Over on the GURPS hacking thread, it was brought up that Steve Jackson will take the GURPS IP with him to his grave. That's his prerogative, and I'm not interesting in sneaking into someone else's pool party.  

So I decided to start my own party. Let me begin by setting down my design goals, as much for myself as for others.

Building a character will be done in distinct modules, with points sequestered between the categories. There may not even be points, simply arrays of abilities. Character can be classified by tiers, with higher tiers increasing the potency of the starting character. Depending upon the genre and tier, entire categories may appear. For example, in a Fantasy setting, the 'Species' Category appears, but it is absent in a realistic Western setting. Likewise, a Supers setting has a Superpowers category, while the Fantasy setting does not.

There are Character Creation categories that are universal, however.
1. Attributes - The basic aptitudes and physical traits that the character possesses. We're all familiar with this part. Attributes, in humans, range from 3-18.
2. Skills- The application of those aptitudes to specific tasks or sets of related tasks.
3. Psychology - The internal state of the character's mind. Because internal states are not easily quantifiable, I want to steer far away from the GURPS methods-- I've always found the idea that there's a definable value to say, Bloodlust, a bit silly. I'll go into my approach later.
4. Background - These are the events that have happened, perhaps even in the distant past, that have defined the character's place in the setting. It is important to note that these are all things that are linked intrinsically to the setting. Being hereditary nobility may mean little or everything depending on society's views on government.

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Action resolution is a fairly simple roll 3d6 and compare to a skill rating. Difficult tasks either add to the roll or subtract from the skill (depending on how it goes in the playtests).  There are a few benefits to a roll-under system: it's fast, it's easy to eyeball your chances of success, and its extremely easy for a newbie to understand how competent their character is.

That said, there are some drawbacks that I may have to workaround, and the biggest is skill contests. In a roll-over system, you just compare the two character's rolls. Whoever rolled higher, wins.  

So here's my first option: Roll 3d6 and subtract it from your skill. This gives a margin of victory, and the Margin of victory can be treated as the difficulty of an opposed check.

I'm not totally happy with that-- my wife is one of my players, and she has a hard time with math. My rule for RPG systems is that if I my wife can't play it, the system is too math heavy. I'm pretty numerically dyslexic myself, and its' really easy for me to get confused by numbers.

I don't want to give up on the roll under method just yet, but if it's untenable then so be it.

My complaint with the GURPS mental disadvantages is that too many players will take blood lust and sadism in the belief that sense of duty and code of honor are too restrictive.  Much like D&D's alignment system  where players will often play chaotic evil characters out of the belief that evil is less restrictive.

More mature players don't of course but I'm juggling half a dozen new 17 year old players at my store most Saturdays and I often go home feeling sick to my stomach and wondering why I bother.

I'm probably a bit farther down the road on my own GURPS replacement but I don't really know where I'm going with it.  I keep thinking that trying to capture another game's fan base is probably a waste of time.  To capture a decent chunk of the fanbase you have to be pretty close to what that game is doing.  Another problem is that HERO system already exists and is in many ways  simpler than GURPS but less realistic.

The question you have to ask yourself is "Do I want a new universal standard or just my own private little corner of the world."

If any such attempt fractures at all you end up with the OGL effect where in a couple years we wound up with around three dozen fairly significant variations on the theme.

I don't know how it would be done, but I'd like to suggest a more united approach and standard.

Why did D&D cross the road?  To get to the middle.

And I think the middle of the road would be the place to be if we wanted a united GURPS Alternative Solution to succeed.

Here's a couple points to consider.

1-10 stats.  Yes this divorces the game from GURPS and D&D a bit but it's a useful distinction.  First, it reduces the power of stats a bit and second GURPS really runs on a 10 - 15 scale most of the time when you think about it.  1-10 gives the same functional range, is a common way of rating things, and appeases the cult of stat normalization a bit, I don't think they'll really be pleased until everyone in GURPS has an 8 in their base stats and no one ever is allowed to buy a score higher than a 9.

BANG! Skills as core skill with additive specialties.  This cleans up the default skill mess.  You can just buy the core skills and not mess too much with the specialties if you don't want to while still having full access to a detailed skill treatment if you want it.

