Quote from: One Horse Town;531109Petrol and a lighter.

Buuuuuurn!

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;531079If SJGame would stop with the stuffed Cthulhu toys and the Munchkins and produced only GURPS books (in hardcover with color artwork), of course GURPS would be king of the generic RPGs.

And then they could watch in glee as their business dried up and they had to close up shop.  Hooray!

Quote from: misterguignol;531112And then they could watch in glee as their business dried up and they had to close up shop.  Hooray!

Yeah, let's face it, GURPS is a legacy product. Munchkin's where the whores go.

Quote from: Rincewind1;531113Yeah, let's face it, GURPS is a legacy product. Munchkin's where the whores go.

Pretty sad that a joke card game relegated GURPS to that status though.

Quote from: Ladybird;531107I mean, props to Steve Jackson (US) for keeping his company going so long, but fuck Munchkin.

I just wish Steve Jackson put more money into his products.  He aways bids low.  Car Wars was a fun game in 1982.  It still is to some extent.  But the paper maps and the paper units you had to cut out.  The same for Ogre and G.E.V.  More paper gameboards.  Fantasy Flight Games puts out a game like Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition with amazing production quality.  Steve Jackson doesn't even try, unless it's a game that he wants to play himself and not care what his customers think about his cheapness.

Quote from: misterguignol;531112And then they could watch in glee as their business dried up and they had to close up shop.  Hooray!

We don't know that for certain.  But chances are SJGames would have to sell GURPS to another publisher if they failed at advertising the game.  Lots of RPGs have been owned by several publishers over their years.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;531124We don't know that for certain.  But chances are SJGames would have to sell GURPS to another publisher if they failed at advertising the game.  Lots of RPGs have been owned by several publishers over their years.

Don't let your love of the game blind you to the fact that it doesn't sell well enough to sustain SJG's business.  They don't focus on Munchkin because they're short-sighted; they focus on Munchkin because they have the numbers in front of them.

I have to wonder if GURPS' numbers would be so bad if they hadn't murdered it.

It needed a refresh, not a mercy killing in the name of pleasing solely their hardcore fans.  

Time was there wasn't an FLGS around that didn't have a few GURPS sourcebooks on the shelf.  Now you're lucky to even see corebooks.

Quote from: misterguignol;531127Don't let your love of the game blind you to the fact that it doesn't sell well enough to sustain SJG's business.  They don't focus on Munchkin because they're short-sighted; they focus on Munchkin because they have the numbers in front of them.

Correct.  Card games sell and are cheaper to produce.  Table RPGs on the whole have been on life-support since multiplayer online games.  Table RPGs may never come back in full force like they once were.  At least SJGames still sells their core rules in color with hardcover.  The art could have been better though.  Qin has fabulous artwork.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;467542The fact that BRP continues to use "roll under skill" instead of "add skill to roll, your TN is always 100" shows a simple lack of vision and a grognardian refusal to adapt to the modern era.

Yes, it's mathematically identical. But in the latter version, your degree of success is simply the end result. There's no end stage math. Even more important, if you forgot a modifier and have to add it in after the fact, you only have to remember the reported total, rather than having to remember the original die roll and the modified roll-under target number separately.

Percentile roll-under is intuitive to design. But so was THAC0, and for the same reason. It made "sense" that 1st Class Armor was the best and 3rd Class Armor was worse than that, just like it makes "sense" that if you have to roll under your skill of 30 that you have a 30% chance of success. But let's be real here: d20's handling of AC is superior. Similarly, if you have to beat 100 and you add that 30 to your roll, you still have that same 30% chance of success. It's just that you can then report all relevant information to the GM with a single number so that when he says "Oh, did you count the curse from the spider mummies?" and you admit that you did not, you can still glean everything you need from the number you reported to the table. It's just better. In the same way and for the same reason that getting rid of THAC0 is better than leaving it in.

I understand the nostalgia factor and how it was "good enough" for us when we were playing it in 1984, but for fuck's sake. It's 2011, and if you're still on the roll-under wagon that is fucking pathetic.

-Frank

I understand what you're saying, but in regard to BRP I just haven't seen it in actual play. I personally have zero trouble with roll under.. in fact my other fav game used roll under in it's previous incarnation and it was also no problem at all in actual play. I haven't even personally seen anyone have any kind of trouble with roll under, although I have heard the complaint before second hand and online, like in this thread. I suppose if that makes me a pathetic,  nostalgic grognard I'll just have to find a way to be ok with that. I don't anticipate any difficulty there either.

On a side note, I originally misspelled "grognard" as "gragbard", which I think I will make the name of my next half-orc character

Quote from: J Arcane;531128Time was there wasn't an FLGS around that didn't have a few GURPS sourcebooks on the shelf.  Now you're lucky to even see corebooks.

