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xiphiasYeah, I finally have gotten a chance to sit down and read the thing.
Some definitions first, for folks who would be otherwise totally lost. GURPS is a roleplaying game system. If that term means nothing to you, then the rest of this entry will be so completely meaningless to you that it's probably worthless to keep reading it. So this is where I'll put the cut tag.
So if you're still reading, you either know what a roleplaying game system is, or you're comfortable reading an LJ entry that's probably totally incomprehensible, in hopes that it will be amusing anyway.
I've been playing GURPS since Second Edition, when I was, um, ten or twelve years old or so. So about twenty years now. I've got a bookcase full of GURPS suppliments. And, like everyone who's had a hobby for two decades, I've got lots of ideas about What's Wrong With The Way Everybody Else Does It.
GURPS, in Third Edition, had the following significant problems as I saw it:
1) Advantage and Disadvantage Bloat. There were a lot of cases where there were several virtually identical advantages or disadvantages, often with wildly disparate point costs. It got confusing. And stupid.
2) Skill Bloat. Same thing with skills. A lot of cases where there were nearly identical skills. Sometimes you'd have The Mystical Oriental Version Vs. The Boring Western Version of skills -- like Broadsword skill did some stuff, but Katana Skill did everything that Broadsword did, plus lots more coool things, becuase Japanese Stuff Is Cool And Ninjas Can Do Everything!!!
3) Overemphasis on Talent Over Skill. It was much more efficient in GURPS to create a character who was supertalented and could pick up skills easily than one who was normally talented but had studied for years.
There were some minor problems as well. Like "SuperSmart Guy can always avoid giving into his mental disadvantages, so, effectively, gets free points for them."
GURPS Fourth Edition fixes most of the minor problems with GURPS 3rd, and some of the major ones.
I like what they did with IQ, DX, HT, ST, HP, FT, Perception, and Will. I think that all works much easier now, and is more balanced. I mostly like how they re-worked languages, with every language now being a low-cost advantage instead of a skill. They finally plugged a bunch of my favorite rules abuses -- my infamous "Bob The Were-Clam" thing no longer works.
(It used to be that, if you were a shapeshifter, the cost of shapeshifting was based on the power of your alternate form. So I made a character, Bob, who had the ability to become a clam at will. He never HAD to become a clam, but if he wanted to, he could. This gave him something like an extra five HUNDRED points. The ability to turn into a clam was a DISADVANTAGE. They fixed that.)
In general, they did a lot of streamlining of the advantage and disadvantage lists, and turned a lot of things that didn't work very well into power frameworks that look more useful. I think that GURPS 4th may finally be usable for superhero type games.
On the other hand. . . they still have Skill Bloat (although they stripped away a couple of the more egregious examples) and they still over-emphasize talent over skill.
And frankly, I blame myself for this.
'Cause, see, I solved those problems, at least partially, a few years back. Unfortunately, I did so shortly before stopping reading Pyramid, and dropping off of Usenet. So I never really got around to writing up a Pyramid article that would have explained how to solve those.
See, they came up with the idea of Maneuvers, now renamed Techniques. Those are little parts of skills that allow you to be particularly good at particular parts of skills. Like, maybe you could be especially good at, oh, Juggling Flaming Things. That'd be a Technique, based on Juggling, that would buy off the penalty that you'd normally have at juggling things that were on fire. So you could juggle flaming things every bit as well as you juggle non-flaming things.
What I did was give Free Points To Buy Techniques. Every point you spent in a skill also allowed you to spend that same point again to buy techniques. This mean that a swordfighter who had an average DX and spent a lot of points to get a high Sword skill also got a whole lot of free points for sword Techniques. While a swordfighter who had a high DX would spend relatively fewer points to get the same high Sword skill, and would have fewer Techniques.
It balanced things out, and made things more fun.
But, while I wrote that up on Usenet, I wasn't around for the big fights where everyone got to argue for why THEIR cool house rules should become official parts of GURPS 4th Edition. And I'm annoyed by that. Because I look at the Main-Gauche skill, and say, "Hey! Isn't that just the Knife Skill with Techniques to buy off the -4 for Off Hand Weapon Parry and the -2 for Parry With a Knife? Why is that a separate skill?" And that makes me grumble. Because I think you could cut the skill list by at LEAST 25% with appropriate use of Techniques.
Some definitions first, for folks who would be otherwise totally lost. GURPS is a roleplaying game system. If that term means nothing to you, then the rest of this entry will be so completely meaningless to you that it's probably worthless to keep reading it. So this is where I'll put the cut tag.
