Any Fans of GURPS?

[AsenRG]

right here: http://www.uncouthsavage.com/uploads/1/3/3/2/133279619/darkerf.pdf

I appreciate your appreciation for my genius but the appelation may be presumptuous.

It came out of a few off the cuff sessions I ran at my store using my rough recollection of Rogue Trader and later editions of 40k. I wanted something that'd let people play Eldar and Spacemarines or whatever without buying half a dozen books. It's a rough knockoff at best but sufficient to my needs.

Never expected a store owner to say that!

 

[MoonHunter]

I am just going to interject here (then return to your regular thread).

I was/am a long time fan and GM for The Fantasy Trip. It was my first chronicle and here we are forty years later and old old players still bring it up. I like GURPS, as it is TFT 2.0 - doing things the game really needed - in the beginning. I like the concept of GURPS. I am challenged and turned off by some of its design assumptions.

If I am going to play a universal, I can do anything, point buy game, I am going to play Hero. Hero is smoother around the edges. It has fewer moving parts (skills). It integrates powers and abilities more easily. (GURPS supers kinda suck, as you can only play realistic physics metas well - ala Wildcards (which is a perfect fit for GURPS). )

So I am fluent in the game. I adore the setting books. I could even be coaxed to play it. However, it is more like a 5th choice game.

 

[MoonHunter]

Never expected a store owner to say that!

I do.

They would rather you buy one bigger book than have four or five smaller books sit on their shelves. After all, if you are not going "all in" or are totally in love with some aspect of the setting, you tend not to buy ANY OF THEM. So if they are lucky, a customer buys the core rules. But those six splats required to run the game properly or run all the aspects of the setting? They sit there.

I totally get it from their point of view.

 

[Sharrow]

100 points for the common (and rather sensible) "IQ-", but even at full price it's often a bargain if players are allowed to do that (and at creation, they definitely are unless one is a hardcore member of the Cult of Stat Normalization).

Default in 4e is that you can't lower Will or Perception by more than four levels without GM permission, so that's 160 points for IQ-20, Per-16, Will-16. And it is a bargain, as long as your point budget is sufficient to allow you to do this as well as buy the essential skills, not have your other stats so low that your character is a liability, etc. I wouldn't consider doing this on less than 250-points, maybe 200 if I could be certain being nothing but a big brain was going to work.

I think constraints here are rather common in house rules, but I wouldn't mind seeing more of that in published products. Okay, not that we got a lot of published settings in 4E, never mind the explosion of CPs (beyond "inflation").

It seems that the market buys more high-power stuff than low, so Dungeon Fantasy, Action, and Monster Hunters all went with higher point values than the core rules' default. After the End went with the 150-point standard, with an option to bump up to 200 points built into the templates.

Dr Kromm reckoned that 150 points in 4e matched 100 points in 3e. I think it's closer to 125 points in 4e equals 100 points in 3e, but as 150 points lets you get similar results with slight power creep and a lot less optimisation (i.e. many fewer iterations of the build as you screw value out of every single half-point) I'm fine with 150 points as the standard. One thing I don't think was a good idea that 4e does is recommend a disad cap of half the beginning point value. I think one of 50 points, including quirks, works better.

This reminds me of the thing I most noticed when 4e first came out - compared to 3e it felt a lot more generous to the player. 3e had huge lists of disadvantages compared to the amount of advantages, and the skill descriptions and GMing advice lasted heaps of penalties and very few bonuses. It just felt stingy. 4e still has all the penalties, but it also has difficulty modifiers that are bonuses for when times are easy, and rules for spending time to get a bonus, and so on.

 

[Ravenswing]

Twenty years of fiddling has me thinking that around 135 is comparable, but that's just me.

 

[David Johansen]

To my mind disadvantages should scale up more than they do. I Superman's rogue gallery capped at 60 points? Somehow I don't think so.

