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Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Nobody plays the game I play, say the internet

I check the referring sites to my blog fairly often, so I can see where my traffic comes from and where it goes to. It's helpful for me and interesting to me, as well.

But if I get hits from Reddit, it's usually something odd. Like this one - a thread about games that people don't play. You know, like GURPS. People don't play GURPS, according to at least one commenter.

What RPG Did Really Well in sales but is hardly ever played

Hah.

I get it, GURPS isn't a big player in the small RPG pond. Not in terms of popularity compared to D&D, Pathfinder, and some others. But geez, guys, before you go off and say you can't find anyone who plays GURPS, go try looking to find someone who plays GURPS first. It's really amusing to me. The internet is a great place, but the number of people who won't take the simple step of searching before they say something is pretty high. It doesn't need to be. Type "GURPS campaigns" into Google . . . and click on the link to the Reddit sub-forum about GURPS. I don't know, maybe that might help?

I just found that really amusing, tonight. I'm going to go back to working on getting ready for this weekend's session of the game that is hardly ever played, in a campaign no one could think of. Heh.

7 comments:

  1. I am the only person running ongoing public games of GURPS/DFRPG in Sydney and probably NSW if not Australia.

    There was one other GURPS GM at a con and I know of one who runs an online game.

    That's despite dozens of books beong backed on kickstarter

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  2. I just don't hear anybody talking about GURPS.

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    1. I don't hear anybody talking about a lot of games, yet they're played. And armed with the internet, it should be trivial to find people who run a game, discuss a game, play a game, and/or right for a game if they're out there.

      And if you're having trouble finding them, it's probably easier to just ask for pointers to people who do than to opine that they don't exist!

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  3. Well... I mean if you aren't flashing the secret sign or wearing the proper [FNORD], we GURPS GMs and Players won't speak our secret games in front of you.

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  4. My experience is that a lot of RPGers who play one of the "big games" are very insulated and a little entitled. They sort of expect to be able to walk into an FLGS or their RPG association and just play their game of choice. If they don't see anyone around them playing it, they think nobody is playing it. These are the same guys who clutter up "general" RPG groups with their highly D&D-specific jokes or memes and think that "general" RPG really means "D&D."

    I say this as a guy who plays a lot of really, really niche and indie RPGs. The number of people who know what I'm talking about when I say "Legends of the Wulin" or "Nobilis" or "Dark Pages RPG" are vanishingly rare compared to GURPS. I think I'd call GURPS solid mid-tier. If you walk into an RPG association, you might not see someone playing it at that moment, but if you call out "Anyone here play GURPS?" you'll be surprised by how many people answer, or so is my experienec.

    (This increases a lot of at least one person is running GURPS, or has run GURPS at some point. It's one of the more infectious systems, in my experience)

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  5. Also, having gone over the thread, a lot of that sounds like "I own this game and wish someone would run it for me" (or "This thing I don't know seemed popular, but since I don't know anyone in that community, I guess it isn't popular). My experience has always been "If you run it, they will come," and it only takes one or two GMs in an area running a game to take it from "Weird, niche game nobody has heard of" to "wildly popular in my area."

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    1. That, too. You'd find that GURPS has been wildly popular in my immediate area if you asked around my gaming group, but you'd think that D&D 5th edition was this neat, fringe game that some guys run or play sometimes. It'd be a skewed sample, of course, but that's kind of the point. "I didn't try to find anyone and I couldn't find anyone" isn't a really good way to determine if those people are out there. :)

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