How to Be a GURPS GM

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Anders

I think the best advice to players and GMs both is "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." In an optimal system, the rules would be so amazingly obvious and in service to the game that you wouldn't notice them. And I think we can benefit from paying less attention to the rules and more attention to the game we want to play.

Does that even make sense?

I think so. Roleplaying and GMing are things that I mostly do by craft. I want rules to resolve the outcomes in situations in which neither my feel for what would really happen in the setting nor my feel for what has to happen in the story give me a single clear answer. In those cases I want the rules to take over cleanly without bumps, produce outcomes that neither present perverse incentives to the character-players nor produce outcome that violate my understanding of the setting nor my feeling for the dramatic situation, and then can be put down.

I want to play roleplaying and use a resolution procedure. For this I accept the up-front cost of dealing with a representation system. I want to play roleplaying and use GURPS to fill in the gaps, not play GURPS and use roleplaying to fill in the gaps.

[Steven Marsh]

I agree with the notion that the rules should, ideally, be something that folks can ignore or make up as needed; I also think a fair bit of this ethos is baked into the game itself. (See, for example, the last non-appendix chapter from GURPS Social Engineering: "Throw Away This Book!")

However, in my mind one of the great things about rules is that they give players and GMs something to hang their hats onto, by providing ideas for things they didn't know were possible. For example, Social Engineering has rules for advertising and propaganda; enterprising players might read that and go, "Whoa! Our heroes can just run an ad campaign against the Evil Mastermind's plot!" GURPS Zombies has rules for using a large vehicle to drive through a mob of zombies; a GM could easily read that and start conjuring a set-piece scene with a horde of walking dead and a garage with a double-decker bus . . . And so on.

Without rules, your only limit is your imagination. With good rules, you might not even be limited by that!

[namada]

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[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by fartrader

That's a brilliant quote... ;)

it's why they pays him the medium bucks.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Steven Marsh

Without rules, your only limit is your imagination. With good rules, you might not even be limited by that!

A good point well put: quite the bon mot!

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by johndallman

This is why I'm not into GURPS DF: offering people who play that genre, and are currently happy with it, a different game system isn't an especially compelling offer.

For me, typical D&D was the genre I always most liked, but lots of things about the gameplay I found to be better in GURPS. Armor as damage resistance, active defenses, point-buy characters, wizards being able to learn healing spells and use non-crap equipment. The game part of the game just seems better to me overall.

Once the DF line started coming out it bridged the gap between "I have all this GURPS, what can I discard to just play a normal fantasy adventure?" to actually being able to play.

Ironically I haven't come close to playing a second GURPS campaign since 2006, and the person I was expecting to GM finding Minecraft in the meantime hasn't helped campaign prep move along any faster.

[Anders]

I'm a little disappointed that there weren't stats for Kromm.

ETA: Chapter Two - Marcus purchases the new "How to be a GURPS GM", setting up a loop in the space-time continuum which ultimately results in the destruction of the universe.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Anders

I'm a little disappointed that there weren't stats for Kromm.

Just use one of the scientist templates from elsewhere and add Dancing, Conneseiur (Beverages), and Gaming (GURPS) with the Cosmic enhancement.

We should count as an Ally Group, probably with the Minion modifier.

[Anders]

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[GodBeastX]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Oh, I see. Yes, they're quirky, but our tastes are... different. Munchkin is by far the most productive line, ridiculously so (so much so that it's basically mainstream now. At least here in the Netherlands, you can pick it up everywhere, including random bookstores or toy stores). Most of their dice lines are similarly popular. I wouldn't be surprised if Zombie Dice or Cthulhu dice outside GURPS by an order of magnitude. The rest are fairly niche, but about as niche as most boardgames are here in the Netherlands, which is to say you can order most of them straight from a store, and some of the specialty shops simply carry them outright.

The weird ones are GURPS, Car Wars, Ogre, Illuminati (though I was able to simply pluck that off a shelf at a specialty game shop too). But I suspect these exist more because they have a die-hard fanbase and Evil Stevie likes them, hence why those get supported through Kickstarter rather than through general retail.

Regarding GURPS, it has been my observation that most RPGs sell on the strength of the people running them. Some indie games sell on a concept or the strength of the players, but those don't have very deep market penetration yet, I think. But games like 7th Sea or Rifts or Scion or the oWoD, despite having atrocious systems, tend to have their big fans mostly, I think, because they've played great games. And those great games are the result of wide-eyed, creative, energetic GMs more than anything else.

GURPS too sells on the power of its GMs, and so it doesn't surprise me that GMs are the ones making the purchases. And likewise, it doesn't surprise me that the books that seem to immediately empower a GM and help him leapfrog all of the work and start a game right away tend to sell better than the slow-burn world-building books, because a game that's years in the making earns less devoted fans than several less-perfect games run in quick succession.

"How to GM GURPS" might be more of a boon than we realize. Any book that we can point to when someone expresses confusion or timid interest in GURPS raises its stock. This JUST happened over on Google+, and Mook was able to immediately pimp his book and make a sale, not just on his book, but he was able to tip this particular GM into "Okay, I'll make the investment" because of this book.

Biggest reason I end up GMing is because everyone else goes "I don't know how to GM" or "There's too many numbers!"

This book is exactly what I need to slap people in the face with to make them stop trying to get me to play Pathfinder in custom worlds because "They know the system".