 

[chuckdee]

To my mind disadvantages should scale up more than they do. I Superman's rogue gallery capped at 60 points? Somehow I don't think so.

I've always house ruled that they could. I use 100 as my cap for more powerful beings- above that and I've found that they become a lot to keep up with.

 

[Sharrow]

To my mind disadvantages should scale up more than they do. I Superman's rogue gallery capped at 60 points? Somehow I don't think so.

4e suggests a disad cap of 1/2 the starting points, so there's plenty of room for scaling there. I just don't think that's a great piece of advice for the default.

 

[thebigh]

I agree. I usually suggest no more than about a third.

 

[David Johansen]

I'll have to check, third edition had a specific 60 point limit on enemies.

Anyhow, I've got issues with allies as well. I don't think you should be able to buy even one ally who is more powerful than your character. After that it's a patron. There was the player who took 12 civil war veteran vampires as an ally group, that was pretty fun/silly.

 

[Skarg]

They were already there. It was during 3e's heyday that people were stating up literal vegetables as characters, and coming up with point crocks like telekinetic quadriplegics.

One thing that changed for the better in terms of tone/philosophy was 4e moving away from the assumption that just about all games should start with 100 point characters, which (in my experience) encouraged players to look for ways to squeeze the absolute maximum value out of each and every point.

Ok. Though I followed the SJG GURPS forums back then and before, and it used to have plenty of conversations that were more about such things as how to best represent normal human situations with rules. Strategies for dealing with people trying to run around and past you. What are good house rules for real nunchucks, based on someone's real experience with them. Should the Knockback rules be tweaked to be more realistic? Do guns malfunction at a realistic rate? Etc.

Since 4e, I can still find people to talk about that, but most conversations I see tend to be more like, "If I want a force field that doesn't deflect carrots on Thursdays, but launches 340 throwing stars from nowhere but they go in all directions unaimed, but won't hurt my friends, how do I do that?" Where "how do I do that?" doesn't mean getting the game mechanics good, it means, "how many character points does that cost, and how do I use 4e official terms to describe and calculate the official point cost?"

 

[Skarg]

Yes, curating the system is too much of a pain because it will have to be a focused effort for people to build their characters for the setting, and not just try to warp the setting to three or four different character ideas.

That's not hard for me to do, but I'm doing it from my experience (and book ownership) from pre-4e books, or by just making lists of what I do want, with the general rule that if I didn't put it in the campaign description, it's not available for PCs until/unless discovered in play (i.e. probably never, for most weird things).

But it does mean that the 4e Basic Set is mostly noise for me.

 

[Skarg]

Nowadays, and for a very long time now, that statement there mades a lot of sense to me. But I'll also say that to the teenagers running and playing the game at the game shop back in the 80s, it would have seemed blasphemous.

I chalk it up to all those Gygaxisms where we were preached down to in other games about how "if a rule is for the players then it must also apply to the NPCs/Monsters" and all the insanely play hostile things the mindset encouraged.

I create NPCs as if the rules fully applied to them too, but as GM, I get to say how much aptitude they had, and what experiences they've had up till this point. I do my best to do that realistically and appropriately, and I've made countless thousands of NPCs over the decades, so I can just do it off the top of my head, so it both amounts to me giving them whatever abilities I want, but since I want them to be realistic and fair, they also end up having very reasonable skill levels very much like what they'd have if I were actually playing out all the life experiences I'm estimating they had. Except for the details, which are optional and often omitted and just made up on the stop.

e.g.
Sal ST 10 DX 10 IQ 10 HT 11 - Literacy, Mechanic 13, Brawling 9, OPH: transparent emotional facial expressions.

That's all I need to know about the mechanic a PC is having fix his car. I can invent it in my head in under a second, and if need be, jot notes about him in a few seconds.

As soon as I need to know anything else about him, I can imagine and jot such details as needed, possibly rolling dice to help make my intuition more unpredictable and fair.

