OSSR: GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade

[Prak]

A quick search turns this up-


Of course the maps were like 31 sq. feet when laid out, and the box was 24 fucking pounds.

That's actually pretty insane. I approve.

[TheFlatline]

Yeah, that's the box. It's been a while but I remember it being freakishly large. And 24 pounds sounds about right.

The funny thing is, Ogre is a fun game to play as kind of a throw-away on occasion. I don't find it a particularly engaging war game.

But it's one of those bizarre artifacts like Call of Cthulhu or Space Hulk that hasn't really evolved the ruleset in 35 years, so you can see what gaming used to be like pretty directly.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 4: Disciplines



Disciplines provide, essentially, the mechanical appeal of Vampire: the Masquerade. If you go back to Stoker, Dracula is an aberration. Most vampires in Stoker's novel never leave their crypt, and show relatively few supernatural abilities beyond the desire and ability to fuck Keanu Reeves. Dracula went to the legendary Scholmance, and could transform into animals and shit. He was unique. Subsequent movies and books expanded on that, giving vampires different powers - although far from the full X-Men like gamut displayed in the later Twilight books - and Mark Rein-dot-matrix-Hagen capitalized on that. This was good, and this was bad.

On the plus side, divvying up the powers meant it was easier to distinguish between different clans - not everybody had the same capabilities, and some powers were unique - and it gave players things they could aspire to, in having their characters learn different powers and thus level up in a game where you didn't really level up except through carefully orchestrated murders (as opposed to the indiscriminate slaughter of D&D style games, where you kill a hundred bunnies and now you can read Elvish.)

On the down side, nobody could be Dracula. Nobody could ever really aspire to be Dracula; the number of points required to be the necessary dots was staggering. The Disciplines were not balanced well amid the clans, and even between each other. The mechanics for the Disciplines were themselves godawful, and many of the powers useless stepping stones on the way to a power you did want. Worse, as the game expanded the number of disciplines and powers exploded, and even drastic revisions and outright retcons to the Discipline list didn't help much...or last long. They're still dealing with some of the 2nd Ed. Discipline issues in Classic Vampire: the Masquerade today.


This is about how I feel when I think about needing to do an OSSR of cV:tM in 8-9 years.

I'd like to say GURPS approached this with their usual mixture of pragmatism and scrapped the whole thing and wrote something better. But not...quite. They had the relative advantage of only needing to cover the subset of Disciplines used by the seven major clans of the Camarilla, and they were helped in that Vampire 2nd edition had already established Thaumaturgy as having different paths. But because they were catering to some of Vampire's own audience, they also decided to keep all of the individual powers for each Discipline, plus the general "How do I shot web?" rules on using Disciplines and augmenting them. If White Wolf was behind this product, this would take up the rest of the fucking book. But this is GURPS, dammit. So Jeff Koke does it in 22 pages.


No, seriously, how do I shot web? When I was Embraced I lost all of my previous splat's powers and need to convert.

Most of the Disciplines are therefor pretty much identical to the first five dots for Animalism, Auspex, Dominate, Obfuscate, Presence, and Protean. The odd ducks out are Celerity, Fortitude, Potence, and Thaumaturgy.

Celerity, Fortitude, and Potence are the "physical" disciplines - they let you move faster/have more attacks, tank, and hulk out. Instead of having a different power per dot level, they had one power that increased linearly with dots. They were considered common disciplines in every edition of Vampire, and were - as Frank likes to argue - laughably overpriced and overvalued. Being able to lift a car is cool, but not as cool or versatile as turning into a swarm of bats. It's worse at the higher levels, where you gain one die of damage smacking something and the Tremere warlock is throwing down fireballs or turning into a giant bat-creature.

That is a really long belt.

