I am hesitant of the profession-based model because not all professions are equal in the eyes of the GM, players, game designer, scenario designer, etc. Compare “Secret Agent” to “Stenographer.” As a GM, I don’t want to rein in players who would abuse the spirit of the system and as a player, I don’t want to argue with a stingy GM.
[I’d hate to be my own boss. On one hand, I don’t want that lazy, sarcastic employee working for me. On the other hand, I’d hate to have that asshole boss telling me what to do.]
That doesn’t sound very different from the standard understanding of skills - Programming (Python) is probably a GURPS skill already, and something like Artisan (Woodworking) is definitely one!
Edit: I’m not sure I understood what was going on in the conversation at this point!
Well, but these are constellations of skills. And they need not be so specific.
Spent a summer volunteering to build houses for the less fortunate? That might imply carpentry, community relations, and logistics. But don’t just write “community relations” on the character sheet
Yes, the macro-skill game would call that “I did that summer of volunteering”, and in real time at the table you’d say “ah, which would include the basic accounting we needed to do to keep track of the materials on site”.
The micro-skill game, if well organised, would have a template that says “spend up to 3 points on Carpenter, Teamster (for the truck loading), and Diplomacy”.
I keep thinking about it, and I still see nearly the same amount of pros and cons between ‘picking umbrella skills that cover a lot of stuff’ and ‘making very detailed simulationist skill lists’ - provided that you’ve got an experienced GM on both sides. Without an experienced GM, perhaps the granular system has the most egregious flaw of likely being boring and frustrating. But I think that just comes with the territory, and a lot of agony could be avoided if people were just honest with themselves that maybe they’re not skilled/practiced/determined enough to run something as detailed as GURPS.
Well, another thing is that you don’t have to run “raw” GURPS – if what you want is (say) fast-moving action film gameplay, a lot of the setup and tuning has been done for you in the GURPS Action series. But if you’ve just bought the Basic Set books, that may not be obvious.
I’m not skilled, practised, or determined enough to run something as detailed as GURPS.
If GURPS shed 90% of its rules, I still wouldn’t be skilled, practised, or determined enough to run the 1,700 pages that were left. If GURPS were cut down by 99%, to 170 pages, we might be in the ballpark.
I’ve been GMing for forty years. I have run at least a dozen games, run campaigns in every genre from historical adventure through westerns and cliffhangers and hard-boileds and weird horror and weird SF to far-future sci-fi and from Christian fantasy in the12th century through wainscot fantasy in the 1930s to adventures in Middle-earth and several of my own fantasy settings. I have about 10,000 hours of GMing time, besides which I have designed and run multiple conventional tabletop scenarios, thirty-player LARPS, and ambitious table-top/LARP hybrids at big regional cons over twenty years. I have written setting bibles up to 100,000 words. I implemented the star generation procedure from GURPS Space 4th edition as an Excel workbook with no macros, including both the straightforward Advanced system and the backwards-working Basic system in the same workbook. But I’m not skilled, practised, or determined enough to GM GURPS.
My one experience playing in a game you’ve run suggests that you could run “relaxed GURPS” at least as well as I do. But hey, as long as you have systems that work for you…
I don’t run GURPS, but I think its easier than the page count makes it out to be. Off the top, you can ignore the rules that don’t apply to your campaign (you don’t need the rules for magic if running a spy thriller). All the front-loaded rules that are mainly referenced during campaign and character creation have relatively low impact on running the game. The GM can offload rules knowledge to the players for the PCs’ dis/ads and skills (just as a D&D DM doesn’t have to memorize the rules for all the PCs’ spells). When running the game, you can choose whether to look up a specific rule or just wing it (as is true for any game).
Possibly, but I think I would probably come unstuck as soon as a PC with a modern sidearm shot an NPC wearing modern body armour. And I might need someone to help the players generate their characters.
That’s all very well, but I am not skilled, practised, or determined enough to figure out what modules to pull out, nor how to convey to unfamiliar players what is left.
