Next we have the next in the series of How to GM GURPS, and it's the second time Christopher Rice has tried his hand at it.
This has one chapter:
- Great Power which offers said advice.
The Good, the Bad and the Very Christopher
So I can break this up into pieces to get a sense of how I feel about the book. It's not all bad, so there is some "Good." It's also a very distinctive book that I feel has more of the author's fingerprints on it than I'm used to seeing, but that might be because I'm quite familiar with Christopher. So let's use these as our categories
The Good and the Christopher
Let me start by noting that I found the book rather peculiar. Perhaps it's my familiarity with Christopher, but I found myself thinking that this was less a book on how to GM high powered adventures, and more what "How To GM GURPS" would have looked like if Christopher had written it in the first place.
Some examples:
- Encouragement to simplify systems
- Emphasis of Wildcard Skills
- Advice to use Pop Culture comparisons
- The Use of Buckets
- A deep emphasis of narrative while maintaining a considerable understanding of the mechanics.
This not necessarily a problem, though I'd rather a stronger focus on solving problems with high-powered origins than on how to generally run GURPS games the Chris way, even if the latter isn't necessarily a bad thing to have. If you take this as "How to GM GURPS the way Chris does" then it tends to read better, and there's some very good lines in here that newbs need to read. Let me quote some of it at you.
Despite its reputation, it’s also not a “reality simulator.” Rather, GURPS is a toolbox to create exactly the game the GM wants within a consistent framework (which is sometimes confused with being a perfect simulator).
Pop Culture Comparison: Be open to players phrasing questions like “I wanna be X from Y.” This sort of fiction-based concept is extremely helpful when starting character or campaign design because it lets the GM build a good foundation.
Having access to large numbers of points has its hazards. Aside from risking characters who are too focused or too general, players may suffer from “decision fatigue” because they have too many choices!
Good stuff! These are the sorts of things a new GURPS GM should watch out for and think about and approaches they can use. And a lot of these are problems that are pretty focused on GURPS as opposed to, say, D&D. So I think it belongs in a How to GM GURPS. I'm not saying these are the only three good lines. I'm saying that Chris is being open and honest about his experience, and it helps in a lot of places.
Props, by the way, for the Cardboard World quote.
The Bad
Alright, let's get into it. This book is badly organized, offers bad advice and is frustratingly good-advice adjacent, so much so that I think with a decent editor kicking Chris literally once, most of the problems in this book would have been solved.
First, know that I'm approaching this book from the perspective of high powered games. I have fewer objections to some of the advice as laid out for "a generic GURPS game." Some of it will cause some problems, but it's mostly alright and won't lead you too far astray. But I run a lot of GURPS. I run a lot of high-powered GURPS, and I've also run a lot of low-powered GURPS (for awhile, all of my games were 50 points or less). A lot of this advice sounds like someone who regularly papers GURPS pitfalls over and runs the game in a more narrative way and has little advice for how to tackle those pitfalls other than "Don't fall in pitfalls." And I know for a fact that Chris does have the chops to tackle these problems because I use material he's written to tackle these problems, which is one of the reasons I find the book so frustrating. So why isn't that advice in here!?
Let's break down what I mean.
Decomplicating the Rules
So the premise in this section is that GURPS is already complicated, and the more points you have, the more complicated it gets, so you should use less optional rules and less crazy things and just keep focused on what will make your game work. That's fine advice at its base: "Keep focused," but it's not stated that way, it's also based on a faulty premise, and it will guide new players in a bad direction.
First, as I've said before, I've run a lot of low-powered GURPS games, and one of the reasons I do that is that GURPS feels made for low powered games. Most games I've played are additive: you start with a base, and as you advance, you gain more power and complexity, and this means a low-powered character is boring (you can't effectively play a kid in WoD without a special ruleset, for example). But with GURPS this isn't true. In GURPS, you can go negative. A zero-point character can be as wildly detailed as a 100 point character or even more so, because you can take disadvantages. In fact, in a low-powered point games, you often need to fret about how many problems the PCs are taking on, because each disadvantage adds another layer of complexity.
