Crunch Sweet Spot
Crunch Sweet Spot
Let's kick off some activity here with a question:
How much crunch do you, personally, like in your games?
Ultra Lite? Lite? Basic Set? Every book you can get your hands on?
Light on combat, heavy on skills? Vice-versa? Light overall with some aspects way more fleshed-out? Heavy overall with some aspects way more simplified? Are there specific mechanics you like to take full advantage of? Mechanics you like to gloss over?
No wrong answers, let's just get some discussion going
I find I tend to get sucked into the minutiae of the rules, and then get frustrated by the length of time things take. So, I typically stick to rules-light until something dramatically important happens, where more details can add to the story and it's worth going more slo-mo for the action. Similar to the idea of using mooks for the most part, but the lieutenants and the boss get full combat options.
This seems like the most pragmatic approach. Personally, in my upcoming game, I'm planning to basically go with my gut while allowing my players to challenge my rulings at any time. If they do, they can reference a specific mechanic they think should be used, and I'll either agree or counter.
That way, things keep moving most of the time, but players don't feel like they suffered some crucial irreversible consequence because of flippant or inconsistent rulings. I think putting the burden of finding the rule primarily on the player also prevents overzealous challenges from bogging the game down.
Crunch is not exactly a problem if you can write a few simple programs to take care of it.
I've been playing with a local GPT instance trained on the sourcebooks. It needs a little work but hopefully by the time our campaign starts I'll have a working GM assistant.
I want an Ultra Lite game that has rules for every known armament to man, ammunition types, weapon attachments, cover, and crafting in depth.
I'm never satisfied.
Lol, when I got High-Tech I just started excitedly asking players in my group to name any gun so I could flip to it and show them the mechanics
Man, I haven't played GURPS in decades. I naturally barely remember its play tbh.
But I'm generally a crunch friendly GM, but not a crunch mandatory one. I tend to prefer crunch where it's useful, meaning in combat. Outside of combat, there's much less use for it. You don't really run into things where it makes a lot of sense unless there's a lot of quasi-random factors in the activity in the real world.
That's interesting, I was drawn to GURPS precisely because it offers so much crunch outside combat. As much as I do appreciate the granular combat mechanics, I like the unique blend of freedom and consistency offered by the skill mechanics. I've grown tired of DnD which forces the GM to either spontaneously adjudicate an action and try to stay consistent the next time the scenario comes up, or just forbid any action not specifically described RAW.
Yes, obviously, the GM is still the one to have final say, but I think it's so much easier to have RAW defaults to refer to when needed.
You know what's funny though? My home brew system is over crunchy on skills and non combat actions and because I wanted a broader way to avoid those judgement calls lol. So, I ended up going with a roll + modifier being subtracted from the base skill. That way, you can not only have difficulty modifiers per circumstances (like with called shots), but you can have opposed skill checks where whoever succeeds more comes out on top.
Like, let's say you've got two dancers trying to win a competition. One has a 90 skill, the other has 80. Roll d100, add the relevant modifier, and person 2 ends up at -20 because of the modifier, and person 1 ends up at 0 because of a bad roll. It takes the quasi-random things like a drop of sweat under a foot making someone misstep a little (the dice rolls), but factors in skill and native ability.
Way over complicated, but it has ended up lasting over thirty years, with minor adjustments here and there to the modification charts and expansions of what skills are available, skills that modify other skills, and the fact that combat actions are skill based to begin with.
But it was the only way I could figure to make magic, real world fighting, unusual skill, and superhero style powers all mesh in one system.
New players are always confused, but it only takes one session for most folks to get into it.
I used to get super crunchy when I played GURPS Supers. Less so with other genres.