This is another co-creating with John Wick and Jessie Foster. You can watch John’s recording and come back to see my thoughts, if you like. But first, look at these cool fezzes:

Today, we started a little newspaper with an editor, a reporter and a bouncer-for-hire. I created Marco Pascal, the insomniac, xenophilic reporter with a mission he didn’t intend.

The Character

A reporter for The Lighthouse newspaper, Marco wants to see new things. So much, that he got involved with the Discordian Society. When asked to spy on his boss, Marco gladly agreed, not really thinking of what he was agreeing to.

Now, with years of insomnia, long work hours and easily waking, Marco has found himself directly in the middle of Illuminati Machinations that he doesn’t fully understand. His Patron believes his editor is planning to leak dangerous information to the public. They would like to know about possible stories before they are published and that meant spying for Marco.

This is not what he wanted, except that he really wanted to see new things. Be careful what you wish for.

The Experience

The GURPS character creation system by itself is cumbersome if a) you are unfamiliar with it and/or b) you have no idea what character you want to create. For that reason, a group creation session is much better, as you aren’t worried as much about the points until you know a little about your campaign. You need to know more than a little about the character when you use GURPS, as it is a generic system. It is not designed for any given type of play, but for a more realistic look at whatever game you plan on running. You will fail spectacularly and often if you don’t know what you want your character to do.

I love GURPS. It is in my top 3 systems for one simple reason. GURPS rules help me explain the world better. If something someone does doesn’t make sense, I try to figure out what a given person’s disadvantages are and it helps me to understand how to deal with them. More than any other system, it is core to my understanding of reality. To me, it is a Programming and Query Language, since I needed some kind of structure to the way I examined the world. Thus, if I know your approximate GURPS stats, at least I can understand you enough not to do anything to hurt you. At least, on purpose.

The GURPS experience is always a good one for me, and I sometimes just make characters or rules in GURPS, before trying them in other games. I also try to pin down MY stats to make my world easier to deal with. If I had my character sheet and a CLI for my brain, I could make some serious changes for the better quickly.

That was a ramble. I will talk to you again soon. LLAP