I don't have any experience playing it, but it's quite "crunchy." If you're looking for a system that will give a try at modelling any setting without much regard for tone (you supply that), it's good. But if you want a system that helps support a particular tone, or a system that only has the bits you need, GURPS will feel bloated and frustrating.
Its power is in its ambivalent willingness to provide an exhausting amount of mechanics for any physical situation your characters might find themselves in.
@BESW yeah, without any sorts of mutual exclusions on what you can have in a single campaign. but that's also the limiting point -- there's just so much there to grasp.
It doesn't give much support in figuring out which of those bits your particular group will actually want to use, and which might get in the way of your group's goals.
And heh, no problem. Ping away. I'm just hopping in and out as I play Danganronpa 2 (I have a feeling that someone is about to go down... I just... know...).
@Anaphory the time-management tag you created earlier; is there something you're intending to cover with it that doesn't seem to be hit by the time tag?
@Shalvenay My wife's asked me to help her work on something tonight for her church-board meeting--I'm going to be checking out for the night momentarily. Perhaps next Thursday? Then definitely Sunday, 7/31.
@Pixie The good thing about the library getting rid of old books, is that they sell them for cheap! We've picked up tens, maybe hundreds of books from the local library's sales. (including D&D3.5e PHB & DMG)
@Miniman Whoa. … Huh, looking at it, I think that was one of the early questions when game recommendations “came of age” and the mods (before my ♦ time) got serious about enforcing the Back It Up principle for answers, on pain of deletion. That question has 30 answer in total. o.o
@trogdor Yeah. But also what Miniman said: looking through the deleted answers, it's just a pile of “I think X would be good…” “I've heard of Y used for newbies…” “I started with Z…” “Here are six games off the top of my head…”. It's just a list of everyone's favourites, the classic problem game-rec always fought to avoid.
@trogdor I think the rules were embryonic then. I'd have to go digging to put exact timelines together, but it was questions like that which showed the need for the more stringent rules, if I recall correctly.
if a question popped up now and had the same number of deleted answers, it would be the first sign to me that the question itself might be deleted (not automatically, but it could be a sign)
@SevenSidedDie It's certainly nice with that query how quickly the numbers drop off - there are only a few really out-of-control examples, and then the list really settles down.
One of the answers is "instead of using a system, just have them flip a coin," with no extra elaboration or explanation of how to do it or why it's a good idea.
@Reibello And to unpack my comment a little better - without magic items, AC sort of maxes out at 18 without a shield, or 18 with one. There are a couple of exceptions, like the Monk who can have 20 without a shield but can't use a shield anyway, or the Barbarian who can have 20 without a shield or 22 with one, but my point is, a magic item that sets Dex to 19 doesn't just fail to break the 18/20 max, it actually doesn't even let a character reach the 18/20 max.
But since we've already got this one, I assumed there would be others involved in the calculations. Additionally, it might not be super game-breaking on everyone (maybe on the Barbarian), but it certainly does offset the math by a bit.
Yeah. My argument isn't that "nothing else messes with AC"
it's that the game designers built the system around the things that already do
it's also worth 0 anything until I do some math and see if it's actually a thing
I mostly just wanted to put something in there as a comment about it, but I didn't want to post an answer type thing ina comment
I'm somewhat concerned that that question is going to turn into a bunch of “well I think…” unsupported opinions. I suspect decision fatigue has set in for the day, and I think that might be the only reason I haven't already changed it to “have any designers said…” or closed it.
@Miniman This is what they were arguing for: being able to post answers to questions like this that are either backed up with experience or by “rigorous” analysis.
@Reibello There are many situations where math alone is insufficient to answer an RPG question because of the subjective nature of the game and its reliance on social interaction to function.
@SevenSidedDie I liked them from the POV that, as a category, it was clear how they were helping people.
We get a lot of questions that don't really benefit anyone (I'm ignoring rep here).
@Reibello Thanks, but I know what I did. It's a little more than twice as long as it needs to be, but unfortunately I can't mess around with indexes to fix it properly, so long and ugly it is.
