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How do you communicate what rules you're using to your players?

So, the whole big trick to using GURPS successfully is to ruthlessly cut down the rules you're using to just the ones that are useful to your campaign, right? So how are the rest of you sharing with your players which rules apply in a given game? Or do you share them at all? I'm running a game right now which has taken a "generic" Dungeon Fantasy world with all the races and magic options and everything, run it forward a few hundred years with generally low mana, low sanctity, etc; and advanced technology up to a steampunk style setting. I'm running it as a high adventure campaign, so some Action components are in, and we've got automatons and artificers and such, so weird science and metatronic generators are included. And since the players are managing an airship that's perpetually about to go broke, I'm looking to the After the End scrounging and invention rules. I've also supplemented all this with various other Pyramid articles.

So I've got around a dozen or so rules sources, on top of the Basic Set. Now, I knew when I was setting this up that there'd be a lot of splicing sources together (that's part of the fun!); but I didn't think through how tricky this would be for my players to work out. Right now I've got versions of the PDFs edited down to just the salient details, but I'd love a better way to present a cleaner, unified ruleset for them. Has anyone else run into this? Or have you found it best to just hide the sausage making from them?

3 comments

jhymesba

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GURPS really could use a 'setting generator' app that pulls in all the appropriate rules from the various GURPS books, and generates a clean PDF just for your setting, with a section you can type setting notes into. I'm making these kind of books for my settings. Unfortunately, I can't share it because it has copyrighted material in it, but the general layout is:

Introduction -- What the setting is, what you need to play, and what assumptions are in play rules-wise.

Character Creation -- a list of races and occupations, and specific rules about character creation (one 250 point occupation, 100 points for race, 200 points to customise, for example)

Traits -- A list of valid traits for the setting, plus any modifications from GURPS baseline.

Modifiers -- A list of valid modifiers for the setting, with any modifications noted.

Skills -- A list of valid skills for the setting with any modifications noted.

Magick -- A list of valid spells for the setting, with any modifications noted, plus the system (RPM, GURPS Magick, Sorcery, etc).

Psionics -- A list of valid psi powers for the setting, with any modifications noted.

Wealth, Status, and Equipment -- A gathering of rules around money, and the setting's gear book. This could be broken out into its own book.

House Rules and Optional Rules -- A list of rules used in the game. A collection of all the special rules in use in the game, taken from both Campaigns and any Pyramids.

For my GURPS: Rifts game, there are also notes from Rifters (Palladium's version of Pyramid) and occupational templates for things like Juicers (Chemically augmented supersoldiers), Crazies (cybernetic warriors with brain implants that ... make them go crazy), and Deadboys (faceless armoured soldiers representing a despotic human-supremacist government. Their helmets are all stylised skulls...).

Problem is that I'm not sure how SJGames would be able to write this app. You'd need to make sure the player had the necessary PDFs on hand to generate it, and I'm sure that SJGames would want to make sure those are legit PDFs.

5too

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I don't think something like this would be hard to write, technically - I just get the impression the people in charge aren't terribly comfortable with online tabletop tools. Look at Starforged - all the assets, the oracles, all that stuff is available via an online API, without bothering with any kind of customer verification. Which means fans can put together something like the Stargazer app (https://nboughton.uk/apps/stargazer/#/), which lets you play the full game. And it doesn't sound like Shawn Tomkin is hurting for sales.

But even without SJG making everything available online, I think this could be done - you'd just need to put in the page offsets that correspond to each chunk of rules, similar to what GURPS Character Sheet does for its components. (I'd have to look, but I think the Foundry plugin for GURPS supports this too). Then let the user point the app to the relevant PDFs locally.

What I'd really like are preset groupings you can adjust - if you pick Action and Post-Apocalytpic, it'd pull in those sources and the corresponding bits from Basic Set. Then you could chop out, say, Invention if nobody's going that route. Or set up a Dungeon Fantasy game, and select just the relevant additional books from that series. Maybe with a nice editor to adjust the resulting output...

jhymesba

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That's how I'd envision it running, to be honest. Several pre-generated gameworlds you can start with from various themes, and you can enable/disable as you like from that. As for the SJGames concern about online tools? Yeah, they're definitely old school, though not as much as Palladium is!