GURPS vs. Pathfinder / d20 / etc.?

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Novembermike
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Post by Novembermike »

Starmaker wrote:
Novembermike wrote:Yep. Quite a few of the disadvantages aren't even designed for PCs. In a standard heroic game traits like Bully, Chronic Depression or Sadist probably aren't suitable, and if you're playing a human then Invertebrate makes absolutely no sense.
Oh that's absolutely great! Now a thug who beats me up at the alley get to have Bully, Sadist, Dependent (kitten) and Dies Like In A Month to put some real power behind his punches and get to be a 25 point character.
Why would you put point restrictions on NPCs? They're there for PCs because you want to keep the party balanced, but why would you do that for characters that play a limited role in the story?
kzt
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Post by kzt »

In typical HERO, NPCs have as many points as are needed to make the story work. For mooks it really isn't worthwhile doing detail on the differences between thug number 3 and 5, as they will last about 1 phase in combat. But mind controlled fanatics will fight differently than a few hired gang-bangers, so noting that might be kind of useful.

For any serious NPC disadvantages/complications are really useful, as they both give the GM a general idea on how to play the NPC and allows the players something to worth with. Bullying sadistic bad guys approach how to deal with annoying PCs quite differently than overconfident arrogant bad guys, and PCs can use that if they choose to.

Things like dies in a month are just stupid, as are things like "powers only work on Mondays" for supervilliens who can choose to only get in fights on Mondays.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

the players didn't want to bother with yet another new system
This in a nutshell is the main appeal of Universal multi-genre systems. Like Gurps, HERO or Nexus : The Infinite City.

That said, time has proven that there really isn't a huge market for it, as GURPS is rare, HERO is 98% in the single genre of Champions and I'll be surprised if anyone here knows what the successful version (and single-genre) of Nexus is without googling it first.
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Novembermike
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Post by Novembermike »

I agree. I'd say that a large portion of DnD's success is that it's designed to be "Baby's First RPG". If you have a new group and you want to run a game it's pretty simple. Everyone chooses a class and follows the instructions for building that class, the DM chooses some monsters for them to fight based on the encounter level of the monster and they fight it. The first game of GURPS usually has everyone building characters that don't actually work in the story the GM made so they have to go back to the drawing board (aliens in the west or a sniper in the stone age). Then they actually play the game and the GM puts out some reasonable enemies from a book that one of the characters absolutely dominates while everyone else is trying to stay alive because they didn't put enough points into combat skills. Eventually it all works and they figure everything out (at which point they can play almost any kind of game) but a lot of groups will just drop it and go back to dnd.
icyshadowlord
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Post by icyshadowlord »

Funny how I fail to describe my GURPS experiences in words the same way I would describe my D&D ones. It's just...I have only played D&D and GURPS so far, and the latter has been so different from the former (mostly in the good way) that I cannot even say much.

All I can say is that I will NEVER be a GM in a GURPS game, because my brain could not apparently handle it. (I've seen my two other pals manage it, and it seems far beyond the capabilities of someone who has only known how to DM a D&D game.)

And secondly...the two games play far too differently for me to want to even make comparisons. All in all, I can only go by personal experiences, and even then all I can say is that "I like both."

...and now I feel like I did not contribute to this discussion AT ALL.
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Novembermike
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Post by Novembermike »

That's actually a decent contribution. The major difference I feel is that DnD tends to have more tools for keeping the game balanced (level appropriate monsters, a certain base level of combat ability for a player) while GURPS has more pitfalls but allows for a much more diverse array of games that can be played.
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