An Omega Datemaster Chronograph is not a simple watch, even if you only ever look at the hour and minute hands, if you have never set the day or date, and you didn’t even look up how to use the stopwatch function. You tell me that it’s simple: all I have to do is open up the case, pull out the gear trains that drive the day and calendar, the stopwatch and flyback, close it up again and show the players. But in my current state of inexperience and unskilful flightiness I just see a plethora of tiny gears and mysterious wobbly bits, and I can’t tell which ones drive frivolous complications and which ones are vital.
If GURPS is to be used as you say, it ought to be presented as a motherboard of functional core with the sockets and expansion slots clearly labelled, together with an organised collection of plug-in modules, each presented with a clear statement of what it is good for. As it is, a player starts out to generate a character and in no time is being asked to make fussy design choices about Home Gravity, build, age & beauty, Appearance, Social Background, Wealth and Influence…
The thing that is extra-super intimidating about it is a series of five PDF books, costing US$41.96, that tell you how to simplify the Basic Set by enough to run an action adventure in a recent real-world setting with no magic, monsters, or skiffy kit.
A game that needs that much simplification can’t credibly pass for simple.
Getting back to the profusion of skills in GURPS, the rules actually say that there is a separate Pistol, SMG, Rifle, Shotgun, and Cannon skill for each of firearms, beams, and liquid projector, at each of about eight tech levels. That’s perhaps 120 gun skills. The skill “Engineer” is a category of compulsory specialisations (i.e. separate skills) numbering fifteen plus however many different vehicle types — for each tech level. Maybe 160 Engineering skills? The various unarmed attacks (punch, kick, sweep, grapple etc.) are assembled into Brawling, Boxing, Judo, Karate, Sumo, and Wrestling, each of which is then triplicated with Art, Combat, and Sport versions: eighteen skills for five manoeuvres (including the judo throw, whose rules are hidden in the skill description). I estimated 2,200 skills without counting sporting skills, hobby skills, professional skills, optional specialisations, techniques, manoeuvres, spells, or compulsory specialisation by setting-defined categories (as in Geography (regional)). But with all that, it doesn’t distinguish between microeconomics and macroeconomics!
Such a maniacal profusion of skills in a system that has only four attributes makes it almost impossible to avoid presenting a perverse incentive for characters to be built with with stratospheric attribute values and a bunch of one-point skills.
Furthermore, it makes character generation so bewildering that even @whswhs and Our Roger — who write official rules product for GURPS— tell us that they routinely advise players to set aside five character points to buy the skills that they have forgotten.
In a sense GURPS has something a lot like that. In the first place it has Hobby, Profession, and Expert skill (and Games and Sports skills) that cover broad areas rather the way you describe. There’s no rule that says you have to be a professional to have any of them, even the Profession skills. And in the second place, there’s floating skills to a different stat. For example, Guns (Pistol) skill is based on dexterity, but if you need to quickly clear up a mechanical problem you can roll vs. IQ-based Guns (Pistol). It’s quite common for all the ancillary tasks that go with a standard skill to be encompassed by it in this way.
And then there are familiarities. You’ve driven one model of car? Your Driving (Automobile) skill will let you drive a different model of car, but at -2 to skill until you get accustomed to how it handles and the layout of the dashboard and shift lever. My Professional Skill (copy editing) would presumably be at -2 if I had to work on articles for a medical journal until I learned the style manual.
They’re not perfect solutions. But they do address some of the things you’re talking about. And really, any system of game rules that a human being can learn and run will be a flawed approximation to how things work in the real world, just as any novel or movie will be.
I have, actually. It gave me a bit of an urge to make my own, different, cut of GURPS’s character representation system. Then I read on and was reminded that I don’t like GURPS’s attribute set, combat system, or damage/injury model much either. Besides which I was gaming at the time with people who refused to consider GURPS and I got distracted by Flashing Blades, Ghosts of Albion, Spirit of the Century, The Dying Earth and a bunch of others.
I just pulled up GURPS Lite in my PDF reader and had another look at what is actually in it. I think I’d rather use James Bond 007 with a page of tweaks.
The fact that GURPS has other things that I don’t like about it has no bearing on whether it has too many skills.
