humboldtscott wrote on Nov 30th, 2008 at 3:40pm:Thanks. It is quite an interesting and useful thread. I've been thinking about using GURPS for any of the three game ideas I posted recently. Reading over the cyberpunk rules, I've realized how outdated they are. Also, the character creation rules are built around classes specific to the genre, which is somewhat different from my "branded as terrorists" world. And Call of Cthulhu, while a nice lean system, just isn't that appealing to me, and the character creation rules are somewhat limited.
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These are GURPS 3E, but can be converted fairly easily to 4E
And just to make you go wow that would be cool, and whoa I never thought of running a game like that...etc
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Quote:Which brings me to the problem I have with GURPS: character creation. Until you get familiar with the rules by creating dozens of characters, it's hard to know how to use your points most effectively. Given say 100 points, roughly how many points should be spent on stats/skills/advantages? The second problem that I have with character creation is that there seems to be a temptation to create weird/screwy characters, using the disadvantages. "My character is a hemophiliac!" "Why? How does that fit into your character concept?" "I don't know, I just wanted a 25 point disadvantage so I could buy this other thing I wanted." Quirks would probably be outlawed in my games...
Any ideas/guidelines for handling these problems? Am I the only one who has noticed these things?
The thing I have learned from the past few GURPS games the group has tried. Decide what skills, advantages, disadvantages, perks, and quirks will be allowed and write them down for the players. Instead of handing the players the books and say have at it, had them the book AND the list of allowable skills and traits, etc. I can see that this will help keep the characters (and players) focused with traits that will be acceptable to the campaign.
I have not done this yet, but from the past few games I have done, this will be put into play the next time I run a GURPS game. I do, however, have have a 30 page PDF set up for DragonLance setting in GURPS that uses this concept.
Another thing to do is to get with your players individually and have them go over their character concept with them and make sure it makes sense, then disallow any skills, adv, disadv, perks, and quirks that would not fall into that concept.
Quote:I've always called D&D the DOS/Windows of tabletop gaming. We all know it sucks, we all know there are better options out there (Linux = GURPS) but we use D&D anyway because it's the one we were introduced to first.
Yep, and most are unwilling to even give a thought to trying something else. I have to admit, I was one of these people several years ago. 'D&D was the shiznit and I am not gonna try your great new so and so system.' This alone has lost me many opportunity's to play quite a few games I would really enjoy playing now.