Treasure Type Revised

Treasure Type Revised

My previous Treasure Type tables were flawed due to poorly gauged average values of various things. AlexPsi created a monstrous spreadsheet that allowed us to tie the values much closer to what GURPS DF8 tables have, shift the probabilities around, and expand the table. And now that we managed to come up with a way to estimate the combat effectiveness of a creature, we can tie it to Treasure Type and get much better guidelines that the thing I had before. That's another major obstacle cleared. As before, these tables are inspired by those from ACKS II, but this iteration has departed much further from its origin.

GACKS AAR: Week 13/Post Mortem

GACKS AAR: Week 13/Post Mortem

In the last post, I mentioned that my campaign was approaching an organic conclusion and specified that it wasn't going to collapse. I lied. It did collapse prematurely, so it's time for a post mortem. I have to analyze what worked and what didn't work, and try to understand why it didn't work. In addition, I'll share some fun stuff that wasn't public knowledge.

GACKS AAR: Week 12/Session 10

GACKS AAR: Week 12/Session 10

Now that was an intense week with lots of activity on the faction level. Let's see the SEEN posts first.

GACKS AAR: Session 9

GACKS AAR: Session 9

This week's session started exactly where the previous one left off despite 1:1 time, as last time the PCs went just far enough into the future. The situation was quite dire - four adventurers, one of whose was under 1/3 HP, stuck on the 3rd level of a barrow mound dungeon after a difficult fight against 5 wheeps. Initially, I was planning to manually create the rest of the dungeon, but didn't have enough free time for that, so we continued with Appendix A. Will the PCs find a way out, when there is only 1-in-20 chance to get a staircase on the periodic check table, and then you have to get lucky to get a staircase that goes up? They only had ~4 torches left, so they had to do it within 4 hours or be eaten by a grue in pitch blackness.

GACKS: Week 11 and GURPS BrOSR Flaws

GACKS: Week 11 and GURPS BrOSR Flaws

First, let’s list the SEEN posts for the last week, then quickly discuss what happened, and then I will have a lot to say about what needs to be done for the game to run more smoothly.

GACKS AAR: Week 10/Session 8

GACKS AAR: Week 10/Session 8

Let's see what happened last week on the faction level and what happened during today's session. As usual, I'll list last week's SEEN posts firsts, then provide some commentary, and then go over the session recap.

GACKS AAR: Session 7

GACKS AAR: Session 7

Let's see how the week went. Below is a compilation of SEEN posts, for the most part caused by faction players, and a session report.

GACKS AAR: Session 6

GACKS AAR: Session 6

We've reached the point where statistically most of the conventional games fall apart - session #6. We had a short hiatus in terms of in-person sessions due to lack of free time, but after two weeks we gathered again for a session. These two weeks between the sessions were dense with faction-level events, so let's dive into what happened there first. Note that only public events are posted below - there was a lot of secrecy behind the scenes.

GACKS AAR: Session 5

GACKS AAR: Session 5

We had not one, but two sessions this week. The previous one ended on something of a cliffhanger, where the party was preparing defenses near the entrance to a dungeon overrun by undead.

GACKS AAR: Session 4

GACKS AAR: Session 4

Due to health reasons, there were no sessions the next two weeks. However, the game world wasn’t standing still. Isn’t that wonderful? Here’s what happened during these two weeks, at least what is known to the public, because there was plenty of hidden actions. What follows is, basically, a compilation of SEEN posts. And then you can read what happened in today's session.

GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

 GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

I've been running my BrOSR-style game for almost a month now, and the experience has prompted some introspection. Was GURPS the right choice? Why am I playing GURPS in the first place? What's missing? Why is GURPS like this? Eloquence isn't my forte, but I'll try to explain my thoughts.

GACKS AAR: Session 3

GACKS AAR: Session 3

Between session 2 and session 3, I recruited eight players to control the various factions in the game. I wrote up some order resolution and rumor-posting rules, such as GOSS and SEEN, and while diving headfirst into running this sort of game without proper preparation felt daunting, I think I'll be able to handle this. Let's see what happened in the world both faction- and PC-wise. I will avoid giving out any information that isn't public.

