Breaking the Mass Market

The unique aspect of GURPS and fantasy settings that I find compelling is the freedom it offers. I can break all my crayons, take a world, and do what I want. It's not about creating 'the standard world' with 'all the monsters ', but about crafting a unique and personal experience.

Oh! Are you playing fantasy? Here is a list of the things you need:

• Gnolls
• Trolls
• Goblins
• Orcs
• Bugbears
• Kobolds
• Dragons
• Centaurs
• Fifty types of Elves
• blah, blah, blah...

Who says? The OSR, 5E, Pathfinder 2, and many other games are guilty. I opened a typical fantasy gaming book, and it was more about packing the supermarket aisle with "fire gnomes" and "pyrite dragons" than giving me a set of rules that let me build a sandbox experience. Even the character options in many of these games are nonsensical, choice paralysis, and funny shapes for the marketing department choices rather than anything that means anything to a world or story.

The games become "who has the bigger lists" than "providing a play experience."

Starfinder 1e was one of the worst offenders. I opened a book, and they listed about 50 new weapons on a half-page chart. "Here is a chart with some more content. Have fun."

The word "content" is like the poop emoji. In the age of AI, where computers can endlessly churn out content like a poop emoji factory, our games suffer with zero thought, more content; here are another 500 poorly thought out options, and we will patch it later; who cares to? Buy another book with mass-market fantasy content.

I miss the days when a designer carefully designed one option to be great. I have been in game design, and we designers sometimes fight with other designers about a single choice. We are passionate about making a single choice meaningful and fun.

I miss a world where artists did the art.

GURPS starts with a "zero-based" world. There is nothing in there but the standard zero-point human. You can create a world with a massive sheet of blank hex paper. No company forces you to put cute kobolds or football-headed goblins in there for their marketing department to own and "brand" your game world. You don't need to include androids as character options or 101 planar races so Wizards can shove its foot in the door and say, "Your world is a part of ours. We own this."

What is happening to fantasy is what happened to the lore, stories, and myths we pass down to the next generation. Disney remade all the classic childhood stories, and they now "own the myth." Of course, our copyrighted cute cartoon animals were always in these stories! They end up owning the childhoods of everyone in the world. You must now pay them for your myths, legends, and stories.

And the price keeps going up.

Mass Market Fantasy does the same thing but for a slightly older audience seeking escapism from a world where everything is bought and sold. These "huge lists" of "content" are supposed to define your ideas of a fantasy world. You don't have mimics in your world? What are you, some sort of anti-fantasy freak? The monster is on the list! Include it!

Yes, your game is yours, and you can include anything you want or exclude an option. But in many cases, you can't. You get on D&D Beyond, and the company gives you the choices you must accept in your game. Any character a player can build is legal and should be accepted. In fact, the system recently eliminated all the data for the 2014 books, and now the spells, items, and other choices only reflect the 2024 versions.

Welcome to the memory hole of live services, everyone.

Those options never existed.

((Update: This decision has been since reversed, but it highlights a disturbing trend of companies "memory holing" their products and treating their legacy as a problem to fix.

Yes, GURPS is a sometimes awkward, confusing, slow, contradictory, messy, complicated game. But everything I build inside is my idea. My world is mine. I don't need vast lists of 500 monsters to have a fantasy world. I don't need lists of 10,000 magic items. Yes, the options are good. But too many options are the tool of an oppressor seeking to crush your imagination. They also force you to use "live service" systems to "manage all your choices." Why wasn't the game designed cleanly with a few meaningful choices? Ones that everyone can use and understand without needing a website to sort through them?

Look up choice paralysis.

It is a real thing, and it can also be used against you. A company can create a confusing and complicated aisle of products with too many choices for our brain to process, so we go to an option that is presented standing on its own (and has a higher price). Hidden in that aisle was what we wanted and right for us. Instead, we took the thing the company wanted us to choose.

Oh, that's why.

The game was designed so that you need the website to play it. Forced dependency is another issue in the corporate world. The choice is good, everyone! Look how many options we have! The truth is, 99% of those character options, monsters, magic items, and other options - you will never use.

In my GURPS Fantasy game, I am figuring out what is out there. I am not sifting through a 500-page book and converting monsters. I don't need to. The "monsters" could very well be other humans in this world. The GURPS books give me a few animals and other standard things to use as a yardstick, but I am free to create everything else.

Ask any optimizer for any 5E class; only very few choices on the list for each class are good. The rest are garbage. This is the "West Coast" design theory; they ship a ton of garbage choices with one or two best options hidden in there. They have been doing this since D&D 3.0, the MtG card printing strategy. 90% of the cards are junk and useless in serious play. Then, they tell you, "Options are good."

I will pick a game that always puts freedom and my ideas first.