Quote from: Gunslinger My brother bought GURPS to run Rifts.

So, uh, just out of curiousity, did he ever finish and how many sanity points did he have left?

Quote from: KoltarEat the Whole Cow!! I love that motto now.  Really silly catch-phrase for gaming.

Man, I'm gettin' the wrong paycheck.  UnnowhatImean?

Quote from: Dominus NoxSo, uh, just out of curiousity, did he ever finish and how many sanity points did he have left?

No and none.  Though I believe it was more futility that no one wanted to play Rifts regardless of system.  Rifts did not treat our group well.

Quote from: GunslingerNo and none.  Though I believe it was more futility that no one wanted to play Rifts regardless of system.  Rifts did not treat our group well.

Oh, rits is playable, but the system is just so unplayable.....

Gurps rifts is possible, I'm just not much into rifts.

Quote from: darI agree. It's a little weird but I like Koltar's joke analogy. I like Nox's defense. I like talking about GURPS. And actually I'd like to start a game going against some of what Nox said. Eat the whole cow, so to speak. Have a game where EVERYTHING is acceptable. Some gonzo wahoo game where a knuckleheaded spell casting cave man goes Cthulu hunting with his ultra tech robotic insectoid archeologist friend from Betelgeuse 5.... maybe.

Your mad prayers have been answered... but can you truly face what you have willed into being?

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=318193

Another thing I liked about gurps was te fact it offered detail to those who wanted it.

F'rinstance, in most games it's just automatically assumed that hollowpoint bullets do more damage to body tissue but don't penetrate armor very well. The fact is that small calibur pistol hollowpoints often fail to "expand" in the real world due to the lower velocity of the rounds not being powerful enough to cause them to "mushroom".

Gurps gave rules to simulate this in 3e and you can still use them in 4e if you wish. It's a nice touch and shows a little attention to detail that other RPGs missed.

Quote from: Tom BI don't think that's entirely true.  I prefer roll-over systems, because they're more open-ended in scale.  In particular, I prefer systems like Rolemaster, Unisystem and CORPS that allow for open-ended rolls so that no matter how high the difficulty, there's always a slim chance of success...that 'one-in-a-million' shot.  I also find them easier to work with and more flexible, but that's my own preference.

But that is not inherent to roll-over systems. In a roll-under system it can be decided that there's always a minimum possibility of success. For example, in RuneQuest, a 05 or less is always a success, no matter the penalty.

Of course, it hasn't got anything to do with preference, I don't get why some people prefer roll-over to roll-under, or the other way around, when mathematically they're equivalent*, but I respect that.

*= The only difference is psychological. In roll-over systems, usually one finds a great variety in difficulties, whereas in roll-under systems, all difficulties tend to be 0.

I think I get it on under vs. over. In D&D you could end up with a roll of 35 needed on a d20 to hit a high hit die monster. Impossible for low level characters but easy for say a 40th level fighter. It's simple and elegant to have an increasing forward/upward march of difficulty.

The same thing can't as easily or elegantly be done with roll under.

Though it strikes me that that upward march becomes an increasingly silly arms race.

what am I missing?

If GURPS is rubbish, then I must be a piece of rubbish, because I love GURPS (I try not to be a fanboy, but still).

Reading what Settembrini thinks about GURPS and how much a piece of crap it is, according to him, I recognize myself when I thought D&D was crap and its players played D&D because they didn't know better. Of course I was full of shit. I may not like D&D, but there are people who do like D&D, they're not retarded, some of them know other systems and even so, they prefer D&D to them. That doesn't mean that D&D (or GURPS, or whatever RPG) is not to be criticized, but stating that, because one doesn't like an RPG, then it must be a joke? :confused: Please! :rolleyes:

Quote from: darI think I get it on under vs. over. In D&D you could end up with a roll of 35 needed on a d20 to hit a high hit die monster. Impossible for low level characters but easy for say a 40th level fighter. It's simple and elegant to have an increasing forward/upward march of difficulty.

The same thing can't as easily or elegantly be done with roll under.

Though it strikes me that that upward march becomes an increasingly silly arms race.

what am I missing?

In GURPS, you can have a -15 penalty to a given roll, almost impossible for a character with a low skill, let's say 12, but easy for a character with a 32 skill. So it can be done, easily and elegantly.

Anybody thinks that's not easy nor elegant? How so?

As I said, the difference is psychological.

Quote from: dar...a knuckleheaded spell casting cave man goes Cthulu hunting with his ultra tech robotic insectoid archeologist friend from Betelgeuse 5...

Hey, they would fit right in the GURPS game that I run. Well...maybe "fit right in" is a bit of a stretch, but they would certainly be possible as PCs.

