What GURPS needs... now

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by CraigM

So what's the difference? Is it that fantasy has a richer library of popular archetypal plots? Or is Banestorm just written with more hooks?

There's really not much in Banestorm that strongly appeals to me. On the other hand, NOW I can come up with multiple ideas for THS campaigns—and I've seen interesting proposals from other THS GMs that I would never have come up with (one of them wrote about his British Space Naval Academy campaign, for example). THS didn't present much in the way of obvious campaign hooks, and I had to think about it for a while. But the setting was rich and interesting enough so that I really wanted to use it. . . .

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

See, my problem here is that you can end up defining "the core conflict" so vaguely and loosely that it ends up as a useless point of reference - and any game that isn't just about sitting in a corner meditating has a "core conflict" on those terms. Certainly, every TS campaign concept I've ever created has some kind of "core conflict".

I don't think either of my THS campaigns had a core conflict. At least not one that related to the plot and the scenarios. The private investigators one had a series of thematically related core conflicts, having to do with the misuse of information; the cosmic horror one had a series of core conflicts relating to threats to humanity itself made possible by transhuman technology. But in the former, the tension that ran all through it was between transhumanism and preservationism, and it was largely a conflict between two of the PCs. I suppose it was a little like the way the tension between reason, emotion, and executive function runs all through original Star Trek, no matter what the particular episode is ostensibly about.

And, you know, we're running improvised serial fiction, which in some ways is more akin to classic television than to novels, or films, or mini-series.

[lordabdul]

Originally Posted by whswhs

When I'm planning a session, I look at the disadvantages of the PCs, especially their relationships with NPCs;

[...]

That kind of thing isn't what I'm able to do routinely, but it's the kind of thing I aspire to do. And I'm just not seeing that I'd find a published adventure that worked for it, except through sheer luck.

Sure, when I have a continuing campaign I often resort to writing my own adventures in a similar way (either from scratch or based on some published material or movie plot or whatever), so I take advantage of ongoing threads, current makeup of the party, etc. What do you do when you try a completely new game/setting though?

In my case, I often (but not always) fall back to published adventures, because I'm just trying it out. If I want to try TimeWatch or Wild Talents or Numenera or Unknown Armies, I may not want to go through the trouble of writing my own adventure -- especially since I don't actually know yet what makes any of those games... well... be that game. I don't want to play a TimeWatch game that will really be a D&D plot with some time travel on top. I want to play something that was written by someone who truly understand what makes TimeWatch be TimeWatch, so that I then understand it, and can, maybe by the second adventure, write my own. It's especially important for very "moody" games like Unknown Armies or Puppetland -- I would probably run a couple published adventures before I would even attempt to write my own, otherwise I don't know if I would write the correct "feel".

In many ways, this relates to what Gollum said about an example being worth a thousand pages of world description. And although I agree with you that I enjoy a lot more reading world books than adventure books, in the end I still need to make an adventure. And when I'm trying a new game, I don't have any existing PCs and campaign arcs to honour, so at that point writing my own adventure or using a published one is a moot point.

Even when it's a not a brand new game, there are many situations where published adventures are still an option -- and interestingly enough this ties in to this "core conflict" debate that is simultaneously happening here. Games like Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green for instance are much less a setting ("it's the real world, plus magic and monsters") and more a campaign framework ("you play investigators who ended up fighting those monsters to keep the human race going for a little longer"). Delta Green even more so than CoC since it adds "and you're a federal agent that got sucked into a government conspiracy to do so" (and it must be doing something right since it's been routinely voted as one of the all time best RPGs ever in many polls). As such, you know that the PCs will go on different cases around the country -- some might be specially designed by the GM to build up on various threads going on, but some might also be filler "monster of the week" episodes, in a similar fashion as how several TV series are built. But either way, it's going to be a case your FBI/CIA/whatever PCs are going to be working, and that provides a basic level of structural similarity that makes published adventures significantly more usable than a complete sandbox campaign.

In that regard, things like Golarion are both a sandbox setting and campaign framework. Sure, you can do whatever you want -- you could be a noble, playing political games in some capitol city, you could be a pirate making trouble in port cities around the gulf, you could be a mercenary or dungeon raider or imperial guard or whatever... but you can also stick to the campaign framework, which is to be an adventurer that's part of the Pathfinder Society -- which means you have a bunch of assignments and just like Delta Green you have some basic framework for adventures.

As such, what Transhuman Space lacks is that campaign framework. It has the setting down, with lots of different people to be, and lots of different things to do. Oh boy does it have that. It has so many cool things. But it doesn't have that "entry point" that you can use if you don't know what to do or, worse, you don't know what to choose among all the things you want to do. It doesn't have this default "you are a member of faction FooBar and you're doing this" framework. Which means no common structure to write adventures around, which means either no published adventures or, worse, published adventures than nobody wants to use, or can use. Therefore no entry point. Therefore only for people with the skills and time to write their own adventures. Therefore a niche game.

