Books: GURPS, GURPS, GURPS

[woodwardiocom]

GURPS Deadlands: Varmints for 3rd Edition &
GURPS Space & GURPS Powers for 4th Edition

-Varmints is what you'd expect; lots of weird wacky Wild West critters, from the Bear Lake Monster to the printer's devil. If you're into RPG bestiaries, this one is highly recommended, particularly for being so far off the beaten trail.

-Space and Powers are very typical of 4th edition GURPS; solid chunks of game rules and advice, with a whole lot of math and kinda middlin' art. 4e seems to be locking GURPS into the math-philic demographic. The hard-science world-design system, for example, blithely states that you may need to take fourth roots during the process. Now, they're marketing to a real demographic, and its one that GURPS is strong in. And, it's one that I'm in. But I worry that they're scaring off potential new customers. Supers is also quite math heavy, though it does present an ingenious new way of handling related superpowers. Both are strongly recommended if you like math-heavy rules; otherwise you might want to give 'em a pass.

Comments

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

Yes, they do seem to be.... and even our regular group of Hero v4 players had a huge amount of hassels doing character generation for a GURPs emerging Powers game (just using the 4th edition basic pair of books and the Powers book). These were not people afraid of math (accountants, engineers, software designers), 4 of whom had played 3rd edition GURPS extensively before, and it took longer than it did for them to generate hero characters. Of course the way some stuff is spread out and requires you to jump back and forth between the books was part of the problem. It left the one newbie completely lost.

[dimers.livejournal.com]

I'm okay with math personally, but I think it's unfortunate that they're effectively de-Universal-izing the product by turning off potential buyers. About half of the players I know prefer to avoid number crunching if possible (the other half and I wallow in it) (okay, maybe a quarter and I).

Would you mind summarizing the invention regarding related powers?

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Would you mind summarizing the invention regarding related powers?

-Very briefly, the notion of organizing powers into conherent groups by special effect and origin is formalized, so that the application of limitations and countermeasures is conceptually simpler.