Well, in any system, you get only four basic results,

• Fuck-up
• Failure
• Success
• Awesome

In principle you could have just two results - success and failure - but almost every game system seems keen to have those four. How you generate that result, all are variations on a theme - the idea is that as your character improves in ability, success becomes more likely, an awesome result more likely, failure and fuck-up less likely.

The simplest system allowing the four results would be "roll 1d4, each number corresponds to one result." But you would probably want to distinguish between "has learned this skill" and "hasn't." So then you might say that the guy without the skill shifts result one down - so the guy without the skill will fuck up half the time, and never get an awesome result; and the guy with the skill shifts the result one up, so he never fucks up, and is awesome half the time. You might want to adjust these a bit, like, "+1 for simple task like driving in a straight line down an empty road," or "-1 for doing it while under fire," and so on. But that's about as simple as you can get, I think, and still get those four basic results.

Roll over, roll under, draw a card are all just means to the same end - those four results. Many games have tried to do more with those numbers, things like, "roll against each-other, the difference between your success levels adds to damage" and so on - but they're usually pretty minor parts of the game system. It all comes down to give us those four basic results.

The actual means to that end, really it's personal taste. For example, lots of people dislike the d4 because it doesn't really roll, and lots dislike the d20 because it bounces around a bit, and often off the table. Some people hate adding dice together for skill rolls, though no-one seems to mind it for damage Others hate subtracting one die from another, or having to decide which d10 should be the tens in rolling two of them for d100. Some hate deliberately "different" dice like the dF (d6 marked two sides each +, - and 0).

I think it's mostly personal taste.

I think one flaw that GURPS has, along with other crunchy systems, is that it's hard to glance over a character sheet and get a good idea of what the character's about - it's just a bunch of numbers. Percentiles are often easier to grasp, and descriptive systems like Fate. So GURPS, like all crunchy systems, takes some study for you really to get the most out of it. I guess GURPS (for example) could be said to be roleplaying's chess to d4-d4's (for example) draughts.

Quote from: JimBobOzI think one flaw that GURPS has, along with other crunchy systems, is that it's hard to glance over a character sheet and get a good idea of what the character's about - it's just a bunch of numbers. Percentiles are often easier to grasp, and descriptive systems like Fate. So GURPS, like all crunchy systems, takes some study for you really to get the most out of it. I guess GURPS (for example) could be said to be roleplaying's chess to d4-d4's (for example) draughts.

I don't know, I like the GURPS character sheet and I think it's easy to know what a character is about, as long as there's not a lot of advantages, disadvantages, and skills. I guess your criticism is valid.

My experience is that the number of different traits (Dis/Advantages and Skills) to a GURPS character depends mostly on the GURPS experience of the player.

New GURPS players will tend to choose 10-20 skills, and 2-4 Dis/Advantages. Experienced ones will tend to choose 20-30 skills, and 4-12 Dis/Advantages. So we get the number of traits as newbies with 12-24, and experienced players with 24-42. It doesn't sound like a lot, but with the numbers, can be a bit bewildering when you first look at it. The player who created that characte - and possibly their GM - will find that individual character quite easy to grasp; both because they helped create it and because behind those numbers is a "character concept", some idea or mental image. But if someone else looks at the character sheet, they might have trouble figuring out what they're like.

Consider for example the trait "Truthful." It gives you a game-mechanical penalty to verbal deceit, and says, "you hate to tell a lie - or are just bad at it." Those are two very different things, really. A character who is just bad at lying may recognise that, and just shut up sometimes and let someone else do the talking, if they think deceit is needed. But a character who hates deceit won't be able to be silent, and will speak up and tell the truth. So you can get two players, given a character sheet with Truthfulness (SC12) [-5], might each play the character entirely differently.

Now, in some ways that's a strength of the system - you could have four identical character sheets, and yet have them played four different ways by your four different players; flexibility and openness of play is a strength. In other ways, it's a weakness of the system - as I said, when someone new to the system or the character looks at the sheet, they might not learn much about the character.

In GURPS, I see the character sheet as like a caricature of the character - it's a representation of them, it's recognisably them, but it's not really good as a portrait, it exagerrates some features and ignores others. And if you look at the caricature, you wouldn't learn much about them unless you already knew the character. That's fine in a well-established group, but it means that when you give a pre-generated character to a newbie, they're a bit lost, in my experience. Because of this, it's actually better to have newbies make their own characters. They won't be optimised for anything much, but the newbie will have a better grasp of things than with a pre-gen; this is the opposite of most systems.

Thats what a decent backstory is for.
There is that NOTES section on the GURPS character sheet.

- Ed C.
 (VERY sleepy right now)