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I went looking for my original video source with a quite different Meredith Placko and couldn't find it. Please disregard. Either I am going crazy... or I'm going crazy, I guess.

[Never mind]

I think it depends largely on things like your players' openness to metagame currency (including XP BTW). The primary problems IMO with the GURPS disadvantage system are that: 1.) Point accounting: points from disadvantages are fungible, and the praxis of imposing a numeric cap on total...

To be fair, Kromm isn't the one who makes business decisions about GURPS direction. Illustrative KrommQuote: However, whether any of the suggestions are things SJ Games could act on isn't for me to say . . . I'm a long-term contractor, not an employee, much less senior staff with a deciding...

It's a good niche for something like Film Reroll (The Film Reroll Podcast – We play through your favorite movies as RPGs and totally ruin them.) where you want to "replay" through a variety of different movies, from Star Wars to Last Action to Clue, with the same group and using the same game...

Measuring monsters in terms of orcpower/ogrepower/peshkalipower in a cage fight is actually a pretty nice metric and easy to implement: Shining Sword Arena Of course, in actual play things like mobility and placement matter more--it's almost never an actual cagefight--but if you choose a number...

In 2nd edition, the strongest characters at max level are multi- or dual-classed individuals. Single classed wizards are good but fragile, and not necessarily stronger than max level fighters or psionicists. It depends on a lot of factors including gear and campaign pacing/amount of downtime...

Yeah, in an interview that I watched today he, Macriss, was talking about how things like the dwarven Forgewives or whatever they're called are inspired by antiquity, and how women were often treated quite poorly except for (my paraphrase of his example) a subset of women who were put on a...

Yesterday I didn't know ACKS II existed. Then I stumbled across a reddit thread, read a couple worked examples of the custom spell research rules, read some MM entries and likes how much non-combat-related stuff was in every entry. Long story short, I'm now $280 poorer and 1900 pages richer...

I agree that Munchkin is a better business, but that's why it's hard to understand SJG's decision to jealously guard both its IP and its non-IP, as well as the GURPS authors' community's decision to even more zealously defend SJG non-IP on SJG's behalf. It's toxic and also drives away players...

You're not wrong. Since so much of GURPS' business model is centered on selling rules, I view it as a major misstep that Steven Jackson Games hasn't prioritized making it easy for GMs to find/buy/publish adventures for players to use those rules within. SJG has instead chosen to keep...

In my opinion, this underscores the fact that GURPS isn't a game, it's a toolkit for creating games of which Dungeon Fantasy RPG (Powered By GURPS) is one example. Some people seem to be able to get away with skipping the "create a game" step and playing directly out of the GURPS rulebooks, but...

In all RPGs, speed and pacing are key to fun, and practice is key to speed. The attack/retreat/defense/damage loop is the most complicated thing in GURPS, but it's also something that can and should be reduced to only a few seconds: GM: Kared, the peshkali attacks you in a whirlwind of blades...

The simplicity of the core mechanic is worth emphasizing here, in contrast to The Least Interesting Type of Crunch games with lots of fiddly special cases for how to roll dice. There are a couple of core combat-related use cases like taking damage where that core mechanic turns into a...

Fun fact: according to Steve Jackson (via Sean Punch, the GURPS Line Editor), point costs were originally designed to control trait rarity, not model utility. To be fair, I know as a fact that in GURPS, First Edition, advantages were indeed priced for desired rarity in the game, not for their...

I like the rules for running a game, especially fantasy games with wizards and warriors, and also for modern gunfights. Rules are in most cases well-thought out and realistic enough to make it easy to align player expectations and gameworld results: if a new player tries to stab an ogre in the...

How about "wretched"?

Every so often I'll meet a new GM who is just getting into Dungeon Fantasy or GURPS DF, and who is struggling to figure out how to "read" monster difficulty from stat blocks. I remember being one of those GMs not too long ago even. Unlike D&D, DFRPG stat blocks don't come labeled with a metric...

It's a roleplaying game though, or at least is supposed to be one. "Why are you still here?" needs to have an in-character answer. Asking players to accept the hook of "find info about the Hand and retrieve it for me... Or Else" is less of a stretch than asking them to accept the hook "go play...

Motivation and problem statement: WotC's 20th level Vecna adventure (Free Level 20 D&D Adventure: Face Off Against Vecna in an Epic Battle in 'Don’t Say Vecna!') is kind of terrible, but I want to use it anyway as an onboarding ramp to teach D&D players how to play Dungeon Fantasy, not least...