GURPS seemed to recognize the issue...sortof. Each of the three disciplines became Buffs (or in their parlance, "Augmenting Disciplines"). No skill roll is required (unlike the other disciplines), but it costs more to buy. The buffs you get have a duration that varies from 10 minutes at Level 1 to 6 hours at Level 5. The bonuses given are geometric - that is, Fortitude 1 gives you +1 Damage Resistance for 10 minutes, Fortitude 2 gives you +2 DR for 30 min, Fortitude 3 +4 DR/1 hour, etc. That's good. But the rest of it still sucks. And you're paying a lot for the privilege. Still better than White Wolf's take on it.



Thaumaturgy has been replaced wholesale by GURPS Magic. The explanation is that in-character, the Tremere call is a Discipline, but out-of-character and mechanically it works exactly like regular GURPS spellcasting, where each spell is a separate skill and they're arranged in "Colleges," and the only difference is that vampires can spend Blood Points instead of Fatigue when casting spells. That's actually kind of clever. It actually looks farther ahead than White Wolf ever did at the ever-expanding Path system, and just says "fuck it, we have this other thing that already works, we're gonna slap a new label on it and just use that." Done.

Vampires also get exclusive access to the Blood College, which is basically a handful of spells that mimics the Blood Path, and a bunch of "Ritual Spells" which mimic familiar Thaumaturgy rituals like Defense of the Sacred Haven and Deflection of Wooden Doom; for vampires that like the Lure of Flames or Weather Control, they have spells for that too. Sorted! That was almost painless.

But wait, there's more.

GURPS being GURPS, they don't leave the chapter on that. There's an optional rule for just flat-out using psi abilities from GURPS Psionics, and notes on how those might interact with Disciplines. There are optional rules for Augmenting Disciplines, where they decouple the cost, bonus, and duration for the physical disciplines - so for example, if you don't want to pay 10 Fatigue to have +10 Strength for 6 hours, you could pay 6 Fatigue and have +10 Strength for 10 minutes. Or +1 Strength for 6 hours. You see where this is going. It's fun with charts, but it's actually a step in the right direction. Honestly, I'd love to see a version of vampire where every vampire can do this without buying Disciplines, and then your combats turn into Supersaiyan kung fu hulking-out contests where you try to balance speed, strength, toughness, length of combat, and how much ki/blood points you have to spend/can spend.


Gear: secondu!

And that's Disciplines. Not much to be honest, but then there wasn't a lot to cover. There's a mix of good and bad in this chapter, but the things they didn't fix are things that were broken in the original. The more I think about it, the more I like the angle they went with blood sorcery. Yes, GURPS Magic is a complicated supplement and the skill-based system is complicated and clunky and requires algebra, but so does the rest of it at this point. And it actually is more consistent than White Wolf, because all the other Disciplines (except the Augmenting Disciplines) are skill-based too.

Next chapter: Clans

[Ancient History]

Let's wrap this up.

Chapter 5: Clans



This short chapter is the two-page spread deal that White Wolf went to for every clan/sect/tribe/[category_label] in their books. Its just the GURPS guys working due diligence. So this is their version of White Wolf's version of the seven Camarilla clans...plus the Caitiffs. As you might expect, Jeff Koke actually does a strong job; the only clunky part involves adapting the clan disadvantages to GURPS mechanics. The clan write-ups aren't straight from Vampire - I'm pretty sure White Wolf were being dicks about actually quoting lots of stuff - but it's a snapshot of the clans of that era; Malkavians aren't full fishmalk, but presented as being slightly off and with a tradition of pranks, but that's as far as it goes.

I guess the big surprise for this chapter is the Caitiff, or clanless; unlike in the game where they have three different sets of costs for buying disciplines based on whether they're in-clan, out-of-clan, or you're a Caitff, here they just say "Caitiff pick any three Disciplines to be 'in-clan.'" Refreshingly simple. The Caitiff clan weakness is default Kindred Status -2.

