Review: UMBROS

Review: UMBROS

I'm not dead, I was busy. Busy writing some stuff to make GURPS playable on all scales, but also busy thinking about running a strategic-level Braunstein to resolve a military conflict between two nations in my setting. It's been set up a couple of years ago, but due to games happening in other regions of the world, nothing was happening on that front. There was just an eternal "upcoming war that is about to happen." No, I'm not just rambling and telling you about my games, this is just a segue into the topic of this blogpost, which is a review of UMBROS: A Braunstein of Dinosaurs & Treachery at the Earth's Core. You see, my ramblings highlight a problem with conventional play - the world is static no matter how hard the referee tries to maintain the illusion of it being alive.

Heroic Combat, Timescale, Abstraction: Outline

Heroic Combat, Timescale, Abstraction: Outline

I cannot stop thinking about the question of scale and abstraction in combat. If you are reading this, you probably already know that GURPS has very granular combat with one-second round, where the exact way you attack, move, or defend matters. This is one of the strengths of the system, something that allows for plenty of tactical decisions and detail, but also one of the weaknesses of the system. While I do love GURPS combat, I cannot disagree with the fact that it takes too long when there are many combatants (many claim that it takes an unbearably long time even in 1-on-1 combat, but this is a skill issue), and it forces you to artificially scale down the engagements to prevent fights from taking hours.