I'd like to recommend a couple of blogs. Both are by freelancers who have written for GURPS.
Gaming Ballistic
This is Douglas Cole's blog. Doug is probably most (in)famous for his article, "The Deadly Spring" in Pyramid magazine. It's reviewed here.
At least at the moment, it's got only a few articles, but they are good ones:
- One on toting 10' polearms (and poles) in a dungeon.
- Two on a variation how GURPS figures damage from weapons (amongst other things.)
- Some retrospective on why he writes what he wrote.
tetsujin no llama
The other blog is by Matt Riggsby, who has written so many things I can't keep track of them all. The first DF adventure being one of them.
His blog is a bit sparse on GURPS rules right now but it's got a lot of details on his own world. There are a lot of little bits you can steal from his musings to fit into your own game world. Plus, it's just a good read.
Both really interesting blogs so far.
That review of "The Deadly Spring" (and most of the other articles in that issue) is baffling to me. OK, so he's not the sort of Referee to make use of detailed design systems like that. That's cool, it's a perfectly suitable play style, and the criticism is well-founded from that perspective. But to leap from there to assuming that, because one does not want it, then also no other Referees will want such a thing - I just don't get it. Or maybe he's the one who doesn't: it seems to me that one of the strengths of GURPS is that it can be scaled to nearly any level of detail that suits the particular Referee and group. (I admit that the main interest I have in Cole's article is the option to make bow damage more "realistic". Bows in RPGs tend to be overpowered, and that offends my sensibilities. *grin*)
ReplyDeleteThe blogs you are actually recommending both seem quite good, however. Thank you.
I get it entirely - a lot of tools in the GURPS toolbox are very complex, or require a lot more work than picking stuff off of a list or a table. Not everyone wants that. I feel similarly to Jeffro - the most fiddly and detail-oriented the rules, the less interested in them I am. I appreciate they are there, but I rarely want to make use of them.
DeleteI said the same thing in many, many more words. :-)
Deletehttp://gamingballistic.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-sound-of-silencer.html
To be honest, the setting really isn't my world, in that I'm not actually using it. It something I ended up making some fairly extensive notes on before realizing that I'd never end up actually running, nor was it ever likely to see publication.
ReplyDelete