Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 01-15-2011, 02:22 PM   #21
chimchim
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: South yorkshire, united kingdom
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

I have "converted" several groups from other games to gurps. The first was way back yonder. I had a group who were 100% fixed on D&D and were very anti change especially one particular player who had always been the GM up untill i took over the job. I tried but failed initially to get the group to even consider GURPS until during one session the old GM's character (he was playing a bard D&D 2nd ed) life depended on someone being able to pick a lock. He was convinced lock picking was a bard skill but it turned out it was not. He then asked :-
"Could my PC try to pick that lock under GURPS?"
I replied yes but the default skill would be low.
The group began converting their PC's to GURPS right there and then and that group are still using GURPS as a system of choice.

The next success came when a friend opened a FLGS of his own and asked me for help by running various demo games of all the different games i play (rpg and wargames). The first game night he organised i was scheduled to run a RPG so i chose GURPS and caravan to Ein Arris. THe group of players who arrived had expected D&D but were willing to give the game a try. I had ten players that night. I lost one due to his hatred of GURPS disadvantage system (mainly due to a him fluffing a kleptomania roll forcing him to steal something - i had warned him). The other nine went on to become regulars at the store for gurps games and my then second rpg group away from the store.
__________________
battlegrounds:rpg edition. A really useful VTT system. Down load the demo at
battlegrounds home
chimchim is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 02:35 PM   #22
CousinX
 
CousinX's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Shangri-La
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett View Post
Who here has induced a reluctant or sceptical gaming group to switch substantially from some other game (eg. That Other Game) to GURPS?
I've been on all sides of this ... I was somewhat reluctantly converted from AD&D 2nd edition to GURPS 3rd edition back in junior high. Reluctantly at first, but I quickly realized that it was perfect for all the things I was having trouble doing in AD&D. I then took up the banner and started converting others (no zeal like the recent convert!) By college, I converted a new gaming group who had never used GURPS at all, to the point that the players started using GURPS in their own campaigns.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett View Post
What did you do? What setting and genre did you use to tempt them across? What worked, what didn't work, what would have worked better?
We started with fantasy, because it was what we knew, but quickly got into cyberpunk (in no small part because of the brouhaha surrounding the release of GURPS Cyberpunk, which amused us all to no end). Later, I used the GURPS/White Wolf conversion books to (rather seamlessly) transform a Storyteller campaign into GURPS, which everyone liked better after the conversion.

The best approach I've found is just to run something that the GM has put a lot of time into polishing, and in which the best features of GURPS can shine. Trying to show a group that GURPS can handle their favorite genre better than their favorite game is hard, because there's a lot of bias to overcome ... but if it's the GM's specialty, it can still work.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett View Post
How did it go? Are they all keen now? Are they using GURPS for their own games, or promoting it otherwise? Clamouring for GURPS, complaining about other games?

How long did it take to win the players over? What helped? What hindered?
I can't say every new GURPS player I've ever run a game for became a card-carrying member of the GURPS Conspiracy, but I've had some overall good success ... usually, getting several sessions into a successful campaign does the trick. Not everyone takes to it, but those who start noticing how much smoother GURPS rules can run tend to pick it up and run with it.
CousinX is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 02:36 PM   #23
CousinX
 
CousinX's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Shangri-La
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett View Post
Either that or I am on a lot more "Ignore" lists than you are.
What?? I can't imagine why that would be....

Well, okay, I can. ;)
CousinX is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 02:36 PM   #24
Phaelen Bleux
World Traveler in Training
 
Phaelen Bleux's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Chicago, IL
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Ironically, it was my players that forced me to move away from DnD. I had played GURPS and loved the system as a player (although not the spell prerequisite flow) but didn't want to GM a campaign with no pre-built characters. My big complaint went something like "But there's no Monster Manual and I don't want to have to roll-up every orc and kobold you meet."

What did you do?
My brother wrote a program to generate GURPS chars. Suddenly I was making orcs by the boatloads. . .spearmen, archer, commanders, etc. all at 5 minutes a pop.

