Heh - they claimed that the parents showing up to play was as big a surprise to them as it was to me - they were expecting the kids, not moms and dads.

I run the second part on New Years day - the party is going after a missing pay wagon for the Church.

For some reason they do not trust the dwarf and ogre that hired them as caravan guards, and suspect that they will be meeting the pair again. (what can I say, they're right....)

The Auld Grump, ogres in my homebrew are mostly okay people, but Ansel is a bit of an exception, and Roosevelt does not make dwarfs look all that nice either, a trifle atrocity prone, the pair of them....

I DMed 6 people for eight hours. The last thing I did before my brain melted was rolling a random wilderness encounter with....62 orcs.

That was IT. My brain was OUTA HERE.

I peaked at 11 players in high school for awhile, and averaged 8. I'm not sure I could handle 11 now. Maybe when I know the 4e rules

I prefer 6.

Six is also my comfort zone - enough characters that most of the roles can be filled, and few enough to be easy to run for.

The last time I ran a game with that many orcs was deliberately set up to expend one of two fireballs the wizard had prepared. (It did the job, and given the number of orcs and ogres that the wizard flash cooked he did not feel his spell was in any way wasted. ) If he had spent both of his fireballs I would have added a scroll to the treasure recovered.

Sometimes I am prone to both manipulation and micromanagement. (Which are survival traits for GMing.... )

The Auld Grump

My gaming group is at 5 players and even then there are a number of times when the GM is working with one or two and the rest of them just sit around.

We're in more of an RP game and she's rather partial to one player/character, neither of which help.

An occasional "Can you do that away from the table/some other time" prods her to realize that she's being exclusive of the other players. Sometimes not.

Our rule is that if you're not going to be a part of the game for a while (see above) you get up and leave the table to do other things. That is, no other activities at the gaming table. Having a couple of us get up and leave again will sometimes prod her, sometimes not.

No, I'm not the one she's partial to and I'm very glad for that.

Combat is an entirely different nightmare of taking far too much time. This is why I have no interest in epic campaigns/characters. When it takes half an hour to resolve one round of combat it's just not working.

62 Orcs would have taken ages. They were only 2-3rd level.

Funny, in our old-school 1ED sessions, my highest level character was a 5th level Druid. No one EVER got past 8th level. We were so scared of Monty Haul, XP and treasure was doled out with a very small ladle.

Later on, my last regular campaign turned Monty when I got tired of all the low-level stuff. It blew out and got out of control...not fun. A couple of the players, well just Steve, were real min/max chuckleheads and wanted to see how far I could be pushed.

Just GM'd a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. The main Meat Shield will be layed up for a month (game time) as his sword arm is now crippled, and the Elf Scout is looking for new armor as his got destroyed by an acid spider.

Half way through the adventure they actually thought about turning around and going back! But they pushed through and made it! It was a no think hack and slash game to get them used to combat in GURPS. The only reason they won against the bandits is because they got a lucky critical strike to the leaders right hand. It's amazing what decapitation will do to a man.

I was really nice and gave them a few character points.

Just wondering if it was fast and flowing or is the combat at about the same speed as D20?


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

I've heard several people complain that GURPS combat is complicated and slow. I've run many games of GURPS, and the flow of combat really depends on the GM knowing his stuff. The PC's don't need to know the range/speed modifiers, they need to be thinking about staying alive. I usually go "OK Max, you want to shoot Rex, he's 30 yards away behind cover, roll your skill at -6" (or whatever) and we're off. To be fair, I have not run a 4th ed GURPS game yet. I'm running Serenity, currently.
GURPS remains my favorite system, I would love to hear HP's take on it.

I love how deadly GURPS combat is. At the moment we are doing lite rules and slowly adding more and more of the complicated combat rules in. It is definately not a game for anyone to just jump into with all of the rule options. Options. Options. I say that several times because most people seem to forget that GURPS is Generic Universal Role Playing System. You don't need to use all of the rules that they provide. You can play GURPS as basic as the original D&D was if you wanted.

GURPS has one of the deadliest combat systems I have ever played. Right now we are playing High Fantasy Cinematic game in the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy setting. The main fighter can kill almost anything in a swing as he spent all of his points into Broadsword, and Advantages and Perks into increasing that Broadsword skill. It is really annoying some times. However he could not spot a Trap if it had a neon sign flashing at it. Plus even though he is a meat grinder he is still as squishy as the next guy and it only takes one lucky shot to make him rethink the blind charges.

GURPS also has the rules to do the combat using miniatures and hex maps which gives it a nice Wargame feel to it as well.

Honestly I found my system and don't see myself purchasing any other system again.

Heh - my only problem with GURPS is that we had a few really obnoxious 'one true game' type players in the area - we are talking about nit wits who would pull a boxed D&D introductory set out of the hands of a twelve year old, and force a copy of GURPS 3e into his reluctant hands.

The end result was the kid not purchasing either game. And this was in a Borders, not a specialized game store.

Because of those lack wits I have decided to never, ever play or run the game. They might be contagious....

The Auld Grump, who does own a couple of GURPS books - Goblins and Discworld.

@Auld Grump. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with a couple of @$$holes playing GURPS. Not all of us GURPS fans are that bad.

I'm with HP on this one. I've played many RPGs but none compare with GURPS. If I had to choose just one RPG to play for the rest of my life it would be GURPS. The options you have at your fingertips allows you to tailor make the game to how you want it to play. Slow and complex or quick and dirty - you decide. As HP said - it's all in the options. Also, GURPS 4e is vastly superior to previous versions of GURPS and I can't think of any way that it could be bettered.