Low powered games often care a lot more about things that high powered games don't. If you're a 50 point character who meets two goons in an alley, you want to know as much as you possibly can about both of them so you can defeat them, while to a high powered character, the nuance of their specific skills doesn't matter much, you'll blow through both in less than a turn. And high powered games can afford to just sweep lots of abilities into a single, expensive super-traits rather than fiddling with techniques and perks and limitations to save points.
So in a lot of ways, high powered games are naturally less complicated than low-powered games. This isn't a deal breaker, but we're already on the wrong foot. A high-point fantasy game doesn't need each sorcery spell to be lovingly hand-crafted to 5 points or less, or need to worry about exactly how many perks you can take, or going into enormous detail on your techniques. A better way to state this is to focus on what complexity matters for your game, rather than just taking on all the complexity you can. This bad premise isn't a deal-breaker, but it's the foundation for the next misstep, which in my opinion is a deal breaker.
The other problem is that a lot of complexity in GURPS was added specifically to handle high-powered games. Imagine you're a new GM who wants to run a high-powered shonen anime campaign. You hear GURPS is great, but daunting, so you grab this book to help, and you read this line:
For a good starting point on essential mechanics for running a GURPS game, see GURPS Lite; from there, add in rules from the Basic Set and other supplements to address situations most likely to come up in the campaign.
What are you gonna do? You're going to tell your players to toss together 500 point anime martial artists, and then run the combat out of GURPS Lite. You know what will happen? Nobody will be able to hit one another. Because Deceptive Attack exists precisely to deal with skill 20+ characters fighting one another, and it isn't in GURPS Lite. I just had someone commenting to me on how vitally important Deceptive Attack is and how it's not emphasized. This is the place to emphasize it, because the purpose of an advice book is to point out how to overcome problems. "Help, my character can't hit anyone because everyone's defense is so high" is exactly the sort of thing this book should be helping, but ctrl+f "deceptive" turns up no hits.
What you really want to do here is talk about having a focus and keeping on that focus and removing complexity that doesn't help that focus. I think he's trying to do that by suggesting "start with minimal stuff and add to the campaign what is helpful" and in principle that's good advice, but this is the place to bring up some core things that really help high level play. Without doing that, you're encouraging people to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and only after they realize they have no baby, to go hunting around to find it again after. It's broadly useful advice, but mis-applied in such a specific book.
High-Powered Combat
If there's one problem I see over and over again in any "build-your-own-character" systems, it's how difficult it becomes to write balanced combat scenarios for it. I've seen this in Exalted, and I've seen it in Aberrant, and I've seen it in GURPS. The problem is people will take so much DR or so much damage or so much offense or defense, in comparison to everyone else, that any scenario that would challenge one character is a bloodbath or a cake walk for another character.
The way to solve this is with Benchmarks. Characters should be within a particular range when it comes to offense and defense. In Psi-Wars, I accomplish this with the ubiquity of battleweave (there's no reason for anyone to have less than DR 20 against blasters), and outside of military ordinance (which is typically handled with cinematic rules like the Cinematic Explosions rule), everything is calibrated around between 3d(5) and 8d(5); it's rare to find someone outside of this range (and if they are, it's usually because they have less of an armor divisor). With these benchmarks, you can roughly eyeball scenarios so most people feel useful and like they can participate and don't just get curbstomped by the wrong guy. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be equally effective at combat, I'm pointing to the risks have having a combat at all with one HP 1, DR 0 Pixie and an HP 100, DR 100 combat god in the same party. You need to be in the same ballpark, speaking the same mechanical language. This is the sort of thing that can happen in a High Powered Game. So the advice to give is: "try to have this minimal level of offense and defense, and try to have these minimal skills and don't go beyond this particular range." With that in place, you can design your scenarios in a way that won't absolutely destroy or bore someone in the party.
And then where it gets frustrating is he almost offers this advice: he talks about working out how much offense and defense each character has (what specifically are we looking for here?). He talks about having the GM look over each character to make sure they don't have any major holes (what holes are we looking for?), he talks about being overly focused or overly generalized a lot ("Jenny One-Skill." I like that!), but what specifically are we worried about here and how do we solve it?
It's BENCHMARKS!
