Dice Of Doom: GURPS Review

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

Damn, I just hate that. Player traps, I call them, that is, the player, trusting the GM, decides to try the "nifty new rule" only to find that he is actually worse off...

Hell, I'm pretty sure that there are a number of unemployed math graduates that would do the statistics of an RPG for a pittance... Balance might be a myth (or might not, it's not the topic at hand), but hell, please, no player traps!

Could not agree more.

Me, I grow suspicious of any dice-pool-based system (that is, any system where you keep adding dice as you improve), because the probabilities are not trivial to figure, and RPG writters are seldom any good at math. Now, GURPS and FUDGE both seem to understand that their dice mechanics create bell curve discrete approximations, and use that to make the game better.

nWoD is not bad. You can see that they carefully thought their way through the system and fixed the vast majority of the problems that afflicted oWoD. In particular, the system's simpler: Everything is based, more or less, around how many dice you have (which is similar to how GURPS bases everything on your skill level). More skill equals more dice, more problems equals less dice. Simple. Everything only needs 1 success, and 8+ is always the target number. This tends to create a curve, though in my opinion, that curve makes it too easy to succeed with minimal skill (1 die has a 30% chance of success) and too easy to fail with high skill (at 7 dice, you still have a 9% chance of failure), but that may be because I'm spoiled by the GURPS bell curve. My point, though, is that nWoD is a perfectly serviceable system, one that works well enough that I regularly use it (though I generally pick it over GURPS based on player-culture, rather than superiority. There's only a few things that it does better than GURPS).

But I'm getting off-topic. If you want to share notes on it, we can do so through PM or via the RPG general forum.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Could not agree more.



nWoD is not bad. You can see that they carefully thought their way through the system and fixed the vast majority of the problems that afflicted oWoD. In particular, the system's simpler: Everything is based, more or less, around how many dice you have (which is similar to how GURPS bases everything on your skill level). More skill equals more dice, more problems equals less dice. Simple. Everything only needs 1 success, and 8+ is always the target number. This tends to create a curve, though in my opinion, that curve makes it too easy to succeed with minimal skill (1 die has a 30% chance of success) and too easy to fail with high skill (at 7 dice, you still have a 9% chance of failure), but that may be because I'm spoiled by the GURPS bell curve. My point, though, is that nWoD is a perfectly serviceable system, one that works well enough that I regularly use it (though I generally pick it over GURPS based on player-culture, rather than superiority. There's only a few things that it does better than GURPS).

But I'm getting off-topic. If you want to share notes on it, we can do so through PM or via the RPG general forum.

Let's move to the RPG General forum

[Jeffr0]

I weigh in on this in a lengthy blog post here.

The short version: playtesting should include at least some component of reviewing how the game/supplement will go over with people that are picking it up cold. All this stuff that is so obvious to the "experts" should be written up somewhere.

I really like the review, but still... I can't resist fisking the darn thing! (Most of what I say is probably derivative of the comments here and there, but maybe not.)

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Wraithe

The guys over at Dice of Doom have posted a pretty solid review of GURPS, so I just figured I'd mention it.

http://diceofdoom.com/blog/2011/08/gurps-review/

Mad props and mentally ill sets to these guys for actually playing these games for a month. That's admirable committment.

I think my favorite observation in the whole review comes, mirabile dictu, from the comments:

When you've got in your head how something's done, it can be a bit rough to be given a system that does things in a dramatically different way.

This was brought home to me rather dramatically the last time I tried to play D&D in the early-mid 3.0 days. After having been nigh-exclusively a GURPS player for over a decade and having last played D&D (1st edition AD&D) during the late 80s, I sat down with the Player's Handbook to roll up a character. It took me over an hour, and I still wasn't sure I'd done it right. Now, D&D had gotten more complicated since the days of that guy prying the gem out of the idol's forehead, but clearly what was going on is that I had so internalized one way of thinking of building a PC that this other method had become entirely alien.

[Jeffr0]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

This was brought home to me rather dramatically the last time I tried to play D&D in the early-mid 3.0 days.

It's like the old proverb... if you want to know what water is, don't ask a fish.

Few people realize they are as parochial as they are.

