Sep 8, 2017, 4:52 AM
Wheel of Time MU(SH|X)
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I have never enjoyed a GURPS game I have played. I've had diehard fans of the system insist it's 'just bad GMs' or whatever, but I still blame the system. I think it's far too rules-heavy and clunky than any system has any need to ever, ever be.
And this from someone who finds the HERO system to be downright amusing and fun to build characters in sometimes.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Auspice said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
I have never enjoyed a GURPS game I have played. I've had diehard fans of the system insist it's 'just bad GMs' or whatever, but I still blame the system. I think it's far too rules-heavy and clunky than any system has any need to ever, ever be.
I played in one enjoyable GURPS game once. (Using GURPS 2nd edition, I think, though it may have been 3rd, and GURPS Space set in the Traveller universe.) And it was purely the GM who made it enjoyable -- by largely ignoring the actual GURPS rules most times. Once the dice came out, the joy vanished. Eventually we switched that campaign over to CORPS, though, and it was for the better. By far.
And this from someone who finds the HERO system to be downright amusing and fun to build characters in sometimes.
One of the things that really, really, really, really, really bugs me about GURPS is that it's an utterly schizophrenic system.
Does armour work D&D probabilistic-style with a chance of just not having anything happen at all? Or does it work Runequest style as damage reduction. GURPS: "Why not both!?"
Do character points measure IC difficulty of learning/acquiring/whatever abilities (in the vein of, say, Rolemaster) or OOC estimates of "utility" (in the vein of, say, HERO)? GURPS: "Why not both, randomly, without rhyme nor reason!? And then make costs way out of line sometimes for no reason that can be discerned."
Almost everywhere you turn in GURPS you find this kind of decision by choosing all available options simultaneously. It makes the game incredibly incoherent and trivial to hack.
As an example for the latter, in that very game that I mentioned above early on we all made the characters we wanted (which was one of the selling points for making us use GURPS over Traveller). The first session, though, was a disaster because most of us made a character based on reasonable "this is the character role I want to fill" and one, who was familiar with the rules, made a character, on the same number of points and disadvantage limits, etc., that was better than everybody else's character at every role in the game. He was a better combat monster than the Marine. A better starship pilot than the Naval pilot. A better medico than the actual doctor, etc. All of this was because he knew the system enough to know how to get grotesquely disproportionate outcomes from trivial point investments.
After the disastrous first session he helped us create our own characters and gave the GM some tips on making the NPCs and challenges, but really, no game should be so trivial to hack that you can have one person who knows the system a bit better than the others make a character that can literally replace all the remaining characters put together. (I mean HERO is hackable too, but not to that extent! There's some numerical breakpoints you can use to eke out a bit more ability for the same price, but not orders of magnitude more.)
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And that's sort of the issue I have with it. Every game I've been in has been that way. Either a player (or players) knew it well enough to break it to that extent without helping everyone else, thus making it unfun for the rest of us who just sort of sit back going 'oh, well, I'm useless' or the GM is asking for rolls in stats we never knew we needed to begin with. And again, 'poor GM,' but at the same time... A good system never runs into that issue to begin with.
I mean, for fuck's sake, when I'm having to try to make all of my own shit up and the GM is trying to do the same thing, and Jim is off in the corner and he's been in twenty games already and knows how to hack this shit so he can counteract anything that'll be thrown at us...
Yeah no.
Anyway, we digress. This is for a whole other thread, or likely an entirely other board since no game uses this garbage anyway.
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@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
I am leaning towards a (maybe heavily) modified FS3 at the moment. Folks are pretty familiar with it and with AresMUSH most of the heavy lifting is done.
If you need to "heavily" modify it, I think you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you just start from scratch. Enough people are familiar with it that if you start throwing in all kinds of extreme modifications, you're just going to be swimming upstream against expectations and confusing everyone. There's nothing particularly magical about the FS3 skills code. It's just a roll&count success system, same as SR4 and nWOD. You could steal the basic building blocks of the code and adapt it easily enough to whatever skill system actually fit your game.
