Recent content by Panzeh

I think it's important if all you're really doing in your game is dungeon SWAT team stuff, then yeah it needs to be kinda optimal for that. But I think, there's a lot of kinds of balance that are important especially in other kinds of games. For example, i do think it's important that...

I really don't think the details of how templates and attributes are used in NPCs and templates are really what drives the sales and attention to GURPS, as a big deal thing, as most people don't even know the details of that stuff- it's inside baseball for enthusiasts.

Honestly, I see GURPS as something that has a lot of potential if it's marketed correctly, as unlike most other games put out today, it actually does the work to try to be both 'universal' and 'sim' in its sensibilities, which runs against almost everything else in the market. It's not pretty...

I can sometimes see how this plays out, but my experience has taught me players can only track so much, so either a logistically-inclined player trivializes it, or the group forgets it and the GM acquiesces because it would feel like a gotcha to people who don't have such a player. It's a lot...

For what it's worth, i kinda find the torch management to be more of a pain than it's worth- one logistically inclined player can basically make it no big deal, same as rations, water, etc. I've heard a pretty good argument that the best way to keep people from dallying in a dungeon in OSR type...

I think the problem of algorithms basically means that every article creator has to make headlines that present its material as provocatively as possible, so it ends up being some rousing attack on D&D(and current indie creators) while also being about the biggest thing in the room. It's sad-...

One thing to note about gun skills in GURPS is that most gun based small arms default to each other in a very friendly way- it's usually best to just crank one gun skill up as high as you want and then let the others be -2 from that. Though i generally don't play with familiarity(i think it's a...

I imagine FL didn't quite understand what they were getting into with the contract with Alchemy and decided to discontinue the license after that. The Fantasy Grounds modules for Traveller contain full PDFs, too, but they never get discounted all that much probably because there's some...

I'm not sure how StartPlaying makes money itself, yeah, but i'm not sure being the middleman here would be that lucrative, and I don't see WotC being able to actually pay professional GMs to handle the mass of business they'd need to do- SP relies on people doing it as a side hustle for the most...

If it was GURPS i'd just look up the skill "wainwright", see what the defaults allowed (some skills cannot default off of IQ or DX), and go from there, i wouldn't feel bad about it. If i let someone with that high an IQ stat into the campaign i'd know that's what i'd be getting into.

I really think you need to play through a Forged in the Dark game as it is before you start trying to hack it, you'll learn a lot more about the structure. When I played through a Band of Blades campaign, i learned a lot about how to do things differently next time and what i thought needed to...

I think the article is more Riggs talking about how it was more interesting to talk about D&D as a hegemon in TTRPGs and kind of being nervous about trying to write about TTRPGs if it ended up being different- sort of a lament about having to write for a more fractionalized media.

They don't necessarily have to be, but i've found in general that almost every campaign i've been in that starts with that ditches it pretty quickly because it's a fairly trivial challenge if you have a player who's good at planning things, and a massive annoyance if you don't. I get the...

Yeah, I mean, if your game is going to feature a lot of attacks, having the hit roll and damage roll isn't 100% necessary, especially when the damage roll is already abstracting so much. I look forward to seeing how it pans out in play- a lot of effects that affect the hit roll are effectively...

GURPS really needs a guided character generation from the GM based on the specifics of the game- just getting the books out and telling people to go hog wild will not give good results. It's a good system, but it doesn't work out of the box, you really have a lot of work as the GM to do the...