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Basic Roleplaying: A Played It Review
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9048813" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I learned a lot from trying to run GURPS and it has informed for me how I run games and how I house rule. There are artifacts of my experience with groups in even my D&D house rules.</p><p></p><p>But one of the things that GURPS taught me is that a lot of the "logic" that was pervading how rules were evaluated in the '80s and '90s weren't in fact logical. For example, it was commonly taken for granted during that period that a dice pool with a normal curve so that extreme results were less likely than average results was just more logical and more realistic. Well, that turned out to be rather pointless in practice, whereas in practice dice pools had two difficulties that were serious - first that it was not intuitive what odds you were as GM setting on a roll and secondly that it was not intuitive what a modifier on a roll like +1 or +2 actually did since such modifiers were highly situational depending on where on the curve you were. </p><p></p><p>So I generally don't consider GURPS to be a game system as much as I consider it one of the ultimate examples of "lonely fun" from the '80s where almost all the customers of the books weren't actually using them for actual games but were enjoying them for the creation of hypothetical games or for just the pleasure of reading them. Yes, you could play GURPS and I've done so, but I think once you understand Game Mastery to a sufficient degree you'd never choose to run GURP.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9048813, member: 4937"] I learned a lot from trying to run GURPS and it has informed for me how I run games and how I house rule. There are artifacts of my experience with groups in even my D&D house rules. But one of the things that GURPS taught me is that a lot of the "logic" that was pervading how rules were evaluated in the '80s and '90s weren't in fact logical. For example, it was commonly taken for granted during that period that a dice pool with a normal curve so that extreme results were less likely than average results was just more logical and more realistic. Well, that turned out to be rather pointless in practice, whereas in practice dice pools had two difficulties that were serious - first that it was not intuitive what odds you were as GM setting on a roll and secondly that it was not intuitive what a modifier on a roll like +1 or +2 actually did since such modifiers were highly situational depending on where on the curve you were. So I generally don't consider GURPS to be a game system as much as I consider it one of the ultimate examples of "lonely fun" from the '80s where almost all the customers of the books weren't actually using them for actual games but were enjoying them for the creation of hypothetical games or for just the pleasure of reading them. Yes, you could play GURPS and I've done so, but I think once you understand Game Mastery to a sufficient degree you'd never choose to run GURP. [/QUOTE]
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