Has anyone here actually played GURPS before? What was your campaign's premise? Did you have fun?
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UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Has anyone here actually played GURPS before? What was your campaign's premise? Did you have fun?
Yes, I have run and played GURPS quite a bit. My favorite campaign that I ran with it was a short lived alt history game set in an Axis victory timeline where the players were all mercenaries in 80s Africa following a limited nuclear exchange between India, Pakistan, and South Africa. My setting has national socialist 'reform' Germany, the US, old SS hardliners, and the Soviet Union (in possession of Siberia and North Korea) all doing glowops in the Congo.
This is the sickest thing I've ever heard m8. I would love to play your game. I've often thought about those 2 former rhodesian pilots turned merc who were hell bent on flying and killing until they died in battle. They were mentioned in africa addio and it was stated that they put "to hell" on their flight manifest every time they sortied. What a wild place.
Here's the timeline for the alt history setting. It says point of divergence is Jan 23, 1941 which is sort of true (historically Lindbergh's speech was not well received by Congress) but apart from that, the major PoD is actually on Dec. 9, 1941, with the ahistorical German publication of the very historically real, so-called "Hull note", which was the ridiculous and clearly bad-faith peace offer the US gave Japan just before Pearl Harbor. Still, it's a fun and wacky setting.
Wat
Probably should've been an Irishman.
It has some fun bits, yeah :^)
As for why he did it nobody actually knows. It's one of several unsolved mysteries of the setting, which I myself did not create a certain answer for. Popular conspiracy theories suggest he was working for the Germans, that he was embittered by Churchill's refusal to end the war, even some who think he was a communist agitator (professor of literature after all). There is no specific answer, though according to the British government's official investigation he was just a madman on the loose in a very disorderly and dangerous London, not many people were Churchill fans in this timeline after all.
>I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
Well, I suppose if he never got famous, then nobody would bother to read his letters. Then again, assassinating a head of state tends to make one famous.
All questions I'm sure people asked in the setting. How could a man who spoke so highly of the war against the Germans in 1941 have turned against them? Well, actually, that bit is pretty obvious, really. 5 long years of a failed and ridiculous struggle against a continental superpower without the support of any other European country or the United States might lead to a re-consideration of Britain's diplomatic priorities.
He had already published The Hobbit by 1937. It feels weird.
Twice, and it was terrible. Ultra convoluted subsystems perched atop a bland resolution mechanic. A bit like dnd/pf, really.
>What was your campaign's premise?
The ones that were memorable:
Caribbean piracy and buccaneering
Isekai into jidai-geki shounen anime
The Hanza campaign
SMAC
Their own Reign of Steel setting one-shot
Other than that: a bunch of generic fantasy campaigns and as an alternative ruleset to Shadowrun
>Did you have fun?
Sure. Why would I otherwise stick to the system if I didn't have fun? It shines best where it has to do a lot of stuff from different genres at the same time (like SMAC or that isekai), and becomes kind of pointless when doing one-note settings (you might as well just play 2d6)
>t. never even saw a GURPS book, not to mention opening one
Played it once for an X-Men style superhero game. Once was enough. Game balance is an absolute mess, the mechanics are somehow super complex and convoluted but also don't offer meaningful tactics or strategic decision-making in the moment to moment gameplay (you will have one "most effective" choice 99% of the time and only ever use that), and the system is a bigger pain in the dick to DM for than D&D somehow.
I would unironically rather play a shitty non-game like FATE than have to play GURPS again. At least FATE doesn't make me want to say "OMG, who the frick cares, can we just say X happens and move on already!?!" every 5 minutes.
>setting has immortality, access to unlimited free energy and lossless energy-to-mass-conversion as baseline abilities of PCs
>also the drama people care about is all interpersonal soap opera shit
>play it in GURPS
There are japanese systems for exactly this, but you'd rather put on a cape and attempt to fly to New York by jumping outta sixth floor window.
So what is GURPS for?
Games on a basis of a pretension of quasi-realism. It's Alien rather than Superman vs Batman. It's Legend of Dragon Pass rather than Legend of Korra.
I actually ran a GURPS Avatar game in the past. Nobody was the avatar, but everyone was benders. The game was super fun, everyone loved doing crazy shit with their bending powers. They were agents of the White Lotus trying to counteract a terrorist cell of benders in Ba Sing Se trying to destabilize the government and institute anarchy in the city.
Game for people who want the trpg equivalent of Morrowind with 150 mods.
