FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

AmiYumi posted:

Brucato really should have the same level of prominence and professional respect as Chris Fields. Who at WW/OP has such a boner for hiring him?

Maybe he's pleasant to deal with in person and his books sell well despite the content? I mean it is still a hobby industry here, even with White Wolf. :shrug:

# ¿ May 7, 2016 20:20

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:18

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Ah, Destiny merits, or, "pay this point tax to be an actual hero". I guess the default state of PCs would be "Destined For Meekness", then?

Yeah I think I now have a new go-to example for why 90's style merit-flaw systems are horrible.

# ¿ May 11, 2016 17:17

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

I recall a lot of whining about this game on RPGnet and the like back when it was new, but hell if I remember what actually set it off. Besides being one of the early modern-style heavily theme-focused storygames that made grognards absolutely livid.

# ¿ May 11, 2016 20:21

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Adnachiel posted:

One thing I've started to notice is that Harris likes to reuse the �fanart� that other people made for him. Usually by editing the pictures into new pieces.

I hate this more than everything else shown about this loving game so far. Well, almost everything, but "literally stealing other people's work" is a pretty succinct summary of shittyness.

# ¿ May 11, 2016 22:56

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Even if it's commissions, it's still rather abusive to put them in paid a published work without making that clear ahead of time. Which they may have? I guess? But I ain't holding my breath.

# ¿ May 11, 2016 23:52

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Count Chocula posted:

Really? I remember RPG.net loving DIIV and suggesting it for every setting, so the point where I can look at In Nomine and Mage and Exalted and see which splats can be used to play DIIV.

Nah there was definitely a lot of complaining about it. A lot of people really loved it too, mind you, so it was kind of a tempest in a teapot for a few months there. But it was also like over a decade ago so I'm probably misremembering, or thinking of some other RPG forum at the same time too. :geno:

FMguru posted:

We talk a lot about nineties RPG design and its pathologies in this thread, and I thought I'd sit down and try to enumerate all the traits that make an RPG a specifically nineties RPG. Here's what I came up with:
(...)
Have I missed any?

Honestly, all you really need is "has an aggressive metaplot that basically ignores player actions" and "has some sort of advantage/disadvantage point buy subsystem that is totally metagameable". There's a lot more common elements than that, but those seem to be the hallmarks of the shittiest 90's games. The former demonstrates a complete disregard for any sort of player empowerment, while the latter shows a dramatically uncreative cargo cult design philosophy.

# ¿ May 12, 2016 03:38

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Doresh posted:

But isn't the fanart itself a form of stealing other people's work? They just brought balance to the Weird Transformation Fetish Force.

To avoid a very long and off-topic discussion: no, not really. An artist still owns the rights to their work even if it's a derivative work, that just makes it trickier to sell or market it later on. If the creator of the original work wants to use your art in a published work they still have to pay for it, or at least get a signed waiver or something equivalent.

And yes there is definitely a long history of RPG publishers abusing this idea. I recall an anecdote of Siembieda not paying freelance artists who did commissioned work for his books because he owned the characters and robots and whatever being drawn, so obviously he owned the final art too. :what:

# ¿ May 12, 2016 20:20

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Doresh posted:

It always comes down to money at the end.

Even in a lovely hobby industry like this one people deserve compensation for their labor, and misunderstanding of the laws involved doesn't make it any less skeevy when they're skirted. It's just something that rarely gets prosecuted or punished because the actual amounts involved make it too small to really bother with. :shrug:

And if Soto did get permission then it's kind of moot anyway. But again, considering the edits to make them look new and their prior history I'm not holding my breath there.

# ¿ May 12, 2016 20:33

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Hostile V posted:

A definite offender of "can't do your job worth poo poo" is Pathfinder's official premade characters. I had to play one at Society to sub in for someone in a higher group and they are not good at what they're supposed to do in the slightest.