The other major change is that they actually present rules for the Caitiff to join the Camarilla, discover their true heritage, and even join their clan. It's a weird approach, but no more than the idea of Caitiff themselves; after all, if the clan disadvantages and powers and stuff are in the blood, then bastard vampires should all have a clan regardless...but that's not actually the case in Vampire. Here, they give you the ability for a Caitiff to discover their true heritage and join a clan, but don't mention the clan disadvantages at all. I think Koke just forgot about them, considering he was clear that normally Clan weaknesses cannot be bought off.

Chapter 6: Campaigns


This is the kind of chapter where White Wolf normally drops the ball and GURPS usually shines - so, no surprise that GURPS knocks it out of the park. This is the chapter where they talk about the kinds of games you can run using GURPS Vampire - and these are by in large much better than anything that White Wolf has ever come up with. One of my favorites is "Primogen":

The characters are the primary Kindred of a medium-sized city (less than 1 million) - about the size of Charleston, North Carolina, or Madison, Wisconsin. In some sense, they "own" it; they certainly rule it. because of the size of the city, the Kindred might even by the only vampires living there.

What a great fucking idea. Being Princess of Madison may not be on any goth girl's to-do list, but think what a different campaign that is than any of the shit in White Wolf's Vampire, where you're constantly cow-towing to an unbelievable hierarchy of Elders and playing by their rules. In this campaign, the PCs make the rules, and enforce them. They might have to deal with new vampires wandering in on their turf and fucking up the Masquerade, or even deal with organized crime that has magical support. They can blood bond the mayor without worrying whose toes they're stepping on; they could cover up an elder that wakes up and eats a kindergarten. The possibilities are endless!

And the whole chapter is like that, looking at different kinds of campaigns that players and gamemasters might want to play and looking at how you might play them. There's two paragraphs given over the idea of a traveling vampire rock band for fuck's sake, playing their gigs at night and feeding off groupies. There's sidebars on using Kindred with other GURPS settings. Granted, some of them are a bit weird...

GURPS Aztecs details the life of the ancient Mexican indians, from their Mayan roots to their defeat by Spanish invaders. Were there Kindred among the Indians?

Okay sure, it's not much, but it's more than Vampire would say about the subject until Mexico by Night.

The chapter ends with "Mortal Desires: A Vampire Adventure" by Jeff Koke and Chris McCubbin.


McCubbin sounds irrepressibly dirty.

The crux of the adventure is one of those bits of lore that Vampire made up and then left in the dust: there's a 100-year old vampire in New Orleans that wants to be mortal again, and she thinks she can do it if she drains her sire, her grandsire, her great-grandsire, and her great-great-grandsire. She's already diablerized the first three, and is moving in for the fourth - cue the PCs. A Justicar suspects her of diablerie, and enlists the PCs to help him figure out if she's actually behind it. One small problem: the Justicar is also her next target.

A chunk of this adventure involves talking about Texas Kindred politics (it is assumed that the PCs are in Texas and traveling east through Houston to get to New Orleans; the reason for the Justicar not springing for airline tickets is one part not trusting new-fangled planes and two parts being a miserly dick); this is actually given a lengthy sidebar - all that one remains, one presumes, of the Texas location book for GURPS Vampire that was planned and shelved. It's actually not bad. No, I take it back, it's actually great compared to Vampire, where you start the game without any idea of what the vampire political situation anywhere in the world is. The skinny is actually quite skinny:

The Camarilla of Texas is divided by a unique and precarious political situation. Basically, there are only three princes in the entire state of Texas, one in Dallas, one in Houston and one in El Paso. Between them, they control the entire state. The prince of Dallas controls eastern and central Texas from Austin to the Oklahoma line, Houston controls central and eastern Texas from San Antonio down to the Mexican order. El Paso controls the vast but underpopulated western half of the state.

There's more, but you get the drift.

Anyway, road trip involves brief squabbles for local politics in Houston and swamp vampires (Anarchs) in Louisiana before hitting the Big Easy; you could probably still run this almost any way as long as the PCs are driving in. The PCs meet with the Prince, a thinly-veiled version of Robert Johnson - total respect knuckles for including a Blues Legend. Then the PCs are on their own to hunt down this mysterious vampire - with plenty of resources on "it's 1 AM, can I go fill up on blood on Bourbon Street" and "Let's just break into her house and get this over with" details actually filled in; it's a fairly robust little adventure.

