09-27-2024, 07:01 AM | #21 |
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Trondheim, Norway
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Re: another campaign prospectus
For me, the system is just as important as (if not more than) the campaign concept. The first thing I looked for in the list was whether the game would be played with GURPS. There's just something about GURPS that resonates with me. Most other systems I've played with feel too restricted, like I can't build/develop my character the way I want. That said, here is how I would vote, where I only consider campaign concept (otherwise I'd almost certainly put 14 on Trucking).
Capital - 4 Demobbed - 2 Heritage - 4 Manse II - 1 Science Heroes! - 0 Shadowlands - 1 Trucking - 2
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You don't need to spend 100 CP on Status 5 [25] and Multimillionaire [75] to feel like a princess, when Delusion [-10] will do. Or, you can run so far away that Status and Wealth don't apply anymore... Character sheet: Google Drive link (See this thread for details.) Campaign logs: Chaotic Pioneering / Confessions of a Forked Tongue / A Doe Among Wolves |
09-27-2024, 07:05 AM | #22 |
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Trondheim, Norway
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Re: another campaign prospectus
I would like to add that I might be convinced to play another system than GURPS if given a good explanation why the other system is particularly well suited to the campaign concept, but I think the explanation would have to be very good to preclude me from asking, "Why can't we just play that with GURPS?"
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You don't need to spend 100 CP on Status 5 [25] and Multimillionaire [75] to feel like a princess, when Delusion [-10] will do. Or, you can run so far away that Status and Wealth don't apply anymore... Character sheet: Google Drive link (See this thread for details.) Campaign logs: Chaotic Pioneering / Confessions of a Forked Tongue / A Doe Among Wolves |
09-28-2024, 05:22 AM | #23 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: another campaign prospectus
Quote:
Three of my campaigns use World of Darkness, including your two favorites, Capital and Manse. Those two both involve characters with superhuman powers. Now of course it's possible to do such powers in GURPS! But it's a somewhat complex process, involving balancing advantages worth from 5 to 100 points against each other; choosing suitable modifiers to customize them; and in some cases choosing power modifiers as well. It's a lot to ask players to do, and a lot for me to check. And World of Darkness has a much simpler system, where such abilities simply cost from one to five dots. The character sheets seem more elegant and easier for players to understand. Of course GURPS has a magic system that derives from M:tA: Realms and Power in GURPS Thaumatology. But if I adopted that, I'd have to do a huge amount of design work to get a system that ultimately recreated the system of M:tA. And then there'd be extra work to produce a technomantic version. I'd also have to do that sort of thing for Shadowlands, which uses lower-powered magic; and I kind of like the way the WW supplement Sorceror handles the matter. Then there are the superheroic campaigns: Demobbed and Science Heroes! I have run a supers campaign in GURPS. But its native idiom is more realistic than I'm going for in Science Heroes! That's intended to be a more classic campaign, with a focus on costumed action; and the Hero System is strongly focused on that sort of action. I've also long admired the elegance of its combat mechanics. So I'm looking at blowing off the dust and seeing if I can actually make it work for the era of transition between pulp and four-color comics. Conversely, Demobbed is intended to be noir with powers. Noir isn't exactly realistic; it's more a cinematic rendition of realism, with a lot of emphasis on visual storytelling. Absolute Power is based on BESM, and my experience is that BESM is just brilliant at visual storytelling. I think it may give me the ability to shift smoothly between larger than life powers and mean streets. As for Manse II, the original Manse campaign was run in straight BESM, and was one of my most successful campaigns ever; why change? BESM was especially helpful because, with every player playing three or four characters, I needed character creation to be quick and simple, and my experience is that designing one GURPS character is about as much work as designing two or three BESM characters. The original Manse had a huge cast of NPCs, ready to be brought on stage, and using BESM again would let me do likewise. The one other thing I'd say is that I like to explore different systems and find out how they work, and running a campaign in a system is a great way to do this. So to some degree I'm probably running for people who like my GMing enough to accept learning new systems as an acceptable price for it. Running relatively rules-light systems like BESM and WoD helps lower that price, perhaps.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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09-30-2024, 01:35 AM | #24 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: another campaign prospectus
So far it's looking as if there's a neat split between the Kansas players and the non-Kansas players (though my wife C falls among the non-Kansas players). The former are going for Science Heroes! or Demobbed, the latter for Shadowlands. Science Heroes! and Shadowlands are the top choices for all but one player; Science Heroes! is that player's second highest choice.
But I still have four prospective players, all outside of Kansas, who haven't gotten back to me. I've asked them to respond by the morning of 7 October, and they seem to be waiting till the last minute. It's possible that when their responses are in, they'll bring a third campaign offering to the front. My own favorite is actually Heritage, but that one doesn't seem to be strongly favored; only two players have given it a positive rating.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. Last edited by whswhs; 09-30-2024 at 01:55 AM. |
10-08-2024, 08:13 AM | #25 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: another campaign prospectus
Final news: It looks as if things have settled out. Of the original 14, three wrote back to say that they were sitting out this cycle; one didn't respond even after I requested a deadline of midnight, October 6/7. So that left me with 10.
Science Heroes! and Shadowlands were runaway favorites. I looked at the possibility of running three campaigns, with Capital as the third (Heritage and Manse II had almost no support, everyone who liked Demobbed liked Science Heroes! better, and everyone who liked Trucking liked Shadowlands better); but I couldn't come up with any configuration that made the players as happy as running just the top two, and the best configuration left Science Heroes! with only two players. So I settled on just the top two, with five each. I had four players who strongly favored each of the two favorites. One player liked them exactly equally, and one had only a one-point difference, so they might have gone either way. But in the end I decided to go with that marginal point of preference. It's going to be a little interesting sociometrically, as Science Heroes! has three players from Kansas who've played together, and two players from San Diego who've played together, but no one in either set has played with anyone in the other set. But I'll hope for civility, at least. Timing seems to be settling out also. Several players in Shadowlands prefer third Saturdays, and some players in Science Heroes! say that third Saturdays don't work for them. I'm hoping to pin this down this week and move forward on the settings, character design specifications, and house rules. And I think that concludes this cycle of campaign selection.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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