Quote from: fearsomepirate;1034162My cursory reading of the combat suggests there's a lot of shuffling around for optimal position before unleashing hell, much like an X-COM game. Fair?

  In  a game with modern, or futuristic firearms, this is very, very true.  Without some pretty big cinematic advantages, getting caught in the open with people shooting at you is a quick night.  I would say in DF, with magic and some of the cinematic ranged advantages this is true to a degree.  Close Combat focused characters are well suited to function in sudden, chaotic, close encounters.  But for sure setting up a formation and having casters rain down on enemies as combat specialist hold a front line is very, very effective.

Quote from: Malfi;1034217Does anybody else feel Caverntown was a great release?

Never even heard of it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035592Never even heard of it.

It's a PDF release for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy which is different from the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, Powered by GURPS but can be used by the Dungeon Fantasy RPG with little to no work by the referee. It's a good product my issue is that SJ Games doesn't have a fucking clue how to manage an RPG brand anymore. Sean Punch is a great line developer but the nitwit running the company doesn't like RPGS and never played RPGS. He doesn't know how to sell to the modern RPG market and is trying to sell their RPGs like they do their board games or Munchkin supplements. It's stupid.

Caverntown should have been advertised and marketed to people that purchased the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Dungeon Fantasy RPG released after the con season last year, sold out quickly, and they dropped support. They didn't even give it a year to try to sell it. They didn't even bring it to fucking conventions to sell. Fuck SJ Games.

Yeah, I'm a little tired of their approach to GURPS too at the moment.  But at least they gave it a shot.  I've always thought making a free point of entry that covers magic and monsters would do more to bring people in and while I can appreciate their desire to showcase what GURPS can do, a simpler point of entry would also be to their advantage at the moment.

Over the years I've started work on a GURPS clone that fans could use to write GURPS content without getting sued.  The problem is that in turning switches and dials to obscure the relationship it always moves too far away from GURPS.  The problem with creating a new standard is that it only becomes another standard rather than unifying everyone under a single banner.

Anyhow, I've been putting some work into a 3d6 system that draws on what I've learned by running GURPS for years.  It gets rid of many of the stumbling blocks like defense rolls calculated from skill, skill purchasing, mundane advantages, cinematic advantages, and powers all in a single alphabetical list, one second rounds.  It probably won't come to anything.  The roleplaying market is saturated and I'm just one guy noodling around with concepts.

They 'gave it a shot' and because Phil Reed doesn't like RPGs he sent it there to die so he could tell Steve Jackson that RPGs just aren't feasible in todays market. I really think their stupid Munchkin CCG is going to do have serious blowback to the company. CCGs are expensive and that game is going to fail.

Munchkin has a lot of fans, that's okay, it's a bit like hating Magic the Gathering for keeping gaming stores alive in the nineties.

I can't speak to Phil Reed's likes and dislikes but I think rpgs struggle in the modern retail market.  What's really needed is on site print on demand but nobody on the manufacturing end is interested in taking the step of giving retailers a discount on pdfs.

I've read some more of the material, and it seems like DF offers high "crunch" without being a broken clusterfuck the way 3.x is. I do think this is a really bad product (already seeing it in Half-Price Books), not because of anything in the rules, but because of the aforementioned issues with presentation (sterile, not sure who its audience is, more interested in mechanics than content, etc). I think that if this is nothing more than "a crunchier way to play D&D," then they should have gone all the way and converted all the SRD monsters to GURPS.

It seems like a good game, but not a good way to make money. It seems like the perfect engine for making a Fallout-like RPG.

Quote from: David Johansen;1035633Munchkin has a lot of fans, that's okay, it's a bit like hating Magic the Gathering for keeping gaming stores alive in the nineties.

I can't speak to Phil Reed's likes and dislikes but I think rpgs struggle in the modern retail market.  What's really needed is on site print on demand but nobody on the manufacturing end is interested in taking the step of giving retailers a discount on pdfs.

I think RPGs are thriving in the modern retail market. They aren't doing well in the traditional retail market. The traditional retail intermediary model doesn't work anymore because the volume for anything other than D&D just doesn't work. RPG publishers (outside of WoTC) sell most of their product direct to consumer which is great because it's higher margin but bad because they cannot spread the risk out and it's lower volume. The other way is through conventions, I talked to Kevin about this over the weekend at the open house and one reason Palladium has started going out to more conventions than they did 10 years ago, is not only the CRISIS of TRECHARY is behind them, but they are selling more inventory at conventions than they used to. It used to be, 10-15 years ago, they'd sell most of their product through the intermediaries. SJ Games is still built on that model.

SJ Games never advertises (and I mean just on their site, social media, facebook, newsletters, etc) conventions and they never ask fans to run GURPS games at conventions. I have run Dungeon Fantasy RPG and 3 conventions over the last two years and every game has been filled. If SJ did a push for volunteers to run games at conventions and they had materials to help support the games that would go along way. Palladium sent me a zip file with a bunch of materials I can use to run store and convention games: advertisements, pre gens, etc. SJ Games could have something like that and create it for very little money.