 

[Skarg]

It's all the fussy stuff about points that puts me off of GURPS nowadays.
Mythras and BRP (which I love!) have points buy as well... but it doesn't feel nearly as insanely nitpicky as GURPS.

I own 4e, but he last time I played it was 3e and that's where my heart was won by GURPS. Now it's like, "Oh, she put on some weight..."

As a GURPS maniac, yes! When I say GURPS, I mean more like GURPS 3e, with some of the better ideas in 4e as house rules.

 

[TheSaint]

I've been running GURPS, almost exclusively, for about 35 years now. Ever since 2nd edition. So, yeah, I'd say I'm a fan.

As a GURPS maniac, yes! When I say GURPS, I mean more like GURPS 3e, with some of the better ideas in 4e as house rules.

Ditto. I ran one 4e campaign and swore off of it. Back to 3e now. It isn't even that 4e is that much different, it's that the books are horribly bloated and unusable. And the changes they did make to the rules don't make wading through the mess of the books worthwhile. As you said, the rules that are worth salvaging from 4e are very easy to integrate into 3e.

 

[Ravenswing]

Ok. Though I followed the SJG GURPS forums back then and before, and it used to have plenty of conversations that were more about such things as how to best represent normal human situations with rules. Strategies for dealing with people trying to run around and past you. What are good house rules for real nunchucks, based on someone's real experience with them. Should the Knockback rules be tweaked to be more realistic? Do guns malfunction at a realistic rate? Etc.

Since 4e, I can still find people to talk about that, but most conversations I see tend to be more like, "If I want a force field that doesn't deflect carrots on Thursdays, but launches 340 throwing stars from nowhere but they go in all directions unaimed, but won't hurt my friends, how do I do that?" Where "how do I do that?" doesn't mean getting the game mechanics good, it means, "how many character points does that cost, and how do I use 4e official terms to describe and calculate the official point cost?"

... and they tend to take 250 words and considerable mathematics to do it. I drop in Voice of Common Sense responses every now and then (*), but I get the feeling that the crazies see me as a feeble-minded grouch spoiling their fun.

(*) - current case in point, a thread about using a flour explosion as a booby trapped room, with the standard amount of numbers-crunching errata. My encomium at the sheer difficulty of pulling it off short of high tech thermobaric weapons being "Easier to detail a dozen crossbowmen with orders to do the party when they arrive" fell decidedly flat.

 

[thebigh]

GURPS rightly has a reputation for being the best-researched system out there. I suppose this kind of pedantic fiddling goes with the territory.

 

[Ynas Midgard]

As you said, the rules that are worth salvaging from 4e are very easy to integrate into 3e.

I'm only casually familiar with GURPS; could you specify a few of these improvements?

 

[AsenRG]

I'm only casually familiar with GURPS; could you specify a few of these improvements?

Flat cost of attributes.
Defense being (Skill/2)+3 for all skills.
HT determining FP while ST determines HP.

Ok. Though I followed the SJG GURPS forums back then and before, and it used to have plenty of conversations that were more about such things as how to best represent normal human situations with rules. Strategies for dealing with people trying to run around and past you. What are good house rules for real nunchucks, based on someone's real experience with them. Should the Knockback rules be tweaked to be more realistic? Do guns malfunction at a realistic rate? Etc.

Since 4e, I can still find people to talk about that, but most conversations I see tend to be more like, "If I want a force field that doesn't deflect carrots on Thursdays, but launches 340 throwing stars from nowhere but they go in all directions unaimed, but won't hurt my friends, how do I do that?" Where "how do I do that?" doesn't mean getting the game mechanics good, it means, "how many character points does that cost, and how do I use 4e official terms to describe and calculate the official point cost?"

Well, we know how the game mechanics would work, it would be 3d6 vs Trait...

