Does GURPS need original-setting world books?

[Collective_Restraint]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

GURPS Yrth is, for all practical purposes, an alternate history game, not a fantasy setting proper. It's amusing to people who are into Crusades history and it provides carte blanche for having characters who look like very anachronistic fantasy art pierces.

You summed up a lot of my thoughts on Yrth. I looked at it but it wasn't appealling enough to my taste. Too historical, not fantasy enough. I'd buy a generic, typical fantasy world similar to GreyHawk, Mystara or Forgotten Realms in an instant.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by Collective_Restraint

You summed up a lot of my thoughts on Yrth. I looked at it but it wasn't appealling enough to my taste. Too historical, not fantasy enough. I'd buy a generic, typical fantasy world similar to GreyHawk, Mystara or Forgotten Realms in an instant.

GURPS should try to aquire Lejendary Adventure. I just bought it a week ago and the setting is better than Greyhawk IMO and much better than either Mystara or Forgotten Realms. Gary Gygax has some really interesting monsters too. The rules are poor but the ideas are awesome. This setting is a gold mine just waiting for GURPS to give it some playable rules.

[Cernig]

Does GURPS need original-setting world books?

Yes. Using licensing, so that others bear the costs of production of those books. "Powered By GURPS" needs to be as ubiquitous as the D20 OGL, because that will drive interested people to buy the core rulebooks. Rules Purity is fine for games geeks but it's a crap business model.

This has been an installment of "Simple answers to simple questions".

[pawsplay]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Somebody better tell Robert M. Schroeck that the supers world he's been running since the mid-1980s isn't "a real superhero setting", then...

IST isn't a four-colour-comic-book setting, true, but that isn't the only possible kind of superhero setting. (In fact, four-colour-comic-book is possibly the least-believable superhero setting.) Ever read Watchmen or Wild Cards? IST is closer to those than to any Marvel product I'm aware of.

I could make similar responses to your other examples, but I'll just sum up with this: Nowhere is "bad" defined as "what pawsplay doesn't like". (And nowhere is "bad" defined as "what robkelk doesn't like", either.)

I didn't define anything as bad. I'm actually a huge Watchmen and Wild Cards fan.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

I didn't define anything as bad. I'm actually a huge Watchmen and Wild Cards fan.

Ah, sorry. I'm not used to people thinking of "weird" as "good"; that's what threw me.

[Collective_Restraint]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Ah, sorry. I'm not used to people thinking of "weird" as "good"; that's what threw me.

The problem with "weird" though, is that it won't attract the majority of people. It doesn't mean it's "bad", but it probably won't bring as much people as something a little bit more standard or common.

[tantric]

Are you guys seriously contemplating a GURPS fantasy world on the lines of Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk? What do you mean by "not weird"? Were Eberron and DarkSun weird?

[pawsplay]

Originally Posted by tantric

Are you guys seriously contemplating a GURPS fantasy world on the lines of Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk? What do you mean by "not weird"? Were Eberron and DarkSun weird?

Not really. Eberron was basically a setting built from the ground up to have D&D elements, with pulp adventure motifs and a baroque, post-imperial setting. It reminds me of The Goblin Tower and The Misenchanted Sword.

Dark Sun is a straight up swords-and-sorcery setting. It would be hard to get any purer without going straight to Howard and Vance. It might have seemed slightly weird to younger D&D players without a lot of background in the literature.

[demonsbane]

Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and similar are more or less OK, but certainly they could be much better settings if they contained more fabulisimilitude in their cosmologies, world-history designs, etc. Midnight (FFG) was/is dark fantasy but contains some very good profiled elements in that sense. However I'm not confident of any author for doing that work well enough, so:

Does GURPS need original-setting world books?

No.

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Cernig

Does GURPS need original-setting world books?

Yes. Using licensing, so that others bear the costs of production of those books. "Powered By GURPS" needs to be as ubiquitous as the D20 OGL, because that will drive interested people to buy the core rulebooks. Rules Purity is fine for games geeks but it's a crap business model.

This has been an installment of "Simple answers to simple questions".

"Powered by GURPS", maybe. I did mean not more Banestorms and such things, not more settings pertaining entirely to the official GURPS 4e line.

Cheers.