This is true of pulp Westerns, yes. In accurate historical fiction or roleplaying campaigns aspiring to represent the period as it actually was, it was generally illegal to be armed within town limits, those ordinances were enforced, and the crime rate was lower in the American West than in any of the big cities in Europe or the US East Coast.
So, there was absolutely modern society to consider, if a character brought a gun into town and shot someone. Self-defence could be successfully claimed, of course, but the character had better be able to convince everyone it really was self-defence.
Given that GURPS is a toolkit, where the people playing determine which rules are needed for their campaign, ‘too much detail’ sounds like a very fixable problem. GURPS can be much simpler than D&D if simplicity is the goal and an advanced tactical system with hit locations and detailed effects of them are very much optional.
Depends on how you define the crime rate. I remember reading somewhere that absolute numbers feel low but that mainly because the settlements were quite small but if you do the average of ‘per 100,000’, it was considerably higher. But I guess that is because you’re extrapolating a ‘population’ rate from relatively small numbers
Knowing which tools out of a big toolbox to use does require at least one person who has familiarized themselves thoroughly with the rules and has the judgement to know which optional rules will produce the desired setting and game experience.
Fortunately, series like GURPS Action, GURPS Monster Hunters and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy represent worked examples of certain genre treatments, where professionals have already done that for the player and GM. If one of those or any of the other published genre treatments fits the campaign you want to play, it makes things much simpler for new players and Game Masters.
For what it’s worth I play and run a lot of GURPS, and you can hear some of it at Whartson Hall. Yeah, you can get excruciatingly detailed if you want to, but the conditional applies and you don’t have to.
I must admit, I’m not a huge fan of listening to playthroughs - I find it a bit like relating the funniest conversation you had in the pub after a few pints - hilarious at the time to those present, confusing and not really that interesting to those not there!! I much prefer written accounts (or on occasion professionally produced and, more importantly, edited playthroughs) where all the general nonsense, um and aahing, injokes and messing about, GM searching through their notes etc can be safely ignored and just the delightful story, good or bad or ridiculous, can be related.
This is in no way a comment on your game. Having not listened to it.
Comparison of crime rates is almost always done using an average of per 100,000. The crime rate in the American West between 1850 to 1900, i.e. the period where most Westerns were set, was lower than in big cities. This also holds true for the average rate of homicides per 100,000.
Generations of pop culture lie behind the incorrect assumption that gunfights were common in the West. However, history does also give us good gaming material in that historical cities really were wretched hives of scum and villainy, with homicide rates that feel preposterous by modern standards, and the number of missing people, and/or found corpses in rivers simply assumed to have died by accidental drowning, strongly suggest that homicides may have been even more common in cities than the rate of officially reported ones.
On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.”
Sure, I just thought it might give an idea of how the game can go. However, you might find “The GURPS I Run”, in issue #5 of The Path of Cunning, of interest.
Players often expect there to be asymmetry between their PCs’ actions and behaviors and those of NPCs. The PCs are after all the protagonists of the story and the focus of the game. For example, it tends to be far more likely that NPCs will surrender to PCs than the reverse.
This also applies to the application and consequence of violence. If you expect to be able to knock someone out by hitting them over the head with a glass bottle, does that expectation apply to PCs and NPCs equally? Some games have “mook” rules which allow it to happen against unnamed foes, but not PCs or “named” NPCs. Savage Worlds, for example, makes a distinction between Extras (mooks) and Wildcards (PCs and important/powerful NPCs). When I first encountered such rules in Feng Shui (1st edition), I was a bit appalled, preferring there to be symmetry between PCs and NPCs, but I have since softened this stance.
Hit points are a very convenient abstraction that have stood the test of gaming time. The very concept is fundamentally flawed and wilts under scrutiny, but they get the job done of managing a fight. If you want other effects besides “number go down,” then a second layer (like critical hits) and/or special sub-system (grappling!) needs to be added.
Fighting is far too chaotic, nuanced, and technical to be modeled “realistically” in a game system. The best you can hope for is a system that captures the excitement and danger of a fight within the expectations that players have (as shaped by genre and balance between a storytelling versus tactical skirmish game.
THere is also ‘the rule of cool’. If it creates a great dramatic moment by the guy collapsing after you smack him with his own tankard, then that is what can happen!
I have an allergy to this rule.
a) What others think is “cool” often makes me cringe.
b) If decisions about the game are made based on vibes, that’s fine, but then let’s not have a whole bunch of mechanisms and rules that we’re just going to ignore.
b) rules are there to adjudicate important things. If you want to do something that isn’t bending the rules too much (casting a spell as a reaction when its not allowed as a reaction, for example, but you still have the spell, you have slots etc) and it creates storytelling moment that will increase the pleassure of all at the table, then the rules are getting in the way.
