Quote from: KenHR;647464Not too familiar with JAGS (I have the PA sourcebook they did years ago...Have Not?  It's very good!), but why couldn't you just treat any 6 on a die as a zero?  You get the same spread, no need to subtract.

Looking to the future...

If predictions of price drops and attendant ubiquity of 3-D printers prove true, RPG'ers could be able to design custom dice for any game. Fudge dice, 0-5 6-siders, the outré n-siders used for DCC.

Would be cool, to download a PDF of a game, along with templates for printing customized dice and maybe minis. Whole new era in gaming.

[Snipped an excellent post]

Quote from: David Johansen;647454What testing the waters has shown me is that people are too fragmented or too loyal for such a project to work.

I publish for Swords & Wizardry, I play mostly GURPS.  Now I do eat my own dogfood with Swords & Wizardry by running a game store campaign for a number of years. But my preference is by far GURPS.

But....

I learned that I can still present the things I want to present despite not using my system of choice. Namely sandbox campaigning with hexcrawl maps and my Majestic Wilderlands. The Majestic Wilderlands supplement doesn't play quite like the GURPS version of those notes. Certainly not as customizable. But you know what? It pretty close and bears up in the five years I been running the two side by side.

Folks publish for a lot of reasons, for me it is about getting my material in the largest audience possible while making some beer money. So my choices back in 2008 were

1) To make my own RPG
2) To use a OGL skill based system, at the time Mongoose Runequest I or Fudge/Fate
3) Publish for 4e using the GSL
4) D20/Pathfinder
5) Publishing for the legacy D&D crowd using a retro-clone.

I went with #5 because

1) I would have to build an audience from ground zero for my own RPG and I don't think I will do well at that.

2) Mongoose has a order of magnitude smaller audience than the Legacy D&D crowd. How most Fudge/Fate system are designed is not what I like to focus on. So if I did how I wanted I would have the same problem as #1 and perhaps worse.

3) Well I am not going to publish using a license that can be yanked out from under me at anytime like the D20 trademark license. Also while talking to game store owners, I felt that the buy Wizard only tendency of game in the late 3.5 era would just increase.

4) I hate with the fire of a thousand suns creating D20 style stat block. After doing it for the three Goodman Games Judges Guild modules.

5) Older edition D&D is easy to modify and has the largest hobby audience of any of the mainstream RPGs. I picked Swords & Wizardry Core rules as it the closest thing to an Ur-D&D I could find and a very generous open license and trademark license.

If I really wanted to publish material for a skill based system with detailed tactical combat I would pick Legends or Openquest. For the purposes of publishing the difference between those two and GURPS is virtually nil.

Yeah, which is true enough if your main bent is fantasy.  On the other hand, if there's a bridge in D&D fan country I haven't burnt it's only because I didn't know about it

Quote from: danbuter;647249Take Gurps and get rid of 80% of the skills. Maybe rename a few things. Publish it.

Wasnt that called the tri-stat system;)

Nah it was FUDGE.

I do not understand the premise of this thread.

What support is GURPS missing by this point?

Almost every major genre is covered by a hardback. It has pdf supplements on D&D style games, action movie style games, Martial arts, space, magic, psionics, multiple weapons and combat supplements etc. etc. etc. There is nearly 200 supplements for that game.

Seriously, what isn't supported?

You sound like a bunch of spoiled jerks. Throwing a fit because they are temporarily not releasing products? Threaten to take your money elsewhere? Plot a retro-clone revenge? Why don't you just play the the goddamned Gurps you already have.

It has rules for different settings, it does not have the settings themselves. This is a big contrast to earlier editions of GURPS; it used to be famed for its excellent setting books, which were bought even by people who didn't play GURPS. Now it's famed for its obscure and overly-detailed rules which are used by no-one and only argued over by BNGs.

Retro-Revenge?  I like your turn of phrase sir!

But no, revenge isn't the point.  The point is that I do a lot of work for my campaigns and sometimes I'd like to be able to do more with them than make a fan page.  SJG has no intrest whatsoever in publishing such material.  Over the years I've seen at least a dozen people show interest in publishing their work for GURPS stuff and there's no way for them to do it.

No game I design will wind up close enough to GURPS for that to work but a unix-like project might.

As far as releases go.  GURPS is a hard game to sell people on playing let alone buying.  Like every single massive compendium edition ever including the D&D Rules Compendium, the GURPS Basic Set is popular with fans of the game and virtually impossible to sell to new players.

It's also a real problem in play.  You can't just hand the book to most people and expect them to build a character for a generic fantasy campaign or a western.  There's just too much stuff in the book that has no place in those campaigns.  Yes you can write up a list but it would be very nice to either have a campaign specific core book that didn't result in every player asking if they can take Battlesuit skill or at least a mundane core book that completely strips powers and cinematic abilities out of the core book.