... and they tend to take 250 words and considerable mathematics to do it. I drop in Voice of Common Sense responses every now and then (*), but I get the feeling that the crazies see me as a feeble-minded grouch spoiling their fun.

(*) - current case in point, a thread about using a flour explosion as a booby trapped room, with the standard amount of numbers-crunching errata. My encomium at the sheer difficulty of pulling it off short of high tech thermobaric weapons being "Easier to detail a dozen crossbowmen with orders to do the party when they arrive" fell decidedly flat.

Out of curiosity, why? I remember that no open flame was allowed in mills. That, to me, would suggest you don't need thermobaric weapons to produce an explosion.

 

[Sharrow]

Ditto. I ran one 4e campaign and swore off of it. Back to 3e now. It isn't even that 4e is that much different, it's that the books are horribly bloated and unusable. And the changes they did make to the rules don't make wading through the mess of the books worthwhile. As you said, the rules that are worth salvaging from 4e are very easy to integrate into 3e.

Whereas I find having almost all the rules (and especially character traits, etc.) I want in the basic set vastly superior to 3e where they're all over the place. Now over time this has become less the case with 4e, but it's no worse than 3e and at this point I'm more familiar with it, and in general the changes made were ones I consider improvements.

 

[Sharrow]

(*) - current case in point, a thread about using a flour explosion as a booby trapped room, with the standard amount of numbers-crunching errata. My encomium at the sheer difficulty of pulling it off short of high tech thermobaric weapons being "Easier to detail a dozen crossbowmen with orders to do the party when they arrive" fell decidedly flat.

How I'd do that - well, someone posted what the best case would be (with citation), and everyone agrees that it'd be far, far less effective than that. Okay, so assuming that it's been agreed that it'll work at all, take the best case, assume 1% efficiency, and that gives 1/10th the damage of the best case. Done - and I came up with that in much less time than it took me to type it out.

 

[Sosthenes]

Defense being (Skill/2)+3 for all skills.

Including removal of PD?

 

[Savage Schemer]

How I'd do that - well, someone posted what the best case would be (with citation), and everyone agrees that it'd be far, far less effective than that. Okay, so assuming that it's been agreed that it'll work at all, take the best case, assume 1% efficiency, and that gives 1/10th the damage of the best case. Done - and I came up with that in much less time than it took me to type it out.

That's just insane. I was going to say stupid, and I'm thinking that might actually be the better and more appropriate word. Like, why the fuck isn't the default assumption that it would work? OF COURSE it would work! Flour bombs are a known fucking thing! I guess that firmly puts me in Ravenswing's camp on this one. Use a modicum of common sense, make a quick ruling regarding how to pull it off, move on.

Which I'm pretty sure is your point - I'm not disagreeing with you here insomuch as just reacting out of sheer exacerbation.

I think I'd lose my mind going anywhere near a thread like that one. But I think my suggestion would be that some of them need to go watch an episode of Deadliest Catch from just a couple of weeks ago. In it, the crew of one of the ships decided to flour bomb a guy as a birthday prank. Only the execution of said prank turned serious when the flour somehow caught a spark and ended up incinerating the poor birthday bastard.

 

[Acmegamer]

Including removal of PD?

Yeah was a part of the change for 4e. I liked having PD personally. I do like the change to the cost of stats and skills though. I'll also second Ravenswing 's comments about the forum. There isn't a lot of room for reasonable conversation debate there. It's rigid, pedantic and annoying to try to converse with the core posters on the SJG forums. The GURPS Discord is no better and then again Discord sucks as a tool for having conversations and finding things.

 

[David Johansen]

Well, their forum convinced me to take another shot at an open 3d6 engine this week, so there's that. I guess the value of that depends on how fed up GURPS fans are. As it stands there are a number of games in the field. HERO seems to be friendlier to its fans and more open to fan projects. Corps by BRTC is technically solid though I don't know enough about it, my understanding is that it's much less cinematic and crunchier. EABA is BRTC's more cinematic game. JAGS by Marco is super friendly to fan projects and is more rigorously structured than GURPS. Savage Worlds licenses its system to fans.

