Tribe 8 also had that mechanic: spend your xp for a bonus to one dice roll, or save it and improve your character. No-one I played with ever spent it on dice rolls. Several expressed distaste for such a mechanic even existing.
It is an especially useless rule to have in Tribe 8, because skill improvement is exponential: square of the level you are going to. So 1 xp for the to get skill at 1, then 4xp for skill 2, then 9xp for 3, etc. So players are hoarding their xp for several sessions to buy their favourite skill up (or saving up 20 xp to buy a stat up).
Thereās about 56 inches of GURPS Third Edition books above my desk. Thereās about a foot of GURPS Fourth Edition on another shelf but a lot of the servicing of the line in recent years has been by pdf only.
Iām glad to be reminded that thereās a Favours mechanic in GURPS but in addition to all the other reasons for not using it that Phil and Roger have pointed out, Iām quite willing to say to my players who have a few points left over: āyou can save those for skills youāve forgottenā.
I may well use the mechanic when I give out āfavoursā as scenario rewards. The reliability and access rolls could be useful to emphasise that you canāt ask the King for just anything.
The peculiar thing about the 21st century conspiraciesā¦ well two things. One is how loopy they seem and the second is that the people who think āthereās something to itā donāt see the behaviour of those putting the strange ideas forward as suspicious. No, itās heroic because everybody knows that they are in charge of the world and they have to be fought by the heroic truth seekersā¦
Sometimes I look back to all the fun we had with stories of the illuminati and the X-Files tropesā¦ And I wonder what we have wrought.
My private GURPS search engine reports 17,669 pages for fourth edition. This includes the Dungeon Fantasy RPG and Discworld Second Edition, and many of those pages are A5 or equivalent; but itās still quite a lot. However, my quibble was purely with the size of the core book.
Interestingly, Hero System now has e.g. Champions Complete, which is effectively a one-book superhero game ā for people who only want the system for superhero games, it strips out the stuff thatās not relevant, and comes in at 242 pages. While the canonical approach to universal systems has usually been ācore book plus genre expansions, because players donāt want to buy the core rules again and againā, this does offer the advantage of the single physical book.
I think that conspiracies were more fun in the GURPS Illuminati days (RIP Nigel Findley who died three years later ā coincidence?) because they were more obscure. I mean, we all knew there were people who actually believed in that stuff, but we also knew that nobody took those people seriously.
Then came Wakefield in 1998, and then came social media. The great thing about USENET was that if you were interested in something obscure, you could meet the few other people who were also interested, out of the relatively small number of people who were on USENET at all. The terrible thing about social media is that this now applies to everyone, and where someone might have been embarrassed about being a horrible person they can now see that theyāre not alone, there are lots of other horrible people like them, so they should be proud about it. (Of course this also applies to non-horrible but societally un-accepted peopleā¦)
I have run conspiracy-based games since then, but much of the fun has gone out of the genre for me.
Regardless of what publishers try with universal / broadly compatible systems, they canāt win: Back when Champions was still a complete game and before it split into a generic core system, Hero released Justice Inc., an excellent pulp RPG which was nonetheless criticised because for building gadgets and using ghosts it referred the GM back to Champions. You either get complaints that youāve included everything yet again, or you get complaints that youāve left something out to make people buy your other games.
Champions Complete is now effectively the core volume for Hero 6th edition, recommended as such by the publisher who eventually had to accept that the market for gigantic books of rules without a ready-to-run game in them was distinctly limited. Alas, by the time they realised that the money had almost run out, so itās PDF or print on demand paperback for the line these days.
I think the worst case of this was TSRās Amazing Engine. The core rulebook was a separate physical item from the genre booksā¦ but the setting books were only sold shrink-wrapped with a copy of the core book. So whatever you picked up, you got a complete game; but since part of the point of the game was that you could take your characters, or at least a crude shadow of them, from one setting to anotherā¦
Itās a real shame ā there were some good ideas there.
The conspiracy becomes a nexus around which people can create their tribe and tie their personal identity. There are parallels with religion, but the church or temple is replaced by the Facebook group or online forum. To challenge the conspiracy is to challenge them personally, so they dig in their heels and either rally their brethren or retreat into their welcoming community.
Now I had read a review, a very short one, that seemed to suggest this was only of use if you already know the rulesā¦ or is that just legal schmeagle beagle?
Itās not as well written as CC and does a poorer job of presenting the rules, but I think itās all there. The 6th edition Fantasy Hero book, on the they hand, is purely a genre book and definitely does need a book of rules.
If you have a good idea what you want your fantasy setting to be like then CC might be a better choice. You can always get pre-made spells in the Hero Grimoire if needed, or make your own with the standard powers rules.
Many many decades ago I had the first FH.
I loved creating spells.
Maybe I should just start with what I have, itās not at all impossible that I will just have fun creating characters and writing spells.
Hero Grimoire, you say?
Yes, itās a chunky volume of pre-designed spells in different categories including Dr Strange style superhero magic. There are also a few much smaller PDFs of specific niche spell types, handy if you want to look at some examples. Equipment and a bestiary are in other books. Essentially they are all unnecessary, but serve as time savers and useful examples. If you have CC or the core books then you have all the tools to build stuff yourself.
Hmm, not in the first edition at least. That has skill points (end of adventure rewards) and force points (make something good happen) as separate entities.
I think Force Points just doubled the number of dice you could roll for one check or attack, so they didnāt guarantee something good would happen (although usually helped a lot).
