[gurps] How has 4th Edition changed your game?

[Roger Burton West]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 12:36:17PM -0600, Bret Indrelee wrote:

>Did the changes to Strength and Health change the way that people  
>started building characters? Especially in science-fiction and modern  
>settings, it used to be extremely rare to see a high strength  
>character in 3rd edition. Even in fantasy settings, many of the  
>fighters would have a higher Dexterity than Strength.

A slight change, but most of the games I play in aren't about
point-optimising for maximum combat effectiveness anyway.

>I remember the discussions about how Essential Earth was an economy  
>destroyer in 4th edition. What other spells have people found to be  
>problematic?

Haven't explored the outer edges. Most of the energy transfer bugs seem
to have been fixed.

>Do you feel any need to rewrite large sections of material that were  
>based on 3rd edition? Other than point costs, I wouldn't expect there  
>to be much of a problem here.

I don't tend to be very rule-bound anyway; my adventure notes tend to
say things like "pretty competent" rather than "IQ foo, skill bar". The
only time I worry much about point costs is when building packages for
PCs...

>Overall, what have you found to be the best improvements and the worst  
>problems in 4th edition as compared to 3rd edition?

I like the flow of the game and the integration of lots of the fiddly
special-case rules that had been tacked onto the side of 3e into
convenient subsystems. I find combat _much_ easier to run than 3e,
especially when it comes to nifty martial arts abilities. I don't miss
anything that wasn't transferred from 3e.

R