@Miniman Yes, there's clearly an unmet need, and they're “feel good”. There's a reason that Sofware Recs and Hardware Recs became SEs of their own to house well-regulated recommendations for those two categories! (Incidentally, HR is turbulent right now because some users are rebelling against having stringent question requirements. I feel for their mods, with this déjà vu.)
@D.Webber fire away -- we support every RPG system under the sun, or at least try to :) (we may not be able to get you an answer for a while depending on who's around, but there are plenty of obscure RPGs on this site)
We've had some questions about foreign language RPGs, and all sorts of obscure little RPGs. I'm not sure how much we've had questions about obscure foreign-language RPGs, but they're quite welcome.
If we don't have experts on those games now, the only way to attract them is to ask questions!
Even better hypothetical question... If a dragon polymorph/shapeshifts into a human form, can they bathe themselves, and then shift back squeaky clean?
Fun thing a friend discovered: most of prestidigitation's work is temporary illusions, but when it cleans something it genuinely gets clean. He used it to "clean" a section of a magic circle that was the focal point of a very powerful piece of magic. It exploded and quite nearly killed several party members.
@Garan Reporting. But it's actually better to just take the PID equation (Wikipedia) and plot it in something (wolfram alpha) and fiddle with it until you're happy
ufff... Magicans thinking they can seal a tower completly... and then worry if they need magic to breath. Why not just plant a tree in the basement andprovide sunlight?
I was wondering if a person could use water breathing to avoid breathing a toxic atmosphere.
The spell itself states:
This spell grants up to ten willing creatures you can see within range the ability to breathe underwater until the spell ends. Affected creatures also retain their normal mod...
@Trish you can and you can't. If you have a technological paradigm you need to consider chemistry strictly, but if you're a wushu magician maybe you just subsist on pure chakra for a while. That's why I like it so much.
Last Friday at my Mage: the Ascension table we had a serious discussion whether the characters can even speak to each other without complete disagreement and comprehend each others' magick in any way.
The conclusion was that they can, as long as they substitute uneducated gibberish the others spew with actual reasonable truth in their own minds.
I like my Son of Ether... Built a DeLorean with flux compensator and used it at ComiCon. People cheered as he drove down the street and got the iconic flames, and then appeared in a mighty flash 10 seconds later screaming "We're in the future!" (pro tip: neck breaks at 800 Newton)
@eimyr applying the force to the right body part is what makes it lethal - you can kill with much less force, if you can target the brain directly and just have it slam into the skull with a 2 Newton push.
Well, keep in mind @SimonGill, and I am sad to say that I have this from the designers, that they were all deeply and completely stoned and high for oWoD
you need trees in the basement. No adventure without trees in basements. Or trees growing on trees. My exalted group has a twilight that has a manse that is a tree that carries a garden with trees.
@Trish DFRPG is a Fate implementation of the Dresden Files intellectual property. It's not a great match of system to setting, but some of the ideas in both system and setting are worth cribbing.
Bubblegumshoe is an aggressive hack of the GUMSHOE engine to emphasise relationships for teen detective games.
ohhh, Dresden Files I know from the TVshow and the comics... it relies on magic having a cost to a good degree. And it incorporates quite a little lovecraft horror. Fungi-crabs are a bit over the top for it though... however there are plenty of supernatural beings...
Mostly I'm taking the idea of a supernatural ideological war-by-proxy and stripping the very-bad-for-an-RPG bits where any real change in the cold war status quo means the end of the world.
Not really. GUMSHOE is an investigative engine designed around the idea that you should never roll to find the clues necessary to continue the story: instead failure chances are applied to what you choose to do about the clues.
@Anaphory I went ahead and pulled the time-management tags as long as the weak consensus on meta seemed to be "meh... it's okay as-is." But you're clearly not alone in thinking a split would be better. I tend to agree with one of the meta comments, though, that time-management would be susceptible to the same problem. Some thing that clearly distinguishes between in-game and at-table seems, to me, a necessary condition.