What's missing?  Well, a proper bestiary covering real animals for starters.  A vehicles book that covers a wide range of real and futuristic vehicles.  A realm management and or mercantile economics book.  New settings, I know settings supposedly haven't done all that well but that always seems weird given how many people claim to have loved the world books and hated the system.  Adventures and solo adventures, yes solo adventures, why not damnit?

Oh well it's okay, really, I've had a lot of disagreements with SJG's aproach over the years, mostly I'm just realizing that I don't feel at all inclined to support them any more.  After all they aren't at all inclined to support me.

Quote from: David Johansen;647670As far as releases go.  GURPS is a hard game to sell people on playing let alone buying.  Like every single massive compendium edition ever including the D&D Rules Compendium, the GURPS Basic Set is popular with fans of the game and virtually impossible to sell to new players.

What I do to get around this, and just went through the process with a GURPS novice last night, is use GURPS Lite, GURPS Characters, and selected copies of templates that is the closest to the type of character the person wants to play.

Last night it was to help him make a 125 point character so we talked about the character's background made a few roll on a family generator I use for these things, and then I gave him a copy of the Solider template from the fan created GURPS Historical Folks, the Guard Template from DF Henchmen, and the Squire Template also from DF Henchmen.  He ultimately decided to go with the Squire Template using the advice from the Holy option. As he wanted to play a lay warrior of a religous fighting order.

Doesn't change the fact that I agree that it would be nice to have an all in one powered by GURPS Fantasy RPG book to him to use or recommend to buy.

Quote from: KrakaJak;647633You sound like a bunch of spoiled jerks. Throwing a fit because they are temporarily not releasing products? Threaten to take your money elsewhere? Plot a retro-clone revenge? Why don't you just play the the goddamned Gurps you already have.

The big problem is finding, recruiting, and retaining players. Not system support or having something new and shiny to play with.

I will get GURPS Zombies when it is released as I know it will be good and probably have some very thought provoking ideas to throw into my campaign. But I have to say is this type of product really what best for the line at this point?

A minor problem is that it would be nice to just to have some ready to run material like folk enjoy for D&D and other fantasy RPGs.

Quote from: estar;647680A minor problem is that it would be nice to just to have some ready to run material like folk enjoy for D&D and other fantasy RPGs.

SJgames actively refuses to believe that people find GURPS intimidating and difficult to use and thus have done NOTHING to counter that perception.

I think it comes closer to actively don't want to see GURPS succeed.  Rpg books are a lot of work for the money and they don't really want to do the work when they can just print money errr Munchkin.

In essence they're good with GURPS where it's at and wouldn't cry if it stopped being something they had to bother printing and inventorying.  Keeping it around is a service to the fans, nothing more.

So, while I may use GURPS in the future if it suits my needs, once again it's not something I'm going to put any effort into promoting or selling anymore.

I would be willing do work on a replacement game but with HERO, CORPS, EABA, Fate, FUDGE, and d6 out there I'd need to see sufficient interest in the project.

One thing I'm pretty sure I'd want to do is push basic damage for Strength 10 up to 3d6.  It'd give some room to scale down to handle lower Strength characters.  Armor and hit points would have to be adjusted but I think Strength + Health HP makes sense.

Quote from: Piestrio;647855SJgames actively refuses to believe that people find GURPS intimidating and difficult to use and thus have done NOTHING to counter that perception.

I bought 4E and my immediate reaction was that it is now intimidating and hard to play.  Many, many options were added to the 3E GURPS that I remembered, all of which helped with accuracy but none of which made the system easy.  

What makes games like Munchkin (and Ogre, back in the day) work so well is that you don't need to know much about the game to start playing.  Time from opening the box to playing can be 15 minutes.  A new player can have an oral tutorial in the major points and play immediately  It can take a while to master, but it is easy to start (like playing HEARTS, the card game, for example).  

Default GURPS is a lot of pages with a ton of rules.  It takes a lot of work to say "we are using X but not Y" and the combat options are fairly unintuitive at first.  It's not that it isn't a good system (it is) but that it takes a lot of work to understand how to craft the default rules into a campaign.

Older GURPS had the bare bones only, which obeyed the maxim of RPG design that it is always easier to add on material than it is to subtract it out.

Quote from: Votan;647940Default GURPS is a lot of pages with a ton of rules.  It takes a lot of work to say "we are using X but not Y" and the combat options are fairly unintuitive at first.  It's not that it isn't a good system (it is) but that it takes a lot of work to understand how to craft the default rules into a campaign.

Bullshit.

They give you (the gamer/customer) credit for having a brain and being able to make choices - how is that 'bad' or 'complex'?

- Ed C.

I was wondering when you'd weigh in Ed.

Given that the majority of the population thinks Monopoly is a big complex game and ignores half the rule book and Basic Dungeons & Dragons was seen as impossibly complex and difficult to understand?

Sorry dude 4e's just a craptacular introductory product.  It's a great reference work, well organized and indexed but it's a terrible teaching and learning tool.

For me, it's time to move on.  I think for anyone who wants a living system or a functional product, it's time to move on.