I dont do it often but if I can see that everyone is up for it (or even just that individual player is going to get a memorable moment), then I’m all for it
To me, what is cool in an RPG is when a highly dramatic and/or appropriate event takes place organically, not by placing a finger on the scales, but by going by all the rules which make it dangerous and/or unlikely, and still getting that result.
Just like people are unlikely to respect the guy telling people to respect his authority, coolness tends to be uncool if you have to declare that a cool thing happens because it is cool.
I don’t announce 'I AM INVOKING THE RULE OF COOL!"
If someone asks if they can do something and I believe it will genuinely create a highlight to the story, then I’ll say “I’ll allow it” or I’ll come up with a difficulty level and allow them to roll to see if they achieve it. I’m not going to say ‘it would be cool if you didn’t die from this fall and therefore you just float away’ but if a player says I’m going to dive off this wall to catch the small child that fell, and cast something like featherfall or whatever at the last second and maybe casting under those circumstances wouldn’t be allowed by RAW, I’d still allow a roll to see if they could manage it, because it would create a heroic moment that would look cool.
I’m not saying they’d automatically achieve it but they’d definitely get a chance from doing something so heroic and the opportunity to create such a heroic moment.
I know this thread has spun off into discussing violence, but just to scoot back a bit for the sake of commentary.
In my original comment, I was more focused on the impressions people get and on the capital-a Adventurer stereotype that games (or at least game settings) and fiction often present. In particular:
It’s common to handwave things, such that adventurers aren’t required to disarm and remove armour in civilised places
Adventurers are inclined to wander around wearing enough magical jewellery to open a shop, armour that glistens with magical ice and enchanted coronets of bone, and an array of deadly weaponry. In modern settings this might instead be a full tactical load-out, body armour, a slung submachine gun and headset, etc.
Even moderately powerful adventurers are often much wealthier than anyone else they tend to encounter.
In many systems, adventurers can survive large amounts of punishment, and can kill the average citizen trivially.
Adventurers often develop noticeable unnatural effects, like glowing eyes, or an intimidating aura, or bladed cybernetic limbs, or hovering a few centimetres above the ground.
Where most of these things are true, having a group of adventurers walk into your village is a scary experience. Even a glance shows you that these people are trained killers, ready for battle, and dripping with ostentatious wealth. They could kill you if they felt like it and there’s probably nothing anyone here can do about it. Plus, rich people can usually throw their weight around a lot anyway, including breaking the law with impunity. Rich mercenaries are a bad combination. If they’re just here to shop for vegetables, why would they be dressed for a fight? Ordinary people should at least be nervous of adventurers. Pianos should stop when adventurers walk into an alehouse, merchants should try to get rid of them quickly and politely, beggars should slink away, crowds should part around them. When they try to ask questions in the street, people should pretend they didn’t hear and scurry off. It should be obvious that nobody likes them or wants them around. I do not want to talk to the Kalashnikov-toting probable mobster with all the bling, and if he’s in my shop I want him out as soon as I can possibly arrange it, and if he walks into my bar I’m going to leave.
But this bit of psychology tends to get glossed over by the stories and settings that want capital-A Adventurers, whether they’re paladins or blaster-wielding space explorers.
All of these things vary by genre, setting, and how you play your game, naturally. If you do implement weapon binding, and restrictions on armour within city walls, and rights to arms, and magical arms control, things will look different. Adventurers who are dressed and act like ordinary people won’t provoke the same fear. Icelander’s games, for example, take a more grounded approach, so there isn’t the same issue of people being surprisingly chill about it. And in stories or games where adventurers are always or identifiably Big Damn Heroes, it isn’t as jarring.
Yes it is all defined by your setting. But if you’re used to seeing people with guns all the time (say the Wild West, regardless of the crime rate one way or another), you’re not going to be too shocked if you see someone with two pistols and a rifle slung over a shoulder.
If you’re seeing magic and swords and stuff all the time in say a high fantasy magic world, seeing people with glowing armour and several sharp pointy/slicy weapons etc might not be as strange and/or intimidating.
Unless there are specific reasons to dearm and ‘dearmour’ our heroes, then generally I play it so if the PCs are careful and polite, people will be the same back.
I much prefer written accounts (or on occasion professionally produced and, more importantly, edited playthroughs) where all the general nonsense, um and aahing, injokes and messing about, GM searching through their notes etc can be safely ignored and just the delightful story, good or bad or ridiculous, can be related.