So to me it's not really about having a core conflict, but having a core campaign framework. That's what makes the viability/usefulness of published adventures so much higher.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There's really not much in Banestorm that strongly appeals to me. On the other hand, NOW I can come up with multiple ideas for THS campaigns—and I've seen interesting proposals from other THS GMs that I would never have come up with (one of them wrote about his British Space Naval Academy campaign, for example). THS didn't present much in the way of obvious campaign hooks, and I had to think about it for a while. But the setting was rich and interesting enough so that I really wanted to use it. . . .

This I think is the more useful bit of the "Core Conflict" idea.
Vampire was a great setting not because it had the core conflict of trying to retain your humanity as a constant thing players dealt with.,
It was a great setting because

• Trying to retain your humanity was an obvious conflcit that could be used
• The Masqurede was acommon Wainsoctt idea that people liked and understood
• Clans gave another method of conflict with your peers
• Antitribou? and other but related settings like Werewolf added more conflict but also diversity

It was that nice mix that made the setting appealing. Plus it hit a popular trope at the right time. However that mix was a big deal.

A good setting should give the GM and the players plenty of ideas for things to do and ways to play or interact with each other and the world.
It needs to be more than just details and stats it needs to inspire.
Transhuman Space is a richly detailed setting but like Bill I had trouble on reading it figuring out what to do, later I thought of it as a cyberpunk like world with higher tech and gene mods.
Banestorm is an interesting idea and you have typical fantasy tropes you can use but it lacks that inspirational awesomeness. I actually liked Mad Lands better.
Madness Dossier is an inspirational setting that borrows on some common ideas, gives them a plausible explanation and twist and adds the Sandmen as a built in way for the GM to get things moving.

The other original settings Lands Out of Time, Reign of Steel, Tales of the Solar Patrol, Zombies Day One, IST, and the Thaumatology books provided an interesting idea but to me at least were not as inspirational. I did not pick up those books and say "I have to run this!"
Instead I enjoyed the read and maybe mined them for ideas.
Now that I think of it a lot of my own settings have suffered from this. The players enjoyed the campaigns but they only played in the first place because it was a genre they wanted.
They rarely heard the world background and said WOW, instead it was like Ok or that will work.
As the game progressed they became more attached to the world and some liked digging into the background. However as a book I was selling? It would flop unless presented in a much different way.
In my mind GURPS is like that. Get people involved and you will keep most of them, but with so many choices out there you have to make a more attractive opening pitch.

I think most of the original settings could benefit from an adventure or expansion that was tied to the setting and inspirational to get people to take a fresh look.

EDIT: Licensed books in theory help here as you have the source material for inspiration on what to do and people already inspired and appreciative of the setting. However they still need that "Where do I start?" bit to succeed.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

See, my problem here is that you can end up defining "the core conflict" so vaguely and loosely that it ends up as a useless point of reference - and any game that isn't just about sitting in a corner meditating has a "core conflict" on those terms. Certainly, every TS campaign concept I've ever created has some kind of "core conflict".

Some people talking about a core conflict of a setting mean that any campaign in that setting should be about basically the same thing. If you're running in the Forgotten Realms, your campaign is going to be about dungeoneering. There's not much point running GURPS Lensman if your PCs don't get to be Lensmen or similar. And so on.

Identifying campaign frame with setting (and, even more, with game mechanics) makes it easier for a new player/GM to get started: not so many choices! (And this is crudely what Dungeon Fantasy or Action or Monster Hunters does for GURPS, except that they don't have an Official Setting in the same way.) But it makes it harder for an experienced GM to build the campaign they want.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

There's not much point running GURPS Lensman if your PCs don't get to be Lensmen or similar. And so on.

Identifying campaign frame with setting (and, even more, with game mechanics) makes it easier for a new player/GM to get started: not so many choices! (And this is crudely what Dungeon Fantasy or Action or Monster Hunters does for GURPS, except that they don't have an Official Setting in the same way.) But it makes it harder for an experienced GM to build the campaign they want.

Another good way to look at it. And it appears those books sell better than the setting books based on the number of supplements.
Also a lot of splat books sell well and I think its related. Sure, some go for the unbalanced power ups but I like the ones that delve into background and give me interesting ides for directions to go in.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

See, my problem here is that you can end up defining "the core conflict" so vaguely and loosely that it ends up as a useless point of reference - and any game that isn't just about sitting in a corner meditating has a "core conflict" on those terms. Certainly, every TS campaign concept I've ever created has some kind of "core conflict".