@nitsua60 the term time-management is too ambigious: is it 'using time between groups to plan effectively', 'effective use of time at the game table', or 'planning/tracking ic time'?
@Trish I agree, which is why I pulled off of the only two questions it'd been applied to. The time tag itself has the exact same problem, but at least that one's under discussion on meta.
hmmm, in german military there is the saying "shit falls from top to bottom", meaning when you do something wrong and someone high in command sees it, he will make his underlings miserable, and those theirs till they make you and all others miserable.
@Trish I'm adding that to a notefile I have of "earthy aphorisms." It'll sit right next to a current entry, "shit flows uphill," meaning that the higher on the food chain you are the more troubles make themselves yours =)
@Trish I like it when I can have two opposite aphorisms at hand. One experimental hall I worked in had signs with "better is the enemy of 'good enough'" and "anything worth doing is worth doing well" hanging on opposite walls. Depending on the mood a supervisor was in they'd just point left or right to tell you whether you were going to fast or taking too long =)
I'm looking at a transcript and have no idea what much says--do you mind a tiny bit of translation-help? (We'll be getting an official translation at some point, but if I can get a head-start my life'll be easier.)
"W roku szkolnym [some dates]" Are these dates of attendance?
@eimyr Problem is I don't know what might be personal/confidential or not (yet), so I can't redact for sending. There's really only a few lines, if you don't mind...?
"jezyk lacinski dla neofilologow"? (and there's a dingle hanging from the e in "jezyk", a diacritic on the n in "lacinski", and a diacritic on the last o in neofilologow")
"latin for neophilologists" - neophilology is the opposite of classical philology in that it deals with modern languages, e.g. English studies or Japanese studies
@Nox I'm a school's registrar (sorta), and just got a transcript in from a kid coming from Poland, and I'm hoping to get a jump on the official translation.
then "realizowała nastepujące przedmioty" meant "was a student on the following courses"
@nitsua60 generally a few pieces: "język polski" is a language AND a literature course all in one. There are very few schools that offer EngLit as part of the curriculum.
Then the curriculum changes a bit at high school level, depending on kid's class profile: some have extra maths and physics, some history and social studies, some a focus on languages etc. So if there is a mention of specialisation or class profile that means the kid has generally an advanced knowledge in that. I was in a Math-Phys profile and people with a "3" grade in Maths knew much much more than people with a "5" grade in a non-Math profile class.
Ok, I have a topic that is apparently not a good fit for the QnA, but which I'd like to have a second opinion on. That is, playing Powered by Apocalypse games as GM-less. Anyone tried anything close to that?
I am specifically interested in ways to facilitate the group of peers, not in solo play (solo plays goes nice, actually)
The idea is that once the problem of fleshing out the gameworld comes up, anybody can offer an idea with a subsequent vote of 'like/dislike' around the table.
And the GM is 'replaced' with the algorythm of 'once players have nothing to do', roll for random GM move.
If the GM move requires you to 'flesh out the gameworld' - see point one.
The fronts are prepared beforehand, but in the form of general troubles, such as "Big Bad" or "Savages tribe". And advancing them is 'fleshing out the gameworld' again.
It may be a strange obsession with that idea from my part, but I am having a directly opposite impression from it. I have GM-d AW and "Worlds in Peril" and at least first sessions of both can go GM-less without little to no hit to the experience. Latter sessions are supposed to bring in preplanned fronts, but that is optional as well. Players have tremendous power in their moves to seriously shape the gameworld even in GMed game.
@Nox I just don't see the point. If you're going to be there facilitating, why not just… do these things you're saying, as the MC/GM? When a setting detail comes up, pick a player whose PC might have knowledge, and ask them (remember to talk the character, not the player) what is true about that thing, since asking is a GM move. And there's nothing stopping the GM from rolling their moves randomly…
I was wondering if a person could use water breathing to avoid breathing a toxic atmosphere.
The spell itself states:
This spell grants up to ten willing creatures you can see within range the ability to breathe underwater until the spell ends. Affected creatures also retain their normal mod...
