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Old 01-16-2023, 07:10 PM   #41
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Character generation requires too much time and effort, which creates a hurdle and delay before players can start having fun. That often deters players from joining campaigns, especially new players.
Agreed, although I don't know a good universal solution - for a specific genre/setting, the Delvers to Grow approach can let you build a new character rather quickly... but you'd need a separate list for each genre, which is a lot of work and you'll inevitably leave something out.

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Rank, status, wealth, starting cash, jobs, independent income, cost of living, settled and unsettled lifestyle, restrictions on adventuring gear, classless meritocracies, and societies in which Rank or Wealth incorporates Status are a tangle of rules that interact inappropriately, in many cases don't work well, and are scattered through the books so that they are hard to find and (I believe) often overlooked.
Yeah, all these are a bit of a mess, honestly.

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
The attributes are too few, and therefore fail to make important distinctions. The supplied fix is an unsystematic mixture of special-case disadvantages (such as Hamfisted, for instance) and secondary characteristics (such as Will and Perception), creating bizarre asymmetries under the disadvantage limit either way, scattered through the Characters book so that they easily get overlooked.
I believe one of the Power Ups volumes has advice on how to expand the attributes, but I think even there it's largely up to the GM to work through it.

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
There are far too many skills, and that's even without using Manoeuvres and Techniques. This profusion of skills combined with the shortage of attributes makes it very hard to balance attributes and skill within a point budget. The long skill list, often odd /TL distinctions (e.g. on Handguns skill) the distinctions drawn within listed skills between optional and compulsory specialisations, and Combat, Sport, and Art versions of some skills bewilder and deter prospective players.
Ye gods, Filch, Holdout, Pickpocket, and Sleight of Hand are all different skills from each other - as are Broadsword, Jitte/Sai, Shortsword, and Tonfa. Defaults are fine and good, but trying to buy up from them is a trap, and anyone who wants more than a few skills of a given attribute are generally better served investing a minimal amount in each skill and then pumping the attribute as high as they can get.

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Many disadvantages have misleading names and legalistic special-case rules.
And as another poster noted, many Advantages have idiosyncratic built-in Limitations.

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
The damage system, involving hit locations and sublocations, armour ratings that may be split, damage types, armour divisors, hardened armours, wounding multipliers that depend on damage type and location/sublocation, critical hits, stunning and knockdown, stunning, crippling injuries, major wounds, mortal wounds, wounding multipliers, vulnerability, unliving and homogenous targets, shock penalties, stunning checks, reeling from wounds, unconsciousness checks, death checks, bleeding and so on takes far too much time to work through, besides which it isn't all in one place in the rules. I have never had an attempted GURPS campaign for new players last past the point where we first work out what the effect is of a character being shot. Players bail out at the complexity.
Humorously, I think something akin to the Conditional Wounding rules could actually help simplify things, here - have a small chart on each character sheet for quick reference (basically, a note of what damage puts a wound at that level, and the effects of being wounded to that degree), and then have traits like IT:DR, Vulnerability, Unliving, etc, shift wounding level up or down as appropriate (and change Unliving and Homogenous to just be part of IT:DR), rather than needing to multiply/divide; special hit locations and damage types like pi+ would so the same. Then keep the effects relatively sane without getting too complicated, and you've got wounding rules that have decent resolution and can be applied quickly and easily, rather than needing to flip around in the book.
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Old 01-16-2023, 08:42 PM   #42
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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Originally Posted by Refplace View Post
This is the real kicker though. What format, where stored?
The purchaser would store it at minimum.

Format would depend a lot on the form the company chooses.

Ideally it would be in a format at least one popular VTT would accomadate.


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This is a big headache and added expense.

The returns would have to justify it.
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Old 01-16-2023, 08:57 PM   #43
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
...
Several excellent points there. If I were to pick one that stands out, and intensifies, the others, it's that with the proliferation of supplements the rules are

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scattered through the books so that they are hard to find
.
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Old 01-16-2023, 10:38 PM   #44
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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Originally Posted by RGTraynor View Post
(nods) While GURPS has done a lot of licensed products, you just can't hang your hat on them. There are the many people with no interest in them...The proof is simply in this: with the many licenses SJ Games has had a hand in (Conan, Wild Cards, Vorkosigan Saga, Riverworld, Discworld, Witch World ...), how many of them have turned into enduring product lines? Only one I can see; the GURPS Traveller line.
Sometimes good narrative settings do not lead to good roleplaying settings.

