Today I made the decision to build some characters to run new players through “Caravan To Ein Arris“, the freebie fantasy adventure for GURPS.
To do this, I grabbed the GURPS Fantasy supplement and used some of the professional templates. These are “first draft” characters built for the scenario but also to keep things fairly simple. No magic, nothing fancy.
The four characters are:
- Jorell, an ex-soldier built with the Basic Set Warrior template
- Haldan, an ex-soldier built with the Fantasy Archer template
- Kellan, a merchant built using the Fantasy Merchant template
- Belial, a burglar on the run built using the Fantasy Thief template
The plan is to read and then run the scenario at the school club.
Following that, my next step will be to return to the SF game I almost began with the Friday Night Roleplay group: it’s time to write a scenario for the characters they built.
Game on!
Update: Ran some promo stuff today for the school club and almost immediately got two neophyte gamers signed up for an intro game next Tuesday. I suspect I need to run a short, sharp, light, fantasy taster event … and then I can offer this adventure. Suggestions welcome!
What age kids played in your GURPS game? My 11 year old loves making characters with GURPS Discworld and the 3E core rules but I am thinking it might be too crunchy for him to actually play. But I might try Dungeon Fantasy when the boxed set is published.
The club has 11-16 year olds, mostly 11-13. GURPS is the least crunchy game, given that they all play D&D5e and have played RuneQuest/Mythras.
Very interesting! Out of those three games – all of which I quite like but don’t know intimately – which do you think works best for that 11-13 age group? I am drawn towards GURPS because of (a) flexible character generation (unlike D&D) and (b) less deadly combat for the PCs (as opposed to RuneQuest, assuming the PCs are built with a generous amount of points). But I also get the sense that people have drifted away from GURPS while D&D and RQ (in its various iterations) are very much alive.
In the past, I have opted for D&D 5e because it’s easy to learn and has free rules online. RQ/Mythras is fine with this age group too and also has free online rules, and works great!
I am switching to GURPS, however, because it’s more flexible and also has free basic rules online. The downside is that the very flexibility that is GURPS’ strength will mean more effort for new players who want to build their own characters… so, I’m going to do it for them at first.
Overall, D&D is very low effort but restricts play to D&D Land and very prescribed ideas about fantasy. The other two systems allow more freedom of imagination but require more investment when creating characters. All three games are easy to play.
Does that help?
(For the record, I’ve never much paid attention to how popular a game is – that’s a fickle thing and no reason to de-select a game. Many very good games have been unpopular and vice-versa.)
“Overall, D&D is very low effort but restricts play to D&D Land and very prescribed ideas about fantasy. The other two systems allow more freedom of imagination but require more investment when creating characters.”
I couldn’t disagree with this statement more.
I have no idea what you mean by “D&D Land,” but I can say that D&D only restricts play to “prescribed ideas about fantasy” if you approach it with prescribed ideas about fantasy. If you do that with the other two systems you mentioned, you’d have the same problem. In other words, the problem lies with the player, not the game. I’ve never had that problem with D&D.
Systems also have little to do with how invested players are with their characters. Sure, a system can try to force the issue by utilizing more involved and time-consuming methods of character creation, but it won’t mean much if the players aren’t motivated to make use of it, and that motivation can exist completely independent of such systems. The most interesting characters I ever played came from fairly rules-light systems; I didn’t need explicit rules provided by the system to feel invested.
Furthermore, neither of the other two systems allow for more “freedom of imagination” because that is not something which is determined by a set of rules. And speaking of rules, I am baffled by your claim that GURPS is “less crunchy” than 5E or Mythras given the sheer number of books that system has–you yourself admitted it would be difficult to allow your students to make their own characters given this.
I think you’re getting too wrapped up in rules and systems and drifting too far away from what first attracted you to RPGs in the first place. I think I’ve had that problem too, for what it’s worth; I’d advise you to consider the matter.
Hmm. In my experience, players bring very little to the table when we play D&D: they pick a race and class, they name them, some players give them some backstory. I can’t remember a player ever asking to play something outside of the choices in the PHB. Thus, options given lead choices.
