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As the title suggests, 2 out of the 5 players at the table had never played GURPS and I personally had only GMd it once. We led the players through character creation, a short adventure and finally in this episode we've tried to give our thoughts on the system from the viewpoint of how it feels to play for newer players.

Firstly, on a more macro scale, it kind of surprised us how actually playable GURPS is as a system. We expected to get into much more trouble while trying to teach it to new people, but the logic of it slotted into place rather fast.

The rest I'll mark as seperate headings

• Combat

It's arguably more tactical than something like D&D or Pathfinder. Just the fact that you have to think in a more granular time frame makes every turn count, but also makes it harder to pivot plans once everything goes tits up. That and the penalty scaling at range for firearms (or any ranged weapon actually) was surprisingly not as cumbersome to deal with as it seemed at first.

• Skills

This one was a bit more contentious - personally I like a skill list. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it limits roleplay, but rather provides guardrails and direction for how to approach problems. From the other side of it, some of us felt that with this massive skill list a lot of time was wasted on bellyaching over skills that never ended up being useful in the first place. Often times you can't even mitigate that as the GM by saying what might or might not be useful without spoiling some of the plot elements.

• Character creation

Leading on from the previous point, we "cheated" a little bit and used templates for our characters with freedom to modify to taste. But even then, the character creation was not as painful as we were led to believe. The logic is pretty easy to understand and we fell into the min-maxing side of things rather easily.

• 3d6 resolution

It's great! It gives a very nice Bell Curve distribution - rolls even out around 10 and crits (and crit fails) are rare. It also means that early points in a skill are much more valuable than hyper specialization... which we did anyways, since it seemed cool.

• Simulation

GURPS has a reputation for being simulationist for the sake of being simulationist, but in our experience, the simulation did somewhat help enhance the versimilitude of the game. However, since GURPS is so modular, you can go into to excruciating detail with things that are of minor consequence. The GM can put a stop to a lot of it by picking and choosing what and to what degree their game will simulate.

• Genre mixing

This might be the biggest strength of GURPS. We played a modern(ish) explorers team in an Ice Age and those two settings meshed together with 0 problems rulewise. In the episode some of the veterans go a bit more in depth on this topic, but safe to say that it's the most successful genre mixing that we've seen in a system.

• GM workload

We found the game easy to play, but hard to GM. Much in relation to the previous point, the GM has to do a lot of prep work to pick and choose what rules to play with, but also the fact that you don't really have good guude to NPCs. Every single meaningful NPC has to be handmade. Sure, a skilled GM can cut down on a lot of that since they know what is likely to be needed and what is not, as well as estimate some skills/stats without writing them down, but if you're just picking the game up, it's going to be a hell of a learning curve.

• Conclusion

It's not half as scary as it sounds. Yes, it's simulationist, but it's not that way just for the sake of being simulationist. There is actual thought put behind the rules - a sort of faux-real world logic that is surprisingly intuitive even for new players to pick up. It's a staple of the scene for good reasons!

We set out to prove that GURPS can be taught at the table and I'd say we succeeded! You can come listen to our more in-depth thoughts on the Dicey Discourse podcast (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcast or any other podcast platform)!

Edit: formatting

I run a "D&D" game at my local public library. It takes place once a month, and it is a 4 hour session. The game is open to everyone, so it is basically an open table month to month. It usually attracts 4 to 8 players per session.

I started playing D&D with B/X in the 1980's. I got back into D&D several years later with 5e.

At first I ran D&D 5e for this monthly library game, but I found 5e to be bloated and slow, especially with more than four or five players. As a GM, I also hated the "press a button on your character sheet and immediately solve the problem" aspect of 5e.

We then switched to Shadowdark, which plays faster than 5e, but so many of the adventures published for it are grim and dark and filled with doom and gloom and I prefer a more lighthearted, heroic, swashbuckling game. I don't really want high levels of lethality found in many OSR games. I had criticisms with D&D 5e, but I did like the 5e death save rules. The 5e level of lethality is fine with me for this type of library game.

