?

I'm looking primarily at group dynamics, who GMs, and what sort of genres are played and how diverse those are?

Also one last question...do you mostly play online or around a table? or both?

[Kromm]

I've played GURPS since it first existed. I've always been the full-time GM. We've always met as near to weekly as we could manage, always at my apartment, where my books and notes are. Despite the system's support for lots and lots of genres, and for genre crossovers, I've just about always run long-term campaigns in fairly narrow (if not always common) genres: 4 years of hack 'n' slash, 5 years of cinematic secret agents, 6 years of secret alien conspiracy, 7 years of epic fantasy, etc. I say "just about" because there have sometimes been short gaps in which I ran one-offs for a few weeks to a few months – also as the GM, also weekly at my place, also in narrow genres (alt-history, cyberpunk, supers, etc.). There has never been any rotation or overlap, of GMs or of campaigns.

[Farmer]

Our group, which goes back to the late 80s, currently has 4 regular members consisting of 2 regular GMs and 1 former GM who might make a GMing comeback. Our non-GM is our game journalist who takes detailed notes and writes them up in a session journal that is nicely written and fun to read, he also does most of the maintenance on our game wikis. This helps the GMs and players immensely.

We have 5 current campaigns and 1 potential (c.f. the GM thinking about a comeback) covering Modern sci-fi slightly space-operish post apoc(ish) with elements of SG and very long lasting and now over 1000 pt characters, and a modern espionage and intrigue game somewhat cinematic, 2 fantasy games with different worlds and twists, and a time-travel espionage campaign just started. The 1 potential game will be a more pure sci-fi game.

We've played a lot of different genres over a very long time.

We play exclusively online now due to locations (1 on a catamaran in the Med, two in Sydney but not close to each other, and another in a rural part of Australia). We originally were face to face, of course. We use FVTT and GGA, and Discord, plus our own private PHPBB message board, shared cloud storage, and a wiki for each game, and so on.

Frequency is based on availability, particularly the GM being able to prep. We try to alternate with 1-3 sessions of one and then 1-3 of the other. We do reset campaigns and come back to them, but we can also "complete" them. Some are designed to be shorter, others more epic.

We also run some parts on the message boards - the "bits between" sessions, if it's helpful. Our sessions also tend to be long. Minimum 5 hours, we've done 12 when the timing supports it (time zones, jobs, other activities, etc.). When we can, we cram it in, although sometimes sessions come to a natural pause inside the available time, and that's fine.

[Kesendeja]

I tend to be the GM for the games my group plays. We try to shoot for at least bi-weekly.

I prefer sandbox games, or as my husband calls them "kitchen sink games". They tend to end up epic, even if I'm not making them with "cinematic" rules. I just can't seem to do overly subtle for long without getting board.

The players don't help. Just too damn out there in thought processes. Box what box. Take the current game.

It's Resident Evil meets Parasite Eve meets Seal Team 666 meets Devil May Cry. Right now the poor characters are FBI agents on their way to my version of Racoon city....

The other one I was running was Warhammer 40k meets Shadowrun with a few other things thrown in.

[Dalin]

I ran a D&D adjacent GURPS campaign for 10+ years with a steady group of players. We didn't rotate GMs in that campaign, though players did occasionally run other campaigns with overlapping sets of players. Some of those games were also GURPS, though we also occasionally played Call of Cthulhu, Fudge, Traveler, Blue Planet, a diceless RPG called Persona, and a few others that I've forgotten.

Then I took a ~10-year hiatus from regular gaming as I started a new career, moved across the country, and started a family.

In recent years, I started running DFRPG for some colleagues who have settled into a fairly stable group. We do rotate GMs. Our longest "campaigns" have lasted about 2 years. We played only DFRPG for the first 4-5 years, mostly in Douglas Cole's Nordlond setting. Then we expanded into other genres, often running J.C. Connors' incredible collection of one-shot adventures. Some of those led to other adventures because we liked the characters so much. Last year I tried Monster Hunters for the first time, and we had a good time with that. We just wrapped up our first campaign. One of the other players is running a short DFRPG adventure right now and then I'm going to follow it up with a longer adventure for the same characters using an old D&D adventure for inspiration.

Finally, I'm also involved in a lot of youth games. At school, I help run an RPG club that features plenty of DFRPG. In the summers I run two week-long summer camps for both DFRPG and GURPS. And my own kids love RPGs and they and their friends regularly ask me to run adventures for them. They lean toward gonzo DF, but we've also done Monster Hunters, Action, Horror, Old West, and Star Trek. My kids have also GMed for me sometimes, which is always fun and I've played in a few games run by parents of their friends, though most of them speak D&D rather than GURPS.

[hal]

I've been largely the Group's GM since 1986, with a few "Breaks" running D&D with visiting GMs. I won't get into the dynamics of interplay other than to say that as GM, I try my damndest to avoid railroading the players and offer as best as I can, a Sandbox style campaign. Others ran linear style campaigns or as one GM ended up doing "you travel 2 days and run into an encounter, you fight. You beat your opponent, you travel 1 day, you have an encounter, and then you fight.

Those styles didn't go over well, which is why in part - I tend to be the GM.

That being said, one of my favorite campaigns involved a player turned GM who ran a Swashbuckling campaign. One of the other players turned spy on the rest of us, and when we found out, we sort of knocked the player character unconscious, buried him upright between the high and low tide mark, and put a bucket over his head until he came to. Then we had a talk with him about betrayal... left him on the beach to meet his fate as it were.