A system like GURPS or FATE (just two examples) can emulate any concept. Unless you impose templates or other limits, actually there are no boundaries to what players can bring to the table. Unless the GM restricts choices, anything goes. That can be good if you have imaginative players who want to experiment, bad if you don’t because they get paralysis of choice. The latter is my experience. Players freeze in the face of choice and opt for standard tropes, or beg for boundaries.
As for crunch, depends how you define the word. If you mean by word-count and book stacks, then yes GURPS is crunchy. But I don’t judge crunch that way. For me, it’s how many rules I NEED to learn.
GURPS has Success Rolls, Damage Rolls, Reaction Rolls, and the concept of Character Points. That’s not very crunchy. Everything else is options, which I like, but unnecessary. That’s about equivalent to FATE but with more definition in the choices made: in FATE the player’s have to work out what’s acceptable in a scene, in GURPS that’s defined fairly clearly: e.g. It’s not “I can move and shoot one zone”, it’s “I can move X yards and shoot X range.”
BUT you may be correct in your assertion that I have lost sight of what got me into gaming. What suggestions do you have? What answers are you offering? What SHOULD I be doing?
I’ve been reading your blog for over a year now and I can’t help but notice that you’ve vacilitated between different fantasy gaming systems about five times in that period. First, you were playing 5E in an “old school” manner, which you thought was great. Then you were singing the praises of the old Red Box D&D system and how simple it was, and then you got hooked on Classic Fantasy: Mythras and even wrote adventures for the system. Then you went back to 5E with these new Dungeonesque rules, and then suddenly you think GURPS is the holy grail of gaming…your rapid shifts in game systems strikes me as a person who can’t find the gaming experience he’s looking for, so he keeps moving from system to system in the hopes of discovering it somewhere else…but that never seems to happen.
It reminds me of a rut I found myself in some years ago. Eventually, I came to realize that the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t find the right system, but rather that I had gotten too wrapped up in systems. No system, regardless of how many “choices” they offer or how complicated their character creation methodology shapes up to be, is going to grant you “freedom of imagination” or any of the other things you seem to believe you can get from a game system because they cannot.
You ask me what you “SHOULD” do; I’ve no interest in doing that. If you want my suggestion, I’d say you should focus on what I suspect is what attracted you to role-playing games in the first place, which is the play itself, not the rules which are simply a means to that end.
Looking at your reply, I am again struck by how much I disagree with your opening paragraph. You claim that players bring little to the table other that a race, class, and a hint of a backstory, and thus need a comprehensive skill system that gives them “choices” to fit a “concept” they must have at the start of the game. I see nothing wrong with a player starting a game with nothing more than a race, class and hint of a backstory, because I think it’s fine for characters to evolve organically through the course of play. This process begins with rolling up the character’s ability scores and proceeding from there, making it a process of discovery for the player rather than a proscribed “concept” which leaves no surprises. That’s one reason why I’d never use GURPS or any other system too convoluted to allow players, particularly young ones new to the game, to make their own characters.
Concepts may not even prove relevant once the game starts, as players don’t know what will spark their interest once actual play begins. You may build a skilled duelist at the outset, but find the political intrique between two noble houses presented in the game more interesting to involve yourself in. At this point you might say, quite reasonably, that having choices and concepts doesn’t preclude one from exploring such interests, but I would reply that if the concept you spent so much time creating (and required a shelf of splatbooks to boot) didn’t actually match up with what you discovered you really wanted to do in the actual game, then what was the point? You just wasted time grappling with a convoluted rules system that could have been better spent getting to the good part, the actual play itself. In other words, systems heavy with choices have clear downsides in that they complicate character creation and require loads of rules to use, but not necessarily an upside to counter them. You say they spark imagination during character creation, but I think the true imaginative element of role-playing games only emerges after play has begun.
In all my years of playing role-playing games, I can’t recall a time when another player told me about a favorite character of theirs and didn’t directly connect their sense of enjoyment with the actual events of the campaign they played. One friend of mine had a favorite character who constantly engaged in all sorts of wild stunts yet through sheer luck at dice rolls managed to escape unscathed time and time again. His character became famous in that campiagn for his incredible luck, but that had nothing to do with a “concept” or “choices” offered to him at character creation; it emerged through play, and his creative interpretation of his lucky dice rolls. As such, I think your time and energy is best spent on faciliating such moments, which means less time engaging with rules and more time sitting around the table getting on with things.
