• general

    Ingredients for a better GURPS

    The 2002 GURPS Diner article, brought into the new Games Diner site. One gamer geek’s wish list for a new GURPS 4e. This is a pretty straightforward HTML paste into the new site. Sorry, don’t expect much from the copious internal links. If you want to see the original article with its links intact, head to www.gamesdiner.com/gurps/old/improvements.htm . And if you want to see how well 4e fulfilled the wish list, read the follow-up to this article: The New GURPS Delivers… Or Does It?. One Fanboy’s 4e Wishlist I’ve worked long on GULLIVER and other house rules, suggesting dozens of options and rules tweaks for gamers with the inclination to…

  • general

    Martial arts in games

    Interesting news bit: In preparation for the World Cup games, police in Japan have developed a gun that shoots a 25-m square net over fans who bring just a bit too much enthusiasm to the proceedings. Specifically, the police are worried that their standard method to rein in rowdiness – judo-based restraining moves – may prove difficult against hyped-up, beefy European hooligans. (Like the police, we’ll politely refrain from specifying British. Oops, just did.) A comment from the World Cup security division, Sapporo HQ, Hokkaido Prefectural Police: “Of course, martial arts form an important part of our training, but if you take the size and power factor into consideration, (the…

  • general

    Game design musing: combat pacing

    Know what’s one of the hardest development tasks for a GURPS add-on — heck, for just about any RPG? A slick system for variable action times. That is, rules to allow one character to perform certain actions (typically attacks) twice as fast as another, or five times for every four of a foe’s, etc. HERO‘s Speed stat doesn’t quite have it. It’s great that Speed 10 lets you have an action rate a little slower than Speed 11, which is a little slower than Speed 12. . . but what about a creature a little slower than the human norm of Speed 2? The only level allowed below that is…