The second act closes with an ambush on the PCs during their investigation - a well-planned ambush with a couple of gunmen and a firebomb. The third act is a dinner party at the diablerist's mansion. There's a lot of Malkavians in this adventure, but the actual mandatory insanities aren't played as goofball issues - more like everybody seems normal but their demons lie deeper. The diablerist has been planning this party (to drain the Justicar), so while the PCs might be expecting just a 10th-generation Malkavian, they're also dealing with a brood of six 12th-generation vampires and the swamp anarchs from earlier (who are being paid for their assistance). Outnumbered (likely) and outgunned (probably), this adventure looks to get interesting no matter if the PCs win or lose...

If the Justicar survives; the diablerist challenges him to an old-fashioned duel. Which the PCs may or may not interfere with. There's even a couple ideas for potential sequels and recurring NPCs. It's a bit railroady in some respects, but there's a decent amount of action in this adventure - there's meat to it, even without any maps or anything. Very solid.

Chapter 7: Conversions
What it says on the tin; how to convert you White Wolf Vampires characters into GURPS Vampire characters. The largest part of this is trying to convert Vampire Talents/Skills/Knowledges to GURPS skills. Some of these are easy ("Leadership converts to the Leadership skill.") some like Firearms involves GURPS skill default rules and get kinda messy. There's a recommendation on converting Personality Archetypes using GURPS advantages and Disadvantages, though they stress this is purely optional, and they give several characters pre- and post-conversion stats so players have examples to work from. There's a sidebar on what to do about final point differences and handling the campaign transition from Vampire mechanics to GURPS mechanics. And that's the chapter.

I should add, conversion used to be a bigger thing, back when players made relatively fewer characters and were more invested in them; you don't see it as much these days as you did back in the 90s, when there were systems to convert your D&D character to Shadowrun via Torg or something. Hell, the first thing I published for Shadowrun was an SR3->SR4 character converter. GURPS has enough options it tends to do fairly well for converting to it, but has so many options that converting from it often causes weird changes and omissions because the target game lacks some of the GURPS options.

In the back there's a lexicon of Vampire terminology, and that most infinite of rarities in any Vampire book, an index. And that's the book.



Final Thoughts
This book is about what you would expect, once you've learned to expect it. The drop dead is that this book is competent; the mechanics are no worse than other GURPS mechanics, the setting is imported almost entirely as-is from Vampire with only a few almost imperceptible tweaks unless you have a raving fan-boner for the minutiae of V:tM. You could almost wonder why this is a book at all, when it really amounts to a glorified conversion document for players that want to run their vampire games with GURPS instead of the Storyteller system. Like swapping out the engine on a VW Bug.


Down boys.

Except...except...it's remarkably clear and concise. It's old school, some of the world hadn't been built yet, and Jeff Koke was basically boiling the Vampire main sourcebook down to its concentrated essence, but it works. What should be a laughable joke conversion book turns into...another, pretty good GURPS supplement. You could play this. You could mix this with other GURPS books and still play this. You could have Kindred in Space in a Cyberpunk Future, and it still works. There is potential here that is lacking from your average Vampire game, partially because you don't have the metaplot but also partially because...well, it's a GURPS book. It's made to be used with other GURPS book. You can play with it on its own, and it'll be fine, but it also plug-and-plays with other things, which Vampire is consistently bad at.

And, to echo what someone said about GURPS Traveller - I think GURPS Vampire gives a briefer, more concise and clearer view of Vampire than most of the Vampire main books do. It does lack some of the atmosphere and wank, but it has all the right pieces laid out and shows you how they work - and they put some actual fucking thought into the campaigns, while White Wolf just vomits onto the keyboard for page after page and hits print.