Roll Over target number.  This is a popular rule that's mathematically not any different than roll under and both methods can be supported but it opens up the full range of people who won't play roll under systems.  It also means the game can be flexible with governing stats and allows skills to simply be the number of points put into them.

I wouldn't want to get rid of points entirely, you lose too much of the potential user base that way but I would like to get it so you can make a character by picking a few modular objects (cards for instance) and calling it done.  I'm thinking template / lens cards of equal value rather than one point per card with different cards having different values.

In terms of points systems I'd like to argue for a no discounts approach.  The cost of an effect is the cost of an effect no-matter where you got it.  It's always bothered me when gadgets are always more powerful than innate powers in supers games.  I think it would be good to treat tech level as an omni-power.  The five points per TL in GURPS 4e is ridiculous when considered in the light of how powerful the steps are there.

I think it would be wise to have a physics based vehicle design system but it would be interesting if you could stat the vehicle with points and then reverse engineer its physical characteristics and tech-level with the design system.  It doesn't matter to everyone, but when trying to build a new platform with a follower base it doesn't hurt to remember that SJG has basically snubbed us vehicles gear heads for ten years now.

Spells are powers bought as skills.  I'm not quite sure how that works, probably no more points in the power than in the skill or something.  I'd rather have a shorter and more modular magic system.  More universal elements like Create or Enhance rather than the thousands of different spells approach.

At any rate, if such a project were to go forth, everyone would need to check their ego at the door, or the effort would fail.

"GURPS handles this well, and my Abstract System (I may call it that) uses the same method: A skill is based on the statistic, or general predisposition. It is relatively cheap to purchase the first few skill points, with costs rising precipitously after that."

You just solved the skill, stat divide issue for the cards, do you know that?

Remembering that I'm talking about broader skills here that cost two points and contain around a dozen specialties that cost one point here:

Stats cost four points per point.  Skills start at a -2 default (remember 1-10 stats).  A card buys four points of a skill, which is general professional competency and if we went roll under is also skill = stat, so a card buys two in the Skill (which costs four for skill = stat).  Specialty cards buy +1 in four specialties or +4 in one specialty.

But for those using the full point system, you have to buy one point in a specialty and upgrade it by another point to get a point in the skill and we can do that for every point in the broader skill.

Quote from: JonWake;778007So here's my first option: Roll 3d6 and subtract it from your skill. This gives a margin of victory, and the Margin of victory can be treated as the difficulty of an opposed check.

Blackjack is the easiest solution; whoever succeeds with the higher roll wins.

Another thing: We need to get strength scaling right from the start.  It's something GURPS hasn't managed to do once in its history.  Super strength levels should just be very high strength levels with perhaps some kind of comic book physics advantage to keep you on the pavement when your ground pressure hits ridiculous levels.

I'd also like the damage to scale well at the low end, so, a 5 St should be doing more than 1d damage.  The swing and thrust distinction can probably go as that should be reflected in scalable weapon stats anyhow.

So
ST 1: 1d+1
ST 2: 1d+2
ST 3: 2d-2
ST 4: 2d-1
ST 5: 2d
ST 6: 2d+1
ST 7: 2d+2
ST 8: 3d-2
ST 9: 3d-1
ST 10: 3d

?

Have y'all looked at Warrior Rogue & Mage?

It's a free game from Stargazer Games.
http://www.stargazergames.eu/games/warrior-rogue-mage/

WR&M is not a GURPS clone, but it's GURPS-ish. I have found it much more fun than GURPS Fantasy with a similar feel for customization.

Doesn't FUDGE have a pretty direct lineage from GURPS?

Only in that Stephan O'Sullivan was so sick of the GURPS approach that he created something completely different than it.

We're wanting to do something universal and open, so someone else's proprietary system is right out.  I think we also want only d6s so Mutants and Masterminds is out.

I was thinking about the turn sequence.  Why not in order of movement rate but with ten second rounds, the ability to pause or interrupt a move and one second attacks?

I'm not exactly clear on what the goals are, or in general how far people are intending to deviate from GURPS' underlying design, or a GURPS expert, but interesting project and I wish it well. :popcorn:

Quote from: apparition13;778056Blackjack is the easiest solution; whoever succeeds with the higher roll wins.

