Reflection on Session 1

  • The system works pretty well and quickly. I was slow at first, moving from table to table and trying to make sure I did everything right, but I got much more used to it toward the end.
  • There is occasionally a little strangeness with some of the rolls when your Peril is very low. I mentioned that journey length and hazard damage rolls are such that at Peril 1, the Far Away and Nearby results are very close, and the trivial hazards do more damage than standard ones.
    • Really, this is a minor issue and just a fringe thing, but it does happen.
  • I did not anticipate how quickly the Peril could change. I am not sure how it is at higher character levels, but the jump from 2 to 4 was pretty scary.
  • A real outdoor specialist would help a lot, Carys is not cutting it.
  • It takes me much longer to write the report than to play the session. This is probably obvious to other bloggers, but was new to me.
  • There was no combat or dungeon this session, which I want to try out soon, but I like that the system makes a variety of challenges: not always just ‘go to dungeon, kill anything that moves’.
  • I decided to suppress the actual rolls. That is, I just say the roll failed instead of something like, ‘My skill is 11, but there is a -2 modifier so I need a 9 and roll a 14 so it fails.’ That level of mechanical detail is interesting sometimes, but requires a lot more record-keeping by me and takes longer.

I’d be curious to know your thoughts on Session 1. Did I do things correctly? How long do you think the siblings will survive? Anything you’d like more or less of in reports? Let me know if anything crosses your mind.

I am planning to post a session report right around Thursday, a reflection around Saturday, and some kind of small piece around Tuesday. Hopefully, I can settle into that kind of schedule. Best laid plans of mice and do oft gang aglee, though.

Session 1

Housekeeping

Before we start the session, we have a few things to do. Bastian has mild insomnia, so I need to roll for when his next insomniac episode is. It is 12 days away. With a GM, Bastian wouldn’t know when his next episode would be, so I will make conscious effort not to act on this knowledge. Carys has a duty, so I roll for that, but it does not come up. I finally roll on the Plot table, but it just says continuing the story. I will be keeping track of days fairly seriously because I like that sort of detail. I could make up names for months and so on, but I will just use the real-world ones. Continue reading “Session 1”

Carys Chapwyrd

In this post, I develop one of the PCs, specifically the older sister Carys Chapwyrd. In most games I have played, the smaller the group of PCs, the more important warriors are so I figured that Carys would be primarily a warrior with some outdoor skills to round her out.I will be using the system for fantasy journeys here so outdoor skills will matter a lot. Continue reading “Carys Chapwyrd”

Mission Statement

I describe my plans.

This blog is designed to serve as a repository of sorts for my GURPS related activities. In many ways, this is a fan site for The Collaborative Gamer, whose system for playing GURPS without a GM has been a great inspiration to me. Initially, at least, this blog will focus on my use of his system to have adventures. I plan to include both summaries of play and also my thoughts and experiences using his system.

The first few posts will have a little background on my plan, but I do not intend to waste much time. And thus… Continue reading “Mission Statement”

The Setting

In order to keep myself in suspense, I will only generate regions as needed in play. I will just assume that the PCs have really never left their starting region and don’t know much about the wider world. This will also keep me guessing.

I roll on the starting region tables and get the following results: the region is small, only about 5 days across, semi-civilized with one town. The population is human, and the theme of the region is “oppressed.” Continue reading “The Setting”