|
After gaming last night, we got to talking about the D20 "open source" gaming system that TSR/WoTC/Hasbro has put out. The idea is kind of similar to GURPS: there's a very basic core ruleset, and you can apply additional rules to it in order to have gameplay appropriate to your genre or setting of interest.
The "open source" aspect is basically an attempt to become RPG infrastructure; not just for WoTC's games, but for most RPGs released by most game designers. The core rules are apparently free for use, so if I wanted to build the best goddamned Crazy Dog Tactical Assault game out there, I could build it on top of D20. The advantage to me is that if people are already familiar with D20 (and if they play D&D 3rd edition, they will be) then they'll have a big advantage in learning how to play my game.
This is basically the same idea as GURPS, except that GURPS has historically only been used for games published by SJ Games, the publisher of GURPS. (Note that I found Powered By GURPS on the GURPS website, which is a clear response to D20. Also, GURPS Lite is a very basic distillation of the GURPS rules; presumably similar in scope to D20.)
Now, I found this kind of interesting when we were talking about it last night, so I went to the above-linked D20 site for more info. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a little confusing -- it took me five minutes of poking around to finally find the System Reference Document, which describes the core rules. Worse, the SRD isn't available as one download; instead there are twenty-eight different RTF documents to download (many only a page long!). Needless to say, I lost interest pretty quickly in trying to do any kind of comparative analysis.
This post has been a bit of a ramble, so here are my points: D20 seems interesting; web-site design and the ability to download and inspect the rules sucks. Eric's entrenched love of GURPS unlikely to change.
Finally, for the Mac-mackin' GURPS fiends out there, send your love out to the GURPS Character Sheet. It's a Carbon app for designing characters that works pretty well, and is pretty darn flexible. The only complaint I have is that they're still using the old polling style of checking for events, so when it's in the foreground it drives my laptop's CPU usage up to 100% (and my fan into "whine loudly" mode). But hey, it's free. 6:52:47 PM () 
|
|