What setting and genre did you use to tempt them across?
We started with fantasy, since everyone was most comfortable with the flavor of that style of gaming.


What worked, what didn't work, what would have worked better?

It was hard for people to loose the DnD stereotypes. "I'm an elf, of course I'm great with a bow." "What do you mean I can't see?? Dwarves have infravision."

But of course players loved "I can cast spells AND use a sword!"

How did it go?
We played that initial campaign for 2 years, and started again with beginning PCs for another round. We decided as a group to switch to a Space campaign. By brother was less than enthused, until we told him a blaster uses the same rules to hit as the crossbow he'd been using. Once he found out he could also use grenades, he was all in :)


Are they all keen now?

Never looked back. We have used GURPS for fantasy, WWII, Indy Jones, road warrior, espionage, and Star Wars themed campaigns. Next weekend we are beginning an Age of Sail campaign for pirate PCs. . .one of the few slices of technology we have never used in GURPS.


Are they using GURPS for their own games, or promoting it otherwise?

I'm pretty much all-time GM, so once I was hooked, that was that.

How long did it take to win the players over?
PC generation. All the 1st timers loved the non-random creation system. A couple of my players blossomed as role-players, using the disads to create great backstories for the PCs and dove into the roles of their characters.

What helped?
Again, having a computer to do the crunch work. I don't think I'd player GURPS without a computer.

What hindered?
Again, preconceived notions about races or modes of play. PD and DR were a little confusing, and things like Recoil, Hit Location, Crippling, etc. But that all melts away when a player calls a shot to the Vitals, rolls a critical, and drops some major Boss enemy in a Heroic Called Shot. Then the details make it all feel real and cool.
__________________
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." -- Kierkegaard

http://aerodrome.hamish.tripod.com

Last edited by Phaelen Bleux; 01-15-2011 at 02:38 PM. Reason: typos
Phaelen Bleux is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 07:26 PM   #25
DAT
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

My first group plays just about everything but D&D, so my experience with them may not be as applicable.

My second group were only D&D3.5 players.

What did you do?
For my first group, I asked them to help me play test an adventure I was thinking about trying to get published.

For my second group, our DM moved away for work, and I offered to GM an adventure.


What setting and genre did you use to tempt them across?
I ran a DF style game for my first group. I added a few twists by making them all mercenary special op soilders, so some of the standard troups were not present.

I ran a fantasy swashbuckler pirate setting in the year 1650 with magic, elves, dwarves, etc. It was a reverse banestorm situation.

What worked, what didn't work, what would have worked better?
For my first group, what worked is that I made their characters after getting their ideas, but then I let them adjust them after the first few sessions to better match what they like. A problem I ran into with a couple players is they had a hard time getting a feel for the lethality of the system and settings. I think a sample fight or two would have helped.

For my second group, they liked making their characters, but I gave them the same option of adjusting them after the first few sessions. One thing that didn't work well was that I overwhelmed them with setting information.

How did it go?
For my first group, very well. We are still running the campaign, a little over a year later.

For my second group, unrelated real life issues put it to a premature stop 5 sessions into it (we lost 50% of the players to new work schedules). There has been recent talk of trying to reboot with alternative members, but don't know if it will go or not.

Are they all keen now?
All have indicated they like it and what to continue (real life permitting).

Are they using GURPS for their own games, or promoting it otherwise?
One in the first group was talking about running a GURPS game, but he hasn't had the time to set it up yet. The first group has worked at recruiting new players to the game, and they speak highly of it.

How long did it take to win the players over?
By the end of the first session, they all had positive attitudes towards GURPS (compared to neutral to slightly negative before). By the end of the third session they were really getting into it, and activly wanting to learn the characcter creation rules so that they could modify their characters.


What helped?
For the first group, It helped that they didn't need to learn the character generation rules to start (they initally found that intimidating). I gave them the short descriptions of the different DF professions from DF1 and short descriptions of several races from DF3 that I was allowing in the campaign. Then I asked a series of questions to get them to specify a character concept and background they liked. I then made preliminary characters for them and walked over the characters abilities with each of the players. The allowance to completely revamp their character was also widely liked.

