Re: (TFT) GURPS combat complexity etc.

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

GURPS is like a college degree.
If you know what you want you can do your research and build a plan of what
your gonna require to accomplish your goal.
But much like college, lacking a clear goal can become quite expensive and
leave you with partial information in disparate areas.

GURPS is great at what it does and is quite clear about what it does NOT do
once you get there.
Much of the stuff I'm trying to pull off is stuff that GURPS plainly states
is not in its bailiwick.

uhhhhh

So I was tickled to see an Illuminati GURPS volume was out... wow, quite
some time back anyways and I was really curious to see how they were going
to approach this because I was already messing around with the idea of
using "Power Structures" along with New Followers and yada for chain of
commands.
So you get through the first section on skills and equipment and whatnot
and then the second section is on the Illuminated Campaign.
It starts with an intro that says;

"Perhaps the hardest part of running an Illuminated campaign is developing
the
power structure - the groups that are involved, the Illuminated group(s) at
the core,
and the way these different factors interconnect. There are basically two
ways to go
about this: working out what's behind the scenes before play begins, or
"winging it"
as play progresses. The best choice depends on the GM's personal style."

Then on the start of the next page is this;

"Developing a Power Structure
When it comes to figuring out what's going on behind the scenes, the
possibilities
are limited only by the GM's imagination. There are no hard-and-fast rules,
and few
guidelines. Feel free to play fast and loose with history - the Illuminati
could easily
have re-written it to suit their own ends. Ignore logic. Logic can prove
anything if one
starts with the right assumptions, and the Illuminati have different
assumptions from
the rest of us.
Is there one central Illuminati group, or several? Are they vying with each
other
for power, or cooperating? Or are they "agreeing to disagree," and
splitting the world
among them like a pie? Are the Illuminati even human? If not, were they
human
oncel The possibilities are endless.
The following sections provide some guidelines and hints in setting up a
power
structure for a campaign. These are not rules, so alter them or ignore them
as seems
best for your own needs."

So no rules in the source book for what is termed in the source book as
"perhaps the hardest part of running an Illuminated campaign".
There's a page on "winging it".
How did THAT work for ANY tele-series that pretend to have some great
underling conspiracy like X-Files or Lost or any example really?
I bought the kool-aid on Twin Peaks and was able to skip those programs
thereafter and do so with GM's who "wing it" while still promising complex
intrigue and intricate sub-plots.

What the book tries to do is add what I call "flavor" and it's good at that.
What it does not try and do is add rules for Power Structures and their
functions.
I've had this happen with a number of GURPS supps and figure that if I want
stuff like rules for Power Structures in RPG terms then I have to do 'em
myself.
As GURPS often makes the RPG claim when I start looking at the higher scale
stuff I find that I have to do most of that myself if I want it.

TFT is a dead system.
The TFT material is a MUCH smaller body of work and I have copies of most
of it (?).
TFT is a simpler system to use as a base RPG.
So I'm using TFT for what I'm trying to do.

I know I've been coming off a bit snarky about GURPS lately and I'm really
not trying to be insulting so my apologies if I've offended anyone's game
preferences or "style".
The point of a game is enjoyment in the end and GURPS is quite capable of
fitting that bill.
I've just got weird enough "tastes" that I'm trying to do things that GURPS
doesn't consider to be in the province of RPG's.
That's not GURPS that's me.
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