Trying out new systems

[Bagpuss]

yeah, unfortunately there are no cons in my country.

If you don't mind me asking which country is it?

 

[Fetfreak]

You don't need a full-on convention to try new games. All you need is a few people and a bit of time.

For example, you'll see a couple threads here about Boston and Chicago Gamedays - these aren't full conventions, just collections of like-minded people getting together to play. Right now, the Boston bunch has enough interest to field 8 to 10 games, total, but they started out rather smaller. All you need is a set of the rules and some people, and say, "today we'll play two short games - one of X and one of Y.

No, I know what you mean but RPG aren't popular here. We have one club and it's either GURPS games or D20.

 

[Fetfreak]

If you don't mind me asking which country is it?

I'm from Serbia, Novi Sad.

 

[Fetfreak]

I enjoy trying new systems. I find that it stimulates my creativity and helps me notice things I never saw before in my old system. As mentioned cons are one great opportunity to do this, but there are plenty of other ways.

For example I've got a group of friends who sometimes gets together on the weekends to do one shots. We rotate GMs, and whoever is running gets to decided what we play.

I'll try this out, it's a great way to try new games.

 

[Umbran]

I'll try this out, it's a great way to try new games.

This is basically what I meant - All you need is, say, 4 other people, and one day. Run a 4-hour session of one game, have lunch, and run another 4-hour session of another game! That's all a gameday is!

 

[darjr]

This is basically what I meant - All you need is, say, 4 other people, and one day. Run a 4-hour session of one game, have lunch, and run another 4-hour session of another game! That's all a gameday is!

And there are some cons that started in a very similar fashion.

 

[Mailanka]

I heard a lot about GURPS, I should check it out.
Is it much different from d20(3E)?
I'm mainly interested in combat and skill aspect of the game since that's what I like the most about d20.

No actual GURPS fans around here? Then I'll bite:

If you want to get a glimpse of how GURPS works, look up GURPS Lite (I can't post a link, it seems, because I haven't posted enough yet). It's free, and it'll give you an idea how it works. If you want to invest more deeply, and you're a fan of D&D, try GURPS Characters, GURPS Campaigns (those are the main books), and the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series (in particular, DF 1, 2 and 3). GURPS Magic might be worth a look. If you're a fan of Fantasy, but not dungeon crawling, try GURPS Fantasy instead of Dungeon Fantasy.

GURPS is very different from D20. Where D20 is class based, GURPS is point based. That is, instead of choosing your class, you get a budget of points with which you can built your character, and you can build him however you want, within the limits the GM places. Many GMs use "Templates," which are sort of pre-written character choices to cut down on the options, similar to classes but with more freedom. And as others have said, it uses 3d6 rather than a d20, which gives it a bell-curve, which I quite like. GURPS is also very very detailed. D20 gives you characer options in big chunks: Choose your class, get a big +1 modifier to a broad skill, pick a feat or 2. GURPS gives you ~150-300 points for most starting characters (though some campaigns will have more or less) and then proceeds to account for each point. Skills can cost as little as 1 point, for example, and there's an array of very cheap advantages called Perks that never cost more than 1 point. The result is that you get exactly the character you want, but you also have to do quite some work when building your character, and you can't really just say "I just want a half-orc fighter, man, just give me a half-orc fighter!" Unless you use templates, of course.

Skills are based on your attributes, usually Dexterity for physical skills and Intelligence for mental skills. Skills are rated from "Easy" to "Hard." Skills start very cheap and get progressively more expensive until they flatline at 4 points per level. The skills tend to be highly nuanced and specific (for example, a doctor might need to learn: Physician, Diagnosis, Surgery and Pharmacy, as opposed to "Medicine" in other games). If that's not nuanced enough for you, there are techniques as an optional part of the game, sub-divisions of skills. Mostly, you see these in martial arts games where the exact nature of one's technique is interesting to the player.