A thing to remember about about the lovely premade characters is that they were often made midway through a game's development and any changes made to the rules afterwards usually aren't updated on those sheets, and well, most RPGs don't have any appreciable playtesting so the authors literally don't know what makes a well-designed character or not. I mean this is hardly excuses but it sure does... explain a lot about them.

Well that and what ARB mentioned about them being really useful for filling page count with low effort.

# ¿ May 12, 2016 20:46

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Kavak posted:

Yeah, TNG and onwards the Prime Directive is interpreted in an incredibly dumb dogmatic manner- like the writers seem to think it's the Federation's divine law, rather than just one of Starfleet's General Orders.

"We'd have to contact at least one of these aliens to tell them how to prevent their planet from exploding? Then I think we need to consider whether its part of the divine plan of the universe that all of these innocent people die and that we shouldn't violate it."

The prime directive was dumb and dogmatic even in TOS. It only exists to be a plot contrivance so the heroes can struggle against it to do the right thing, or at least provide a reason for avoiding an obvious easy solution. :ssh:

# ¿ May 16, 2016 22:43

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Yeah, I'm positive that he's one of the people who left the RPG industry solely because he could make infinitely more money doing stuff elsewhere rather than because he had problems with it, yeah.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 07:46

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I don't get why people hate on 13th Age, so much, probably because it got propped up as a savior initially. And then when it turned it had actual flaws, people lost their poo poo because they felt betrayed, somehow. Like I said, I don't get it.

I don't really hate the game, it's fine for what it does, but I do have a big issue with a certain part of the fandom for it who were all "it's the new D&D 4e!" before its release despite the fact the game has literally nothing in common mechanically with 4e beyond the usual fantasy elf stuff. 13A is a somewhat loose and narrative game, while 4e was a fairly tightly designed and tactically heavy combat game.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2016 23:27

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

unseenlibrarian posted:

TBF according to Bioware like 85 percent of people picked "Male Soldier Shepard with the default appearance" for all playthroughs, so, uh, yeah, a lot of folks -do- jump to the default basic guy. It's why they randomized race/sex/class for the default in DA:I to see if that'd impact things.

Yeah, in fairness I'm not sure that's less human nature to pick the "boring default" and more the human nature of "click through all this boring stuff to get to the gameplay ASAP". I mean it kind of looks the same from a distance and a lot of people mistake the latter for the former, but they aren't really the same. It's why, right, almost every MMO and similar game randomly picks classes/races for the initial selections to avoid a glut of one particular type.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2016 08:13

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Nancy_Noxious posted:

stay mellow about Pathfinder

.... not sure which ~~thread~~ subforum you've been reading but it ain't this one. :raise:

# ¿ Jun 5, 2016 15:49

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Doresh posted:

Can you imagine the shenanigans that would've ensued if they'd started their business during the Satanic Panic?

I can't, since White Wolf can only exist in any form vaguely recognizable to us by being sprung fully formed from the 90's urban fantasy and horrible RPG design zeitgeists, much the same way Athena burst from Zeus' brow.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2016 07:03

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Siivola posted:

To be fair, very few rule systems paid anything more than lip service to their settings until very recently. Most are just varying complexities of combat engines, with an afterthought of a skill list on the side.

This is a few days back now, but I want to chime in and say that this most definitely isn't true. There are a whole lot of RPGs that cared very deeply about trying to match the mechanics to the theme of the setting even going back to the early 80s, and probably even the late 70s if you want to be generous to stuff like Bunnies & Burrows. It's just the attempts tend to have... mixed success since RPG mechanics were still something in active evolution and development. But even there you started to see almost modern style light-ruled games in the late 80s with things like Teenagers from Outer Space or Toon, and strongly themed crunchier games like Paranoia.

Being a horrible clunky mismatch for its themes was pretty much an issue D&D and its clones and not really an industry-wide thing.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 01:04

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Siivola posted:

I admit to being a bit uneducated on this, but looking back at the big names, it seems like for every Feng Shui there was a Legend of the Five Rings or a Rifts or some other game that didn't get played by the rules even at their writers' tables.

