Month: September 2014

Taking a while…

It is taking a while to get my groups GURPS characters created, but it is coming along. I’ve let one of the guys borrow my GURPS characters book so he can finish his PC, and the other guys all have some great backgrounds and concepts developed. Just a matter of getting them on paper. I anticipate that we’ll be ready to play in mid October. For the guys who are having trouble, I may offer to take their ideas and translate them into a rudimentary character, then let them complete the process with details.

One of the guys, who has never played an RPG before, has developed this really fantastic background for his character. No numbers yet! Well, he had determined that the character will have a very high INT, like 15. But with the character background set, the number crunching will be very easy, and as GM I already have ideas for how to work with this PC. Exciting!

Really, I’d rather do it this way. Really have the group put some time into the character creation process. Have them create a character they identify with and will enjoy playing.

 

 

First Session!

Well, we had our first GURPS session on Saturday. Well, sort of.

I had the guys over to work on character concepts. As I fully expected, we spent a lot of time catching up. The guys I’m gaming with are all old highschool friends. They were not my regular gaming group, but I played some Champions with them. Anyway, a lot of catching up was needed, and it was a lot of fun.

The two guys who got there “on-time” decided on a couple of general ideas of characters. I really liked their ideas, and I think the game is going to be fun.

It was really fun seeing the interaction of these two friends as they talked about characters. I’ve known these guys for most of my life, but as I’ve said, they weren’t my main group of friends. It was incredible to see how their friendships really haven’t changed in all this time, and it was clear that they’ll have a very tight gaming “team” for GURPS, D&D, or whatever.  I’m sure it is nice to make “new” gaming friends, but it is really great to just be able to rekindle the fire that has been simmering for 30 years.

 

Interwebs Treasures #11

I’m back with more cool stuff…

Clearly, until my friend Williams starts up the very cool looking 1st Edition D&D campaign he has been working on, my GURPS obsession is dominating my gaming-self’s mind.

One last time………………………………. GURPS!

1st Meeting Scheduled

OK, we have scheduled our GURPS character creation session for next Thursday. Looking forward to it. We have two of the Characters core books available, which should help. I’m thinking that after a couple of gaming session I might let them do a little redesign, once they’ve had a chance to play the system and test out their characters.

Also, I guess the end of this month is when the new D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual comes out. I am planning on buying it.

Building GURPS Stuff

Last night I finally sat down and started figuring out how to build things like bionic arms using GURPS.

I already had some idea just from looking through the Cyberpunk and Ultra-Tech books, but I needed to really dig into it. Much like the Hero System, you select the Advantages that a gadget like a bionic arm would confer on a person, then use various limitation and/or enhancements to alter the cost of each of the Advantages. You add up the cost of the Advantages for the device, and then you might actually apply some disadvantage to the device which lowers its final point cost.

Without getting into the details, here is an example. I took the bionic arm from Ultra-Tech and reverse-engineered it, figuring out how the GURPS writers built it, doing the calculations, etc.

Bionic Arm

  1. +2 STR — would cost 6 pts.  Has limitations like “susceptible to electricity, needs maintenance,  which reduce the cost by 25%, so rounding up the final coast for the STR is 5 pt.
  2. Damage Resistance 2 — because the arm is more resistant to damage than the human body. Costs 10 pt, but has the Limitation of only applying to one arm, so cost is reduced by 40%, for a total of 6 pts.
  3. Finally, having a bionic arm entails loss of the human arm. This is the character disadvantage “One Arm”, which could normally get the character back 20 pts. However, according to the rules for Cybernetics in the Ultra-Tech book, you apply  a 70% reduction to that bonus because the loss of the arm is Mitigated by having a bionic arm. In other word, having one arm isn’t such a disadvantage if you have a bionic one, so you don’t get the full 20 pts. You get 6 pts back.
  4. So the final cost of the bionic arm is 5 + 6 – 6 = 5 pts.

Like the Hero System, the more familiar you are with the building blocks (Advantages, Limitations, Disadvantages), the better you will be at crafting interesting gadgets and abilities. I actually think the GURPS Limitations are easier to implement than Hero’s. You just total the percentage of increase/decrease in point cost, and apply it to the base cost.

 

The Player from Hell

All this character creation thought has brought back memories of my most difficult player ever. This guy played Champions and D&D with us. He’d always create a character so lopsided – both physically and psychologically – that he’d be a pain in the ass. Example: in a regular 200pt Champions game, his favorite character had a 9 speed, practically no defenses, a 36 Dex,  and his major power was the ability to throw knives (armor-piercing ranged killing attacks) on autofire. Had I been older, I’d just said “no way”, but I was only about 17 or 18, and he was over 20, and I allowed this bullshit to go on. hahahaha. So you have this “superhero” who really goes beyond the “Dark Champions” vigilante stereotype right into the psychotic murderer zone.