I won't say it's the best GURPS book. But it's a GURPS book, and it's at least in the running for the best Vampire book.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What should be a laughable joke conversion book turns into...another, pretty good GURPS supplement. You could play this. You could mix this with other GURPS books and still play this. You could have Kindred in Space in a Cyberpunk Future, and it still works. There is potential here that is lacking from your average Vampire game, partially because you don't have the metaplot but also partially because...well, it's a GURPS book. It's made to be used with other GURPS book. You can play with it on its own, and it'll be fine, but it also plug-and-plays with other things, which Vampire is consistently bad at.

Goddammit, AH, I know that I shouldn't play GURPs and I know WHY I shouldn't play GURPs but it's reviews like this that make me want to forget all that and play GURPs anyway.

Never before has competence been so depressing.

[Ancient History]

I have a soft spot for GURPS. I know all the down sides to it. I know all the upsides to Vampire. But when you put them together like this...the fun parts of Vampire were never that fun to me. It was always the game that you might pick up a book to follow or to build some hypothetical character to achieve a localized munchkin singularity of power and look-at-the-shit-I-can-get-away-with-in-canon!, but honestly who the fuck cares about building Pun-Pun in a game that interacts with Mage? The extended storyline and metaplot in Vampire isn't even good; the last couple of years were a slow-moving trainwreck of terrible decisions and bad writing leading up to Gehenna, which I still maintain is one of the worst and most fucking insulting books for RPGs ever produced, and the entire writing staff should be ashamed and feel guilty for writing it.

But GURPS...that's the thing with GURPS. It's never one person's vision. It's never "this is the one true way things are." It lacks something of the worldbuilding and the metaplot, but because of that it's kinda of timeless. Yes, the mechanics are convoluted and clunky and we know there's broken bits but...GURPS will never hurt you. GURPS will never betray you. GURPS will never raise your blood pressure by twenty points in a single sitting. GURPS can do ANYTHING. If Steve Jackson did GURPS Sex, then the d20 Book of Erotic Fantasy would cover itself and go hide in a fucking corner and weep at the perfection. There might be anal circumference ratings, but it would be an Optional Rule and there'd be a solid reason presented both for using them and not using them. It's the magic of GURPS - you know that if they do a book, they're going to do it properly.

Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges. Maybe I should compare GURPS, which is really a system, to Storyteller - but then you see what a terrible system Storyteller is! The only advantage that Vampire has over GURPS is the setting material and GURPS can present it better than Vampire can.

[/edit]There is another side of GURPS...but that would require an OSSR of GURPS Illuminati to explore.

[Mask_De_H]

So basically you cannibalize GURPS books for their high quality material and work in a system you're comfortable with? Or is GURPS Lite workable?

[TheFlatline]

Great OSSR.

I'd love to see the Illuminati one, considering how much of a love fest SJGames has for the Illuminatus! Trilogy.

[Eikre]

Oh my god that's the most perfect thing to post in a Vampire OSSR ever.

[Ancient History]

For the Twihard/True Blood fan that has everything (except a date.)

[Prak]

Alternatively-

(Warning- NSFW)

[Archmage Joda]

So then, what are the upsides and downsides of GURPS, particularly its 4th edition (the one I have access to)? Is it still playable and fun times possible, just look out for certain pitfalls, or is it a mechanics nightmare? Would I be better served using GURPS Lite as my core, and how well does the default magic system work?

[Ancient History]

The upsides of GURPS is that they're extremely competent; each individual GURPS book is a great asset devoted to whatever subject it's about, and they maintain a high standard of quality in that regard. In 4th edition they made Infinite Worlds from GURPS Time Travel/Alternate Earths the standard setting for the game, so there's a little more continuity and a better excuse to mix-and-match sourcebooks - although you can just as easily ignore it if you want to. GURPS Lite games tend to be terrific adaptations of stuff like Hellboy and Discworld. There are a bazillion options in the game, and it really is a toolkit for building practically any type of character, from a straight fighter to a superhero to a clockwork rabbit consulting detective.