I'll grant Lo5R, but RIFTS is a pretty bad example since it's just an awkward stapling of other game settings on top of Palladium Fantasy rules, which is pretty much just a straight up AD&D heartbreaker. :v:

(And ironically it's not that bad of one. It's a bit poorly balanced and laid out, but it's fairly streamlined and playable compared to the giant kludge that is RIFTS.)

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 08:04

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Doresh posted:

It was written like that in the Books of Gygax and by God, we will make it work.

Ironically, half the things that made XP "work" in basic D&D was forgotten to the detriment of later editions just because it was stuff that was implied around Gygax's table rather than explicitly stated in the books. Like XP was originally gained from treasure, maybe with some bonus for getting out of a dungeon alive. This sounds like a trivial thing but it explains a lot of other mechanics that came up, like random encounters; the longer you spent loving around in the dungeon the more you'd get worn down with nothing to show for it, since random encounters had trivial loot, so it was a reason to keep moving and not just sit around and rest for hours after every battle. Similarly, because loot gave you XP it gave good reason to divide it up relatively fairly - or to do things like shovel newfound gold onto the lowbie replacements for dead characters, onto characters of players who missed a few sessions, and so on.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2016 23:18

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

The Lone Badger posted:

Lodoss War is a D&D campaign as the GM imagines it in his notes, Slayers is what actually happens at the table.

Lodoss War and its assorted series and spinoffs literally was a D&D campaign, or rather a series of works based on the replays/novelizations of the campaign. I mean you can look at it and even pinpoint the moment they swapped from D&D to AD&D and you suddenly saw demihumans that had different classes and stuff like assassins and barbarians appearing. :v:

For various reasons that mostly involve TSR's licensing in Japan being horrible that I'm sure someone besides me can explain better they eventually swapped to Sword World, but it's really kind of interesting to see regardless.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 06:47

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Ewen Cluney posted:

This is absolutely amazing and it's hilarious to see the other side of the "weird foreign RPG" thing. The fact it covers a lot of relatively obscure weird stuff is even better, but I guess that makes sense in its own way too, since the mainstream stuff is a lot more predictable. There hasn't exactly been a big push to translate Sword World or something after all (unless I missed that...)

And yeah. I'm not sure a full translation would be a productive use of time, but a chapter-by-chapter quick summary in F&F would be super great and I'd totally chip in a bit for the effort if need be.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2016 20:43

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Doresh posted:

Heck, White Wolf made a business out of catering to those guys. Especially the oWoD attracted some weird folks. As in "Magick is real, guiz!"

Keep in mind that at least one of these people were a White Wolf writer.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2016 22:04

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

occamsnailfile posted:

Re: Sword World translation, basically that game had the problem of anime licensing in that the creators felt their product was worth WAY more than it would actually make if anyone bothered trying to translate and sell it here. It's mostly only interesting in being western fantasy through a Japanese sort of lens, and some of the other more quirky/cute games already give us that. Ryuutama, what we've been able to see of Meikyuu Kingdom, etc.

Ah, yeah, that sounds logical. I know there's several classic anime series that are a bitch to license because they're super popular in Japan (and maybe some other markets like south america) but nobody knows about or really gives a gently caress about them in America but the companies still want millions for the license.

And ironically it sounds like the reason why Sword World got written to begin with, the D&D licensing in Japan was a complete mess...

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 22:10

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

That's another big gimmick thing yeah. Not sure how prominent it is these days, but during the early 00's anime DVD boom this reason is why a lot of crappy C-tier things nobody would ever buy or watch got released. I forget the exact title, but I know for a fact there was at least one retail release acquired through a deal like this that sold double digit copies. :ssh:

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 22:29

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Kurieg posted:

If I remember the investors meeting notes from a few years back. Their prefered customer base are the people who will buy every figure that they put out, meticulously paint and decorate them, then put them on display and never use them. The game is only valuable as a means to turn people into moneywhales. People who actually play the game for the enjoyment of it are a section of their customer base that they are intentionally trying to kill.