I think blackjack is more suited to linear rolls like d20 than 3d6. It wouldn't say it won't work, but it will have some strange results with 3d6, like very high skill levels not affecting opposed rolls that much.

Quote from: David Johansen;778125Only in that Stephan O'Sullivan was so sick of the GURPS approach that he created something completely different than it.

Basically this. A few things in FUDGE are yoinked from GURPS, a few other things are attempts to escape from its problems, like scaling and highly-attribute dependent skills. Fudge's design notes mention it a bit: http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/fud-des.html

Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback.

I wrote a thousand words on my thinking about the relationships that stats have to real-world abilities, but then I hit the 'x' button and deleted it by accident.

So the super duper short version:
In the real world, the agility of a creature is directly related to the strength to weight ratio of the creature. In a game, there's no way to model this without a whole bunch of math that nobody outside of OCD loons wants to do with every  character.

This is important because it determines how the statistics scale. I'll go more into depth on it in a minute. I need food. And coffee.

Okay, so I have some coffee and my brains are working at almost peak capacity.

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I've gone over those a thousand and one times, and I think I'll end up going over them a thousand and one more times. Every iteration ends up looking much more like DnD stats than the last. Too few and you have the issue that GURPS has always had, which is everything basing off of a couple stats. Too many and you get the Rolemaster/Millenium's End issue, where the character is this mush of numbers that means nothing.  I think I've settled on five to seven stats.
Strength, Health, Dexterity, Intelligence, Focus, and Presence.

Aaaand we're right back to the Dungeons and Dragons Six. It's really hard not to reinvent the wheel here, folks.

I'm on the fence if Strength should become Size, or Body, or Physique, because of the implicit link with mass, HP, and slight negative correlation with movement speed, but honestly, I've gone down that pathway a dozen times today and it only leads to fiddly madness, which is what I'm trying to get away from in the first place.

So just like in GURPS, Hit Points are determined by Strength, and Fatigue Points are determined by Health.
Now, Strength and HP are roughly analogous to Mass. At least, they're linked. Which leads us to the big, $10,000.00 question: How does it scale?

Whoo, here's the tough part. If you're going to avoid insane number bloat, it has to scale by Logs. So I'll steal the HERO system calculation:
Overhead Press = 25*(2^(STR/5)), round up to the nearest 10's.
So a STR 10 character can lift 25*(2^(10/5)) = 25*4 = 100 lbs.
And a STR 18 character can lift (2^(18/5))*25 = 300 lbs.
For the record, the world record of overhead Press is 445 lbs, which is just under a STR of 21.

Next up, let's talk about damage.

But only if you are sticking to strictly realistic values.

Even so, one of the advantages of a points system is that it tends to produce trade-offs by default.  If you have a high Strength then you'll have fewer points to produce a high Dexterity.  It's mostly a matter of setting the cost relationships and total points properly.  If you give out too many points or have the wrong relationship between say the cost of everything then you get less realistic results.  Of course that can be good in a supers game and if there's one thing I feel GURPS 4e completely dropped the ball on its' supers.

On the other hand I think that the card based or per unit based system should probably be designed to support base-line, gritty / realistic play.  It's a matter of keeping everything's cost to one card or unit for the sake of making it very simple to make a character.

It might even tie into a card based LARP idea I have.

The term Strength covers the broadest generic effect so it's the stat.

The substats or advantages that it includes are size, build, and musculature.  But for a super hero you'd just buy Strength.

I'd lean towards fewer stats, one of the appeals of GURPS is the small stat blocks for cannon fodder.  More detail can be applied with advantages if needed.  But Thief: ST 5, DX 6, IQ 6, Athletics +1, Stealth +1, Throwing +1 should be a fully viable npc stat block.

I'd go full TFT.  Strength, Coordination, Intelligence and possibly Perception.  I like Perception as a stat because sometimes you need a generalized Perception and stacking sense modifiers feels wrong somehow.  Also, Perception as a stat lets rangers with average Intelligence still be fantastic woodsmen.

Health doesn't really need to be a stat if Strength = Hit Points.  But you could have a health stat and make Hit Points = Strength + Health.