I didn’t notice Roger getting particularly ranty. Was he raising an eyebrow slightly menacingly in the recording studio?
I have to say for me the answer is never “It’s looking a lot like GURPS” - I choose GURPS for games like Transhuman Space or if we want to run Traveller with all the weird alien races, where GURPS allows you to points-balance and accommodate just about every character possible. Otherwise, I won’t choose GURPS as the sheer amount of options available overwhelm players with choice paralysis, and character creation takes longer than the first couple of scenarios.
That said, my regular Runequest GM returned from Continuum with an armful of Pyramid magazines he picked up at the bring and buy table. I may be re-educated into the joy of GURPS soon.
GURPS 4th really expects the GM to build an allowed trait list up front for each campaign. Which is a lot of work, especially for a new GM. Experienced GURPS players, such as Mike and I both benefit from, can let you skip this because they can hear"modern people, no supernatural powers but you can be a bit cinematic, ask me" and have a pretty good idea of what’s in and what’s out.
Yeah, the character generation pushes it towards long campaigns (or one-shots, where the GM can run up PCs in advance, and potentially re-use them from one scenario to another). (It occurs to me that there’s a parallel to the writing advice “make your story the most interesting part of your character’s life”—if I’m building a complex GURPS character the traits push me off into thinking what they did before this game.)
I have a devil of a time finding more players. With only 2 players, we’re below critical mass needed to get going.
Why I dither between systems for months at a time.
Every game has advantages and drawbacks and unless I’m running the game as published, as I recently did with Heroes of Cerulia, no system ever quite fits what I have envisioned. This is especially true if I want something with magic.
One system suggestion that occurred to me is Mythras, the generic system based on Runequest published by The Design Mechanism after they lost the Runequest rights they had for a few years. They published the Lyonesse RPG using these rules, and have quite a lot of other good-looking supplements for Mythras too.
Also, I was in a similar situation where I had an idea for a scenario and setting, but needed to find a system. I considered quite a few, and ended up back at Fudge, as I have a fondness for it having used it for a couple of campaigns (shockingly now over 20 years ago!) and liked the resolution system quite a lot. So I decided it had been too long, and started developing it. I found the suggested skill list for fantasy to be too fine-grained for my current tastes, but refined that list down, and think I have something pretty decent to start with. I’m subjecting my regular group to playtesting it in fits and starts, and changing things on them a fair bit, but I feel like it is developing into something interesting. Not yet sure if this will be a single (long) scenario or if it will develop into a something longer - the initial idea is definitely a single scenario, but the setting seems to be developing a life of its own.
Er… It’s always dark in the city in Blades in the Dark? I missed that completely in Mike’s game. The downside of only reading the character gen bit of the pdf…
I felt the game penalised us for doing the sensible roleplaying options. Like we lurked ready to ambush the guards… the ambush never happened… so Ant got zero XP because he only gets XP for violence. If he’d been a dick and blown our cover by charging them he’d have got XP.
I’ve played in two Forged in the Dark campaigns. One was very heist-based and my reaction to that was much like Roger’s, though a shade more intemperate. I tried to plan the actual heist in advance only to find that the players who knew the system didn’t bother. They just spent stress to retcon events during the game such as being at the exact right place at the right time.
The other campaign is set in northern Ellesland. It’s run along traditional emergent-story lines, has a varied party of characters rather than a crew of crooks, and FitD just happens to be the system we’re using. I thought it worked a lot better by downplaying the boardgame-flavour mechanics, but I did end up wondering why we didn’t just use GURPS.
The interesting thing is the same GM is running both campaigns. It’s only the players, the premise, and the setting that differ, but those seem to make a great deal of difference.
Btw it was a nice surprise to come across the summer special episode. It made me hark back to bumper issues of Valiant and Smash that used to appear in W H Smith in the summer holidays.
This goes back to a Thing I Have Said Before: many writers see planning at the table as boring and write games to make it unnecessary or impossible. But if the players are enjoying it, I think it’s better to run with it than to tell them (via GM or rules) that they are having the wrong sort of fun and need to do something different.
Where some indie games fail of me is that they don’t explain what kind of fun they are shooting for. They just present the setting and the mechanics and assume that is enough to convey how the game is supposed to be enjoyed. Everybody brings their own preferences, presumptions, and experiences to the game so you can’t just assume that everyone will approach your game with the mindset and expectations that are required to make the game good.
Being able to look at something while discounting your own knowledge of it is not a skill everyone has. Many people lack the self-awareness to realise it’s necessary.
My experience is that some players might enjoy it, but others get tired of analysis paralysis. Now… some players are good at planning and that is indeed worth sticking with. However, some are ruddy awful…
We have played BitD many times and we enjoy the Hustle/Leverage style flashback adventures and stories.
Roger: [quote=“RogerBW, post:12, topic:5369, full:true”]
many writers see planning at the table as boring and write games to make it unnecessary or impossible. But if the players are enjoying it, I think it’s better to run with it than to tell them (via GM or rules) that they are having the wrong sort of fun
[/quote]
Indeed, and just like in real life some characters will enjoy and fully engage with the planning, others will chip in a bit but leave it mostly to the planners, and some will pay scant attention to the plan and start to wing it the moment they go into action. This is good because it is the emergent story. I think in any case that the games that aim for Hollywood-style stories are only trying to recreate the most overblown and predictable kinds of narrative. Hatton Garden (2019) is much more interesting than any Guy Ritchie heist movie precisely because it’s based on real life and so nothing in it fits those arcs and acts and beats that studio execs love so much.
Well this is basically my Anti Robin Laws Manifesto (which I have never actually written) in a nutshell: RPGs have the potential to provide their own shapes of story. Just as a good film won’t have the exact same story as a good book or play, forcing an RPG to conform to the shape of another sort of story, whether that’s by beat analysis or “what do you want to get from this scene”, gives up a lot of the fun that RPGs can provide.
As a counterpoint: I kind of like haiku.
I am not terribly good at them, but sometimes when playing these narrative led games our table enjoys coming to the end of a three game arc and sitting back and saying “that felt and looks nice”.
We do have a planning fiend focused on detail, and it can derail the joy for the rest of us, so we welcome and embrace “flashback outcomes led roleplaying”.
I also enjoy a well crafted play or film or novel with structure and arcs and beats. The English novel that starts nowhere a and ends only when the words do has never worked for me. I like craft and structure, and often I get more pleasure from helping build as well as the verisimilitude of immersion.