Game Design Sins

[thebigh]

I dunno. I've never experienced character generation in GURPS as all that onerous. It seemed to take twice as long in Ars Magica, and then the results were less than satisfactory.

 

[Sharrow]

I dunno. I've never experienced character generation in GURPS as all that onerous. It seemed to take twice as long in Ars Magica, and then the results were less than satisfactory.

My (dim) recollection of Ars Magica chargen is that some mage concepts seemed a lot easier to build than others, in that the point costs for things encouraged some things over others that didn't seem right to us. I remember no specifics though.

My recollection of the few times we played it was that while we all agreed it had much better and more complete rules, Chivalry & Sorcery 2e covered much the same ground and was more satisfying to play, despite clunky and unclear rules, and a lack of any sort of rules for novel magic research or covenant management.

 

[chuckdee]

or build a vehicle. OMFG

Spaceships are worse than vehicles.

 

[Agemegos]

I'm referring to this...

View attachment 47257

Understood. My point is that nearly all GURPS games run fine without using the vehicle design system. To prove this, 4th ed. has been current for eighteen years with no vehicle design system. That monster is not even part of GURPS these days.

Whereas on the other hand, GURPS games do not run fine without characters.

 

[TJS]

None of that stuff is mandatory the way it is in other high-crunch systems. You can quite easily get by without half the combat maneuvers, remove hit locations altogether, etc. I played in a zombie apocalypse game a few years ago where we ignored hit locations except for head shots on zoms, which necessarily was the only reliable way to kill them, and even that selectiveness worked fine. This is the sort of thing I was talking about earlier about starting with something that's crunchier than what you want and then paring it down to what your players like and your GM can handle.

But how much understanding do you need before you know that you can get by without a lot of stuff?

 

[thebigh]

But how much understanding do you need before you know that you can get by without a lot of stuff?

Either too much or too little.

If you know a lot, you know how to be selective in what to use and what not to. If you know too little, you leave stuff out because you don't know how it works.

 

[PolarBlues]

Oh, I knew what you were most likely referring to. However, that's for an edition that hasn't been current for almost twenty years now.

Here's what High-Tech for GURPS 4e has for a couple of flying boats:

View attachment 47258
Note how little is game mechanics and stats.

EDIT: I'm not disagreeing about the complexity of the VE2 rules, BTW. I'm just arguing that they aren't expected these days.

Goose? How dare you sir bring such filth to this forum? How dare you?

 

[Baulderstone]

But how much understanding do you need before you know that you can get by without a lot of stuff?

I ran GURPS back in 2nd and 3rd edition. It was easy then. The basic rules were up front, and you had to dig into the advanced rules to get to the stuff like hit locations or tracking blood loss. The clear modularity was part of the selling point of the game. It's not surgery, like trying to remove Feats from D&D 3E. GURPS is Lego, and GURPS Vehicle is Lego Technic Set that I never owned. I mostly stuck to the Duplo side of the pool.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

I ran GURPS back in 2nd and 3rd edition. It was easy then. The basic rules were up front, and you had to dig into the advanced rules to get to the stuff like hit locations or tracking blood loss. The clear modularity was part of the selling point of the game. It's not surgery, like trying to remove Feats from D&D 3E. GURPS is Lego, and GURPS Vehicle is Lego Technic Set that I never owned. I mostly stuck to the Duplo side of the pool.

I think there is a valid reason GURPS has stuck around (beyond it having a robust setting supplement line). In just about every group I have been in for the past 30+ years, there is usually one GURPS guy. GURPS is also a good go to system if you like a setting but don't like the system that accompanies it. I've been in a lot of campaigns where the GM wanted to run a game setting but slid the GURPS system in instead of whatever the setting came with (and it usually worked out pretty well).

 

[TristramEvans]

GURPs is kinda like the rice of the RPG world - easy to make, goes with just about everything, robust and filling.

 

[Acmegamer]

Exception-based design is interesting from a perceived-crunch perspective. Because so many of the rules are hidden away in feat, spell, and skill descriptions, and group can get started on a game easily enough but soon get buried as character abilities pile up.

And yes, I am talking about my experience running D&D 3E.