>take drugs
>all the drugs
>end the current age in that one second you have as your rapidly expanding consciousness is ripping your body appart
> the mechanics are somehow super complex and convoluted
That's a GM problem, not a system problem. The entire point of GURPS is that it's essentially a build-your-own-system toolkit. You're supposed to pick and choose which subsystems you use, not try to cram all of them into the same game.
If I wanted to make my own game from a mess of mis-matched dysfunctional mechanics not fit to task, I'd just play D&D 5e instead.
It's like "here's a dictionary and don't use them all".
Yes, offloading the difficulties of game design onto GMs is great game design. But I've gone further, for the sake of true high IQ gaming. My Fully Amorphous Gaming System is just a dictionary from which you pick words and use them to craft the perfect game - rules, characters, settings, plot hooks, and anything else you can think of! It's the greatest game and it's a GM issue if you're not having fun with it.
GURPS sucks and so do you.
Yes, i mostly play GURPS. Yeah i have fun. Played stuff like Witcher, ASOIAF, Dragon Age, other generical fantasy stuff, Supers, Historic based campaigns, Gundam, random scifi and so on.
Shit GM with shit players.
I like it for when I want some light tactical realism instead of going full Phoenix Command.
I did a brief weird west game. Didn't last very long, couple sessions total. I like GURPS books as a reference but the system is a bit too weighty in play for my group's preferences.
I ran three games, one was Caravan to Ein Arris, one was a basic combat dungeon cause I wanted to stress test the combat rules (it got really boring since the players got less creative in combat and just decided attacking was the best option), and then another one with zombies on a space station cause I wanted to see how guns functioned in game
The first and last games were all actually really good, but... I think that was in spite of the rules encumbering it
>victorian london urban fantasy game, we're a bunch of jackasses playing occult detective
>make a local politician specced in group contacts, premise is he's a schlubby in-name-only nobleman who is drinking buddies with half the city
>things go well until i actually try to use my contacts, at which point the dogshit appearance rules mean half of london's population fails to materialize because group contact literally does nothing over regular contact despite being 5x cost
>also anything i can ask my contacts is too dangerous/strenous to be free
>turns out my baseline investment in Area Knowledge is immediately more useful in every way because I can just buy hirelings with it so half my character's point expenditure is just obselete
>also another player took so many ranks in appearance he can just roll on the reaction table and mind control people so my social skills are moot and rping conversations just fricks us over anyway because the alternative is literally every npc starting at indifferent/hostile due to having a magic leper in our party
>end up rerolling after an adventure with a stage magician who made a satanic pact for hollywood hypnosis powers
>spec in enthrallment with bare minimum dice in "real" hypnosis/brainwash to represent his poor grasp of theory
>explain this to the gm twice and he says its cool both times
>a few sessions in again, its my big moment to finally mind whammy a guy
>gm rules that enthrallment is an untargeted aoe and literally everyone in the room has to roll against it including my own party
>ok fine frick you, they make their saves
>gm then rules that i have to roll a successful enthrallment subskill to do it (okay that's fair it's how the rules work)
>...and also every time i make an order i have to roll hypnosis, and if i fail he just gets to railroad me
>ragequit the game because this shit isn't getting better
GURPSgays are correct, 90% of GURPS problems are a result of a bad gm because GURPS is a fricking magnet for shit gms.
>GURPS is a fricking magnet for shit gms.
You know what? You're fricking right. I introduced gurps in my area and i'm regarded as one of the best gm here but after the experience 2 guys were so excited that decided to pick the game up and start gming themselves (despite my best advice against). Those two managed to destroy all my work in convincing people to try gurps by making the worst game experiences for other groups: one guy basically start home-brewing gurps with absolute nonsensical rules (like making an excel sheet for calculating a convoluted trait adjustments that doesn't exist anywhere in the rules or making up asinine skills and powers, injecting d&d 3.5e shit in the game, etc...) to the point i had to explain to some of his players that the guy wasn't running gurps anymore and another is one of the most railroady, histrionic, stupid GM you'll never met. This moron doesn't remember half of the rules for fricking 5e, is adamant on his particular interpretation of, not only rules, but fricking scenario to the point he forces a specific course of action to the player by altering the rules. He's working 24/7 non stop in destroying any game reputation he runs (except 5e because that's just too big) with more and more players.
Frick me, i was just planning on running some gurps game, it didn't have to take this course. Now i can only play gurps with my close group of old buddies once in a blue moon.
>GURPS is a fricking magnet for shit gms.
I hate that I have to admit this too.
I have to wonder why though. Part of GURPS problem is what it DOESN'T tell you, because when 4e was written, they could assume people knew it. Now the RPG culture is so alien to it, no wonder it ends up being shit.