The problem, is that a game designed by a committee will never please anyone but then a game designed by me will never please anyone either. Even so, I've taken half a dozen stabs at it in recent years, the issue will be that the GURPS compatibility will be 0%. Ah well...

 

[Acmegamer]

Well, their forum convinced me to take another shot at an open 3d6 engine this week, so there's that. I guess the value of that depends on how fed up GURPS fans are. As it stands there are a number of games in the field. HERO seems to be friendlier to its fans and more open to fan projects. Corps by BRTC is technically solid though I don't know enough about it, my understanding is that it's much less cinematic and crunchier. EABA is BRTC's more cinematic game. JAGS by Marco is super friendly to fan projects and is more rigorously structured than GURPS. Savage Worlds licenses its system to fans.

The problem, is that a game designed by a committee will never please anyone but then a game designed by me will never please anyone either. Even so, I've taken half a dozen stabs at it in recent years, the issue will be that the GURPS compatibility will be 0%. Ah well...

Unfortunately SJG as a company isn't friendly to anyone working with their systems. I feel that by and large they're just sitting on GURPS and it's in neutral, idling away. When Chaosium starts looking more friendly to third party, you know SJG has problems.

Basically in my opinion, if you want to do work with a universal system, it feels like BRP, Savage Worlds or Hero (based on your comments I don't follow Hero these days by) would be the path to take. Or Mork Borg is you want a mechanics light system. I'm sure I'm forgetting some other systems that are more universal in nature that would work.

Next year it's been what 20 years since GURPS 4e released? For all it's fucking mental masturbation numbers crunching, it's still incomplete and GURPS 3e is more complete system, short comings and all. I mean seriously? WTF? It's stagnant and dead in the water and they've allowed their player base to drift off to other systems due to this lack of support.

I still buy GURPs and TFT material and sometimes even other games of theirs. I have a fondness for old Ogre and Car Wars (don't much care for the new car wars) and even an occasional game of Munchkin. (My wife is the bigger fan of Munchkin). The rest of their games just feel like shallow distractions and make a quick buck. You see the new Kickstarter?



This is the typical stuff they do now. This or Quickstarters with a two week window of something basic. It all feels like shadow money grabs anymore. Hell I used to get frustrated that the CEO Phil Reed ran a ton (still does) of Kickstarter's and his material was useful. Thing is for a CEO of SJG it didn't feel like he was doing much or the company. I mean, he's a Kickstarter machine honestly, highly successful and others want to emulate how he does it. Kudos to him, but it wasn't doing much for SJG in my opinion.

They've got a new CEO, so it will be interesting to see where and what SJG does in the next couple years. I'm holding onto hope that things will change. We'll see.


Edit: Phil's Kickstarters, seventy two.

https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/philipreed/created

 

[Dumarest]

Because of the game design philosophy, not the nudity thing!

We need to get you and Voros into a room to work on this whole nudity obsession thing.

​

 

[TheSaint]

Well, their forum convinced me to take another shot at an open 3d6 engine this week, so there's that. I guess the value of that depends on how fed up GURPS fans are. As it stands there are a number of games in the field. HERO seems to be friendlier to its fans and more open to fan projects. Corps by BRTC is technically solid though I don't know enough about it, my understanding is that it's much less cinematic and crunchier. EABA is BRTC's more cinematic game. JAGS by Marco is super friendly to fan projects and is more rigorously structured than GURPS. Savage Worlds licenses its system to fans.

The problem, is that a game designed by a committee will never please anyone but then a game designed by me will never please anyone either. Even so, I've taken half a dozen stabs at it in recent years, the issue will be that the GURPS compatibility will be 0%. Ah well...

Unfortunately SJG as a company isn't friendly to anyone working with their systems.

