A common question: “With so much stuff on your site, have you considered making your own RPG?” The simple answer is contained on pages like these: https://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/freerpgs/ There are hundreds of home-made RPGs out there! I wonder how many ever get read, let alone played. (Incidentally, that classic page was last updated in 2003, so don’t expect a lot of the links to work. But click around and just let the sheer volume of home-made games wash over you. And imagine how many more have been made in the 20+ years since that list!) Any RPG I “invented” would look like… well, GURPS with some changes. I think GURPS makes…
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From the newsgroup files: Doing collisions right
A recent online post gave me the chance to blather on and on about how to handle collisions in a RPG. Regarding the huge damage that GURPS Vehicles would dish out for a 5 mph collision with a car: Erm, am I missing something here? Because 5MPH is slower than walking pace and should NOT take you to death’s door! Me to said poster: You are correct to sense something funny here. The Vehicles rule does have a big flaw. Others have made helpful suggestions, but if I can wax pedantic here, allow me to dig to the heart of the problem and set things right. You can quickly check…
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From the mail files: ESCARGO question
ESCARGO question. A message from a correspondent, re ESCARGO: ———- Instead of Ease:-1, Ease:+2, why not invert the sign and call it Difficulty. Excellent question! Very slow response! Sorry! So, a simple Ease +2 skill would become a Difficulty -2 skill. A difficult Ease -2 skill would become Difficulty +2. It’s much more understandable then! Well, I believe that your usage was the initial plan; “Difficulty” is, I agree, more natural as a label. But after some mental juggling, I thought the math was more intuitive with Ease. The reason: an easy skill will *raise* your final level, so “+2” is intuitive; “-2” is arguably counterintuitive. And since we’re talking…
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Game design musing: ST schemes
Log ST. You know, ST schemes under which every +X points of ST equate to some multiple of lifting power. This might be x2 lifting power per +5 ST, per HERO System, in which case ST 15 lifts twice as much as ST 10, and ST 105 lifts twice as much as ST 100. Log ST was the choice for the original superhero game that became HERO, and is often suggested as a great fix for GURPS‘ (sometimes alleged) troubles with four-color action. But could it work in GURPS? Here are some recent emails and forum postings on the topic follow. (My text is in black.) An email You state…
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Ingredients for a better GURPS
The 2002 GURPS Diner article, brought into the new Games Diner site. One gamer geek’s wish list for a new GURPS 4e. This is a pretty straightforward HTML paste into the new site. Sorry, don’t expect much from the copious internal links. If you want to see the original article with its links intact, head to www.gamesdiner.com/gurps/old/improvements.htm . And if you want to see how well 4e fulfilled the wish list, read the follow-up to this article: The New GURPS Delivers… Or Does It?. One Fanboy’s 4e Wishlist I’ve worked long on GULLIVER and other house rules, suggesting dozens of options and rules tweaks for gamers with the inclination to…
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Martial arts in games
Interesting news bit: In preparation for the World Cup games, police in Japan have developed a gun that shoots a 25-m square net over fans who bring just a bit too much enthusiasm to the proceedings. Specifically, the police are worried that their standard method to rein in rowdiness – judo-based restraining moves – may prove difficult against hyped-up, beefy European hooligans. (Like the police, we’ll politely refrain from specifying British. Oops, just did.) A comment from the World Cup security division, Sapporo HQ, Hokkaido Prefectural Police: “Of course, martial arts form an important part of our training, but if you take the size and power factor into consideration, (the…
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Game design musing: combat pacing
Know what’s one of the hardest development tasks for a GURPS add-on — heck, for just about any RPG? A slick system for variable action times. That is, rules to allow one character to perform certain actions (typically attacks) twice as fast as another, or five times for every four of a foe’s, etc. HERO‘s Speed stat doesn’t quite have it. It’s great that Speed 10 lets you have an action rate a little slower than Speed 11, which is a little slower than Speed 12. . . but what about a creature a little slower than the human norm of Speed 2? The only level allowed below that is…