For the second group, I think the setting intriged them, and, learning from the first group, I ran a sample set of encounter for them to get a feel for the rules before we started the capmaign.

What hindered?
For the first, nothing.

For the second, unavoidable real life issues.

-Dan
DAT is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 09:59 PM   #26
Gef
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Yucca Valley, CA
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett View Post
What did you do?
After moving several times, I have a system now.

Go to local game store, meet'n'greet, post an ad for my GURPS game, get no response.

Join a pickup game or new campaign, make friends, show through the example of my own play the kind of gaming I like, and wait.

The showing through example part is a big deal. I describe, for my character's actions, the sorts of things that I would do in GURPS. Sometimes the other game doesn't handle it well, and I try not to make a big deal about it; the point is already made. I often ask questions that go to the political and economic aspects of the campaign, again something handled better by GURPS than most. If it makes sense in the game, I might nurture contacts or recruit allies, and in one I even built an army. I attempt to to use social skills like Intimidation to resolve situations in a way that other players don't expect, but which often seem to me more likely than genre conventions imply, even when the mechanics of the game don't specifically support what I'm trying to do.

When the time is right, say when the GM misses a night, I offer to run a game, and the game is GURPS. At this point, I am not selling them on GURPS, I am selling them on myself as a GM. Hopefully, as a player, I've made the recent campaign one of the most intriguing they've ever played, and they're anxious to see what I can do as a GM, regardless of the system. I tell them not to worry, just tell me what their characters do, and I will tell them what dice to roll. They learn by doing, and I lose some along the way, but at this point I gain some new people who hear (or see, if it's in the store) that I'm running a fun campaign with legs.

The whole process takes months, maybe up to half a year to get that chance to run a game by building my rep as a gamer, then another few months before the game goes from "Jeff's game" to "the GURPS game" and a few months more before it goes back to being "Jeff's game" in order to distinguish it from some other GURPS game that mine has inspired. Some of my players will develop a true appreciation for GURPS, others will at least rate it as worthwhile if not their favorite.

GEF

Last edited by Gef; 01-15-2011 at 10:03 PM.
Gef is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 10:11 PM   #27
Mailanka
 
Mailanka's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

I've never bothered to try to convert die-hards. In my experience, it's a waste of time, and you're constantly peppered with questions like "Why can't we do it like they do in X (where X is my favorite system)? That's so much easier and makes so much more sense!"

For people who are merely comfortable in another system but open to trying something new, first of all, I don't run anything similar to what they've been playing. I do not run a Personal Horror game for the Vampire fans, and I do not run Dungeon Fantasy for the D&D fans. The few times I've done that, it tends to result in people saying "What's the point when I can play that in the system I'm more familiar with." But, for example, you can't do sci-fi in either of those systems, so I've had great success running space opera, for example. Next, I make sure that the players have access to the books (Some people want to read) and I make templates to ease the rest in. Then they don't get blasted by the full complexity of GURPS. And then I just try to run a great game. I don't find that I have to reduce the complexity (I had a girl who played mostly systemless games until she tried GURPS, and she was utterly wowed by how fun a game with a deep and rich system could be).

Put another way, I don't apologize for GURPS. I try to give them an honest go and show them its strengths: That it can do something different, that it has rich variety, and that it has deep complexity. I've been pretty successful at spreading the gospel of GURPS.

Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
Woah. If I were told that I could start a new campaign, but I couldn't count on more than two or three sessions because people might get bored . . . I don't think I'd ever do the kind of work I put into startup now. It would be like, oh, spending three hours building a GURPS character and having them die in the second session.
I won't disagree with you on the misery of putting together a huge, rich game, only to watch it die on the vine because players simply won't commit, but I will say that I've been having fun with experiments in short campaigns that still have a lot of detail and depth to them. But then, I've been on a quest to try to stuff as much awesome into as few sessions as possible. I think I'm starting to hit my limit, though. There's only so much you can do in 4 hours.
__________________
My Blog: Mailanka's Musing. Currently Playing: Psi-Wars, a step-by-step exploration of building your own Space Opera setting, inspired by Star Wars.
Mailanka is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 10:30 PM   #28
Gef
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Yucca Valley, CA
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Quote:
Originally Posted by Talonos View Post
The more they saw what was going on in the world, the more they realized that it just wouldn't have worked in That Other System.
I'll second that. That's what sells GURPS, but it has to be demonstrated, and that requires getting folks to try it in the first place.