Judging from F2P MMO market dynamics, games being bolstered by super whales seems perfectly. It's not really an inherently bad idea to cater to the profligate.

The problem though is in forgetting that these sorts of whales are ultimately a percentage of your total player base, and more importantly, you don't know which customers will be big spenders until they're already invested in your product. So you absolutely, positively need to have a game that appeals to people with sane budgets with elements that cater to the whales, rather than giant cash walls at the front that new players don't want to surmount because the game isn't exciting or interesting. And that's not even getting into dynamics like how some whale spenders really need other players around to flaunt their wealth/collection in front of...

# ¿ Dec 13, 2016 19:09

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

JackMann posted:

quote:
(...) (They didn�t; most of our current customers weren�t born when the Atari ST came out.)

Holy

they can't even understand what this statement means for their business and how horrible the implication is. Admittedly, it's not really unique to GW since there's several other fandom-based hobbies that circled the wagon and pandered to an insular and aging fanbase instead of trying to get new customers, but still...

# ¿ Dec 14, 2016 09:02

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Mr. Maltose posted:

You and nearly everybody else. It's yet another entry on the list of best games nobody plays.

This is your regular reminder that Mike Pondsmith is a goddamn game design genius and never gets any recognition for it.
_{_{We'll politely ignore Fuzion.}}

# ¿ Dec 17, 2016 01:10

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Midjack posted:

He hits way more often than he misses and is a legit cool dude if you ever encounter him.

Yeah, almost everything he's done has been literally genre defining (CP2020), has brilliant design (TFOS), really fun to play (Falkenstein), or often all of the above. Even Fuzion was a well-intentioned experiment that just fell a bit flat.

Never met him, but kind of wish I had. He's also one of the few prominent African American game developers from the era, too.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2016 02:27

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

I will say there's a reason V:TM (and the oWoD in general) is still relatively well regarded and still played despite the nWoD being far, far more thematically coherent. And a lot of it does come down to being able to fold, spindle, and mutilate the oWoD themes for specific playstyles and campaigns without too much hassle, even if that meant the games were looser overall.

_{(The rest comes down to inertia and people who bought RPGs in the 90s to follow metaplot rather than game, but hey.)}

# ¿ Dec 23, 2016 08:42

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

I forget the exact details, but there was a big push from Paramount late into TNG's life to try and bring in a women audience and for whatever reason this basically resulted in a small assortment of excruciating soap opera style romance episodes, because the TV industry is a cesspit. I wouldn't be surprised Voyager got hit by the same sort of direction, and I think DS9 partly did so well because it was the "secondary" series so they had a lot more leeway to avoid weird mandates from the producers.

Also this makes me want to pull out the old Last Unicorn TNG RPG and review it, except I won't because it's staggeringly boring and with horrible clunky rules and I can't be assed to spend effort on it. Which I guess is a review? There you go. :effort:

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 00:53

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Doresh posted:

Wonderful. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if all these 90s metaplots were actually failed novel pitches.

This is a few days and a few pages back, but somehow I wound up unsubbed from the thread and had to wade through 700 replies. Anyway...

An important thing to keep in mind that in the late 80s you saw TSR release the Dragonlance novels, and then not long after that the assorted Forgotten Realms series (Drizzt, Elminster, et al), and basically all of these fiction lines were suddenly making them an order of magnitude more money than they were making on RPG sales since you could get schlocky paperbacks into way more retail venues than games. The various game lines started to basically become testing grounds for new crappy fantasy fiction, and other publishers started to take notice. Now there was a general push for metaplot-heavy stuff as the 90s went along anyway due to RPG buying habits, but almost every major game line started putting out related novels in hope of capturing some of those sweet Waldenbooks dollars. Some did alright (FASA's Battletech novels were pretty big at the time and a large part of why they got cartoon and video game licenses, for example), but most didn't. TORG itself got I... think a trilogy of novels that tied into the game metaplot in obnoxious ways. Maybe there were some more too? But it didn't really take off, and obviously wasn't enough to save WEG in the long run.