These were the times where i'd push back at folks who said they could never get into GURPS because it was too crunchy. Meanwhile they were hip deep into DnD 3e or Pathfinder 1e. My mind stuttered to stop every time over that one.

Edit: Also I prefer the older GURPs Vehicles and systems regarding that. GURPS 4e just went overboard. I used to run GURPS Car Wars off as a break from running my fantasy based GURPS Thieves' World campaign. I was fond of the Road Warrior feel of Car Wars. hehe. I liked those old vehicle design systems much better than the new ones. :/

 

[Baulderstone]

Ironically, one my biggest issues with GURPS was a lack of detail. Horror games were very popular with my high school group, and I picked up the GURPS Horror book before I even bought the core book to mine it for ideas. I liked it enough that I picked up the core and went from there.

The issue was that GURPS had IQ as its single mental stat. It wasn't just a measure of intelligence, it also covered your mental willpower along with sanity, if you were using those rules. If you are doing Lovecraftian horror with it, then being highly intelligent is a shield against the crushing weight of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, while the dumb guy is gibbering in the corner at the ramifications of what he has seen.

GURPS Horror tried to patch this with Advantages and Disadvantages that gave you a lower or higher Sanity than your IQ, but that was more of an acknowledgement of the problem than a solid fix.

My other issue with GURPS was more self-inflicted. Character generation is crunchy, but it isn't that bad if the GM shows some discipline in the options available for the campaign. However, my teenage self was always eager to drop sixteen books of options in front of a new player to show off how much the system could do. I expect a lot of players who bounced off the game during character generation had a GM like me.

 

[David Johansen]

Fourth edition mitigates the IQ issue by making it cost 20 points per point and spinning willpower and perception off at 5 points per point each.

 

[Acmegamer]

Fourth edition mitigates the IQ issue by making it cost 20 points per point and spinning willpower and perception off at 5 points per point each.

Yeah that was one of the things I do like about GURPS 4e. That getting rid of half point skill buys. The spin off for Willpower and Perception were solid improvements.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think I'm on the periphery on the GURPS thing. I've used the rules exactly once to run a short-lived western campaign probably 25 years ago. I do own some supplements, but strictly for ideas and info, not the system. Viva la difference!

 

[Acmegamer]

I keep wanting to ask Sean Punch, did you really need four or five different @#$@#!% impales? You all had it down to a nice Cutting, Crushing and Impaling. Now? You've added four mor types of Impale with the Piercings! Was that really fucking necessary? The body hit location used to be so streamlined and easy to read as well. Now it's like it's trying to be a medical anatomy figure.

Edit: I got the reason why the wanted those piercing mechanics as an option for some genres but I truly feel that they should have remained an option one of the source books versus in the core book two books when your basic Impale worked just freaking fine.

Second Edit: Even Dungeon Fantasy has them and it's a freaking fantasy game not high ur ultra tech based.

 

[Fenris-77]

See, I read that page and then slowly close the book, never to open it again. I have no use for that level of granularity, although I completely get why some other people might love it.

 

[David Johansen]

I keep trying to tell them GURPS Dungeon Fantasy isn't GURPS Medium like Sean Punch thinks it is. The funny thing about that table is it's an expansion and clarification of the injury tolerance and wounding modifiers that collates them into a table. It doesn't exist in table format in the 4e core. The table is an improvement of the situation.

Even so, piercing is a necessary damage type because of the way armor and wounding work in GURPS. Damage dice mainly reflect the weapon's ability to penetrate armor and guns have fairly high damages and really don't need wounding multipliers after armour. One place you could clean up GURPS would be to code wounding and penetration into the damage codes so you could have things like 2 / 3d6 / 2 damage. Where you'd divide armour by two, apply the three dice damage to it and then multiply the remaining damage by two. That way you wouldn't have terms linked to values like impaling x2 after armour. But you also wouldn't have the rationale baked into the description. I've argued for a similar approach to skill costs for years.

 

[Acmegamer]

"I keep trying to tell them GURPS Dungeon Fantasy isn't GURPS Medium like Sean Punch thinks it is." David Johansen

One of the many reasons I feel that he utterly failed in his attempt to design and release something that would be user friendly for new players, or as a selling point to get people into GURPS.

