Tonight was the first playtest of my GURPS Solo rules. The rules are not finished but the proportion of what is genuinely GURPS and what is borrowed from other solo rules is definitely swinging more in the GURPS direction.
I have come to realise that I haven’t done a lot of modern-day RPGs recently. I have been doing a lot of fantasy and sci-fi recently and the little bit of modern-day stuff I have done had a healthy dose of fantasy behind the scenes to it (using solo rules Onyx Path’s Scion).
What I am doing with GURPS has taken its inspiration from Beverly Hills Cop, Miami Vice and more than a little bit of Top Gun. My hero is a Vice cop called Jack Bowie and his partner Jim Adams. Don’t ask me why but the character names are a strange concoction of Jim Bowie and Grizzly Adams, which of course have nothing to do with anything!
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Tonight I have working Scene, including subverted scenes that don’t always work out how you expected, Open and Closed question oracles, Chaos rules and Bonus Point allocations. I am using the standard NPC reaction table from the basic set and a very rough outline of my solo combat rules. I would say that the booklet is 60% done.
The playtest was a definite success and the adventure which was all about taking down a drug-smuggling ring has already exploded into a bigger conspiracy involving a dirty senator. Jim Adams is a stock 100pt NPC, just a template character with a name and description. Jack Bowie is more finessed with a few more points from the disadvantages. Jim is the character I am playing.
The police genre is working well, GURPS is not a hack and slash system and although I have been sneaking around with my gun out, I have not needed to shoot anyone yet. This is a good thing as the bad guy’s protection all have IMI Uzi machine guns and I ‘only’ have a 9mm Glock 17. The disproportionate firepower is helping keep me on the side of stealth. The last game I played was a goblin slaying paladin and was very much swords drawn and charge!
This was a good game and the rules are going to be a lot of fun.
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I love combining oracles with a good, crunchy system like GURPS. I’m looking forward to your final product. And I also have a habit of combining names from TV shows and other sources for my character names. I have a couple characters in my new space opera campaign named Olivia Bishop (combined from the two main characters of the US TV show “Fringe”) and Dorian Kennex (combined from the two mains of a US show called “Almost Human” that had a criminally short run about 5 or 6 years ago on the Fox network).
I know Olivia and the Bishops from Fringe. I think my train of thought went from Crocket to the old west and landed by with Jim Bowie and John Adams. Once I had Bowie and Adams they sounded like cool partners.