So yeah, that statement is literally true. :downs:

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 07:52

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Evil Mastermind posted:

The Torg novel trilogy actually takes place before the core boxed set. So Torg actually has three novels' worth of backstory before the game even starts. There were other novels after that, but I don't think they were tied to the metaplot.

Aha. Yeah I never really read them. Since it's Torg and 90s RPGs I'm going to unfairly assume that they have all sorts of important setting information that is not usefully gotten across in the actual game material. :v:

Semi-relatedly, I'm still bitter over the lovely, lovely Dark Sun novels and the even shittier revised edition of the setting based off them.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 16:03

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Kurieg posted:

Is that 4e dark sun? or one of the earlier ones, cause 4e was my first real exposure to it.

Nah, 4e Dark Sun is great, and it even did some creative things to fit most of the 4e-isms into the setting.

Back in the twilight of D&D2e, TSR did a crappy triology of Dark Sun novels that kind of ignored the core themes of the setting, introduced a lot of really dumb elements, and killed/destroyed a lot of the main antagonists and plot threads. A little while after this they release a "Revised" box set of the setting to include all these elements, which sounds good right? Well, nope! The writing was way worse, the books were laid out in ways to blatantly pad page counts and save money (cheap paper, enormous margins that literally took up half the page, wide spacing between lines, etc), all the great Brom and Baxa art was nowhere in sight and given sparse and horrible replacements, and so on. It was a complete travesty compared to the original setting. And the supplements weren't any better, and- well I won't say they were the worst 2e supplements since wow there's a lot of competition, but they were universally pretty bad and continued to completely miss the point of the setting.

It was a goddamn mess and didn't last very long, thankfully.

EDIT: Actually lemme quote my own post from 200ish pages back on this:

Asimo posted:

I dug the core revised box set out of the box I shoved it in to forget about it and took a lovely phone photo of a random page. Quality isn't intended to be good, but it'll give you the idea of the layout...

You should be able to instantly notice two things. The first, two inch margins with nothing in them. The second, the paper quality's so bad that you can see the other page through it. It's barely a step above newsprint. And yes, more papyrus.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 16:56

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

PurpleXVI posted:

With regards to Revised 2e Dark Sun, it's really a shame they hosed it up so hard, because a good few of the locations expanded on in Revised are interesting, and it gives you more world map to play with... (...)

Yeah the expanded map was one of the (the only?) better parts of the revised box, since there were all sorts of bizarre locations and implied adventure hooks. Of course all the new places that were actually elaborated on were horrible, out of theme, or both, and a big focus of the revised stuff was the staggeringly bad halfling crap, so maybe it's better a lot of it was just implied.

I really want to harp on the writing more but it's been ages since I properly read it. It just sticks out to me since I thought it was god awful even in my dumbass "buy every D&D thing" uncritical teenage nerd phase.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 23:29

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

LatwPIAT posted:

atrocious Mel Uran art.

Hey I like her art. :downs:

The problem is that it was such an abysmally poor fit for the WoD and just helped to highlight a lot of the other super dumb issues with KotE, yes.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

There was also a Kindred of the East splat that was all about just getting back to your life before you became a vampire. Which, of course, was heretical, because you're supposed to pretend you're alive but not pretend that much, or something. Which was too bad, because a number of the heretical groups were way more interesting than the core groups.

My personal favorite was one from that same book where they basically said gently caress it to their equivalent of the masquerade and started up personal cults who worshipped them as gods because they literally came back from the dead and have super powers so obviously they're destined for greater things, right?

Yeah it's really amazing how the B-tier splats for the line were so much more fun and useful.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2017 16:31

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I tried reading the first issue and mostly just remember a sensation of confusion and the rest is just blackout. I haven't tried to tackle it since, and prefer to pretend Appleseed Hypernotes was the last thing he did before just realizing he could draw tits for a living and didn't need to bother with pesky writing.