You check the totals of every character to make sure they fall within the benchmarks. The problem with the Jack-of-All-Trades is that he has nothing that sets him apart and he might not meet some of the minimum benchmarks because he's spread too thin; the problem with Jenny One-Skill is she blows the benchmarks in one particular way and sucks at the rest. If we had benchmarks, we'd know what specifically we were looking for! And Chris knows this stuff: he wrote It's a Threat so if anyone knew how to balance combat, it would be him. So why is it not here?
Incidentally, I pick on combat here, because combat is where this problem rears its head the most, but it's really about whatever the central conceit of the game is. In a highly social game set in a court (which is another sort of high powered game, just in a different way), lacking certain core social traits at the levels interesting for the game, or having so many that you blow the premise of the game out of the water, can cause as much of a problem as being wildly unbalanced in combat. You need to know the tolerance levels of your gameplay and keep your players within those tolerance levels so they can enjoy the gamespace you created.
This is also a good place to talk about ways to help people who fall outside of the benchmarks. Rules like Flesh Wounds, TV Action Violence and Cinematic Explosions are survival tricks to make sure that the people who are not invested in combat (or whatever your particular field is) can still participate without the GM needing to wildly intervene all the time to keep them from being destroyed by the game, or bored. He does mention the utility of Impulse Buys, but a little more depth on survivability and gamespace participation would help a lot. It's sort of part of what "benchmarks" is: how do you ensure everyone has at least minimum participation in the core elements of what your game is about?
Building to a Concept
In Building to a Concept, Chris suggests removing point totals as a fundamental limitation. Now, I'm not going to tell you running a game with varying point totals is wrong. I am going to say that it makes your life harder, and if you're a noob, which this book is supposed to be aimed at, it's not the sort of thing I'd recommend doing. It's something to do when you have a better idea of what will and will not work. Like, for example, knowing how to benchmark characters well. He suggest a "tolerance" of 50% up or down for a campaign, but that "supers or fantasy" can go much higher than this, and goes with 200% in an example.
First, I'm mystified that he's picking on "supers and fantasy." If there was a genre that could tolerate whacky point totals, it would be sci-fi. THS outright suggests this! Like, a cyborg with an arm cannon that deals 8d(5) is vastly more expensive (GURPS RAW) than a commando with a heavy blaster rifle, but they're both about as dangerous in combat. So I'm not sure why he picks on fantasy, which lacks the tools that Ultra-Tech has to rebalance these differences. My guess is he's either thinking of GURPS Magic or the fact that it's in genre to have a useless princess and a FREAKING DRAGON in the same party.
But this is where bad advice starts to compound on bad advice. So go back to said noob who is running his shonen anime GURPS game. That's like Supers right? So it's fair to have someone with 500 points, and someone with 250 and someone with 1000 points in the same party, right? The 250 point character works out to something like a Face who is heavy on social traits and has minimal combat traits, and a 1000-point combat god with advanced martial arts. So we have the equivalent to Lois Lane (250 points), Superman (1000 points) and Nightwing (500 points). Now write a combat scenario that's fun for all three and doesn't turn Lois into paste or bore Superman to tears. "I use kryptonite!" is fun the first time, but it gets pretty tiresome after that. But worse, since we're not using advanced rules, the 1000 point martial artist can't get hit. If he's got Karate-30, he has a parry of 19. The only way he'll get his is if he critically fails his roll, and this is made worse by the fact that you benchmarked most of the combat characters around the 500-point mark.
If you forced everyone on the same point total, knew about things like Deceptive attacks and other tricks to allow people to actually tackle their high level opponents, and you kept everyone on more-or-less the same playing field, then a lot of these problems naturally go away. If you follow the advice here, you make the game harder for yourself. This sort of advice makes life harder for the noob this book is aimed at.
I also want to take a moment to note that if you force everyone to have the same point total, you'll find that most of the concepts line up after the players force themselves to fit into the mold. Instead of having Useless Princess and THE DRAGON, you end up with with Moderately Useful Princess and the Troubled Dragon, and they line up better. He correctly points out that setting your point values too low can create over-specialized characters in an attempt to reach what the player thinks of as appropriate for their concept, but modifying the concept (he already suggests we say no to bad concepts) and giving people an understanding of what sort of ballparks define "powerful" (Benchmarks, again) we can mitigate that.