Combat is also fine-grained. Turns are split into seconds (one turn per second), and distances split into yards. On your turn, you get to choose a single maneuver, though there are plenty of options in a given maneuver that might allow you to do things like make rapid strikes, attack specific hit locations, or make your attack harder to defend against in some way. GURPS doesn't have "Armor Class," but instead, those who wish to defend roll against one of their defenses (usually Dodge or Parry) and if they succeed, they defend against the attack. Armor is represented by a reduction to damage inflicted, and sufficiently tough armor can easily reduce an attack to no damage. Characters are not stacks of hitpoints, though, and GURPS death-spirals very quickly, so a single bad hit can be enough to lay you out, especially if its from something like a gun. Thus, I find GURPS combat often feels about being one bad slip from death or great bodily harm all the time... which can make for a very exciting game! There are some options to mitigate that a bit, though.

GURPS is a "Generic, Universal" RPG. It's meant to run any genre and apply its rules to any game. Thus, it needs some kind of baseline, and it tends to take realism as that baseline. Thus, GURPS has a reputation for being "gritty and realistic." It doesn't have to be: I use it exclusively for cinematic, high-powered games, but it does tend to ground things like the damage, weight and costs of its weapons on actual, real-world statistics, and the hit points of things are determined consistently by the mass of them, and so on. As a result, GURPS supplements tend to be rigorously researched, which makes them valuable even if you're not a fan of GURPS.

GURPS is a broad, rich, deep game, and it can intimidate people who are dipping their toes into the water. I recommend GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (or GURPS Action, if you prefer action movies, or GURPS Monster Hunters if you prefer hunting monsters in a modern setting) because it tends to break the game down, show you what elements to focus on, show you what rules to play with and how they work, and it does a lot of the work upfront for you, especially for character creation. I use those books as templates for my own GURPS campaign design.

 

[Fetfreak]

No actual GURPS fans around here? Then I'll bite:

If you want to get a glimpse of how GURPS works, look up GURPS Lite (I can't post a link, it seems, because I haven't posted enough yet). It's free, and it'll give you an idea how it works. If you want to invest more deeply, and you're a fan of D&D, try GURPS Characters, GURPS Campaigns (those are the main books), and the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series (in particular, DF 1, 2 and 3). GURPS Magic might be worth a look. If you're a fan of Fantasy, but not dungeon crawling, try GURPS Fantasy instead of Dungeon Fantasy.

GURPS is very different from D20. Where D20 is class based, GURPS is point based. That is, instead of choosing your class, you get a budget of points with which you can built your character, and you can build him however you want, within the limits the GM places. Many GMs use "Templates," which are sort of pre-written character choices to cut down on the options, similar to classes but with more freedom. And as others have said, it uses 3d6 rather than a d20, which gives it a bell-curve, which I quite like. GURPS is also very very detailed. D20 gives you characer options in big chunks: Choose your class, get a big +1 modifier to a broad skill, pick a feat or 2. GURPS gives you ~150-300 points for most starting characters (though some campaigns will have more or less) and then proceeds to account for each point. Skills can cost as little as 1 point, for example, and there's an array of very cheap advantages called Perks that never cost more than 1 point. The result is that you get exactly the character you want, but you also have to do quite some work when building your character, and you can't really just say "I just want a half-orc fighter, man, just give me a half-orc fighter!" Unless you use templates, of course.

Skills are based on your attributes, usually Dexterity for physical skills and Intelligence for mental skills. Skills are rated from "Easy" to "Hard." Skills start very cheap and get progressively more expensive until they flatline at 4 points per level. The skills tend to be highly nuanced and specific (for example, a doctor might need to learn: Physician, Diagnosis, Surgery and Pharmacy, as opposed to "Medicine" in other games). If that's not nuanced enough for you, there are techniques as an optional part of the game, sub-divisions of skills. Mostly, you see these in martial arts games where the exact nature of one's technique is interesting to the player.