On the downside...well, as Frank pointed out, the fact that everything has a cost in GURPS, no matter how nonutilitarian, is rampant throughout the game. It's really easy to build characters that break any particular setting unless the GM is stringent. The mechanics are still incredibly fussy and tend to get complicated; different settings have wildly different power levels and point costs are still only a very relative indication of actual value - and sometimes not even that. And it's still a game where, as people like to say "First, you design the game."

Moderate downside, I don't think they're *printing* a lot of books these days; most of the newest releases seem to be PDF-only, although I admit I haven't been keeping up lately.

[Username17]

AncientHistory covered most of it. Another thing that bears consideration is that while it was well intentioned in the late 80s, "universalism" is in fact a crock. Even fucking story gamers will grudgingly admit that system matters - every rule you have makes the game better at simulating one thing and worse at simulating everything else (and it's only a good rule if the thing it helps you simulate was the thing you wanted). So for all GURPS likes to talk about how you can play anything, you can't actually play those things in their idiom, you can only play those different things translated to the idiom GURPS happens to have.

Which brings us to another problem that GURPS has, which is that at its core it's coming from a pretty similar place as RuneQuest: basically a D&D hack made by and for people who felt that D&D wasn't tracking enough fiddly details.

Now don't get me wrong: Masquerade had terrible combat mechanics, and nWoD mechanics managed to be even worse. Masquerade provided different descriptions for what exactly you could do with super strength every place they mentioned it. But the fact that GURPS is consistent and exacting with what super strength does isn't better when what it does in the game isn't appropriate to the genre.

Bad rules that you're obviously are going to have to throw out to play the game are certainly a bad thing. But they are actually better than rules that aren't obviously bad that you should throw out but don't know any better. Infinite loops aren't as bad for the game as really big bonuses. And GURPS is basically full of really big bonuses.

-Username17

[Red_Rob]

the last couple of years were a slow-moving trainwreck of terrible decisions and bad writing leading up to Gehenna, which I still maintain is one of the worst and most fucking insulting books for RPGs ever produced, and the entire writing staff should be ashamed and feel guilty for writing it.

And there isn't an OSSR of this book?

Regarding GURPS, for reasons I cannot adequately explain I could never get into it. HERO I could get through fine and we played several campaigns using it, but even though I own the GURPS corebook it never quite grokked with me.

[Ancient History]

There's no OSSR on Gehenna for roughly the same reason there's no OSSR on World of Darkness: Gypsies or Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. They're so fucking bad either Frank is going to damage his liver or I'm going to start frothing at the mouth. Either way, they're guaranteed to lower life expectancy.

[TheFlatline]

There's no OSSR on Gehenna for roughly the same reason there's no OSSR on World of Darkness: Gypsies or Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. They're so fucking bad either Frank is going to damage his liver or I'm going to start frothing at the mouth. Either way, they're guaranteed to lower life expectancy.

Yeah, Gehenna was pretty bad. If memory serves one of the scenarios is literally The Blob That Ate New York (only it's Tzmitce or however you fucking spell his name turning into a tumor basically). The "canon" ending of everyone sitting and praying/feeling like moody bitches in a church for 40 nights was a massive letdown.

Time of Judgement had like two pretty good endings overall. One of them I think strangely enough was the Changeling ending Starlight Express, which was a good read but would make a shitty game (I think they appreciated this when they wrote it, because it read more like a story than something that was supposed to be played). I also enjoyed the batshit over the top ending to Werewolf, I think it was called Ragnarok, where you *started* the Apocalypse by basically blowing the moon up and going more psycho from there.

[Prak]

There's no OSSR on Gehenna for roughly the same reason there's no OSSR on World of Darkness: Gypsies or Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. They're so fucking bad either Frank is going to damage his liver or I'm going to start frothing at the mouth. Either way, they're guaranteed to lower life expectancy.

Hey now, I drunk-viewed FATAL in it's entirety.

