Could also just call their character out in whatever post you create, if they can be trusted to stay out then.

I mean, they do keep coming back.

Though in my case, I run a game for a few family members. They have to come back!

Hah! Don’t really see the appeal of Macs either :p No shade to people who do like either (my wife likes macs and my brother likes D&D!) They just both feel so constraining to me, and it feels like that’s kind of the point?

I think it’s better to think of all the add-ons and supplements as GM inspiration, rather than hard and fast rules. Most everything in GURPS is set up to arrive at a skill roll or attribute modifier; so even if you don’t remember a particular rule for a particular edge case, you can generally eyeball it and come up with a modifier pretty close to what’s in the books. The books give a lot of guidance on how to reach that modifier, though; and give you enough information to feel comfortable coming up with your own modifiers outside of what they outline. I feel like that’s a lot of what GURPS brings to the table - a simple system, with an internally consistent set of guides about how easy or hard a given action might be.

I just want to point out, with GURPS templates, players can absolutely get a character ready to go pretty quickly without missing crucial skills or abilities. GURPS’s Dungeon Fantasy line comes with a set of templates that mirror D&D’s character classes; you follow the guide for your preferred archetype and put together a character that has what you want. If you want to mix and match between them, you just invest the points and pick it up; it even has some guidance on what likely will and won’t synergize well.

And if that’s still too granular, the Delvers to Grow add-on lets you just select “packs” of upgrades, worth 25 character points each, and tailored to specific templates. This lets you roll up basic characters in about 20 minutes (10 if you know what you’re doing!)

I’m running a game for a steampunk airship crew in GURPS over Foundry.

Local game shop seems to be about half D&D and related, but I do see a fair number of others represented.

Thanks! They can go full Borg, Communion isn’t big on control. I see it more as an analogy to an online community; what looks like unified movement is more like Reddit when they got invested in the Boston bomber - some of them are quick to jump to action, and once a few go, there’s a strong bandwagon effect.

Most of the time, they can’t hear them at all - the macguffin they tripped over originally was a kind of psychic repeater that ties Communion together. Without something like that, they’re out of contact, and can only use the memories they already received to advance (or learn the old fashioned way). They could set something like that up, but I don’t think they will; they’ve known how to rebuild it since the first data dump. But the player who’s been enhancing himself seems pretty hell-bent on becoming a steampunk cyber-dragon!

Steampunk game in a kind of post-fantasy world, players run a small airship Firefly-style. They have a psychic encounter fairly early on with a kind of hive-mind community (the “Communion”) that I style as a kind of massive unmoderated chat room. They basically trip over it as part of another mission, and get overwhelmed by the deluge of information; but each come away with a “gift” of knowledge they can use to learn specialist skills without spending time learning from a master.

Nobody has ever heard of this group, but they pick up a few long-term passengers who had the same experience, and want to work for passage up north to join Communion long-term. Aside from these passengers, they largely forget about Communion, except for a few times when a hostile power has tried to enter their minds - then they were able to freely spend points to buy additional mental defenses, which I described as an external force reaching out to cover them.

As they slowly wind their way north, they begin hearing bits and pieces about small towns at the northern border of the Empire falling to what the Imperial news calls “brass walkers” - things that were once people, but are now festooned with bizzare machinery. At one point they hear a firsthand account of a noble’s manor falling to them - after some of the hired help unbarred the gates!

Eventually their passengers decide they’ve arrived, and the crew drops them off. The PCs also end up meeting a few members of Communion in-person, and the players immediately bond with them - it’s essentially a psychically reinforced mutual aid society, which is catnip for my group. So when the local Communion community gets rounded up and disappeared for “insurrection”, the PCs immediately set to work tracking them down and freeing them before they get shipped off - and before the Brass Walkers that have been spotted approaching reach the town!

