Michael Thayne's RPG Blog

 A lot of people, including myself in the past, have assumed that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy  is GURPS 's take on Dungeons and Dragons. However, Sean "Kromm" Punch, who wrote the first four titles in the series, says this has been greatly overestimated, and in fact the biggest influence was video games: D&D – especially AD&D – was an influence on DF but not the dominant one. (I'd put it third behind Diablo II and NetHack , probably, and tied with Tunnels & Trolls .) Source I haven't played any version of D&D since the early 1980s... Inasmuch as it was influenced by other games, those would be computer games I played in the intervening decades, principally NetHack and the Diablo series. Inasmuch as tabletop games were an influence, I've played more hours of Tunnels & Trolls than any other FRPG.  Source My top influences were probably Tunnels & Trolls First Edition (1975), the venerable Rogue (1980) and NetHack (1987) computer games, an...

 Awhile back, I floated this suggestion for how to handle the Medium advantage in GURPS  in the official GURPS Discord, and thought it might be worth preserving here: You automatically know whether there are any "unbound" spirits within Per yards of you. For purposes of this advantage, "unbound" spirits are any spirits not bound to objects, currently possessing someone, etc. Furthermore, you count as a spirit for the sole purpose of communicating with spirits (not seeing them), if this would be helpful. This allows you to hear the voice of a spirit with Mute (Substantial Only, -10%), or be contacted telepathically by a spirit with Telesend (Spirits Only, -20%). Relative to the text of GURPS Basic Set: Characters , this does a few things: Ignores the bit about spirits of the dead, but incorporates some stuff about excluded categories of spirits in Powers and Template Toolkit 4 . Tries to make clearer how it differs from Detect (Spirits). Replaces "nearby" w...

While searching the SJGames forums for something else, I stumbled across an interesting post by Kromm about party creation : Many groups (okay . . . most of mine as a GM and several I've been in as a player) do something like this: Discuss general goals: "We need a healer," "More ranged weapons this time! We always get hosed by flying things," "No barehanded martial artists, ok? Tired of paying for replacement fists," "Don't forget to have two heavy fighters this time . . . I still remember when Sam the Ogre got mind controlled," and so on. Choose specific roles: "I'll take the cleric," "I'll play a scout," "Put me down for a barbarian," "I like knights," etc. Create characters (or dig up previously created ones) – and yes, however many the player likes. Sometimes done collaboratively. Select characters from among that stable. Sometimes done collaboratively. Tweak characters in collaboration...

 In GURPS , picking weapon skills is fairly easy—figure out what weapons you want your character to use, then buy the skills for those weapons. Occasionally you'll have a weapon that can be used with multiple skills, making the choice less obvious, but most of the time it's very straightforward. With unarmed combat skills, though, the choices get a bit confusing, especially for grappling skills. In picking unarmed combat skills, it helps a lot to know what tactics are game-mechanically favored. One tactic that works quite well is a grapple followed by the Knee Strike technique. To do this, you need at least 1 point in Brawling or Karate (Knee Strike doesn't default to DX), but you don't actually need a grappling skill—you can just roll against DX for the grapple. For this and other reasons, putting even 1 point in Brawling goes a long way for characters who mostly fight with weapons but want to be prepared for the possibility of an unarmed scrape. In contrast, following...