06-14-2020, 12:46 PM | #1 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Tech books are cumulative
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Do you find yourself needing not only the book for the current tech level, but also the previous one? Is this generally true? If not, how do you prefer to deal with gaps that would be filled in with the previous book? Improvise? Stick to the Basic Set equipment list? |
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06-14-2020, 01:37 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
Some tech is replaced, but yes, some technology (like the canoe) was basically perfected at a low TL. The only changes would be improved materials.
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius |
06-14-2020, 02:09 PM | #3 | |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
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If it was only "low tech" "high tech" "ultra tech" and maybe 1-5 special supplements for things less likely needed, for a total of <10 instead of >50 it would be so much better. |
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06-14-2020, 02:24 PM | #4 |
Join Date: May 2007
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
Personally, I've always been rather skeptical of the early start to TL5. I feel like adventuring-relevant gear even as late as the 1770s (a musket or muzzle-loading rifle to fight with, a sailing ship for long distance travel, communication limited to the speed a messanger can travel) is a lot more like that of the 1500s or 1600s (with inevitable improvements, of course) than it is like that of the the mid nineteenth century (multi-shot firearms to fight with, steamships and railway trains, the ability to send messages across continents instantly by telegraph). That a Kentucky rifle made in 1740 uses a different tech-level skill than a seventeenth century hunting rifle and the same one as a civil-war repeating rifle strikes me as grotesque, and similar comparisons could be made regarding ships. I am aware that the industrial revolution was well underway by the mid eighteenth century, but I'm not persuaded that it made a fundamental difference to equipment "in the field" until at least the beginning of the nineteenth century (to the extent a particular cutoff is needed, I might go with 1815 and Fulton's steamboat- steam engines turning looms or pumping water out of mines are a mere setting detail; steam engines that let you travel swiftly against the current mean that the technology has reached adventuring relevance).
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I predicted GURPS:Dungeon Fantasy several hours before it came out and all I got was this lousy sig. |
06-14-2020, 02:28 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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06-14-2020, 02:39 PM | #6 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
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Here's an example of what I'm looking at. Low-Tech has a table of containers. High-Tech has a small section on containers that emerge starting in TL5, mostly having to do with superior materials. If we imagine a game set in TL8 and a GM who has only High-Tech, then that GM won't have the containers for, say, glass bottles. So would you, as GM, feel pressured by this to have Low-Tech so you'd have "missing" items like this? |
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06-14-2020, 02:40 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
Searching for relevant rules is the killer app for game books in PDF. I like physical books as much as anyone, but when I'm trying to find a rule, searching the directory is much faster and more thorough.
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06-14-2020, 02:46 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Oklahoma City
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
To be fair, one doesn't typically run a campaign out of the X-Tech books.
I just recently ended a run of a mostly-historical campaign set in 1725 AD, and I definitely used a lot of both Low-Tech and High-Tech gear. I had to do a little research to develop an understanding of what was available at that specific year. Corrections had to be made from time to time, but we all understood that if it doesn't exist yet, it's not available. Collecting stuff in Low/High/Ultra categories is convenient for publishing, but if you're running something in any way historical, you sometimes have to ignore that. Plus, the later the book was written, the better, more-conprehensive the rules tend to be—the "containers" are a good example of this—and in GURPS' case, they were written in reverse order.
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The Art of D. Raymond Lunceford, The Daniverse: Core Group Annex The Daniverse Game Blog Last edited by Gigermann; 06-14-2020 at 02:52 PM. |
06-14-2020, 03:01 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
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An exampel that I did end up nedign multiple books for was when I was stocking a TL9 Life Pod as a thought exercise... http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=158442 (warning there's at least 9 pages) I ended up needing to go to HT for modern lightweight backpacks and one-man tents. I had to go to Infinite Worlds for solar cells. It may be unavoidable that UT is a little hit-and-miss with the potential ground it has to cover but 2 pages that updated the 2 pages of gear in Characters would be nice.
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Fred Brackin |
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06-14-2020, 05:57 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Yukon, OK
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Re: Tech books are cumulative
Yes its cumulative, this is why I love the index and good section listings so I can find what Im looking for pretty quickly.Long as I have the right book open.
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My GURPS publications GURPS Powers: Totem and Nature Spirits; GURPS Template Toolkit 4: Spirits; Pyramid articles. Buying them lets us know you want more! My GURPS fan contribution and blog: REFPLace GURPS Landing Page My List of GURPS You Tube videos (plus a few other useful items) My GURPS Wiki entries |
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high-tech, low-tech |
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