I like the concepts and tropes of D&D. Traditional, Tolkien-esque fantasy is what I like most. I also like to run games with fast, fun, cinematic action scenes. Actual roleplaying would be fairly light, but not non-existent. I also like adventures big on exploration. Having the PCs go on an adventure and interact with weird and interesting things and watching the players come up with clever solutions to puzzles and obstacles is probably my favorite aspect of "D&D".

I prefer lighter rules as opposed to crunchier rules. I want something that is easy to teach to newbies. Easy and quick character generation would also be nice.

I also suck at creating my own adventures, so I am ideally looking for a game system that has a published set of fun one-shots or a rough adventure path that I can run every month without a lot of prep. But players may come and go month to month, so I want to be mindful of that as well.

Based upon everything I've said, I'm considering using Dragonbane with the adventure found in its boxed set. Or EZD6 with the EZD6 Book of Quests. I also like the XP/Leveling systems in Dragonbane, and in the EZD6 Brain Candy supplement, again, being mindful of players coming and going month to month. I'm also possibly considering Tiny Dungeon, but I didn't see a published adventure path or multiple one shots designed for it.

Would Dragonbane, EZD6, or Tiny Dungeon be good for this type of game? Would anyone here recommend anything else? Any recommendations for published adventures would also be welcome. Thank you!

I realize you can talk to your players off role, but mine have fun murderhoboing and I have fun gming for them.

I guess my question is more about what sort of pushback would be reasonable in-universe. It strains their disbelief a bit too much to have town guards that are essentially police forces, especially if their power scales up to present an appropriate threat to the PCs.

This, I'll admit is an odd post to make, but, basically, "World of Game Design" is a company buying out unfulfilled TTRPG KS campaigns, Completely changing their scope, using AI, and then "fulfilling" them with a completely different product and saying you can't get a refund.

So, far, the only two campaigns affected are "Pixel Intrigue 5e" and "To Insanity And Beyond."

Now, you can't protect yourself for the moment. They're buying out successful, unfulfilled campaigns and finishing them cheap. So, if you backed something like that, it's at risk.

But, the prevailing thought (since this is likely losing them money) is to build up a history of "successful campaigns" to then launch their own and seem legitimate. Which sounds absolutely silly but I also can't see any other reason to do it either: these are multi-year dead campaigns that likely spent all the backer money already, so what does buying it out grant you otherwise? (edit: Someone said it may also be to be able to say "from a successful kickstarter in marketing, which LMAO)

When they do pivot and try to use these bought our campaigns, know they are just "project flippers."

Also, don't expect great customer service given how they're talking to backers of these "flipped projects:" https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bitesizedgaming/to-insanity-and-beyond/posts/4803623

Does anyone else use free-form scale combat? A combat map is still used, but there is no "grid". Instead, you just measure distances and angles. It's not hard. I've been doing it on and off for decades using methods adapted from miniatures wargames.

I haven't played Champions since the early 00's, and I want to run it. I've never had the sourcebooks, and frankly the array of options is a little confusing to me right now.

What do I need to pick up to run a fairly straight-forward game? The Champion's rules, and hero system stuff? Is 5e or 6e better? I only saw Champions for 5e rules, how compatible are they for 6e?

Help! I have decision paralysis!

Hello hive mind,

I come with a question: What games exist with good tools, procedures, (reusable) content, or other structures for supporting long-term non-violent stories?

I’ve been thinking recently about the genre of games built to model sitcoms, or dramas, or other genres of media where violence is not the main source of dramatic tension. The ones I’ve read often provide a foundation, but I feel are missing structure to help run them long form. I saw a great post/comment recently about a sitcom-style story based on “we’re trying to beat the neighbourhood a*****e in a cooking competition”, which sounded great, but I’m not sure I’ve got the pop-culture knowledge to build a campaign’s-worth of stories like that.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the idea that “violence is an easily understood source of drama”, and so many stories use it that it’s very easy to write an adventure around it. But also, if we take D&D as an example, each entry in the Monster Manual is basically an adventure seed itself. You could spend years running games just by picking a monster of the week and building a plot hook around them. This is both mechanical and narrative, I think – an interesting ability can also be a good starting point, not just the lore.