There are things they could be doing but they aren't interested in it because Munchkin.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1035635I've read some more of the material, and it seems like DF offers high "crunch" without being a broken clusterfuck the way 3.x is. I do think this is a really bad product (already seeing it in Half-Price Books), not because of anything in the rules, but because of the aforementioned issues with presentation (sterile, not sure who its audience is, more interested in mechanics than content, etc). I think that if this is nothing more than "a crunchier way to play D&D," then they should have gone all the way and converted all the SRD monsters to GURPS.

It seems like a good game, but not a good way to make money. It seems like the perfect engine for making a Fallout-like RPG.

Fallout was originally going to be a GURPS computer RPG but they deal fell through so they created the SPECIAL system in its place. I actually think a post apocalyptic box would have sold better.

I'll admit I'm a traditional retailer and have a certain bias towards physical product.

Quote from: David Johansen;1035626Over the years I've started work on a GURPS clone that fans could use to write GURPS content without getting sued.  The problem is that in turning switches and dials to obscure the relationship it always moves too far away from GURPS.  The problem with creating a new standard is that it only becomes another standard rather than unifying everyone under a single banner.

Anyhow, I've been putting some work into a 3d6 system that draws on what I've learned by running GURPS for years.  It gets rid of many of the stumbling blocks like defense rolls calculated from skill, skill purchasing, mundane advantages, cinematic advantages, and powers all in a single alphabetical list, one second rounds.  It probably won't come to anything.  The roleplaying market is saturated and I'm just one guy noodling around with concepts.

My friends and once a long time GURPS fans is working up his own as well. Our group tried Fantasy AGE (3d6 based) and liked it somewhat. When no 3rd party publishing license was forthcoming, he opted to make up his own 3d6 point based system.

I think basic ideas behind Fantasy AGE really nails the sweet spot and mixed in with some of the idea behind Fudge could get a system most of the way to GURPS.

Quote from: David Johansen;1035633Munchkin has a lot of fans, that's okay, it's a bit like hating Magic the Gathering for keeping gaming stores alive in the nineties.

I can't speak to Phil Reed's likes and dislikes but I think rpgs struggle in the modern retail market.  What's really needed is on site print on demand but nobody on the manufacturing end is interested in taking the step of giving retailers a discount on pdfs.

I think they need to open up GURPS and let the fans assume the risk of trying multiple things at once. They keep looking for the magic fucking bullet. They might as well use the money to buy lottery tickets with that approach. With the fans in the lead they can look at what works and decide what they want to do with the official GURPS releases with actual data rather than the guessing game they play now.

Quote from: Ulairi;1035637Fallout was originally going to be a GURPS computer RPG but they deal fell through so they created the SPECIAL system in its place. I actually think a post apocalyptic box would have sold better.

Me too (and I remember that about Fallout). It's as big a pop-culture thing as elves & orcs now. IMO D&D sold well because of the success of Tolkien & pulp fantasy. People played it because they wanted to be Conan and Merlin fighting Smaug, not because they thought throwing percentile dice to determine if a trap is disarmed is intrinsically fascinating.

But without knowing a whole lot about the 80s scene, it seems like Steve Jackson himself completely missed the forest for the trees, and built the GURPS brand on fascination with bell curves and having a unified core mechanic (which of course WotC shamelessly cribbed for 3rd edition). But people who are mainly interested in probability distributions and the extensibility of a mechanic are a niche of a niche. I guess it's a stable niche, but the growth potential seems to be in the neighborhood of zero.

The entire tone of the DF box set comes off as trying to appeal to a hypothetical novice gamer who is interested in "Fantasy RPGs," but not D&D in particular, who has perhaps heard of GURPS (for some inexplicable reason), and has picked up the DF box set instead of the D&D PHB because it's a hefty box with attractive art for a reasonable price. I know people in this thread are saying that the intended audience of this was primarily hardcore GURPS fans, but that's completely inconsistent with the presentation of the text or the way the box was displayed and sold in the store (if I was going to make a set for hardcore GURPS fans, it wouldn't be this, too much wasted volume on the damn box, and I'm pretty sure GURPS fans already have plenty of D6's). I know what a product for enthusiasts looks like, and this ain't it. This product is trying to sell me GURPS all over the place; it's not assuming I've already bought in.

It's like the D&D Basic Set or Pathfinder Beginner Box, but for GURPS.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035592Never even heard of it.

Well I am not suprized, I don't peg you as following GURPS DF releases.
Its just a release that was kinda long overdue IMO. It actually presents a sample town, which is a pretty big deal if you read dungeon fantasy's rules and it has neat ideas and is well designed to boot.

I actually like DF but my personal beef with it is that its design philosophy is 50% dnd and 50% Diablo, with no clear boundaries between them. I would rather have a gurps attempt that is obviously more faithful to dnd, something like Classic Fantasy from Mythras for example.

At the very least it should have monsters with treasure types and either difficulty levels or experience awards. Without this it just doesn't cut it for me.
It still good though because what GURPS lacks is clear limitations and context, which DF provides.

Also I would like to actually see a pointless GURPS and DF could have been it. I mean actually pointless not the pyramid articles that basically package points into specific advantages and you end with close to the same thing, but actual classes that have a fixed progression.
If you go that route you actually have more freedom as a designer to award cool abilities since you don't need to balance everything with everything else.