Having a good setting is great in many ways, but its not necessary to get the ball of a generic universal system going, instead make creating settings easier for DMs by using our vast collective experience to make a decent guide that shows you all relevant checkboxes you ought to be thinking about when creating a setting of XYZ genre.



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I am utterly unfamiliar with Discworld: an edition that pivoted to that would not get my dollars. While the Dungeon Fantasy line has much in it that's useful to any fantasy GM, I do not play dungeon fantasy: an edition that pivoted to that would not get my dollars.


Ironically, despite me primarily being a fantasy player, I was really bummed by the whole dungeon fantasy series. At the time, my thoughts were: I am a hardcore gurps player playing in a long term gurps campaign, this book adds nothing to me, and if I want to bring a new player in, I will also have no use for it, as it removed most of the complexity (hit locations for instance) that made me like gurps so much.

Some posters have eloquently put foward criticisms that I find very interesting, having concise and streamlined rules for all levels of resolution (such combat and social) that got polished over a ton of pdfs, reviwed and polished in one place would be great.

The combat system we have now is great, but for the way I play, it is specially great when lots of options are enabled, such as sacrificial defenses, and I think these could be better implemented in the canon hardcovers as well, instead of being referenced over lots of different books such as the sacrificial parry perk

In fact, I think thats why I did not think DF was a good step foward, it was trying improve gurps by making it less gurpsy. And in that sense, I think whatever is envisioned, must still be universal and complex, while also being better balanced (ST rules come to mind), revamped (secondary stats, skill bloat, advantages, social rules, initial magic system) or just reagregated (lots of awesome melle combat rules but spread over a ton of books and somewhat bloaty in the ammount of reading necessary to resolve situations)

It breaks my heart, I played a 6 year fantasy campaign on gurps and it was the best RPG of my life, but after seeing how much work it was to make a setting, do combat, etc. all my group migrated to 5e because its simpler, and I dont see nothing short of a new edition being able to bring these people back, and they love gurps, but they want to see a new edition with badass base books that contains all the good stuff from where we left off in 4e but better balanced, with more compact and relevant info

I loved Agemegos posts, I wish I could type 10 more pages of what I think about this subject, but not only its been a while since ive polished my GURPS knowledge, im also tired and must be blabbering like a madman at this point

But do take note, I had basically been away from GURPS for years, my only source of contact with the system was precisely checking this board, only very ocasionally, to see if theres any news of a new gurps edition

Do not underestimate how much of a desire there is for it, specially now that there is all the OGL drama, people are bound to take a look and see whats what. And, unfortunately, for many players out there, the lack of a new edition in 20 years, is synonym with dead game. Theres enough content from Kromm rules adjudications and improvement suggestions alone to start a 5e, hell if there was a kickstarted id put 100$ right now and go to work to be able to donate more

Ill post more later, this is a very important topic for me

Great to be posting amongst you again

Cheers

Last edited by D10; 01-17-2023 at 10:40 AM.
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Old 01-16-2023, 10:52 PM   #45
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

Throwing this out there. What do folks think now about the GURPS 2e boxed set? About what it covered versus what 3e and 4e core books did.

Would a similar product but using 4e version of the various mechanic work out? Maybe 48 more pages on fantasy, horror, and science fiction with 16 pages for each.

Back in the day when we transitioned from 2e and 3e, my group had among us three 2e boxed sets. We wound up handing all three of them out as a way to get more GURPS players and referee in my small rural northwest PA hometown.

And we were successful in all three cases. This was not the case with GURPS 3e or 4e.
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Old 01-17-2023, 12:25 AM   #46
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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Originally Posted by D10 View Post
Ironically, despite me primarily being a fantasy player, I was really bummed by the whole dungeon fantasy series. At the time, my thoughts were: I am a hardcore gurps player playing in a long term gurps campaign, this book adds nothing to me, and if I want to bring a new player in, I will also have no use for it, as it removed most of the complexity (hit locations for instance) that made me like gurps so much.
Huh? Dungeon Fantasy certainly did not remove hit locations! Nor did the Dungeon Fantasy RPG.
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Old 01-17-2023, 02:49 AM   #47
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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Originally Posted by robertsconley View Post
What do folks think now about the GURPS 2e boxed set? About what it covered versus what 3e and 4e core books did.
By modern standards, GURPS 2E was a first draft. It was heavily focused on Medieval Fantasy campaigns, with limited attention paid to high tech gear and no rules for computer, fright checks, magic, or psi and very few rules for Hazards, hostile environments, etc.