Something like Good Society or Hillfolk, on the other hand, makes the story generation part of the game setup. This has all sorts of advantages, but for newer players can place more authorial responsibility on them, which can be daunting. And it’s very geared towards a particular type of story (not so good at the “procedural scenes”, as the DramaSystem would phrase it).

Partly this is to do with dice rolling. I know I can use many systems to tell “dramatic” stories, but they often lack systems that interact with the mechanics. Rolling dice is fun! And as a GM I like having the randomness provide improv prompts for me to build off (keeps things interesting, otherwise I get stuck in the same old grooves). Or I can use a generic system (Cortex, Fate, and so on), but then I don’t have the structure for these kinds of stories, and have to roll my own from scratch.

I do love a game that has systems/content that naturally leads to fun adventure seeds. Sometimes that’s good random tables (Pendragon generates a lot of story seeds out of its random family events, in my experience), and sometimes it’s good content (whether you like D&D or not, the various monster manuals are a great source of adventure ideas), but I’ve not found one in this genre yet.

And so, with all these notions, I’d like to ask what games/systems/sourcebooks do a good job of helping you run RPGs where violence is not the source of dramatic tension? Give me your wisdom, r/rpg!

Like Mutant: Year Zero (and some other Free League games) or Stonetop.

I make weird little RPGs. Four new games launched at Ropecon in July, and I recently opened my webshop. The games are in English, and I ship physical games worldwide outside the EU. Here's what I've been making.

Laser Dinosaur Cavalry is exactly what it says on the tin: You are muscular heroes who ride on dinosaurs that shoot lasers from their eyes and fight the evil Nazi robot empire. An improbably full-featured, delightfully tactical pulp action game in 12 pages. "The best RPG ever", according to Rope Setä, a Finnish YouTube vlogger.

The Moon Is an Annoyance is hard sci-fi lunar disaster survival engineering with a geopolitical twist. Includes a starter scenario and scenario design guidance; over a dozen plausible, unheroic ways to die in space; and an original electroacoustic score by Uumen.

Northpyre: Council is Stone Age political drama for one player and a GM. Three tribes meet in the northern forests to settle matters of life and death. Everything that is political is personal. The game focuses on negotiations, discussions, and cultural misunderstandings.

Blood Nocturne City Hunger is urban vampire tragedy. Tangled, messy, doomed relationships; mortals who matter more than they should. It's print exclusive, free, and you can't buy it – but you can get it as a free addon with any physical order from my webshop.

What's next: more games, obviously. Kiki and Bouba will release later this autumn - an odd game about things and what they do, and about how meaning emerges. Madam Miriam's Magnificent Airship Circus and the Rise of Fascism in Cosmopolitan Post-War Europe is a dieselpunk circus resistance action game where you are circus performers who fight fascists. I also have free PDF addons coming for LDC, TMIaA, and NP:C in the short term, and more Northpyre in the long term. Probably lots of other stuff as well, but we'll see. My mailing list is the best way to keep up with new releases.

Full lineup available at mesolitgames.com .

If anything catches your interest, I'm happy to answer questions about the games or their design.

I've recently subscribed to a kind of newsletter. But what I get are academic articles on gaming.

Here is today's article on the connections found between theatre and tabletop (and larp). I found it fascinating.

I was just interested in what people think is the overall best experience? AFAIK both of them uses a different dice mechanic than D20. They both try to lean more into detail when it comes to survival and settlements, while also providing some RP meta currencies. I would be interested in what sort of observations people have made of the systems, especially from those who have tried both extensively.

I want to move onto something which makes it more difficult to accumulate loads of gold and magical items, but still makes combat quicker and uses more universal mechanics and preferably procedures for wilderness, dungeons and timing.