Let me add that I've learned to be very involved in character creation. If players don't feel threatened by it, I even suggest that they tell me their concept, I nominate a write-up, and then of course they can change it. This helps them avoid some of the traps that new players fall into, so I don't get an army of impulsive overconfident bloodlusty DX-monsters with high pain threshold and combat reflexes. Players of other systems (including GURPS 3e) tend to think that high stats are more valuable than other traits, not quite getting the point that a point is a point, a theory which matches practice fairly well in 4e. A player's first character has a lot to do with his first impression of the system, and if he's first impression is, "Gee, I can't do anything even with DX 17," then he'll quit without ever realizing that he couldn't do anything, or rather, could only do one thing, because he had a one-dimensional build.
Gef is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 10:45 PM   #29
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gef View Post
Let me add that I've learned to be very involved in character creation. If players don't feel threatened by it, I even suggest that they tell me their concept, I nominate a write-up, and then of course they can change it. This helps them avoid some of the traps that new players fall into, so I don't get an army of impulsive overconfident bloodlusty DX-monsters with high pain threshold and combat reflexes. Players of other systems (including GURPS 3e) tend to think that high stats are more valuable than other traits, not quite getting the point that a point is a point, a theory which matches practice fairly well in 4e. A player's first character has a lot to do with his first impression of the system, and if he's first impression is, "Gee, I can't do anything even with DX 17," then he'll quit without ever realizing that he couldn't do anything, or rather, could only do one thing, because he had a one-dimensional build.
I find that kind of high involvement mandatory in pretty much any system. I sit down with players as a group and discuss concepts; have them do first drafts and submit them to me; review them for correct arithmetic, rules legality, efficient design, absence of traits that make sense for the character's history and background, presence of traits that don't make sense, possibilities of clever designs, and possibilities of cool little additions. Then I send the players detailed critiques and lists of suggestions, and ask them to respond. Often we go back and forth a couple more times.

This avoids characters that are poorly designed, characters that don't fit my world assumptions, and characters that will create problems when played with other characters.

Bill Stoddard
whswhs is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-15-2011, 11:39 PM   #30
Alden Loveshade
 
Alden Loveshade's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Hmm, looks like Earth, circa CE 2020+
Default Re: Dragged kicking and screaming from the candy-store

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett View Post
I begin to suspect that few of us have shared your success in converting gamers to the GURPS side.
I hope my post didn't come across wrong. I just happened to have a friend who told me about GURPS very soon after second edition came out (I've been GMing GURPS since 1987). And I also happened to be gaming with some very active gamers, some of whom knew lots of other gamers who in turn knew lots more gamers, many of them at colleges and universities, or in the SCA, which reached even more gamers. And some of them happened to be active in gaming conventions, and some had a lot of influence at a couple hobby/comic books stores that sold roleplaying games, etc. etc. etc.

It's as if someone said to me, "say, here's a snowball; why don't you roll it," I rolled it and it went from there on its own. I didn't make the snow or the snowball, and the roller could easily have been someone else.

But yeah, it's really cool when I talk to a GURPS player and learn there's a distant connection between them and my original group.
__________________
Kerry Thornley: Dwarf Planet Eris, Discordianism, and The John F. Kennedy Assassination Without Thornley, there would never have been the Steve Jackson Games edition of Principia Discordia
Top 12 Clues You're a Role-Playing Old-Timer My humorous (I hope) article that also promotes SJGames/GURPS
GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves My first GURPS supplement
Alden Loveshade is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
gurps recruitment, gurps revival, introductions to gurps

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 10:22 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.