Kickstarter: GURPS Mission X

[Argyle King]

Mission X is a project that popped up on my Kickstarter feed.

Mission X by Douglas H. Cole — Kickstarter https://share.google/d2UUqRxeBPHzwXGGF

Given that I've seen a little more GURPS conversation pop up recently, I thought some folks here might be interested in checking this out.

Quoted from the Kickstarter Page:

"Mission X is focused on modern action, with inspiration from Stargate SG-1, Aliens, XCOM, and the like. A streamlined, rebuilt engine focusing getting new and experienced players to the table. Fast and smooth character generation and gameplay.

Mission X will come to the table with a consolidated skills list – about 65-70 skills that represent clusters of ability - with simpler pricing, plus reorganized and rewritten traits. Different damage scaling gets right to the point (what wound might it inflict), ditches hit points in favor of wound severity conditions, and simplifies a lot of the math in calculating injury modifiers.

This is going to be a full, self-contained game (think the Dungeon Fantasy RPG Boxed Set, not the worked-example genre books), that takes the best and most on-point concepts from a very large licensed corpus of prior art, including some of my own Pyramid articles. It's designed to attract new players to a genre GURPS does better than just about any other game, fast to the table; fast at the table..."

 

[Nikosandros]

Thanks for the heads-up. Douglas Cole does solid work, IMO, and this looks quite interesting to me.

P.S.
The link in your post does not seem to work. Hopefully, this one does.

 

[Argyle King]

Thanks for the heads-up. Douglas Cole does solid work, IMO, and this looks quite interesting to be.

P.S.
The link in your post does not seem to work. Hopefully, this one does.

Yeah... lately, I've been having issues with getting embedded links to work.

I edited my original post. The link there now seems to work.

I agree that Douglas Cole does solid work. I'm very interested in seeing more about this project.

 

[MGibster]

For a while now, I've thought the best way for GURPS to make some kind of come back is to have more self-contained games. Games that have all the GURPS rules needed for that particular genre including powers, skills, or other abilities. The rules for GURPs aren't bad, but if you're just using the basic set to create your own game it can be overwhelming. I wish SJG luck.

 

[Nikosandros]

For a while now, I've thought the best way for GURPS to make some kind of come back is to have more self-contained games. Games that have all the GURPS rules needed for that particular genre including powers, skills, or other abilities. The rules for GURPs aren't bad, but if you're just using the basic set to create your own game it can be overwhelming. I wish SJG luck.

This is done under license from SJG, not directly by them. Other than that, I agree fully. Dungeon Fantasy was a great idea, IMHO, but the implementation could have been better. It is a stand-alone product and it does all the work of creating the game, but it keeps too many complex options and thus, in my limited experience, is too daunting for newcomers.

 

[Argyle King]

For a while now, I've thought the best way for GURPS to make some kind of come back is to have more self-contained games. Games that have all the GURPS rules needed for that particular genre including powers, skills, or other abilities. The rules for GURPs aren't bad, but if you're just using the basic set to create your own game it can be overwhelming. I wish SJG luck.

That appears to be what this product is.

I agree with @Nikosandros that Dungeon Fantasy can be daunting. It starts at a high point level.

(I find that After the End is a better product for learning/teaching the game.)

Some of Douglas Cole's previous products were geared toward faster character creation for Dungeon Fantasy. Given the quality of those, I am optimistic that Mission X will be good.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Mission X is focused on modern action, with inspiration from Stargate SG-1, Aliens, XCOM, and the like. A streamlined, rebuilt engine focusing getting new and experienced players to the table. Fast and smooth character generation and gameplay.

It's like "Ooooh, this sounds interesting and kind of cool" and GURPS is particularly well-suited for some stuff in that vein, especially SG-1's planet-hopping.

And then

Mission X will come to the table with a consolidated skills list – about 65-70 skills

Errrrrrrrrr what. Why. Why in god's holy name would we possibly need 65-70 skills to do the above? Especially if we're consolidating them! Pretty sure that even being generous you could go to 30-ish or maybe less. I mean, Mothership is in basically the genres described and goes barely north of 40, and it has some basically-useless or redundant skills.

Still be interested to hear what people think once it's actually playable.

 

[Argyle King]

My guess would be that it depends on what you want to do in game.

Multiple pillars of play across multiple types of campaigns.

There's a lot of variety across X-Com's tactical warfare, Stargate's Sciency Planet Hopping, Alien's Sci-Fi Horror; etc.

Currently, I can only speculate based upon other products. It'll still be a toolkit; just one that's more focused. When I'm playing After the End (GURPS Fallout, Mad Max, etc,) I don't need any of the magic rules found in Dungeon Fantasy.

From the description, it sounds as though Mission X puts more effort into being a focus and self-contained game, but it will still cover a lot of different possible game types.

X-Com is one of my favorite games, so I'm excited to see how this product turns out.

 

[dbm]

This has been in development for a couple of years, and Douglas makes good stuff. So I will be checking this out.

 

[MGibster]

Errrrrrrrrr what. Why. Why in god's holy name would we possibly need 65-70 skills to do the above? Especially if we're consolidating them! Pretty sure that even being generous you could go to 30-ish or maybe less. I mean, Mothership is in basically the genres described and goes barely north of 40, and it has some basically-useless or redundant skills.

Last time I ran a GURPS game, back around 2005, one of the players incredulously exclaimed, "There's a dropping skill!" 60+ skills does seem rather excessive, and it makes me think a good number of them won't be all that useful for "adventurers."