> (like making an excel sheet for calculating a convoluted trait adjustments that doesn't exist anywhere in the rules
Seen some people do that online too, then wonder why their players make strange decisions.
>making up asinine skills and powers, injecting d&d 3.5e shit in the game, etc
This is fricking insane.
I have to wonder why. Is it because they were D&D5e gays who basically are so used to homebrewing the shit out of D&D that they just think that to make a game work you do that, and thus have never actually run GURPS?
Elsewhere on the net I've seen shit where a GM started running GURPS as 4d6 because he had just let the players do whatever and they all had stat and skills at like 18+, because the GM was new, hadn't learned the system, and wasn't using any modifiers.
Another going "if I give the players a lot of points, should I increase the dice size too?"
You're listed almost every reason I've been GMing GURPS near exclusively for the past 10+ years.
>all of the combats have felt extremely tense.
Yeah, if there's a better combat system out there than GURPS, I've yet to come across it. I've had a player say that she never truly felt in danger in combat, until my games. Not to say that it can't have improvements, there are absolutely flaws, but they're not like, core flaws that need total redesigning, for the most part.
>and all of their characters feel different in play.
Damn straight. I've had people turn their one shot characters that I helped them make, into their own OCs
>character flaws mechanically supported
I've had new players outright say "I love disadvantage traits they're the best thing" after a little while of playing.
>I have to wonder why
He's the kind of guy that instead of learning a rulesystem gets a rough approximation of it and starts changing stuff because "makes more sense" to him. At least i eventually managed to convince him to stop calling his homebrew gurps so i call it a win.
I think a big part of why is because the core premise GURPS is built around is "just keep bolting more shit on" which appeals heavily to people with lazy programmer brains that basically just want the system to do everything for them so they throw together a bunch of shit that's nominally compatible but ultimately redundant or terribly balanced, unhelped by GURPS itself having no numerical parity between options (invisibility being flat worse than just buying equivalent ranks in stealth etc.) and 'generic' systems being a frickin scam.
ran a chinese fantasy one shot and it was great, targeted locations added a lot to the game. An enemy had his arm crippled dropped his sword and so tried to tackle a player. Encumbrance was meaningful.
I've played and ran several GURPS games over the years.
I ran a pretty good fantasy pirates game. The big mechanical twist I put in was all Magery after the first level had to be aspected somehow. In the group I had two people that played casters and one went all in on Air/Weather spells as the Navigator/Helmsman of the ship, the other was a more generalist mage that managed the ship's cannons, he took Moon Aspected Magery (during the Full Moon he powered up and during the New Moon he powered down) and Alchemy based stuff. It was pretty much a sandbox pirates game, they stole from the major empires, hunted for treasure, and started a pirate nation. It ended when they were acknowledged as a legitimate nation by the other major powers.
I also ran an okay game using Technomancer. It descended into Tippyverse type shenanigans and I got frustrated with dealing with it.
I've played in several Supers games and they were fun. I made a Guyver expy for one that fun as hell play and a Super Sonic Stun Gun in another that made the GM shit himself as attacking a person's fatigue to knock them unconscious was something he never considered.
Currently running two games.
>One is a Dracula Dossier campaign where my players are British specialists traveling around the world to stop Dracula from enacting his plan for world domination, the while fighting and running from both vampires and MI6.
>Other campaign is a stringing together of Delta Green shotgun scenarios which is set up to not only create a slow madness spiral but also gaslight my players about what did or did not happen in previous sessions.
First time playing GURPS for both groups and they seem to be having a lot of fun. People really dig having character flaws mechanically supported and all of their characters feel different in play. It's also a system where just having a gun feels like a superpower. All of the combats have felt extremely tense and it was both tragic and horrific when one character got his throat torn out by a vampire in a single second and proceeded to bleed out before the medic could arrive. That player later got revenge by double tapping an unarmed suspect right in the skull.
I did a GURPS Alpha Centauri campaign.
Or rather, I started one. After about 3 months we all decided to switch to AGE. The hardest part was the Gaian empath.
You need a certain kind of group to make GURPS work.
GURPS has a nice simple system it overcomplicates the shit out of for diminishing returns.
Yeah.
Biotech themed balkanized United states setting.
PCs were abandoned bio mod super soldiers living in govt housing, contact for "one last job"
It was pretty fun but I forgot to use rsnge penalties so the ranged combst was kind of a joke.
GURPS Black Ops is my favorite splat written for anything, anywhere, ever. I've bought multiple copies. Great for one-shots.