Combat is also fine-grained. Turns are split into seconds (one turn per second), and distances split into yards. On your turn, you get to choose a single maneuver, though there are plenty of options in a given maneuver that might allow you to do things like make rapid strikes, attack specific hit locations, or make your attack harder to defend against in some way. GURPS doesn't have "Armor Class," but instead, those who wish to defend roll against one of their defenses (usually Dodge or Parry) and if they succeed, they defend against the attack. Armor is represented by a reduction to damage inflicted, and sufficiently tough armor can easily reduce an attack to no damage. Characters are not stacks of hitpoints, though, and GURPS death-spirals very quickly, so a single bad hit can be enough to lay you out, especially if its from something like a gun. Thus, I find GURPS combat often feels about being one bad slip from death or great bodily harm all the time... which can make for a very exciting game! There are some options to mitigate that a bit, though.

GURPS is a "Generic, Universal" RPG. It's meant to run any genre and apply its rules to any game. Thus, it needs some kind of baseline, and it tends to take realism as that baseline. Thus, GURPS has a reputation for being "gritty and realistic." It doesn't have to be: I use it exclusively for cinematic, high-powered games, but it does tend to ground things like the damage, weight and costs of its weapons on actual, real-world statistics, and the hit points of things are determined consistently by the mass of them, and so on. As a result, GURPS supplements tend to be rigorously researched, which makes them valuable even if you're not a fan of GURPS.

GURPS is a broad, rich, deep game, and it can intimidate people who are dipping their toes into the water. I recommend GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (or GURPS Action, if you prefer action movies, or GURPS Monster Hunters if you prefer hunting monsters in a modern setting) because it tends to break the game down, show you what elements to focus on, show you what rules to play with and how they work, and it does a lot of the work upfront for you, especially for character creation. I use those books as templates for my own GURPS campaign design.

Thank you Mailanka.
GURPS really seems heavy on the rules, especially one second / turn in combat. I do like the freedom in character building but I already fixed that in my d20 games.
Tell me, can things get out of control in a point buy system? Seems to me that if you start with 150-300 points you can be extremely good at something very early in the game. I have a player that really likes to create powerful characters and I've manged to create a balanced d20 for my group; What I'm asking is, how brake-proof is GURPS?

 

[DnD_Dad]

Sounds like someone listens to happy jacks rpg podcast. I've never played gurps, but I've always been interested in it. I recently pick up savage worlds and all flesh must be eaten. Both are pretty cool systems and are just something different that focuses on different types of gameplay.

 

[Mailanka]

Thank you Mailanka.
GURPS really seems heavy on the rules, especially one second / turn in combat. I do like the freedom in character building but I already fixed that in my d20 games.
Tell me, can things get out of control in a point buy system? Seems to me that if you start with 150-300 points you can be extremely good at something very early in the game. I have a player that really likes to create powerful characters and I've manged to create a balanced d20 for my group; What I'm asking is, how brake-proof is GURPS?

You can hyperspecialize, certainly, and it's something of a problem with mages, but in practice, a hyperspecialized character is easy to defeat. For example, one fighter might invest all of his points into Broadsword-40, but at that point, if he's ever without a broadsword, he's a wasted character, and he's also something of a one-trick pony. If my fighter instead invests points in strength, combat reflexes, Intimidation, Armoury (Blades), Connoisseur (Swords) and learns a few additional weapons (like, say, two-handed sword and flail) and master the Feint technique, then when we go toe-to-toe, I have quite a few options that I can use against you, like a switch of weapons to best defeat yours, the ability to bypass your defenses with clever tricks, better maintained blade and the ability to pick out that really good sword from that merchant's stand, and the strength to inflict superior damage and carry superior armor.

I've been running a 300-450 point samurai campaign, and while people could invest deeply, they never seem to. They're always branching out and broadening their abilities and exploring powers and other elements of the game.

You can run into some abuses, particularly with the disadvanteges: If I take -50 points in an enemy and you never bring him into the game, that's free points, and in previous editions there was definitely some "point crock" as GURPSers would call potential system abuses, but GURPS is in its 4th edition and it's pretty tight.

A bigger problem than seeing players break the game by becoming "too good" at something is that they'll forget something that's very important, or not realize that a skill might come up in a game. The classic example of the former is "Swimming," and a good example of the latter might be "Poetry," which actually comes up a lot, specifically, in the game I'm running. Templates can help overcome this by reminding players what they should take, which is one reason I recommend using them on your first few GURPS outings.