The stores I've been to still have 2nd and 3rd GURPS core and some sourcebooks in their game room areas along with old Heroes (Champions) and old Chaosium and AD&D 2.0 books (no one will buy old editions of anything).  But no GURPS 4th edition anywhere in the store.  High school kids walking in the stores have never heard of the game unless their dad has a GURPS library at home.  Most stores cater to Warhammer anyway.  Before that, it was magic cards.  Oh my god, 1993 (was it?) to frickin' 2006 or so, every table in the stores had some magic card game going on.  Maybe two tables had an RPG being run.  I'd come in to get my GURPS books (mostly the Traveller modules for the game that were still being made by SJGames).  The rest of the area was LAN computers with some multiplayer games.  The computers are long gone now to make from for painting areas.  Lots of painting going on now in these stores.  Of course, there are still the Euro boardgames to be found in stores.  So that is kind of cool to see people coming in to buy.

Quote from: Sigmund;531137I understand what you're saying, but in regard to BRP I just haven't seen it in actual play. I personally have zero trouble with roll under.. in fact my other fav game used roll under in it's previous incarnation and it was also no problem at all in actual play. I haven't even personally seen anyone have any kind of trouble with roll under, although I have heard the complaint before second hand and online, like in this thread. I suppose if that makes me a pathetic,  nostalgic grognard I'll just have to find a way to be ok with that. I don't anticipate any difficulty there either.

This is the first complaint I've heard about rolling under.  I personally like to roll within my skill range when I play an RPG.  As my skill increases, the range for my success roll increases.  If I succeed, then I can worry about whether it accomplished anything or not against an NPC.  Just like in Fallout 3.

SJG could make the game easier to understand if they wished.

For example: Someone could take the rules and write up a battle online. They could start with the simple concepts and then work their way into more complexity. They could also use programing to embed, so you could get extra info by rolling over the area or clicking into it (I'm not a programer. But I have seen this done on other websites.)

A few good examples and it would go a long way to helping more people understand the game.

Likely there are other things that could be done too. SJG has a Character Generator for GURPs, why not a spell generator, encounter generator, etc.

In one of the examples noted the power source for Magic Missile as Cosmic? Why in the world would it be Cosmic, which costs way more than say Magic?  

It appears to me that GURPs only wants a niche market of people that are already playing other games.


And to fix GURPs... not possible because they don't want to be fixed. It may just take someone in one of the new companies to come up with a hybrid game that mixes the best of pen an paper with the ease of using a computer generated stuff. A game where we can still sit down with our friends and roll dice, but the prep, characters and background can be done on tablet computers, phones or whatever. Where DMs can add/write the flavor and have computers do the crunching for us.

SJ isn't doing much with Gurps anymore, because Munchkin is killing it in sales. Unless Munchkin sales start to drop, I expect Gurps to continue as a wandering zombie that gets one or two fresh infusions of blood per year.

Quote from: Amberfriend;531143SJG could make the game easier to understand if they wished.

For example: Someone could take the rules and write up a battle online. They could start with the simple concepts and then work their way into more complexity. They could also use programing to embed, so you could get extra info by rolling over the area or clicking into it (I'm not a programer. But I have seen this done on other websites.)

Don't get me started on their site.  I got banned for mentioning how Netscape 2.0 their site is.  They won't spend money on anything but the bare minimum.
 

Quote from: Amberfriend;531143A few good examples and it would go a long way to helping more people understand the game.

Likely there are other things that could be done too. SJG has a Character Generator for GURPs, why not a spell generator, encounter generator, etc.

Agreed.

Quote from: Amberfriend;531143It appears to me that GURPs only wants a niche market of people that are already playing other games.

GURPS has had a chronic low-grade fever since 2005.  New customers are just a trickle.  Old customers tend to scare off new ones.  But that is how any RPG is as far as I can tell.

Very few people look for a better RPG than what they learned on in school.  Most players stick to whatever RPG system they started with.  And they'll complain about new editions.  SJGames lost a lot of players when they switched from 3rd to 4th Edition GURPS.  I was thrilled with the change once I played it the first time.  I had been looking for a replacement RPG for GURPS 3rd Edition for quite some time.  I was thinking of going to Heroes 5th Edition or Shadowrun.

Quote from: Amberfriend;531143And to fix GURPs... not possible because they don't want to be fixed. It may just take someone in one of the new companies to come up with a hybrid game that mixes the best of pen an paper with the ease of using a computer generated stuff. A game where we can still sit down with our friends and roll dice, but the prep, characters and background can be done on tablet computers, phones or whatever. Where DMs can add/write the flavor and have computers do the crunching for us.

I try to get players to use the Internet more so they can download PDFs of maps and character sheets and other info that I upload for them.  I'll do CG modeling for all kinds of settings.  And get a Skype session going for someone not in town who wants to join in.  I don't allow phones at a gaming session though.  I know some gamers that use their TV for the map and to show players what the scene looks like and what the NPCs look like.  That's kind of interesting.