[Omegonthesane]

There's no OSSR on Gehenna for roughly the same reason there's no OSSR on World of Darkness: Gypsies or Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. They're so fucking bad either Frank is going to damage his liver or I'm going to start frothing at the mouth. Either way, they're guaranteed to lower life expectancy.

Hey now, I drunk-viewed FATAL in it's entirety.

Is your liver not up to the task of Gehenna then?

[mlangsdorf]

Or is GURPS Lite workable?

GURPS Lite is GURPS, the Highlights edition. It's the minimal set of rules in 32 pages to get you started playing GURPS. But it's not different than the rest of GURPS, and SJ Games expects you to use GURPS Lite as a gateway to more GURPS stuff.

It's really more of an introductory game book than a different game. Any game you wouldn't want to play with GURPS is something you wouldn't want to play with GURPS Lite.

All that said, GURPS is playable and versatile within a fairly wide range of games and genres. You can play Buffy the Vampire Slayer or a gritty Vietnam historical or Pathfinder or a modern action movie with it. If you have a group that's resistant to learning new games but you want to play a couple of different genres, it's not a bad choice. It's certainly no more unbalanced or aggravating than any edition of D&D or Shadowrun or Exalted, and all of those games have plenty of support on the Den despite their manifest and often recounted flaws.

[DSMatticus]

GURPS and HERO and et al are arguably the most imbalanced games it is possible to play. The metrics they use to determine nominal character power (points) have almost exactly fuck all to do with actual character power, and even once you identify the problem there's no systematic way to identify breakdowns. I can tell you that a level 10 fighter is expected to be more powerful than a level 5 fighter, and I can tell you that D&D has systematic flaws which cause fighters to underperform relative to wizards. But if you show me a HERO character built on 300 points and a HERO character built on 450 points and declare that they are both blaster types, I still can't tell you a god damn thing about which is the better character. I like HERO, but I don't have any illusions about how fucked that category of games is. They are 100% DIY projects, and points are at best a completely arbitrary and meaningless way to tell people when to stop adding shit to their character sheet.

[Ancient History]

...and part of the thing is, that's a consequence of the point build system. Real life is not fair; people can go to school for the exact same amount of time and come away with vastly different capabilities. You can't do an apples-to-apples comparison of people by points. To a broader extant, that's true of any game which has unbalanced options - the reason why people bitched about levels in d20 isn't because the idea of levels is a terrible one, it's because the execution was terribad and only got worse as new options were shoehorned in. It's why in Vampire: the Requiem people saw discipline and bloodline bloat and despaired; if you throw enough options at people, some of them are guaranteed to be crap, or nonmaximized, and from a game mechanics standpoint you can't really tell the difference.

On the other hand, people like asymmetric power increases. It's one of the staples of fighting anime like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. It's embedded in superhero comics, where characters turn out to be hidden badasses because they turn around and think of new uses for their idiotic powersets. You can see dozens of game designers try to tap into that idea with the umpteen NPC-only artifacts in Dungeon Magazine adventures and whatnot. But it's to code that into a game without going full Magic Tea Party, and it's usually hell to play. (Caveat: I have seen a semicontrolled version of Magic Tea Party where it can kinda work, but Bookhounds of London is not for everybody.)

[Prak]

There's no OSSR on Gehenna for roughly the same reason there's no OSSR on World of Darkness: Gypsies or Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. They're so fucking bad either Frank is going to damage his liver or I'm going to start frothing at the mouth. Either way, they're guaranteed to lower life expectancy.

Hey now, I drunk-viewed FATAL in it's entirety.

Is your liver not up to the task of Gehenna then?

Honestly, while I'd like to review more stuff (and am looking at doing a Demon the Fallen review) I just don't have the experience in gaming that others such as Frank or AH have that lend a lot to these things.

[Ancient History]

*cough* FARCAST *cough*

[Mask_De_H]

I was actually going to get shitfaced and review WoD: Gypsies, but some mad [EDITED] bought it from the FLGS I got Changeling from.