The big game mechanics difference was how ranged weapons worked. The 2E rules worked a bit better for low-tech ranged weapons, very badly for high-tech/long-ranged ones.

Physically, everything other than the box and the cool Cardboard Hero miniatures had low production values, even even by 1980s RPG standards. The booklets didn't have covers and the art was largely taken from copyright-free "clip art" sources.

It took 15-20 years of punching and pulverizing to turn the very good core rules into a coherent, well-designed game system which could truly claim to be both "generic" and "universal."

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Originally Posted by robertsconley View Post
Would a similar product but using 4e version of the various mechanic work out? Maybe 48 more pages on fantasy, horror, and science fiction with 16 pages for each.
No. 16 pages isn't enough to truly do justice to any of those genres unless you compress all the "crunch" from various GURPS books into 48 pages of "GURPS Neutronium Dense." Fans of those genres would whine about lack of material, fans of genres not included would whine because of their favorite genre didn't make the cut.

During playtest and discussion of GURPS 4E Basic, there were similar complaints about the Infinite Worlds campaign setting being included in GURPS Basic Campaigns.

The modern equivalent of "user-friendly GURPS," like the 2E Boxed Set is GURPS Lite. There have been a couple of fan-made versions of GURPS Lite which focus on particular genres, like GURPS Lite Horror.

GURPS Lite with bigger type, wider margins, more illustrations and the solo adventure from GURPS 2E/3E, with a pointer to online maps and paper miniatures you can print out would be pretty close to a GURPS 2E 2.0.
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Old 01-17-2023, 03:00 AM   #48
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

I'd like to see consistency between Advantage/Perk & Disadvantage/Quirk names and levels.

For example, why have different names for traits like Eidetic Memory/Photographic Memory or Cautious/Paranoia? Why not just call the levels Eidetic Memory 1, 2 and the Quirk Paranoia [-1].

Why not have smoother level transitions for some traits? Examples: Why is there Sensitive (+1 to skills) and Empathy (+3 to skills) but not a +2 version? Why does Voice give you a +2 reaction for 10 points, but not a +1 reaction for 5 points?

Personal peeve, but why have Addiction/Alcoholism as separate disads? They're the same damned thing except for the implied Insidious special enhancement on Alcoholism, which could just as easily apply to other drugs which are constantly advertised and socially reinforced like tobacco.

For lots of useful little ways in which GURPS can be tweaked to make it better, take a look at the Dungeon Fantasy core books and the Action or Monster Hunters series. Never mind the genres, look at how complex traits or rules which can confuse new players are reworked, eliminated, or moved out of the way. Paragraphs are kept short, layout makes reading easy, and Key Topics within a paragraph are in Bold Type. The entire focus of the DF "Exploits" book is "How to Do Stuff," with core game mechanics right at the front of the book, topics organized in the order that players and GMs are likely to need them during the course of play, and "crunch" like skills requirement, modifiers, $ costs, and other things needed to use skills made easy to find.

Last edited by Pursuivant; 01-17-2023 at 03:34 AM.
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Old 01-17-2023, 06:27 AM   #49
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

The first and most important thing I would like to see for 5e: (1) Japanese translations of the core books (including powers and spells) published (2)with a license set-up that would allow SJG to continue to sell the Japanese version even if the Japanese publisher stops publishing GURPS (even if only in PDF and print-on-demand).
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Old 01-17-2023, 09:34 AM   #50
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Default Re: GURPS 5E?

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That would create issues for the systems in which TL goes to determine starting cash, wages, the carrying capacity of planets etc., but I don't think those rules work well anyway.
Gurps attracts gamers who see it as a simulation, but many of those rules were thrown together in the last century or meant to simulate specific fictional settings. Removing and rethinking big chunks of them and ruthlessly reframing around "how does this affect characters in an adventure story?" could help solve that problem.

Trying to represent beings which are very different from humans as a list of Advantages and Disadvantages still feels clunky and do not necessarily make them more balanced than eyeballing a point cost, a digital Gurps might let the designers include more plain language around packages like "artificial intelligence" to summarize the net effects of all the traits.

Mental disadvantages should probably give back a percentage of starting points not a flat number.
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