Give out all the best loot in the first 20 minutes. You beat a boss at the end of a session? “Alright, we’ll go over the loot beginning of next session”

Cure Wounds has a verbal component, but since the monkeys can’t speak they substitute an oral component

Ambiguous "they"s make it look like you want those monkeys to fellate the paladin

When I played a leveled system, typically we’d start at level 1 but the first few sessions would each end in a level up.

Yay, another opportunity to share one of my favorite illustrations ever

GURPS also forgoes initiative for speed based turn order.

Barbarian: Ignore me, I’m a normal lamp

Guards: Y-yup, nothing to see here.

Maybe it would help to know that the Fey are known to delight in wordplay based magical trickery (e.g. the old “Can I have your name?” bit). It’s not just that the pun exists, but that it’s not the DM just making them roll for “fall” damage because he thinks it’s funny, it’s the sort of thing that canonically happens in the Feywild.

When I have print failures, I try to kitbash failed pieces together into monstrosities. I totally believe this.

You really should dive into GURPS. Chris Normand has a good YouTube series in the basics, but the gist is that it’s both the simplest and most intricate system out there. Basically everything is a 3d6 skill check, but there are thousands of pages dedicated to figuring out exactly what modifiers apply. The modularity is delightful, basically every rule is entirely and explicitly optional

I don’t know much about anything before 4e, which is my reference here. But yeah, it really should be. I jumped ship on D&D because they were just getting so lazy on mechanic content.

I think it might be more widespread than WotC, but my only experience is a distant smattering of PF2, D&D 5e, and GURPS 4e ever since. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the lack of attention to detail for actually running the game is a broad problem.

We can’t really put all the blame on the devs though, I think GMs who forget that it’s their table, and some rulebook isn’t the boss of them, make devs feel pressured to not “impose” rules and features in their sourcebooks.

Like homie, give me tools. You’re not holding a knife to my throat, I can chill on the nitty gritty if I want to. But give me the nitty gritty so I can decide for myself.

I dunno, I made my choice, I think it’s the best possible choice for my play philosophy. I think if more people considered my play philosophy, it would be the best possible choice for a lot of people.

GURPS has an official GM Control Sheet for you to fill out with your PCs base stats and things like Perception. This supports their recommendation in the rule books to secretly roll any check where the PC wouldn’t really know if they failed. It’s fantastic.

For a game called “GURPS” it certainly is a Generic Universal Role Playing System

I’ve only heard it with one question, that’s the whole point. Otherwise you just ask a guard some trivial question (e.g. What color is the sky?) to determine which is the liar, then just ask which is the safe door.

The whole point is to get the information you need from a single question.

There are dozens of us

GURPS uses 3d6 for this exact reason.

Based on context I assume they mean in regard to setting and broad strokes mechanics

I’ve switched to GURPS because the mechanics aren’t so combat-focused, but it has interesting combat mechanics too. A lot of people think it’s too complicated, but I’ve always started off super simple and slow-dripped additional mechanics as players get comfortable with the system and start actively looking for more crunch.

I do think it balances the super involved, tactical combat well by making rounds much shorter. Instead of 6 second rounds with Action, Reaction, Bonus Action, Movement, you have 1 second rounds that give you a single Action. There are ways to squeeze in a bit more on your turn, but it comes with trade-offs, like sacrificing active defense.

Active defense is also a great mechanic. Instead of just swinging at an AC, the defender actually gets an opportunity to Parry, Block, or Dodge. This means a lot less damage gets done every round, but that’s balanced by having way fewer Hit Points. I always thought people chipping away at each other’s mountains of HP until one dies to be kinda boring and unrealistic. In real fights, it’s generally a back and forth of attack and defense until an attack finally gets through and does significant damage.

And I won’t really get into all the details of the many different maneuvers available to you, or the techniques you can train. I’ll just say that it’s extremely tactical and provides for suspenseful combat with real stakes.

I started a mini campaign this way. Two of the characters were chaos gremlins, and the third was their lawyer babysitting them for their community service of defeating the local monster.

It’s your world. You decide the geography, technology, politics, etc., as well as the dominant conflict that initially calls the party to action. What the party does in your world is their choice.

Now, if they decide to ignore the BBEG’s plan so they can pick magic mushrooms with Boblin the goblin, there will certainly be consequences. There are consequences for every decision. But it is their decision.