I have the strong suspicion that the translation for the GitS mangas was... not that good. Not entirely due to the fault of dark horse since there's a lot of unusual terminology, esoteric concepts, and Shirow just being a weird (and arguably not that good) writer in general, but most of the video adaptations are comparatively a lot more comprehensible and approachable.

And going back to the cyberpunk humanity stuff a page or two back, it's pretty transparently a game balance mechanic that got handwavey justifications in the original games with it ("Pondsmith really loved AD Police" for CP2020, something something magic uh whatever for Shadowrun) and kinda got cargo culted into later games. It's an interesting theme to deal with in fiction... but only when you're considering stuff like full-body replacements or intentionally discarding parts and similar things that mess with the sense of self. But anything less than that? I mean I'm technically a cyborg and I'm pretty sure I have only the usual goon levels of misanthropy and low self esteem. :v:

Let alone all the people with hip replacements, artificial hearts, prosthetic limbs, or what have you.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2017 12:09

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Ratoslov posted:

Yeah, everything with anything to have to do with Japan is super bad. Shadowrun is the most embarassingly orientalist RPG that is not entirely about embarassing orientalism. For example, traditionally the absolute best sword type in the game is katanas.

It's important to remember that Shadowrun came out in 1989, and this was kind of at the height of that weird pop culture Japan fad in America. I mean poo poo like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn't emerge from a vacuum, and when you combine that with the Reagan-era paranoia of "Japan is an inscrutable economic superpower that will inevitably crush the west!!" you wind up with... well, this sort of nerd culture stuff. I'm not sure if it's the most dated element of Shadowrun but it's certainly the second if not, and it's hardly alone there. There's a lot of other games from the late 80s/early 90s era that share the same sort of orientalist bullshit due to the nerd fashions of the time; we've already got RIFTS Japan a page back, TORG was covered recently, etc.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 08:49

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

unseenlibrarian posted:

An example that always gets me is that Eclipse Phase puts "What the hell you do in the setting" front and center fairly early in the book, but it's one of the games where "What the hell do I do with it" comes up most often in threads about it.

This is a real interesting case, honestly. Since while it is up front about the things you can do with the setting, the character generation is so absurdly broad that it's really easy to focus on that and get off track. It really might be a game that would be better off with a general setting/core rule book centered on a single element and then secondary core books for different parts of the setting, just to force the reader to focus on the specific themes and locations they want to use.

On the other hand this gives me horrible Exalted flashbacks, so maybe not.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 20:55

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Also a lot of the "what do I do with it?" sort of arguments are really more "what sort of antagonists do I write up for the group and how do I make them mechanically fair?", and that's a thing a lot of games have historically had problems with.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 22:42

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

My weird personal issue with the 13A icons is that they're simultaneously too specific and too generic. Like if wanted to do a setting like, say, Dark Sun let alone anything even more esoteric then half or more of them would be useless, or at least need to be reskinned to the point where you're basically making new ones anyway. But at the same time they're just so... open in their niche that they don't provide any real interesting hooks to work off of. It's totally a petty sort of gripe that doesn't affect the game much, I know, but it always amazes me that people keep pointing to them as one of the highlights of the game or something.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 02:13

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:18

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Yeah, GURPS is super weird that way. The actual game is relatively simple, to the point SJG's done a few quickstart style pamphlet books that give basically the whole game in... 16? 24? pages. Somewhere around there. But the sheer amount of skills, mechanics, benefits, whatever you can bolt onto those rules and the thoroughly researched early supplements gave the game a weird fanbase of super-simulationist people that focused heavily on that even if it may not have been the best game for it. This is what lead to the sheer insanity of GURPS Vehicles and Robots and some of the other books around then.

Of course there's other issues with the game too, where it really kind of breaks down at higher power levels of play but since it's "universal" they kept doing stuff for superheroes and other fantastic 700+ point builds that were intolerable to actually design and play, but hey.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2017 02:05

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