You see a similar thing when people learn new programming languages. They are aggravated and beat their heads against the wall until the get over the learning curve enough to benefit from it. It can still take years to be able to code idiomatically in the new language, though. It's painful because you actually have to learn not just new ways of solving problems, but new ways of thinking about problems....

[RupertG]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

...I'm hopeful that the fervor with which some fans are defending their game didn't put either of you two off. It's easy for devotees to focus on the things they disagree with in a review, and lose sight of the larger picture -- that this review is a means by which a few new gamers might be drawn into GURPS.

The pushback is to be expected from a game that such a passionate following. We haven't been put off at all. For the most part the replies and discussion has been quite civil, informative and genuinely helpful. For a comparison of what it can get like try saying something bad about D&D4e and see what kind of response you get ;)

In the end we do hope that we've encouraged people to try out GURPS. We enjoyed it and we're certain that others would as well if they gave it a go.

Originally Posted by Jeffr0

The short version: playtesting should include at least some component of reviewing how the game/supplement will go over with people that are picking it up cold. All this stuff that is so obvious to the "experts" should be written up somewhere.

After playing 10 games this year essentially, as you say, by 'picking them up cold', I heartily agree. Some systems handle this aspect of their game better than others, but most don't do a particularly good job of it. From our experience a simple GM Guide Lite or similar with some straightforward advice for getting started would have been invaluable. Clearly you wouldn't want to be too prescriptive as one of the core strengths of GURPS is its generic universal nature. However, at least a few hints in the right direction would have been really useful.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Mad props and mentally ill sets to these guys for actually playing these games for a month. That's admirable commitment.

We have had an absolutely awesome time doing it and we have learnt an awful lot. It's taken quite a bit of discipline to keep it going the way we have, but it has been an incredibly rewarding experience. The full list of games that we have (and will have) played can be found here. As you can see, we have tried to include as much variety as we could with regards to setting, genre, old, new, etc.

While 12 Games/12 Months might not be appropriate for all gaming groups, I would highly recommend changing things up for a month or two here and there. It give you an opportunity to try out that game you've always been interested in playing or a chance to mix things up a bit. After all, that's how we got to play GURPS for the first time :)

[trooper6]

Regarding the idea that one needs an expert to help one learn GURPS...I suppose I might count as expert now...but in 1988 I wasn't. I was a 16 year old high school kid and no one I new played GURPS at all. I'd never seen it in action. I just saw the shiny, shiny books in the gaming store...especially the GURPS Prisoner book...and thought..."This looks cool!"

So I bought it, read it, taught myself how to play and GM with nothing but the Basic set...no other supplements. And ran a Fantasy game (with no magic). And it was fine.

Sometimes I think the difficulty of GURPS (and many other games) is overstated. Maybe the problem is not that GURPS or D&D or Vampire or whatever is difficult...maybe the problem is that as we get older we get a bit more set in our ways and less willing to put in the time and effort that we would regularly put into games when we were in high school or college.

I mean back in the day the groups I was in would regularly play all sorts of random things...many games which were not well written or organized. I still value variety...for example the sort of variety the Dice of Doom folks are doing. But so often I meet groups that will only play one game ever (that game usually being D&D).

I remember sitting at this 3.5 game and the players rejected playing Trinity because they thought it was too difficult...and this was the group that had basically memorized 8 bazillion 3.5 books...in all their quirky complicatedness. They could tell me that I definitely wanted by Rogue to take the Master Thrower Prestige Class to maximize damage, and then take this obscure magic item and then one obscure Feat from this one other book. And then argue about AoO and all these really, really complex and not always well explained exceptions and unclear things. But that wasn't too difficult. Then they went to 4e...which involves a lot of data tracking. But also not too complicated. But Vampire was too complicated? GURPS was too complicated? I think a lot of this, as I said in the comments of the original review, has a lot to do with the sort of paradigm you have normalized, a certain amount of inertia...and...well...for my D&D players...it is a certain other thing. For the D&D group I was in, there was power in having memorized 8 bazillion splat books and being able to game the system in really arcane ways. There was power in knowing obscure lore details about Forgotten Realms and having read the books and so on. The minute you switch to a new system, you lose that power and everyone is equalized as a beginner again. I think that is not attractive to all people.