I truly wish they'd do what Chaosium did with the Kickstarter for old 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu. Do a Kickstarter for the GURPS 2nd edition Box set (including pdfs damn it) and call it good. I'd then add in what I wanted to that.

I get your points about piercing, points I alluded to in my ramble above but I still don't see a need for it for most games. So there was no need for it in the core base book. Hell I don't think they needed two books for the core. It's granularity gone wild and mutating like a bad weed and it alienates more than it helps bring in new players.

If I had my druthers I'd run GURPS 2nd edition with the following changes, the add of perception and will, the change to one table for skill buys/cost instead of the two (one for mental and one for physical) and call it a day. I prefer passive defense in GURPS 1e/2e/3e.

Why I don't track down another copy of the 2 books from the 2e box set and have them torn apart and scanned is that i'm actually just feeling pissy that I have too so much work into their system before I can play it. I want to just say fuck it and move on from having anything to do with SJG honestly. I'm always teetering on the fence on that one.

 

[Sharrow]

These were the times where i'd push back at folks who said they could never get into GURPS because it was too crunchy. Meanwhile they were hip deep into DnD 3e or Pathfinder 1e. My mind stuttered to stop every time over that one.

Edit: Also I prefer the older GURPs Vehicles and systems regarding that. GURPS 4e just went overboard. I used to run GURPS Car Wars off as a break from running my fantasy based GURPS Thieves' World campaign. I was fond of the Road Warrior feel of Car Wars. hehe. I liked those old vehicle design systems much better than the new ones. :/

4e doesn't have a vehicle design system. It has a spaceship design system that can be hacked to do an 'okayish' job with some vehicles, but this system is simpler than the 3e Vehicles. You may be confusing late-3e Vehicles with 4e, and comparing that to the various earlier 3e systems.

 

[Sharrow]

I keep wanting to ask Sean Punch, did you really need four or five different @#$@#!% impales? You all had it down to a nice Cutting, Crushing and Impaling. Now? You've added four mor types of Impale with the Piercings! Was that really fucking necessary? The body hit location used to be so streamlined and easy to read as well. Now it's like it's trying to be a medical anatomy figure.

Actually, those other damage types (peircing, etc.) already existed in 3e, they just weren't categorised. Bullets in 3e did crushing damage, but had modifiers for bullet size, special rules for vitals hits and blow-through, and so on. 4e streamlined and codified this is all. Also, hit locations in the basic set have changed little from 3e.

Edit: I got the reason why the wanted those piercing mechanics as an option for some genres but I truly feel that they should have remained an option one of the source books versus in the core book two books when your basic Impale worked just freaking fine.

Second Edit: Even Dungeon Fantasy has them and it's a freaking fantasy game not high ur ultra tech based.

Armour piercing arrows use them, and I suspect that removing piercing and then adding back in rules for AP arrows would end up at about the same level of complexity and word-count.

 

[Baulderstone]

Actually, those other damage types (peircing, etc.) already existed in 3e, they just weren't categorised. Bullets in 3e did crushing damage, but had modifiers for bullet size, special rules for vitals hits and blow-through, and so on. 4e streamlined and codified this is all. Also, hit locations in the basic set have changed little from 3e.

Armour piercing arrows use them, and I suspect that removing piercing and then adding back in rules for AP arrows would end up at about the same level of complexity and word-count.

That would be another example of exception-based rule design concealing the crunch level.

 

[Sharrow]

That would be another example of exception-based rule design concealing the crunch level.

I suppose it was/would be. I don't think it's a great way to do things in GURPS though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, in this case, the basic rules are supposed to be multi-genre, so guns and thus bullet damage needs to be in the basic rules and making them a special exception just clutters everything up for everyone except those not using guns at all. Secondly, because of GURPS' chargen system a massive amount of the crunch is front-loaded anyway, so concealing some of it in special exceptions isn't going to help that much anyway (in my opinion).

OTOH, you could argue that all those advantages and disadvantages add up to an exception-based chargen system, just not one that uses this to hide its complexity.

