Astral Projection’s last blog post..Metaphysics Introduction

Really? The wizard lied to and cast an unauthorized spell on the victim with the party’s endorsement/complacency.

What sort of trust is that? If I was the rping the victim in that scene I’d gone off! It certainly would be very hard for the group to coalesce. Not sure if I’d ever really trust them, ever.

The best way to get players to rp caution and suspicion is to give them reason(s) to be fearful and worried.

Once in a blue moon, jack them up. Ask new guy/gal if they are willing to play a “throw away” “evil” character for a few sessions. The player/character with DM’s guidance will make the party regret being so trusting of a stranger.

Ironically enough, at least in my case, GURPS is one of the fluffiest games in existence - because I only ever buy the sourcebooks. As we speak, I own about 15 GURPS books - and have never bought or read any of the core rule books.

In my world, GURPS exists solely to provide me coherent setting information all in one place when I don’t feel like raiding Wikipedia for ideas. GURPS Japan helped me run a Sengoku-era Mage (White Wolf) game, and Steampunk was used to run a freeform (ie, no dice, no rules) game a while back.

“I myself would die in a diceless, storytelling game… it actually represents everything I dislike about a RPG.”

I’m the reverse - nearly any game I play, no matter how crunchy, I slowly erode it into fluff. Complicated games get simplified, simple games gradually become diceless, diceless games eventually become freeform.

I’ve always found that if you have skilled players and a GM those players trust to be fair, and all of them are working together to tell an interesting story rather than spending the entire game session trying to one-up each other, the pure-fluff game produced can be incredibly enjoyable. Meanwhile, mechanics-heavy games always bore me, to the point where it might actually turn me off the game entirely. I think TimeLords was a brilliant game, but the system is so complex, I can’t play the game without throwing 99% of the rules out and more or less freeforming the whole damned thing.

You might love a game where a player can cry with delight after rolling a critical hit, but as a player, I was already bored after the third roll of the night. And as a GM, most of my players tended to feel the same.

As trite a cliche as it is, I much prefer “role-playing” over “roll-playing”.

Which is not to say that the crunch > fluff perspective is WRONG, just that it’s never been to my taste. Different strokes, and all.