It feels like he's aiming at something like "Let people make whatever concept they want, don't worry about the rules, just roll and shout and have a good time!" That's not a bad way to play a game (I run No Thank You Evil for my kids that way), but that's how you run GURPS Ultra-Lite, not GURPS. This is not "How to GM GURPS Ultra-Lite" or "How to GM No Thank You Evil," it's How to GM GURPS, and the point of these books should not be to wave away these problems, but to show you how to tackle them. Where else are you going to get advice on how to properly build high powered characters than this book?
Approaches to Character Design
I actually really like this section. They point out all sorts of different ways to approach how to play a high powered game, such as the difference between characters who mostly have their power based on political and hierarchical power vs characters who are focused on raw, physical power, or characters who focus on narrative concept vs mechanical concept. It's very good stuff, and worth a read... but why is this here and not in "genres for high-powered games?" A quibble, mostly.
Skills vs Wildcard Skills
Man, stop selling Wildcard skills. They were a nice attempt to limit some complexity of GURPS, but it didn't work. The sort of point investments you have to make to get them to a decent level mean at some point you're better off with Talent or Attribute. Yeah, you get less written on your sheet, but the mechanical value is so dubious they had to add free impulse buy points to try to balance it out. If you want to reduce the complexity of the skills of the game, trim the number of skills in the game. Giving a noob permission to ignore skills he doesn't like or bundle skills he thinks naturally belongs together is very much the sort of thing a noob needs to hear.
Character Growth
This isn't a bad section, and it's tackling a real issue, I just think it could be written better. The big problem here is the fact that at some point, everything gets really expensive. Like, your 1000-point character doesn't really care about a 1-5 point total reward; wake him up when he has 25, 50 or 100 points to burn. He makes suggestions like "encourage large improvements instead of smaller" and "limit when players can spend their experience" and points out the advantages this offers. You could just say something like "Consider giving out experience in a larger chunk at the end of an adventure rather than smaller peices after every session." It's what I think he's trying to say, and again, one clean edit later and he would be saying something like this more clearly.
High-Powered Pitfalls
I found this section weird.
He lists Point Debt, but it's not meant as a pitfall, but a suggestion that you should give people free points if they forgot something rather than punish them for not knowing the system, and then let them pay you back. Fair enough, but it's not a pitfall it's how to solve a problem.
He says "Don't build All-Powerful Characters" and points out how boring they can be. But if I'm new t GURPS, my assumption is going to be that the point values and the system already prevent that. This will instead read as "Please don't break our fragile system." Are you really afraid that people will turn their 1000-point character into Q unless you say "Please don't do that?" And this section doesn't actually tell you how to "not build an all-powerful character." What he means is there needs to be ways to challenge you in the gamespace, or you won't have much fun in the game, but then discuss that and how to have holes in a character that act as interesting challenges.
There's a section on Misplaced Realistic Powerful Characters, and I've read it several times and I'm still not sure what it's talking about. I think it means something like making nitty, gritty characters that have mastered high levels of Knot-Tying in a swashbuckling game because they sail ships and knots are important for sailing, but they miss that nobody cares about knot-tying and house keeping in a swashbuckling game. But if so, I'm pretty sure he already addressed it, and he even points you back to that section, so what is this? Just a section that emphasizes the previous point?
In Super-Normal vs Super-Powered, he seems to realize that having a 250-point character in the same party as a 1000-point character is maybe not the best idea, especially if Useless Princess isn't minmaxed all to hell, and if she was played by a min-maxer, why wasn't she also a 1000-point character? And so he suggests getting around the pitfall of his own making by making either parallel gameplay ("Fight these useless mooks while the Great Dragon fights the Death God") or gives them lots of GM plot-armor ("I know you're 250 points, but I'm going to secretly give you another 250-points worth of Destiny, Serendipity and Super Luck that you didn't know you had in the form of me fudging your rolls for you all the time"). How about not advising people make these wildly varying point totals in the first place?
And finally in Unusual (Background) for Whom he... gives really good advice that I with some other authors would take. Just because something is rare doesn't mean it should be expensive. If you're paying points, there should be a reason you pay points and Chris nails what those reasons tend to be: you'd surprise people, you'd impress people, or the GM thinks the power would be too powerful and is taxing you to bring your capabilities in line with your point values. It's a good section and worth a read.
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