 

[TJS]

We played Gurps for a while in the late 90s. I remember actually really liking the system and getting into it, but we stopped as too many people just rebelled at what they saw as the complexity of the system. I can't really remember it all that well now - in fact I haven't seen or heard of anyone playing it outside the internet since then. I don't think I've seen a GURPS book in a shop in a long long time.

I do remember I felt the core system was really good, and it was mostly peripheral stuff that kept tripping us up. In one game I took the Weapon Master cinematic edge and my character was vastly more capable than the others. In another game one character took Eidetic memory and ended up with a crazily extensive list of skills that he eventually found unweildy. I take the point that these issues could be solved by the GM curating this stuff - but I tend to feel that this stuff wasn't curated because we didn't have the experience with the system to know that we should.

 

[Fenris-77]

GURPS was very much the 90's gaming alternative lifestyle.

 

[Baulderstone]

GURPS was very much the 90's gaming alternative lifestyle.

It definitely served a need that D&D and WoD didn't at the time. Pyramid was a great magzine in the '90s too. Chaosium was sleepy through a lot of the '90s too, so there wasn't much that was new on the BRP front.

 

[Fenris-77]

It definitely served a need that D&D and WoD didn't at the time. Pyramid was a great magzine in the '90s too. Chaosium was sleepy through a lot of the '90s too, so there wasn't much that was new on the BRP front.

Yeah, to be clear, I didn't mean that as an insult at all.

 

[Baulderstone]

Yeah, to be clear, I didn't mean that as an insult at all.

I didn't take it that way. I was just agreeing. I worked in a game store through much of the '90s, and GURPS was a steady product line.

 

[TristramEvans]

We've talked about this before, but even though I've never ran GURPs and don't have any interest in doing so for the most part*, I have a substantial collection of GURPS 3rd edition sourcebooks, and I think that the hobby is poorer these days for not having a modern equivalent

(*there ARE a few IPs that I think GURPs reflects perfectly and so would be tempted to use it just to run those games - Star Trek (circa TNG/DS9-era) being one example)

 

[thebigh]

(*there ARE a few IPs that I think GURPs reflects perfectly and so would be tempted to use it just to run those games - Star Trek (circa TNG/DS9-era) being one example)

I was noodling around with an idea for a PbP game set about six months after the Dominion War, that I was thinking of running here. Resources, ships, personnel are still strained after the war and the party would be a bunch of misfits at some obscure starbase at the other end of the Federation, trying to keep the peace and dealing with a sinister new threat emerging from around the galactic rim. There wasn't much interest though; I might still revive it some day.

 

[Baulderstone]

We've talked about this before, but even though I've never ran GURPs and don't have any interest in doing so for the most part*, I have a substantial collection of GURPS 3rd edition sourcebooks, and I think that the hobby is poorer these days for not having a modern equivalent

(*there ARE a few IPs that I think GURPs reflects perfectly and so would be tempted to use it just to run those games - Star Trek (circa TNG/DS9-era) being one example)

The closest that I can think of at the moment in content if not quantity is the line of supplements for Mythras. However, as the pace of the RPG industry is much slower than in the 80s and 90s, it will be a very long time before it can catch up.

 

[ffilz]

I'm going to have to disagree. Whether a game "runs smoothly" or not is irrelevant to how crunchy the system is. Rolemaster runs exceptionally swiftly with a knowlegeable GM, with a great degree of the rules calculations front-loaded in character creation & advancement. That isn't an argumet againt the game being crunchy, as "crunchy" is not a description of how the game plays It's a description of the structure surrounding/underpinnig the game, and this can be objectivelly , if not measured (because the scale is certainly subjective, or at least informal) than evaluated and percieved.

Ghostbusters is objectivelly less crunchy than Star Wars just as Star Wars is objectivelly less crunchy than WoTC D&D. Anyone attmpting to debate that could only do so by redefining "crunch", and thus they are not participating in the same conversation.

The issue is not that the scale is objective, it's only that people need to reach a consensus on the factors inorming the scale. Once those are identified, it's nothing besides a straightforward exercize in categorization.

Well, my argument is that crunchiness is a perception, and that perception is subjective. Now sure, in some cases we can make some objective measurements. And likely they would often be different from the perception. So crunch that the players don't see but the GM sees, creates differing perspectives between the player and GM. The GM's perspective is closer to the objective.