Personally, I've just decided that I'm going to house-rule 3e beyond recognition, then edit my books for clarity. Nothing they can do about that.

 

[Acmegamer]

Personally, I've just decided that I'm going to house-rule 3e beyond recognition, then edit my books for clarity. Nothing they can do about that.

While re-reading through the 2e/3e material recently, I did have the very same thought. I'm just not sure I have the passion and drive to do that sort of thing anymore. I was really impressed with all the work that Ravenswing has done with his GURPS 4e campaign as an aside. I think the problem for me anymore is I love tabletop gaming and like Trevor over at "Me, Myself & Die!", I also love to dive into mechanics and play them. My problem around here has been twofold, one part ageism and one part if it isn't DnD or a DnD variation they aren't interested. The pandemic didn't help and then my own health issues which I'm still dealing with.

So, with that in mind, I don't feel I quite have the passion or single focus drive to want to do that sort of thing. I like to play various systems, and doing that sort of project would get in the way of trying other systems out. Honestly as I've said before, I would simply love if SJG would do a Kickstarter for a reprint of GURPS 2e box set which I always loved and made more use of as my main GURPS books than I did of the GURPS 3e book. That's pipe dream though and I'm meandering around here and thinking out loud. I just need to let it go in regards to SJG.

 

[Sosthenes]

Well, their forum convinced me to take another shot at an open 3d6 engine this week, so there's that. I guess the value of that depends on how fed up GURPS fans are.

I'm all for that, let's hope the target demographic is bigger than it appears to be.

I thought about hacking some openly licensed game into a 3d6 roll under system somehow, so that there's another group to draw from (and also at least one legal post to ties your horse to). RuneQuest, Traveller or OpenD6 could work out.

 

[chuckdee]

I feel that by and large they're just sitting on GURPS and it's in neutral, idling away.

GURPS is not the major draw nor money maker it once was for SJG. They're focusing on those. The fact that they regularly release digital only stuff is an indication of their love of the brand- not how much money it makes for them.

 

[AsenRG]

Including removal of PD?

Nah, I was tempted to backport that even way back then, and now that I know a lot more about armour and weapons, it would be virtually guaranteed.

 

[Acmegamer]

GURPS is not the major draw nor money maker it once was for SJG.

Yeah, you see I blame that on them.

 

[David Johansen]

Yeah, you see I blame that on them.

I believe they could and even should have done more

I don't know if it would have done better.

One thing I appreciate about GURPS is that there hasn't been a new edition in a couple decades but that flys in the face of the conventional wisdom of the gaming industry.

What I do know, is if you create something great for GURPS, SJG won't let you profit from it and there are lots of creative people who have ideas they'd like to share that don't really want to build a new game system from scratch. And no, d20 / D&D just isn't good enough. Not by a long shot.

 

[Ravenswing]

Out of curiosity, why? I remember that no open flame was allowed in mills. That, to me, would suggest you don't need thermobaric weapons to produce an explosion.

Because there's a large difference between "conditions/elements that make an industrial disaster a lot more likely" and "conditions to induce one on purpose, on demand." You have to put that dust in suspension and keep it there, and GURPS neither has a spell that can do it nor one that can maintain such a cloud. A photo sequence I've seen involves taking about five pounds of flour (that dungeon had better be bone dry) and running it through a combo sifter/blower for a resulting fireball about 8-9' wide. I'd have to think that such a mechanism would make a powerful lot of noise -- at vacuum cleaner level -- and have just a couple seconds' worth of effect before the cloud dissipated below ignition level.

This is a great deal of time, trouble and money to produce a quixotic effect, and fails the cost-benefit analysis that starts with "You six crossbowmen, be ready in this gallery, and when those bastard adventurers come by, do them."

* * * * *
Not that the rabbit hole divers care. A couple of times I've also dropped lines along the lines of "This game has a hobby-wide reputation of being difficult and full of impenetrable mathematics, and I hate to think of the number of newbies who've come to this forum running away in fear, all their suspicious about this game validated." That's dropped pretty flat as well.

