Where Worlds Collide

Game WISH 90 is about System Updates

What do you think about system updates (Paranoia XP, Amber 2.0, DnD 3.0/3.5) and conversions (d20 Silver Age Sentinels, GURPS Traveller)? What about world/setting updates that result in system reboots (the end of the Age of Darkness)? Do you buy them, run them, or use them for resources? Why or why not?

As ever, it depends on the update. I’m very much looking forward to the fourth edition of GURPS; the third edition is now sixteen years old, and the system is in danger of collapsing from the weight of accumulated cruft of additional rules from the literally hundreds of supplements SJG have published over those sixteen years. The new edition should cut through this accretion of rules to give us a new streamlined ruleset that will hopefully last another sixteen years.

On the other hand, I’m sure D&D version three-and-a-half is no more than cynical money making exercise. Was 3.0 really that broken to need a new edition that soon? Not that I’m going to buy it; I don’t play enough d20 in any form to justify purchasing. And I wonder if the upcoming sixth edition of Call of Cthulhu will have enough changes to justify my buying it.

Heroquest is an interesting one. It’s really the second edition of Hero Wars, which in turn was the new game system for Glorantha, the world for RuneQuest. Hero Wars suffered from appalling layout and editing problems, bad enough to all but cripple the game, and has to rank as one of the most disappointing releases I’ve ever bought. Heroquest has kept the same core game engine, but they’re totally rewritten the rules, so that the result now makes enough sense to be able to play the thing. The rule system bears little or no resemblance to Runequest at all, which is likely to be a turn off for many old school RQ players; it’s a much simpler and more freeform game, Dramatist rather than Simulationist.

Conversions, again depend on the system. Traveller has gone though a great many systems, some of them good, some awful (remember T4? Ick!) GURPS Traveller works at least as well as classic Traveller or Traveller: New Era. I haven’t seen the d20 version, so I can’t comment. On the other hand, d20 Cthulhu brings out the garlic and crucifixes. And as for Deadlands, any conversion has to be better than that the awful, awful original system.

Setting reboots: Who remembers Traveller: The New Era with it’s Virus? This is a textbook example of How Not To Do It. A pity in some ways, the post-holocaust Virus background was actually an interesting setting with a lot of possibility for adventure; it’s just that most fans didn’t like the way they had to blow up the Third Imperium to do it. Who can blame GURPS Traveller for setting that game in an alternate universe where the Third Imperium never fell?

Game WISH will be coming to an end after number 100. In keeping with this theme, Game WISH 89 asks:

How do you handle character death, as a player and/or GM? What makes a good death or a bad death? Have you ever had a character die? What happened?

I’m not counting all those DnD ‘Deaths’ followed by resurrections; when death is nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, it’s not really death, at least in my book. I only remember a single PC death in any long-term face-to-face games, which happened very early on, and I don’t even remember my dead PC’s name. The gaming group has a general philosophy that once PCs had survived the first few sessions, they never died.

It’s a different story in convention-style one-shots. I’ve played quite a few horror games (a genre more suited to one-shots, in my opinion) with a high PC body count. One PC death that sticks in my mind was the finale of an Unknown Armies game, where two of the last three survivors thought they were being rescued by the third. Another PC had already died in the attempt, eaten alive by horrible grey dust. But instead of saving us, our would-be rescuer proceeded to shoot both of us, in order to save our souls.

PC deaths in online games tend to be the result of players dropping out of the game; I’ve had to GM several of these; sometimes with little warning. The best one was the death of Cylene in my Kalyr game. The city authorities had press-ganged another PC, Reylorna, to perform telepathic scans of everyone trying to leave the city in order to catch an assassin. On identifying a suspect who tried to make a run for it, she attempted to throw a dagger at him, only to roll a critical failure. Just at that moment Cylene appeared as an innocent bystander who got in the way of the mis-thrown weapon. That was the only time I had a retiring player write their own death scene. This had severe repercussions on the plotline of the game; Cylene was a noble from a powerful family of the ruling kandar race, while the hapless Reylorna was (and indeed still is) one of the downtrodden human underclass. She had the be smuggled out of town in a hurry just ahead of the lynch mob. The rest of the PCs caught up with her a few moves later, in an extended quest plot that’s kept the whole party out of town.

More recently we’ve had the death of Jaldaric in the same game; his was a more straightforward death in combat. At least one other PC insisted that he had a proper burial and carried his body back to civilisation. We’re just about to run his funeral scene.

Not an embarrassing intestinal complaint, but my RPG system of choice (well, one of them, anyway). The third edition of the game came out way back in 1986, aeons ago in RPG terms. Since then the system has accumulated massive amounts of cruft in terms of additional rules and patches from the hundreds of sourcebooks and suppliments. A new edition of the basic rules is long overdue. Today, Steve Jackson Games announced GURPS 4th Edition.

In August 2004, at GenCon, Steve Jackson Games will release GURPS Fourth Edition, starting with the two-volume Basic Set. Fans have been asking about a new edition for years, and we’ve always said it wouldn’t happen until we could justify the change in terms of both rules and presentation. Well, we’re there.
Sean Punch, GURPS Line Editor for the past nine years, and David Pulver, a key contributor responsible for many of the core GURPS supplements, took two years to break the system down and rebuild it, guided by a decade and a half of gamer feedback. The new rules are designed to enhance the key strengths of GURPS: compatibility with all genres and flexibility for the GM. You’ll still recognize it, but a lot of little things – and a few big ones! – are different.

The physical quality of the line will take a big jump with the Fourth Edition. All books now on the schedule (and we’re scheduling three years ahead) will be hardcover, with full-color interiors. And we won’t accept any art that’s not gorgeous. The two Basic Set books, for instance, will have cover art by John Zeleznik, who has done a lot of our best covers over the years.

I just hope it lives up to the hype. I think it will; I only need to get another six months use out of my 1988 rulebook, which has defied all odds and refused to fall apart.