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[Podcast] Episode 01: Answering Reader Questions
August 25, 2016 GURPS

Happy GURPSDay all!

Welcome to the first ever Game Geekery podcast, where you can voluntarily subject yourself to what I call my “great voice for silent films” as I answer a few reader questions about GURPS. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Man, that Mook guy seems like he’d have a perfect white-noise voice for putting me to sleep,” this is the post for you.

Download: Game Geekery Podcast 01 | Duration: 14:53 | Size: 34.1 MB

 

I’d love to hear what you think of this, on the spectrum of “OMG what a train wreck, I will sue if you ever do this again” to “The dulcet lilt of your voice cured my halitosis, paid my mortgage, and even topped off the gas in my car.”

These are the three reader questions I addressed and where they can be found.

From Sam, at 00:47:

“Hi Mook! Thanks for all the great work you’ve done spreading GURPS and making it more approachable. I wouldn’t be GURPSing today if it weren’t for your stuff.

Given that it can’t always be expected that players read GURPS rulebooks or resources to get to know the system on their own, what is the most conversational, simple, natural sales pitch you could do for GURPS as a whole?

I love the system, but there are so many things to love about it that I don’t always find it easy to give a coherent endorsement that focuses on the core strengths, beyond saying ‘it’s generic, you can do anything.’

In short, what would be your best elevator pitch for the system?

Inquiring minds need to know… and shamelessly lift it from you to pitch GURPS to their friends.”

From Joseph, at 05:00:

“I have players who play a wide selection of systems, but are terrified of GURPS due to the fact they believe it is convoluted and difficult to play. One of them believes it always takes at least 4 hours and a 100% understanding of literally every rule used in the campaign to make a single character, regardless of what they want it to be capable of. This guy is otherwise a reasonable and awesome person, and forms the cornerstone of the group.

Can you help me convince them to even try GURPS? They havent even played it during the entire span of their lives in literally any form or edition, and their phobia of the system is beginning to bother me.”

From Kurt, at 09:50:

“Dear Mook, I wanted to ask you about your opinions on character Stats; both the number of Stats and the range of those Stats. How do these ranges affect play and play-ability of characters? Do you find that a low number of Stats and small range of variance tends to stifle character uniqueness or can you play the character you desire, even within the limits placed by those numbers? Conversely, at what point do the amount of Stats and range of scores begin to detract from play-ability?

I have played games with six stats ranging from 3-18 in a nice Bell curve, games with seven stats ranging from 1-20 with the normal human range at 5 to 10, games with ten stats that ranged from 23-100 with a standard distribution, and more.

I found that my favorite became twelve Stats with a 3-30 Bell-curve range. This seems like the best of all worlds in my mind, and I am content to believe this.

When I look at GURPS (and I am in no way disparaging this fine game), I feel overwhelmingly limited by four Stats, no matter how high they may be adjusted. What are your thoughts on the matter?”

Thanks for checking this out! I thought it might be a nice change of pace and something fun to try out. What did you think?

 

If you enjoyed this post and others like it, might you consider the Game Geekery Patreon?

"12" Comments
  1. Great stuff Mook, great information delivered from the man himself.

    Cheers,

    JiB

  2. I really liked it! I think that the format is pretty great. I answered over on the Patreon page as well. If you’re going to do this more often I’ll make sure to ask questions. I’d love you to actually expand it. If you’re going to do a “podcast” maybe a longer show that’s monthly…I’d be totally down for that. I think it’s sometimes easier to get folks into listening to podcasts about games they are not familiar with.

  3. Two Thumbs UP!!

  4. Cool, cool 🙂 Monthly sounds about right, we’ll see how it goes. Getting a lot of good suggestions!

  5. This is a great first podcast. Audio is good, the length feels comfortable, and I really appreciate that you indicated the timestamps for each section.

    I think there’s an important disanalogy between GURPS and other systems in terms of attributes. In D&D, for instance, the attribute is what you roll against, with modifiers for things like character level and skill proficiency bonuses. In GURPS, by contrast, you rarely roll directly against attributes. Instead, you usually roll against skill levels, which are set relative to the relevant attribute at character creation. So, as a skill-based system rather than an attribute-based system, your character won’t be described as well by the primary and secondary attributes.

  6. Hey Mook, this is the Sam that sent in your first question. Thanks for taking the time to answer it! I’ll definitely be riffing off of some your points when I bring up GURPS at our next game. For what it’s worth, your audio quality was fine and you spoke well, so don’t sweat it too much on that front.

  7. Please make more of this kind of stuff! I find audio much easier to parse than dense text for stuff like this. 🙂

  8. (Catching up, sorry for the late feedback)
    I’m not a big fan of podcasts (or video) – I don’t have a lot of free listening time, but this was a nice length, the audio quality was fine and your voice is surprisingly pleasant. And the Q&A was interesting too 😉 Great job!

  9. Thanks all for the kind words, the feedback was much better than I anticipated so I’ll definitely do more short ‘casts in the future. “My Voice is Surprisingly Pleasant” will be the tagline. 😀

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