Now there certainly would be value in developing some objective measures. And then cross checking them with perception. Sometimes the discrepancy will be real (the game seems more or less crunchy that it actually is, maybe because of how one piece of crunch is somehow counter intuitive). Other times, the discrepancy will be because the objective measure isn't counting something, or because the subjective values are off. Maybe the person making the scale finds math really easy to downplays the contribution to crunch of any math more complex than adding two small numbers or something. If so, we can re-examine the measures and refine them.

 

[TristramEvans]

Well, my argument is that crunchiness is a perception, and that perception is subjective. Now sure, in some cases we can make some objective measurements. And likely they would often be different from the perception. So crunch that the players don't see but the GM sees, creates differing perspectives between the player and GM. The GM's perspective is closer to the objective.

OK, so you're talking about the percepton in play of players. Sure that's going to be subjective. But no one here is limited by that experience, we can all directly look at systems as a whole and objectivelly see how crunchy they are. The limited perspectives simply don't matter, or even apply to this conversation. There's no call to go around and ask players how crunchy they percieved any game to be, when we can simply open the rulebook.

 

[thebigh]

You could devise a semi-objective measure of crunchiness. Pick a set of well-known games with a wide range of complexity and rank them in your preferred order of crunchiness. Then decide on a set of features that make a game crunchy, for instance:
* Word count of rule book
* Number of distinct types of resolution mechanism
* Number of rules that are exceptions to other rules
* Number of equations
* etc.

Based on your ranking, you can assign weights to the features you've settled on. Then when a new game comes along you can just do the calculations to discover that, say, Phoenix Command weighs in at a whopping 23.5 kilogurps but The Window barely rises above the milligurp range.

 

[sharps54]

You could devise a semi-objective measure of crunchiness. Pick a set of well-known games with a wide range of complexity and rank them in your preferred order of crunchiness. Then decide on a set of features that make a game crunchy, for instance:
* Word count of rule book
* Number of distinct types of resolution mechanism
* Number of rules that are exceptions to other rules
* Number of equations
* etc.

Based on your ranking, you can assign weights to the features you've settled on. Then when a new game comes along you can just do the calculations to discover that, say, Phoenix Command weighs in at a whopping 23.5 kilogurps but The Window barely rises above the milligurp range.

As much work as that would be I’d like to see it done if only to show Phoenix Command isn’t the crunchiest game out there.

 

[David Johansen]

Spaceships are worse than vehicles.

Spaceships are vehicles. The original GURPS Space, ship design system is very simple, if very limited. GURPS Spaceships book offers a simplified design system where you fill in hit locations and total mass but it's not bad, just limited in scope. GURPS Vehicles can certainly do spaceships.

 

[Brock Savage]

All this talk of crunch games makes me wonder why someone hasn't released a modern crunch heavy game that uses PCs or apps to handle the heavy lifting. Is that supplanted by video games?

Edit: I concede that some probably exist but I don't know about it

 

[sharps54]

All this talk of crunch games makes me wonder why someone hasn't released a modern crunch heavy game that uses PCs or apps to handle the heavy lifting. Is that supplanted by video games?

Edit: I concede that some probably exist but I don't know about it

There are modules on Fantasy Ground for RoleMaster although some of the heavy lifting math wise are during character creation.

 

[Brock Savage]

You could devise a semi-objective measure of crunchiness. Pick a set of well-known games with a wide range of complexity and rank them in your preferred order of crunchiness. Then decide on a set of features that make a game crunchy, for instance:
* Word count of rule book
* Number of distinct types of resolution mechanism
* Number of rules that are exceptions to other rules
* Number of equations
* etc.

Based on your ranking, you can assign weights to the features you've settled on. Then when a new game comes along you can just do the calculations to discover that, say, Phoenix Command weighs in at a whopping 23.5 kilogurps but The Window barely rises above the milligurp range.

 

[Brock Savage]

There are modules on Fantasy Ground for RoleMaster although some of the heavy lifting math wise are during character creation.

I was being unclear. I am referring to someone designing a crunch heavy game with app assistance for complex task resolution, combat etc. baked into the system. Fans have been making software to assist with character creation and army lists for ages.