We've run the following Genres:

Classic sword and sandal fantasy

Yrth based Fantasy

Harn based Fantasy

Aftermath - where the players played themselves written up in GURPS

Swashbuckler

Traveller

Cyberpunk

Rome

Modern Fantasy (ie, hidden magic in modern times)

1920's Modern Fantasy (including the Black School - where 7 people enter into intense schooling for magic, the last one to leave the school loses their soul.

GURPS VOODOO - one player will NEVER play in GURPS VOODOO unless he can get an amulet protecting him from possession - as his character was possessed by a ghost. I'll leave the rest of that alone.

GURPS SUPERNATURAL - where the players meet up with Bobby and with Sam and Dean in New Orleans. They stumbled on the aftermath of the movie "Skeleton Key" with Kate Hudson. They met the old man - not Kate Hudson (will let you watch the movie without spoilers - it is THAT good).

GURPS SPIRITS (magic system) plus Alternate Timelines - where the players go camping in Allegany State Park in the less developed area (yes, we've all been there in real life) - only to find out that the night of the campout, they are covered by a dark mist, and transported to a time where the Romans are first breaking out of Italy and laying claim to the surrounding lands. There, they meet up with another set of campers who mention they're tired of the Kennedy boys always winning the office of the President, John, Robert, and Teddy - and solidly in favor of the 28th Amendment limiting office of presidency to non-family members. The third party they met was well, dead. Slain by SS troops fighting World War III in a world where Adolf was never defeated and the war was carried to America's shores. In short - a mix bag of Alternate Earths and Fantasy.

GURPS SANCTUARY (known better perhaps, as Thieves' World).

My wife, my best friend (who is also Godfather to my child) and I are all that remain of a five person crew, and we still game. For our next campaign, the options are: GURPS SWASHBUCKLER, GURPS HARN, or GURPS SANCTUARY. What we have noticed is that if we shelve a campaign for any length of time, we lose the immediacy of interest for the characters. One of my best campaigns ever set up in HARN WORLD - was placed on hold, but we never returned to it. The player characters felt more like strangers...

**Shrug** Hope that helps.

[whswhs]

Since 1992, I've run 43 campaigns, of which 16 have been GURPS; other systems I've run more than once have been Big Eyes Small Mouth, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Champions, FUDGE, Mage: The Ascension, and RuneQuest. My campaigns meet once a month; normally I run two campaigns in parallel, or sometimes three. I accumulated a core group of players in San Diego when I lived there, I picked up an unstable group when I was in Riverside, and I now have a few players here in Lawrence.

No two campaigns have had the same set of players, even apart from there being turnover in the population of players (there have been a total of 53 over the years). I have two players who've been me since the start, playing respectively in 14 and 16 campaigns. When I'm ready to start new campaigns, I circulate a prospectus that lists several possible campaigns, have each possible player assigned 2N points among N campaigns (they can give 0 points to a campaign they don't want to play in at all), choose campaigns that are liked by many players, and do my best to put every player into a campaign they like a lot. I do have some players who often make similar choices, but I resist having stable player groups, because I don't want such a group to pin me down to only running one or two favored genres; I want to be able to experiment with rules systems, genres, and premises, and also to see how new combinations of players work together.

Currently I'm running Science Heroes!, a campaign about early superheroes set in the 1930s, and Shadowlands, a slow apocalyptic campaign with supernatural elements set in the 2030s.

This isn't quite "how do GURPS groups tend to work?" but at least "how do groups that play a variety of rules systems, and often play GURPS, tend to work?" I don't have a single genre that I always run; I run a lot of superheroes and a lot of fantasy, and recently I've begun to figure out how to make a science fiction campaign work, but I try various experimental genres as well, especially when I run a short-term mini-campaign planned to last six months.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

If a group were playing a more genre focused game, like some fantasy one we all know about, the group would generally just play epic fantasy and nothing else...

I've been gaming since '84 and this has never described any group I've ever been in.

Most of my groups have rotated GMs between campaigns and changed systems, though with two of the groups various flavours of D&D were the primary go-to games with us changing pace between campaigns.

Since '88 I've only run GURPS (with the occasional attempt at running FATE, but no takers past chargen - the whole conceit of the game is too different for the groups I've tried with), but like with other GMs I've shifted genres with each campaign to fir the mood of what we wanted to play.

...because changing to something else means finding another game.

That has never been the insurmountable difficulty you seem to be implying it is. Every group I've ever been in, every one, each person has their "system of choice", and in only one of those groups had multiple people with the same system as their system of choice, and that system was GURPS. In that group all but I had a very secondary choice that we'd switch off to between GURPS campaigns - neither FATE nor FFG's L5R existed yet, so I didn't have a system I run instead of GURPS, it was just GURPS for me - I disliked every other system so much I'd refuse to run them.

[whswhs]

As for medium, when I was in California I ran games face to face, not around a table (in recent years) but sitting around a living room. Since moving to Kansas I've found that impossible, first because my local players didn't want to meet face to face during COVID, second because my Californian players were in California, and most recently because I'm not trying to keep the two groups separate, so we do everything online. (And in the meantime two of my California players have moved to other states.)

We don't use anything like a game app; I've played in one, but found it uncongenial. I want to see my players' faces, because roleplaying is so central to what I run. We meet over Zoom. I can share the screen to show things, or drop documents into the chat.

[Emerikol]

Some really awesome responses folks. I have to grant Kromm honors not so just for content as for his ability to cram in the most information in the smallest space.

Your answers make sense. If anyone else wants to comment keep on bringing the comments. I've enjoyed seeing the group dynamics.