I also must say, once again, that I find your comments regarding the complexity of GURPS baffling; you make it sound simple by breaking it down into only four elements, but your actual posts exploring the combat rules of GURPS stand in sharp contradiction to this. In your first combat example (the one with the two fighters armed with only knives), the two characters attacked, parried, chose special manuevers, had to determine degrees of success (how many points did he succeed by?) and then suffered wound penalties and shock…and that was the SIMPLE version before you addressed the optional rules in your second post. That’s several degrees more convoluted than 5E, and you want to run this with young students who are relatively new to role-playing? You’re likely to spend a lot of time just getting everyone up to speed on the basic combat rules, time that could have spent exploring and discovering (and the latter process has already been compromised by the fact they can’t make their own characters).
So, if you really want my advice:
1) There’s no guarantee time spent on building “concepts” at the outset will pay off in the long run, so it’s best to just get on with playing the game and letting characters discover who their characters are in the course of play, because that’s where the bulk of the fun lies.
2) As such, there’s little to be gained from fussing over the ideal rules system; just pick one that won’t get in the way of getting things started as soon as possible. (And I can’t fathom why you would consider GURPS to be that system.)
3) Play the game…and then play some more! That’s where your students will form their memories of the game from.
Not sure, really, how to respond except to say thanks for being honest and direct. You make some interesting points.
Tonight, with three new players and one existing player, I ran a fantasy game using GURPS. I was a lot of fun. I think we have three new converts to the hobby. The game system didn’t get in the way – it played fine – but neither is it true to say that the game session was great because of GURPS. Actually, the game was great because we got into it quickly and the guys enjoyed tromping around fighting Goblins in their quest to rescue a snatched child. They want to play some more next week. That’s a win.
You rather misunderstand my “vacillation” around systems. Actually, around a year ago, I got really “burned out” and fed up as a GM. Playing with 5e was fun at the time but it felt pretty empty – players were having a good time, but I wasn’t necessarily “feeling it” on the night.
I decided to go back to my own beginnings – hence dusting off Red Box and rediscovering what I loved about it. And, honestly, I might have playing Red Box regularly had it not been for my group who basically said, “Yeah, but it takes too long to go up a level and there’s not much you can do (read: there are not enough cool powers and abilities on my sheet)”.
From there, I solo’ed into Classic Fantasy with Mythras and loved it – the classic feel and style emulated with enough “cool powers and abilities” for my players to enjoy. As a tactician, I was pleased with combat being detailed; as a storyteller, I was pleased that the game didn’t get in the way of general play.
Things then went to crap: I tried to shift the game from a classic dungeoneering game to a game with intrigue. I felt this was needed to get one of my players back to the table, but it backfired – I pissed off two long-term players and almost lost two of them. I did lose one of them.
After that, I needed to break from the game… but the players wanted me to run something – anything, I think – so that we could keep meeting and playing. Feeling hurt, I shifted to try GURPS for an SF game, then bottled it and opted for a 5e game.
Recent forays back into GURPS have been about learning the game. I’ve owned it for years, but not played it much. It’s not about me “seeking the ideal system”. It’s about me trying to see how games work and decide whether they are worth playing more. I am really interested in different systems – that’s part of my hobby.
Honestly, right now, I could as easily roll up characters for Red Box as anything… but it’s not that simple, is it? You have to consider the players. What do they want / expect? Sure, often they say “whatever, mate, I’ll play anything”… but then some games fly and others don’t. Mostly, players seem full of contradictions.
You’re probably right to question whether strongly conceptualising characters is necessary. Actually, having tried to follow other advice over recent years that encourages this style of play, I’m coming to the conclusion that being so player-centric (trying to figure out what they want to DO, and then giving it to them) is not actually leading to much fun for anyone. Most of the time, they don’t know what they want to do except turn up, roll dice, and do stuff. Point taken.
That said, I’m also losing confidence as a GM. I can’t quite say why. But I am. And your comments (despite us being relative strangers) actually cut deep… probably because there is a ring of truth to them.
What to do? Honestly, I want to keep playing the way we played tonight. But I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to do that with a bunch of adults.