Forced emulation in Girl Genius?

[Eschwenke]

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Girl Genius book for some time, but I have questions about how much work I will have to do to get it to work for me.

I am not a fan of RPG rules that are intended to emulate the tone of traditional narrative media or of genre conventions that aren’t explicitly justified diegetically. I like GURPS because it generally defaults to “realistic” with the extraordinary and fantastical layered on top. I think the “Rule of Cool” is a logical contradiction because I don’t think justification solely through aesthetics is cool at all. I see RPGs as their own medium and resist attempts to force it to emulate others.

In the context of Girl Genius, the very first page of the comic establishes that the story presented to us is one being told to us by a storyteller that is living in that world. If I have the opportunity to run a GG game it will be in the version of Europa from that first page, not the version that the storyteller is portraying.

So my questions are these: How much do the setting-specific rules assume that the tone of the game will be “cinematic” (for lack of a better term) or will attempt to emulate the comic medium? How dependent are the rules on an assumption that recreation of the oft wacky tone of the comic is the goal? Will I have to do a lot of work to weed those assumptions out of it?

[dbm]

I would say there is almost zero ‘emulation’ in there. There’s almost no completely new rules content at all. It’s core GURPS with some simplification of options and gadgeteering powered up slightly.

[Eschwenke]

Excellent! Thank you.