This is the same guy who, when DMing a D&D game, would start your character at Zero Level, and then make it hard as shit to even find a mentor to get trained in a class.

Thinking back, I’m not sure what this guy was trying to prove, other than lording power over others and showing “how smart” he was. And he was a super smart guy. And frankly, he was a really good guy too. Love that guy to this day, BUT he was the Player/GM from hell.

I learned a lot about how to game from this guy. Just – do – the – opposite of what he did.

More game preparation

Looks like I might have 4 players for my GURPS game. That’s perfect, actually. We are going to get together soon and have a character creation session. This will allow the players to bounce ideas around, and try to make sure they have all the bases covered as far as skills go. I’m always willing to sculpt an adventure to any set of PCs, but it is nice if you have a variety. That being said, they can build whatever sort of characters they want.

I think it is harder for players to come up with character ideas for something like Cyberpunk, because the typical character archetypes just aren’t as familiar to them. In a fantasy campaign, everyone knows what a wizard, fighter, thief, or bard is. With no character classes in GURPS, and a bit more nebulous set of archetypes for Cyberpunk, it is challenging.

It might actually be useful to think of the typical fantasy types when making these characters. You still need a lot of the same kinds of skills, just tweaked to a techno-futuristic setting. A Wizard becomes the technologist/cyberspace cowboy. The Fighter become the ex-military bad ass. And so on.

I’m really looking forward to getting this started!

Interwebs Treasures #10

I’ve been busy working on my GURPS campaign, but found some time to surf the web for some stories…

  • Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition gets it mostly right. The author is slightly critical of the new edition’s emphasis on the official campaign setting provided by Wizards of the Coast. While I understand his sentiment (I am after all spending a lot of time coming up with my own GURPS setting), it makes sense to give players something well-developed that they can dig into right away if they wish.
  • Christopher, over at Ravens N’ Pennies, came up with these GURPS rules for Variant Judo Throw. Then he wrote a PART 2. Pretty cool.
  • I spent some time reading the 2013 Report to Stakeholders, from Steve Jackson Games. Kind of cool to find out what is happening with that company. It’s a great way of letting their customers in on things and make them feel more involved. Besides that fact that I like GURPS a lot, I must admit that one other thing that attracts me to the system is that it is owned by a true small company – a grassroots real-deal company. It’s clear from the report that they don’t make tons of money from GURPS, yet as true gamers they continue to support it. Cheers, Steve Jackson!
  • Still on Steve Jackson Games — check it — Gaming Ballistic’s Firing Squad welcomes Steve Jackson – video interview! In the 2nd half, Steve addresses both GURPS and table top RPGs in general. I love what Steve says about the value of NOT being a publicly traded company – allows him to do what he wants.
  • And finally, also from Gaming Ballistic, GURPS 101. Good stuff.

More GURPS Planning

I’ve spent a lot of time in the evenings over the last week reading the GURPS core rulebooks, reading some William Gibson cyberpunk, and brainstorming a cyberpunk/bio-tech kind of campaign setting.

It’s actually quite a lot of work, but really enjoyable too.

I ended up buying the GURPS Ultra-Tech and Bio-Tech books as PDFs. They are out of print, and the nice hardback editions are going for over $150 on Amazon for a new copy, or $70 used. They were totally out of them at the local game store, but they did have GURPS Horror. Now, I’m not planning a Horror campaign, but I went ahead and got the book as it is really well done and if history repeats, it will soon cost over $100 to get a nice copy. If I ever see used copies of these hardbacks at Half Price Books I will snag them.

Coming up with a “unique” campaign setting that still makes use of most of the common elements of the whole Tech-Dystopia-Cyberspace-Cyborg-BioTech stuff is challenging. I want to have at least the skeleton of an entire world built. It would be easier to just say “You guys live in MegaCity” and just jump right in, making it all up as I go. Most of my gaming history has involved just that. This time I want to be a bit more creative, even if it turns out kind of hacky. You gotta start somewhere, right? I considered just doing kind of a “real world Plus” game, with the PCs starting in New York City or something like that, just about 20 years in the future.

One thing that the classic CyberPunk literature seems to have missed (though honestly I haven’t read that much) is climate change. Very few people were thinking about it back in the 1980s. So I’m looking at the year being 2065, with the effects of climate change influencing everything. While I’m doing a rough outline of what the United States and the rest of the world look like in that year, the game will be based in the “Texas Corridor” – an enclosed MegaCity that includes the current Dallas area, down IH-35, all the way down to San Antonio, with a branch out to Houston. Action will also take place in the Mexico City Complex (El Complejo Grande). This will allow me to put a little Texas/Southwest flavor and style into the game.

Now I need to come up with some of the major players in this environment. People, corporations, the cops, etc.