Tweak of the Week (#0): Introduction and Gauging Interest

The following is a pitch for a (probably) crazy idea I had during my daily meditation in worship of Kromm.



GURPS is great. I don't think I need to convince anyone here of that fact. One of the reasons why GURPS is great is that it's a Rule 0 game, so if you find anything to be a particular problem you can just tweak it. Which is good, because there are quite a few tweaks that can be made.



How I know?



Good question me. Well, mainly because I spent most of my available time yesterday sorting through the following threads:



What do YOU want changed

[Speculation] GURPS 4.5e



Just to be clear, I absolutely don't think GURPS needs a revision. It handles the vast majority of situations fine. However, the tweaks suggested in those threads got me wondering...



Due to it being a Generic, Universal, RolePlaying System, GURPS encourages intelligence and creativity, thus drawing a creative and intelligent fan-base. The sort of people who are not afraid to roll their sleeves up, grab the metaphorical scalpel, and start digging around in the inner workings of a problematic rule-set.



For evidence of this you may look no further than these hallowed forums, as well as the multitude of GURPS blogs, websites, and Pyramid articles that suffuse the universe.



Wouldn't it be great to have one place where all the different house-rules and tweaks relating to a certain issue, then invite the good people of the forum to analyse them, dissect them, contribute their own ideas, and (hopefully), stitch it all back together into something that works well?



I sure think so. That's the idea behind Tweak of the Week, every week I'll put up a post about a certain area of consternation, containing all the material relating to the problem that I can track down. Then encourage others to point out anything I've missed, and try and come up with a solution that takes the best of the material presented, making something truly wonderful.







That's all well and good, I hear you cry, but what subjects do you intend to cover? Well, that question is nicely answered by this great big list of subjects I've compiled from the aforementioned threads, miscellaneous others, and my own thoughts:

Quote:

Strength and Damage: The development of a linear scale of ST-Based Damage. Balancing ST-Based Damage with Innate Attacks, and ST-Based Innate Attacks. Remove any rolls made against ST. As part of a look at ST-Based damage, have a look at penetration and wounding. Protection and Resilience: Adjusted DR and HP with respect to Damage. Alternate protection systems such as Armour as Dice. More detailed rules of things like Blunt Trauma and Edge Protection. A look at the concept of internal DR, or IT:DR, and blow-through damage. Move, Speed, and Initiative: Decouple Basic Speed and Basic Move, and rename them. A detailed look at Enhanced Move vs. Basic Move. Independent systems for acceleration and top speed. A cohesive system for quick reflexes and initiative. Mass, Size, and Scale: Rules for Mass, Volume, and power-to-weight ratio. Improved rules for combat at different scales. Scaling for damage modifiers based on size. A look into the rules for scaling equipment up or down. Fatigue and Stamina: Rules for short and long-term fatigue. A more granular scale for fatigue. Possibly different levels of fatigue for different weapon weights. Wealth, Status, and Rank: A more granular cost for Wealth that allows a wider range of values. Wealth that differentiates between ready funds, assets, investments, and the ability to maintain wealth. Tweak to make levels of Wealth and levels of Signature Gear play nicely. Status and Rank given costs dependent on the number of subordinates and level of authority. Allies, Contacts, and Dependants: Ally costs independent of campaign point total. Revamped Contacts. Fixed cost for Dependents, probably based on Sense of Duty. I'd like to see rules for Allies also cover rules for Equipment as points. Equipment, Crafting, and CF: Artistry and Crafting more harmonised. More complete rules for crafting things. Improvements to the rules for Abilities as Equipment. Better rules for the cost of modifications to an item, an additive multiplier doesn't always make sense. Attributes, Talents, Skills, and Techniques: More granular Attributes, allowing for broad, but more focused expertise. More logical cost progression for Attributes, Talents, Skills, and Techniques. Improvements to defaults between skills. Adjust Optional Specialisations. Better cost progression for Average vs. Hard Techniques. Detailed rules for creating your own skills. More variable skill difficulties. Skills kept as skills, Advantages as Advantages, I'm looking at you Invisibility Art. Applying Modifers to skills integrated into the system. Generalisation, Deconstruction, and Modification: Some Advantages are really Meta-Traits and need deconstructing into their component parts. Others need generalising to cover a range of situations. Modifiers may want to use an alternative system. Legality Classes and Tech Levels: These seem to have the same problem. That is, that a numerical system doesn't really work very well. What alternatives are there? Appearance, Features, and Reactions: Different flavours of appearance, not necessarily related to Sex-Appeal. Distinctive, Supernatural, and Unnatural Features, combined and adjusted to make some degree of sense (pet peeve here). Reaction Rolls made separate to Advantages and Disadvantages, for example Bad Smell would related entirely to being easy to detect/track, the Reaction Modifier would be separate. Finer gradations for Reaction Rolls, and heck, I'll throw Influence Rolls in here as well. Point-Scaling for High-Powered Campaigns: Levelled Traits become considerably worse relative to fixed-cost Traits in campaigns with high point values. How to fix? Simplification and Formatting: Making GURPS easier. Options for reducing die rolls. Ideas for keeping track of information. Revised formatting for Templates and Character Sheets. Guidelines for writing out Traits. Meta-Traits as 'Bundles': Break up Combat Reflexes. But give rules for how to put it back together again, as well as how to create other traits that give a bulk discount. Though this discount should be optional, and left to the GM's discretion.

A lot of these are already answered in supplements, Pyramid articles, forum threads, blog posts, etc. But as previously mentioned, it's hard to track everything down sometimes.







So, does this sound like a useful resource? Does it sound like something you'd be happy to contribute to? If yes, do you agree with my list of subjects? Do you think some should be combined, other separated out, more added, others removed? If so, why? Do you agree with the order I've suggested?



More than anything I want to say that this isn't a criticism of all the hard work the developers have put in to make GURPS a great system. But nothing's perfect, and the ideal system will always be subjective. I'd really like to hear a developer's viewpoint on whether this is okay.

Tweak of the Week (#0): Introduction and Gauging Interest