I love the depth GURPS gives me in terms of characters. But I can’t run that many of them at one time. It leads me to more solo games since I can manage the data for one or two characters pretty well, but three or more becomes a lot of work.
Some genres suffer because of this. I like fantasy, but running a “large party” game in GURPS feels so slow and data-intensive that my games never last long or even get off the ground. I will solo play one character in a GURPS fantasy game before I run a large party all by myself.
To be fair, 5E, Pathfinder, Palladium, Rolemaster, and many other games have this problem, too. I will never run a party in these games since the data load, storage, and character sheet requirements are far too high. Even character creation time is a huge issue. And some of these games do not solo all that well, since party roles are required for playing adventures.
If I don’t have tank, healer, rogue, wizard in my party, forget playing the adventure. So the game needs four characters at a minimum, and that eliminates many games for me playing them solo, since running four heavier characters is something I don’t have time for. Mega dungeons often require 12 or more characters.
I love the depth of GURPS, and I can get more out of a single, in-depth character solo than I can four simplistic characters in a BX-style game. This is another trap you can fall into with too-simple games, why play four simple characters solo if they are all boring? When it comes down to it, one detailed character solo is more fun for me than an army of cookie-cutter drones.
That said, most fantasy adventures are not solo, and playing combat-focused adventures as a social or skill-focused character is not all that great. The character design will determine what the solo adventure comprises. Solo adventures in GURPS tend to “play to the audience” with that being the character’s skills and abilities.
A social bard? Lots of city adventures, guild drama, playing at bars, opera house intrigue, learning songs, finding compositions, and other music-based adventures.
Solo play like this can be fun and very in-depth if you adjust your expectations. Especially if you blend with light combat and pulp-action.
Finding a kitchen sink fantasy adventure like this? I would rather buy a setting book and use that as a backdrop, since the default fantasy assumption is that “four against the world” gameplay of the traditional fantasy party with the four primary classes.
When I do solo fantasy play, one in-depth character is all I need.
But I have that “being left out” feeling if I pull in traditional fantasy adventures. Those are more for balanced parties and not me and how I like to play.
You could make the same comparison with a fighter who specializes in fortress defenses and siege weapons. There is a lot of gameplay on the front lines of the borderlands in remote forts under siege by humanoid armies, and that character bringing their knowledge to bear in constructing defenses and directing defensive weapons against the hordes trying to breach the walls.
I would not really name a classic fantasy adventure for that character that cover those narrow areas, but, again, as a tailored and specific story, this is great in GURPS. That character in a mega dungeon? Probably useless.
This is the core of my issue with today’s fantasy games. And “square peg in the round hole” 5E barista and magic school adventures only highlight the problem. These games elevate the dungeon experience as the pinnacle of fantasy gaming storytelling. The skills in 5E are all dungeon-focused. All the game does is dungeons. The same can be said for many OSR games.
And shoehorning in “cheap combat” into a barista adventure only makes the problem worse. The barista part is so boring and uninteresting that we need combat in there to spice things up.
While the dungeon is also a metaphor for the heroic journey, and that fish-out-of-water moment of the hero, many games focus on that to the point where other styles of play get excluded.
It feels like a strange argument to make, both for barista adventures in system that make that style of play interesting (like GURPS), and against games that focus so narrowly on the dungeon that barista play is excluded.
I suppose people try to make 5E and games like it do too much. It takes 5E two or three shelves of books to make it do the same thing GURPS does in two core books.
Also, fantasy feels like it is stuck in a dungeon rut for me. The stories I like to tell don’t need a wall to each side and one way forward. They are more like fiction and character focused. There is a reason that fiction based on traditional D&D dungeon adventures tends to be tedious. Few want to read a book about clearing an 80-room mega dungeon. That is a lot more fun to play on than read, unless it is watching a live play and watching people act and play roles.
It is a feeling of where I am in gaming is in a different place than what many games offer, and that some genres for me feel stuck in a rut. My games tend to be more like fiction, storytelling around a single character in an interesting world.
GURPS does that well.
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