So if you're still reading, you either know what a roleplaying game system is, or you're comfortable reading an LJ entry that's probably totally incomprehensible, in hopes that it will be amusing anyway.
I've been playing GURPS since Second Edition, when I was, um, ten or twelve years old or so. So about twenty years now. I've got a bookcase full of GURPS suppliments. And, like everyone who's had a hobby for two decades, I've got lots of ideas about What's Wrong With The Way Everybody Else Does It.
GURPS, in Third Edition, had the following significant problems as I saw it:
1) Advantage and Disadvantage Bloat. There were a lot of cases where there were several virtually identical advantages or disadvantages, often with wildly disparate point costs. It got confusing. And stupid.
2) Skill Bloat. Same thing with skills. A lot of cases where there were nearly identical skills. Sometimes you'd have The Mystical Oriental Version Vs. The Boring Western Version of skills -- like Broadsword skill did some stuff, but Katana Skill did everything that Broadsword did, plus lots more coool things, becuase Japanese Stuff Is Cool And Ninjas Can Do Everything!!!
3) Overemphasis on Talent Over Skill. It was much more efficient in GURPS to create a character who was supertalented and could pick up skills easily than one who was normally talented but had studied for years.
There were some minor problems as well. Like "SuperSmart Guy can always avoid giving into his mental disadvantages, so, effectively, gets free points for them."
GURPS Fourth Edition fixes most of the minor problems with GURPS 3rd, and some of the major ones.
I like what they did with IQ, DX, HT, ST, HP, FT, Perception, and Will. I think that all works much easier now, and is more balanced. I mostly like how they re-worked languages, with every language now being a low-cost advantage instead of a skill. They finally plugged a bunch of my favorite rules abuses -- my infamous "Bob The Were-Clam" thing no longer works.
(It used to be that, if you were a shapeshifter, the cost of shapeshifting was based on the power of your alternate form. So I made a character, Bob, who had the ability to become a clam at will. He never HAD to become a clam, but if he wanted to, he could. This gave him something like an extra five HUNDRED points. The ability to turn into a clam was a DISADVANTAGE. They fixed that.)
In general, they did a lot of streamlining of the advantage and disadvantage lists, and turned a lot of things that didn't work very well into power frameworks that look more useful. I think that GURPS 4th may finally be usable for superhero type games.
On the other hand. . . they still have Skill Bloat (although they stripped away a couple of the more egregious examples) and they still over-emphasize talent over skill.
And frankly, I blame myself for this.
'Cause, see, I solved those problems, at least partially, a few years back. Unfortunately, I did so shortly before stopping reading Pyramid, and dropping off of Usenet. So I never really got around to writing up a Pyramid article that would have explained how to solve those.
See, they came up with the idea of Maneuvers, now renamed Techniques. Those are little parts of skills that allow you to be particularly good at particular parts of skills. Like, maybe you could be especially good at, oh, Juggling Flaming Things. That'd be a Technique, based on Juggling, that would buy off the penalty that you'd normally have at juggling things that were on fire. So you could juggle flaming things every bit as well as you juggle non-flaming things.
What I did was give Free Points To Buy Techniques. Every point you spent in a skill also allowed you to spend that same point again to buy techniques. This mean that a swordfighter who had an average DX and spent a lot of points to get a high Sword skill also got a whole lot of free points for sword Techniques. While a swordfighter who had a high DX would spend relatively fewer points to get the same high Sword skill, and would have fewer Techniques.
It balanced things out, and made things more fun.
But, while I wrote that up on Usenet, I wasn't around for the big fights where everyone got to argue for why THEIR cool house rules should become official parts of GURPS 4th Edition. And I'm annoyed by that. Because I look at the Main-Gauche skill, and say, "Hey! Isn't that just the Knife Skill with Techniques to buy off the -4 for Off Hand Weapon Parry and the -2 for Parry With a Knife? Why is that a separate skill?" And that makes me grumble. Because I think you could cut the skill list by at LEAST 25% with appropriate use of Techniques.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 02:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 08:26 am (UTC)I'd like to play 4th Ed with Xiphias to get over it, but I think he's too far away from me to just come over.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 12:10 pm (UTC)The IRC game was Seventh Seas.
I'd be willing to run an IRC game, maybe. . .
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 12:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 11:09 pm (UTC)YMMV; I happen to prefer my games to be combat-light, plot-heavy, and guaranteed to disgust rules lawyers.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 11:00 am (UTC)