GACKS AAR: Session 2

GACKS AAR: Session 2

Between the sessions, I recruited a faction player to run the goblins. Certain events transpired that I will not elaborate much here to avoid revealing non-public information to the players. However, we had another session with the players, and it was a hilarious trainwreck.

Herb Gathering

Herb Gathering

One of my players wanted his character to use his Naturalist skill to find some valuable herbs to earn some money. This prompted me to investigate the rules and finding that there's no out-of-the-box solution to this somewhat simple request. As a temporary ruling, I ruled that this is similar to a job roll for the gatherer - this worked for that purpose, but what if the character wanted to find something more concrete? Let's see.

GACKS AAR: Session 1

GACKS AAR: Session 1

All right, now that the groundwork is all done, I began my in-person GURPS game that borrows a lot of ACKS procedures to see if GURPS can support a BrOSR-style game. It has been a long journey (that still isn't complete), and I've been very excited to give it all a try. I have five players whose only TTRPG experience is D&D 5e and one GURPS game that I ran for them to showcase the system. Despite this, they seem to have had zero problems understanding how 1:1 time works, and all the other BrOSR concepts as well. So, it's time to bring receipts!

BrOSR Game Preparations

BrOSR Game Preparations

I've been rambling about BrOSR for quite a while already, mostly about how such games could work in GURPS, and what is required to run one. At this point, between existing GURPS books, my own blogposts, and posts by the Addled Antillectual, there isn't that much left to do. Right now, I'm running a faction in a D&D 5e Braunstein game - the Shattered Skies (the sequel to Drakonheim) - and it's been a great experience. While I am enjoying the game, I'm also taking notes and studying the way Serious DM is running the game, because this is extremely important to me, as I'm planning to run something similar in the future, but on a lower scale (probably within 2 or 3 months from now). In the meantime, I found an in-person GURPS group in my backwater for whom I ran a short conventional game to familiarize the players with the system. And now we are preparing to play an in-person BrOSR-style GURPS game. This forced me to come down from the hypothetical scenarios that the system would need to cover and think about what I really need to at least start. Starting is the most important thing - I should be able to patch any holes as we go along. This is doubly important because aside from the aforementioned short conventional game I ran, I have no experience running GURPS in person. Thus, I decided to document my preparation process, because it might be helpful to others (yes, you) and to myself as well. It's very likely that I will get some things wrong, but I'll learn from my own mistakes.

Heroic Combat: Iteration 4

                                 Heroic Combat: Iteration 4

All right, let's try again. This time I'll combine the rules and the test fights into a single post.

Heroic Combat: Iteration 3

                                Heroic Combat: Iteration 3

All right, let's try again. This time I'll combine the rules and the test fights into a single post.

Empire Skirmish Combat

Empire Skirmish Combat

One and a half years ago, I wrote a review of a D&D 3.0 rulebook called Empire by AEG. In this review, I wrote the following: "After that, there’s an appendix with optional rules that are mostly concerned with skirmish combat, but I don’t really care for that." But now I do care about that, because I'm really struggling with my semi-abstract GURPS combat system, and I am interested in seeing how others have done it. So, let's take a look at these skirmish rules and see if there is anything useful for my GURPS project.

Levels in GURPS - Why and how?

Levels in GURPS - Why and how?

GURPS is a point-buy classless system, so the concept of the character level does not exist. Character points do not measure the character's power. We all know this. The more I lurk within the BrOSR circles, the more I understand why D&D was written the way it was - more and more things begin to make sense. As I think that I get closer and closer to being able to run a proper BrOSR-style game using GURPS, I realize that there's still a lot of work to do, as GURPS is missing some crucial parts for that sort of thing. One of them is character levels, actually. I'm not good with words, but I will try to explain why they are necessary. Once we understand why exactly they are necessary, we will understand what is missing and how to fix it without introducing actual character levels.