My Life in Two Bad Similes

the other day when my coworkers asked me how I got along with my evil boss i said "okay. i read somewhere that frogs can't distinguish stationary objects; their visual systems are too primitive. you could put a frog in a box with a pile of dead flies he'd starve to death, but wave one in front of it on a string and pow, out comes the tongue." baffled look from my audience. "so i just try to be the dead fly."

Besides the Gattling at the Smithsonian Museum, a nice one with lots of brass, there are several curious pistols. The Pepperbox has revolving barrels, and the Typewriter Pistol has a rack of barrels that feed through the pistol frame horizonally. There is a sword with a built-in pistol. This past week, someone has incinerated THE covered bridge in Madison county, perhaps not an ordinary vandal, but rather a literary critic.

-The House of the Eight Gables
-Bride of Oliver Twist
-Pride and Prejudice II: Attack of the Clones
-Lolita's Younger Sister
-The Returning of the Screw
-Mo' Moby-Dick
-The Cleaning Up the Tiny Broken Pieces of the House of Usher
-The Greater Gatsby
-Madame Bovary vs. the Moon Pirates
-I Still Know what Citizen Kane Did Last Summer

Will I have to hand in my Roleplaying Geek Membership Card (which I earned through many errant D&D / V:tM sessions) if I asked... what is a GURP?

A gurp is when you go to belch and hurl pea soup; a green burp.

At the risk of being the first of many: I think it was Steve Jackson Games who came out with this, at any rate it was intended to be a system which could be applied to any genre, i.e. Medieval, Super Hero, Space Future Precognition Desert Messiah (BTW -HA HA!) by having, say a generic missile attack ""power" which could be a fireball spell, Captain America's shield, and David Lynch's fscked-up "wierding modules" (what WAS he thinking?) all at once.

Sadly, Steve Jackson then subverted the whole brilliance of this by providing expansion modules to help out the imaginatively brain-dead legions of players who couldn't apply this to their own genre/campaign without some handholding and GM's who couldn't come up with a campaign without a 3-ring binder fulla modules and a cardboard saving-throw screen with a dragon/busty super heroinne/kwisatz haderach on the front...

BTW, thanks to all who commented on the last installment of "Blood-dimmed Tide." In particular, the comments on "voice" were insightful, and something with which I struggled. In the last 2 books of the Hyperion series, Dan Simmons neatly elides this issue. Part of the "limited omniscience" of my narrator is due to the technological mediation of his reality, and part of what the narrator of my story knows of George is a matter of public record, though unexplicated such: perhaps I'll make it more obvious. He lives in an age of instant information retrieval, smart search agents, etc. Note that it is around the time that we move from well-known events to "hearsay" that it begins to be framed in terms of Gaunt's interpretation of Thull's memory. Anyhow, thanks all.

Darkness, you have brought me light.

Thank you.

I like Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge jokes.

I don't think the effect is ruined by having GURPS source materials. The ideas are that you don't have to learn the same system to play different games, and it's easy to create your own campaign settings. It has a couple advantages over d20, which ends up reprinting the core rules in everything since each major world/universe comes from a different company. Plus, the whole "design your own campaign settings" bit.

American Psycho was good, but this Rules of Attraction, it looks like another Kids. If I'm not going to like the characters, at least put them in a situation I'll find amusing, not "sleazy college students get laid a lot".

Never minimize my bad-mouthing of something again! Just kidding. The system itself is robust. In fact, I think Steve Jackson has said he thought it was stoo-peed to learn a different ruleset every time you change genres. You can also do cross-genre stuff, like Shadowrun (a personal fave when I was still playing.)
What I in fact was badmouthing was not GURPs, but the lack of imagination that many people show in RPGs. In fact, I've only ever had one really good GM, and he was sill frequently surprised by the imaginative solutions my friend and I came up with to deal with his player-killin' bad mofos. You should have seen him when we took out two red dragons without a scratch- one per player! He almost cried, the poor bastard. God bless magic weapons, the teleportation spell, potions of flight and the "natural 20." We pithed them like frogs.

Frog pith will cure warts.

Endymion did manage to piss me off, with poor editing mostly to blame. For example, after leaving Hyperion, de Soya and his Gideon-drive ship arrive at Parvati system and have to wait a few weeks for the Consul's ship to arrive on its Hawking drives. Another Hawking-drive ship, the St. Anthony, supposedly tails the Consul's ship. After the rendezvous and failed boarding attempt, the Consul's ship takes off for Renaissance V and de Soya "follows" after leaving a message beacon for the St. Anthony. Fine. So how does the St. Anthony arrive at Renaissance V BEFORE THE CONSUL'S SHIP?? Hawking-drive ships all travel at the same speed once they've jumped.

Wiping the drool from my keyboard...

I got laid a lot. I'm in a dry spell, so I'm considering grad school.

N.B.: still sleazy, tho.

I got laid a lot. I'm in a dry spell, so I'm considering grad school.

N.B.: still sleazy, tho.

Whups. I'd hafta reread Endymion again to respond, aspcp, but I've lost me copy. I will say that de Soya and his Marines are some of the best characters ever in terms of makeup and moral quandry, wouldn't you agree?
As for bestest baddest scifi villain, my vote goes to... I 'll leave out the name in case people read it, but suffice it to say that cyborgs who can walk around under 300 gravities of acceleration and bend time to slice people to chum with their bare hands supersonically give me the heebie-geebies.

>Why do they have GURPS: Scarlet Pimpernel and GURPS: Swashbucklers?

Because Steve Jackson needed the money, and at that time was too broke to get a licensing agreement. Scarlet Pimpernel is public domain.

(Swashbucklers was Three Musketeers with the serial numbers filed off...)

Things are better now: They not only have Discworld and Deadlands, they have *Star Trek*

Favorite bizarre neo-kitschy oldskool GURPS supplements:
1)New Sun.
2)Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.
3)Principa Discordia [*]
4)Goblins (GURPSChangeling:The Dreaming emergency rewrite?)
5)Myth.

[* No, really, it's a GURPS book. It's just that all the pages with the GURPS stats are mysteriously missing...]

Favorite bizarre neo-kitschy oldskool GURPS supplements I wish they actually did:
1)Myth Adventures.
2)Monty Python
3)T.M.N.T.
4)All My Children
(...and, for the infinitely recursive...)
5)The Sims.

--
Chaos.



BTW, Annna, John Iceknife's talking about your sister on alt.slack:

You heard it here first. Assuming the html works...

I like Spider Robinson, even if his mystique exceeds his talent at this point; such are the fortunes of war. That's funny about Matie, I'll have to watch eBay for further developments.

Was Iceknife suggesting cross-pollinating Matie with a hemp plant?

Didn't know ICEKNIFE was so concerned about genetic destiny. It's probably a good thing Matie's not very online at the moment.

I like GURPS because of all the sourcebooks - easier than doing actual research - and because it just uses d6s and a pretty easy system. I'll certainly admit, though, that it has its problems. Especially the IQ-DX thing. At heart I'm a dumb powergamer, though, so I like the character generation.

By "dumb powergamer," I mean that while I do like characters who are insanely good at certain things, I am much more likely to make a character who knows every language ever (a true story, but in a different system) than one who knows a lot of martial arts or who can throw a refrigerator.

Cunning linguists are always in demand.

I vote for the zombie army.

The finer points, however, usually elude me.