They get their Big Hero moment, free their friends in the nick of time, slip past the Imperial Air Navy moving in to smash the Walkers, etc. It wasn’t until later, when they were being interrogated by a third party, that it was pointed out to them - Walkers tend to move in force where Communion members are threatened. And a lot of the gear the party gadgeteer has been coming up with seems to use the same ideas as the Walkers’ tech. One of the PCs was even remaking himself physically in a manner very reminiscent of Walker design! They don’t call themselves Brass Walkers, of course - you always have to be mindful of Imperial propaganda! But some members of Communion do remake themselves physically more than others, just as my player is …

TL;DR: Benevolent psychic hive mind that helped the players early on turned out to be steampunk Borg; revealed after one player took the first steps to self-assimilation!

Completely agree on both counts, though I can’t speak to 6th edition.

Some of the community likes a Blades in the Dark conversion for Shadowrun, though.

One of my players feels this way too, and has a semi-charismatic character. He’ll describe what he’s trying to do, we roll for how well it landed, and we quickly work out the highlights of what happened.

I haven’t played a lot of other RPGs, but GURPS is one of my faves - I didn’t realize the turns went quickly compared to other systems!

Shadowrun can drag though - I felt guilty as a rigger unleashing my drones, didn’t realize when I set them up I’d be monopolizing combat time the way I did…

I think you can play complex characters that are tied in to the world just fine with newbies. I have no idea how to manage my footing when I swing a sword, but many of my characters do! Similarly, my quick-fingered thief likely knows a great deal about the ghost field that I’ve yet to learn (I think this is what you meant? The only ghost fence I’m seeing is from Morrowind).

The way I’ve handled this is to give a quick, concise rundown about a topic right when it becomes relevant, or looks about to become relevant. I keep it limited to just what they need to know for what’s happening now, and only expand on it if asked. Being relevant to what they’re doing right now makes it easy to focus on, and being able to experiment with it right then helps it stick for them.

If it’s something just one or two people should know (like how their automatons function, or the political situation of their distant cousin’s family that they’re walking into), I’ll try to give the information just to that player . And if they improvise or expand on what I said, I do whatever I can to make what they said true - that kind of player buy-in is absolute gold, no matter how it might diverge from what I had in mind!

The idea is to teach complex game elements in play as much as possible, rather than explain them. They’ll remember the intricacies of court a lot better if they discover them while being cats-paws, or running a heist! (This is also how I introduce GURPS to people - start with the simple rules, and if they want to try something different, we’ll walk through how that part works. If they didn’t like how that worked, we try a different way next time - either different rules for it, or a different approach).

I’m not confident the nurse was wrong!

GURPS has a specific disadvantage that is essentially this.

My players ran across some Imperial guardsmen killing off skeletons, only for the orcs accompanying them to protest that they were destroying “registered cultural artifacts!” The orcs didn’t have much, and they would leave their bones to their children to help them eke out a meager existence.

Some of those solo games can be played with multiple players and no GM, too!

For flavor, you might include some NPCs mourning relatives who joined other failed adventuring parties. And if the module includes hireable NPCs, some of those might be survivors from other hastily assembled parties as well - the players’ party might be more attractive as a more capable party than their former squad. Or some NPCs might be shell-shocked survivors of other parties instead!

Mostly, this would let The Edge look like the best of the opposition, rather than the only other game in town!

Hah, my first time, I had one of the bandits yell “Sammy!” to another, a name I just grabbed on impulse. Sammy was also one of the PC’s names…

For a Supers game, I’ve been wanting to play a dragon - just start the game with a chunk of the downtown business district for my hoard, run it with enlightened self-interest (high wages, free healthcare, etc), and go after any supervillains that might threaten my modern “hoard” (which might include the people!)

The idea is that he’d be trying to transition himself from an avatar of fear and flame into something humanity might celebrate, or even venerate - after all, he’s seen that humanity tends to wipe out things that terrify it!

I’ve been enjoying Starforged since it came out. The PDFs are available of course, but it sounds like they’re also getting another reprint here in a month or two.