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@WTFE said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
Does armour work D&D probabilistic-style with a chance of just not having anything happen at all? Or does it work Runequest style as damage reduction. GURPS: "Why not both!?"
I've recently been playing through various CRPGs, including the usual suspects of the D&D games. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter.
As somebody who has never gotten the chance to play D&D in tabletop form, but still understands most of the rules thanks to video games and MUs, can I just say...
'Armor Class' offends me. The notion of armor that doesn't actually make you more durable either by giving you DR or more HP (a-la Final Fantasy Tactics) is a sin against God.
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@faraday Heavily modify because I need to add in the channeling system and maybe some feats/talents a la Fate style stunts
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@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
@faraday Heavily modify because I need to add in the channeling system and maybe some feats/talents a la Fate style stunts
My point stands
If you want Fate style feats/talents, why not just use Fate? Plus doesn't it already have a magic system? -
FATE has some rules for making a magic system or ten. And in the FATE System Toolkit there's even more.
Doesn't really have a "magic system" as such, though.
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@WTFE said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
FATE has some rules for making a magic system or ten. And in the FATE System Toolkit there's even more.
That's what I meant though. Contrast with FS3, which not only doesn't have anything like that in its toolkit, but doesn't balance well once you throw super-human abilities into the mix. I mean, much as I love it when people use the system, it's designed for a certain type of game and doesn't work well everywhere. Shoving a square peg into a round hole is just going to cause you problems in the long run. You're already going to have to write a bunch of custom code to do talents and magic and stuff... just take an extra couple hours and change the five commands that let you pick and roll your skills too. Then you have the system that actually works best for your game.
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@Tempest imagine if putting on armor actually gave you more health? Would it cure colds, or get rid of infections? Would it help with arthritis??
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@Kanye-Qwest said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
@Tempest imagine if putting on armor actually gave you more health? Would it cure colds, or get rid of infections? Would it help with arthritis??
Exercise daily.
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@Tempest What?! But you can't move in European armor!? and a katana will cut right through it anyways! etc etc, standard complaints. i love showing that gif to morons.
And system wise.. yeah. Not exactly sure what I'll do yet. Pretty much know I'll adapt DFRPG spell system for channeling, but not sure I want to go full Fate given some other limitations.
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I think that FS3 with a system for using magic (via roll and via using certain weapons in the combat system) dealt stun damage (resistible) to the user would work very nicely for WoT. Just something to provide a little bit of pain to go with the power of channeling (and it should be pretty overpowered, given the setting).
This leads me to the other problem with the WoT setting: channelers are just utterly OP. Without an ambush or a foxhead medallion, a non-channeler just isn't going to be able to beat a trained channeler. This means that combat will be wildly imbalanced. You kind of have to accept this, if you want to keep the setting intact, and it's not the end of the world, just... part of the setting.
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Agreed, it's part of the setting. It's why I like limiting channelers to Aes Sedai for awhile. The Three Oaths keep them in check, and even Black Ajah that don't have the oaths can't go around slaughtering folks willy nilly because of the need for secrecy.
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@Tempest It does make you more durable, in that a hit that would, without armor, cause you damage or kill you now causes no damage at all.
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There is basically nothing stopping an Aes Sedai from just, well, grabbing somebody with air though.
It works every time against somebody who is not a channeler then they are completely helpless, being able to do it to multiple people at once requires a particularly capable channeler sure but it is still an automatic win against anyone who does not ambush you.
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@Packrat The oath forbids them from using channeling against anyone except to save their own life or some nonsense like that.
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@Lithium said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
@Packrat The oath forbids them from using channeling against anyone except to save their own life or some nonsense like that.
Not quite, it forbids them from using it as a weapon except against Darkfriends or Shadowspawn, or in the last extreme defense of her life. Numerous Aes Sedai in the books reason to themselves that wrapping somebody in air and restraining them does not count as 'a weapon'.
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Yeah, it's part of the setting. As mentioned before, it isn't balanced.