If you're playing bodyguards or memetic consultants, the core conflict is with the parties hostile to your current client - except in those scenarios where you stumble over some third party who needs to be opposed out of good citizenship, common morality, or PR concerns, or where the client turns out to be playing some kind of dubious strategy and actually needs to be stopped. If you're playing kid detectives (in TS or anywhere else), the core conflict appears to be with whatever illicit actor is responsible for the badness in your current mystery, but may actually be with an adult world that doesn't understand your priorities, or for that matter with your own difficulties in relating to an inadequately comprehensible world (oh gods Bad Machinery the RPG pleasepleaseplease). If you're playing a journalist and her support team, the conflict is with whoever wants to stop you getting the story out, or to get revenge on you for having got the story out. And so on.

Wherever there's a story, there's a "core conflict". But so what?

I think the suggestion is more like Transhuman Space should have included a chapter with one or a few fleshed out campaign frames.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

Sure, when I have a continuing campaign I often resort to writing my own adventures in a similar way (either from scratch or based on some published material or movie plot or whatever), so I take advantage of ongoing threads, current makeup of the party, etc. What do you do when you try a completely new game/setting though?

In my case, I often (but not always) fall back to published adventures, because I'm just trying it out.

I have to say I hardly ever do that.

When I decided to try Space 1889, I said to the players, "Your characters are members of a superteam based in London." When I ran Call of Cthulhu I dumped the Cthulhu Mythos entirely and took my horror motifs from American black folklore. When I ran Mage: The Ascension I based it in Hong Kong and focused on how members of various Chinese factions of mages (Akashic Brotherhood, Wu-keng, and Wu Lung) dealt with the takeover by the mainland. My first Big Eyes Small Mouth campaign was set in (an alternate) Middle-Earth. My In Nomine campaign had the PCs as minor hellspawn competing in a hell-produced reality TV series. None of those was the standard campaign for that rules system (or that setting, if the rules system came with one).

Now when I ran Buffy, I did have it be about vampire slaying! But I set it in Alta California in 1812 or thereabouts. And the concept of "who are you and what do you do" in that case came from the television series, not from the game books! In fact I think one of the strengths of that campaign was that every player had seen every single episode of the show. And Whedon really is good at coming up with dramatic premises that could be taken as "you're a group of player characters in a setting where you have adventures"; it's as if the Zeitgeist had changed from the old one person or two-person team of classic adventure shows.

But if I'm "trying it out," part of the trying out is thinking about what would be an interesting take on the setting. So, for example, when I wanted to try running a campaign based on the metaphysics of GURPS Cabal, I didn't set it on the material plane at all; I set it on the astral plane. A central geographic feature of the astral plane is the Pearl Bright Ocean, and a central historical fact is the translation of Atlantis from the material to the astral plane; so I decreed that PCs would be privateers in service to the Atlantean empire, and that they would all be figures of legend (in fact three of the six were gods—one Greek, one Irish, and one Hollywood—and the other three were a rakshasa, an Atlantean seafarer, and an exile from Earth). There certainly weren't any "voyagers from Atlantis" adventure books to suggest this; Ken Hite seems to have envisioned that players would use Cabal to play secretive mages in 21st century Earth. But what I came up with gave me a chance to explore the astral plane widely.

In a way I get what you're talking about. Because right now, C and I are away from our established gaming community; so I've offered to run a series of solo adventures for her, and she's asked to play a character in King Arthur Pendragon, a game I've long admired but never run. So now I'm looking through the core book, and I see that it has "winter phase" and three other phases for the other seasons; but I'm not quite sure how "adventures" fit into those phases, or what a KAP "adventure" is supposed to look like. Having a couple of pages about "Here is Aimeric du Val, a young man from Occitanie going to Camelot to win fame for himself, and here is his first year in play, step by step" would be a big help. But I don't know if having "adventures" to draw on would be what I'm looking for.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Madness Dossier is an inspirational setting that borrows on some common ideas, gives them a plausible explanation and twist and adds the Sandmen as a built in way for the GM to get things moving.

Maybe not that well if one of the smartest people here couldn't figure out how to run it.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

... but I'm not quite sure how "adventures" fit into those phases, or what a KAP "adventure" is supposed to look like.

Adventures normally happen in summer. A knight is not needed on his estate at that time, and the weather is better. People have travelled around and spread news during the spring, so a knight can have heard about something that needs his attention, or been assigned a mission by his lord.

Adventures can be quite varied. Knights are the people with freedom to move around in Logres. All the other social groups have restrictions or expectations that limit their activities, but knights are expected to go out and have strange adventures. Further, they expect this: there's usually no need to justify the start of an adventure showing up for a knight, and it being well-suited to him.

So knights are wandering righters of wrongs, enforcers of laws, detectives, ambassadors, courtiers ... all kinds of things, although they are (almost) all warriors as well. Their overall purpose is to maintain the king's peace, the era of calm and prosperity that has come with Arthur's uniquely just rule, and which everyone fears will end when he dies.

OK, the lengthy Pendragon campaign I played was somewhat mystical and definitely T.H.White influenced, but I hope the idea is clear.