 

[AsenRG]

Because there's a large difference between "conditions/elements that make an industrial disaster a lot more likely" and "conditions to induce one on purpose, on demand." You have to put that dust in suspension and keep it there, and GURPS neither has a spell that can do it nor one that can maintain such a cloud.

...there's something GURPS doesn't have a spell for?

A photo sequence I've seen involves taking about five pounds of flour (that dungeon had better be bone dry) and running it through a combo sifter/blower for a resulting fireball about 8-9' wide. I'd have to think that such a mechanism would make a powerful lot of noise -- at vacuum cleaner level -- and have just a couple seconds' worth of effect before the cloud dissipated below ignition level.

Right, but how big of a fireball can a thrown package achieve, if coupled with a suitable spark?

This is a great deal of time, trouble and money to produce a quixotic effect, and fails the cost-benefit analysis that starts with "You six crossbowmen, be ready in this gallery, and when those bastard adventurers come by, do them."

Well, you and I both know that if your villains set traps by using Plot-Relevant Amounts Of Resources, that shouldn't be a problem...

Not that the rabbit hole divers care. A couple of times I've also dropped lines along the lines of "This game has a hobby-wide reputation of being difficult and full of impenetrable mathematics, and I hate to think of the number of newbies who've come to this forum running away in fear, all their suspicious about this game validated." That's dropped pretty flat as well.

Of course...


(And lest someone gets my pithy remarks wrong, I'm on Ravenswing 's side, I'm just amazed at the time he's spent explaining it to people who aren't interested in listening).

 

[chuckdee]

Yeah, you see I blame that on them.

It wasn't a big draw before they made any changes to editions. It had a lot to do with the volume of material they were putting out, and the price of the quality they were putting into them, and the conditions for wholesale of the product- Distributors were a big part of why there were books sitting on shelves.

The whole Secret Service thing didn't help, and the way they came back from that wasn't GURPS.

 

[Sharrow]

Next year it's been what 20 years since GURPS 4e released? For all it's fucking mental masturbation numbers crunching, it's still incomplete and GURPS 3e is more complete system, short comings and all. I mean seriously? WTF? It's stagnant and dead in the water and they've allowed their player base to drift off to other systems due to this lack of support.

What do you mean by incomplete? 4e's covered things 3e never did, so I guess that also make 3e (and pretty much every other game out there) incomplete as well.

 

[Sharrow]

Right, but how big of a fireball can a thrown package achieve, if coupled with a suitable spark?

Bugger-all realistically, unless it's carefully designed and manufactured to spray the dust out and then ignite it at just the right time.

So if someone was to use some kind of wind spell to stirr up a load of flour and then light it up, only a small fraction of it would be at the right density, etc. to 'burn' correctly. Thus, were I the GM, I'd listen how they planned to arrange this, and if it seemed somewhat workable (ruling favourably if it seemed cool) I'd just rule on the faction that went off (I said 1% above), how much of a bang that would make, and move on.

One thing I would not be doing is spending more than the time it took to do a quick google search for how energetic flour explosions can be, and then the time to do a quick calculation of the result in game terms. It's just not worth spending more time and effort on, especially with my players, as they tend to over-plan and over-think everything anyway so I want to be pushing things along, not aiding and abetting them.

 

[Skarg]

I believe they could and even should have done more

I don't know if it would have done better.

One thing I appreciate about GURPS is that there hasn't been a new edition in a couple decades but that flys in the face of the conventional wisdom of the gaming industry.

What I do know, is if you create something great for GURPS, SJG won't let you profit from it and there are lots of creative people who have ideas they'd like to share that don't really want to build a new game system from scratch. And no, d20 / D&D just isn't good enough. Not by a long shot.

Well, unless it's something they'd want to publish.