Subj : Re: Tabletop war and roleplaying games
To   : Commodore Clifford
From : Arelor
Date : Fri May 12 2023 06:42:44

  Re: Re: Tabletop war and roleplaying games
  By: Commodore Clifford to Arelor on Thu May 11 2023 10:39 pm

 > In some ways, that depends.  There are also the "GURPS Lite" rules which
 > is really just a few pages of free PDF.  There are sourcebooks that let
 > you "do it yourself" but also full blown modules for those who don't want
 > to have to build worlds.  A lot of content is on the Warehouse23/E23 site
 > (or whatever they call it today, I think it got recently redone).  A lot
 > of that is inexpensive downloadable content.

I have the Discworld RPG (which is GURPS 3rd edition, I think) and the
corebooks for 4th edition. I also have the Fantasy suplement.

Using a pre-packaged GURPS (such as Discworld) seems to me like a great way of
saving time, but it is still Game Master heavy when compared to most things I
usually put on the table.

You can build a player character just like you want it to be because the GURPS
toolbox is impressive, but that also means you either have a group composed of
comitted players in order to take advantage of it, or use pregens. My
experience using pregens with medium-to-heavyweight games is not great because
non-comitted players tend to forget how their characters work if they have not
created them themselves.

I think *good* generic PRG systems are nice for the reasons you have stated
(ie. learn the system once, play any genre you want without switching rules)
but when I GM for uncomitted players I'd rather not spend an afternoon adapting
a generic system for a setting. I prefer to keep a collection of lightweight
nonñ-generic systems you can explain to the players in 15 minutes. It is not
great, but it removes burden from my shoulders.

See also the OpenD6 series of games. OpenD6 is a generic engine with has
pre-packaged adaptations for Fantasy, Science-Fiction and pulp-style Adventure.
It has a couple of off-shots which are very lightweight adaptations and I am
way more likely to pick any of those if I need a generic system.

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