Musings about the Steve Jackson Interview – Part 1

I interviewed +Steve Jackson, who of course wrote and published the game system for which I write, GURPS. +Jeffro Johnson said nice things about the interview.

Steve and I covered a lot of ground, much of which could have elicited an even larger response than I made during the interview itself. 

I’m going to excerpt parts of the transcript, and say what comes to mind. Hey, it’s a blog. That happens

As I mentioned in the transcript itself, I got this a bit wrong. One of the interesting twists on the original BCG model of “Stars and Dogs” is that another name for the low growth-low profit markets is “pets.” This is likely more apt for the GURPS brand at the moment. As Steve goes on to say, people still like it enough to be profitable, if only marginally, and so it stays. Not because of any particular force of business, but because he wants to  see it go on.

Steve: The executive summary would be we asked Lisa and she said “Ha! Go for it!” It wasn’t quite that quick, but it wasn’t slow. 

Perhaps I should not have been surprised by the evident collegiality here, but I sort of was. Of course, Munchkin Pathfinder will do nothing but support Patfhinder as it succeeds, so this was clearly, as Steve notes, win-win. But I also can’t help but wonder, in direct contradiction to my earlier comments on the subject, if a GURPS Golarion adaptation might be feasible.  

You’d want some sort of conversion guide that would either allow for the translation of Pathfinder monsters into GURPS, or give substitutes that provide the right feel. You’d do it with Dungeon Fantasy, and probably customize or adapt one of the magic systems to feel more like Vancian magic rather than going with the standard spell system so that the flavor would be the same . . . but you’d give advice for using other magic systems as well, for those that like them.

Finally, I’d want to stat out 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250-point lenses for some of the core templates that feature in Pathfinder. Much of that is already done in one way or another. The Knight (Fighter) and Barbarian (um, Barbarian) are already right there. The Ranger is a Scout; the Monk is a Martial Artist. Clerics are Clerics or Saints, Paladins are Warrior Saints or Holy Warriors (Warrior Saints are much more evocative, thanks to Divine Favor and +Antoni Ten Monrós nice work on the subject). The various flavors of Magic-User would need work to make them unique, etc.

All in all, it would work well, and provide a huge wellspring for all kinds of games. Now that DF16: Wilderness Adventures is out, a true “hex crawl” can be entertained, with dungeons thrown in for fun.

It would certainly be a boost in pre-published and available material for GURPS players. I’d have to think more on what the Paizo guys would get out of it – though even if I do say so myself, having the stable of writers that contribute to Steve Jackson Games be familiar with the Golarion world and writing content that could be used in Pathfinder would not be bad for either party. It’s certainly quite lucrative to dip toes into the world of Dungeons and Dragons-based games (my casual forays into talking about D&D5 broke daily records in views for me), and I think the material that would come of such a thing would be very good stuff.
All in all, it would work well, and provide a huge wellspring for all kinds of games. Now that DF16: Wilderness Adventures is out, a true “hex crawl” can be entertained, with dungeons thrown in for fun.

It would certainly be a boost in pre-published and available material for GURPS players. I’d have to think more on what the Paizo guys would get out of it – though even if I do say so myself, having the stable of writers that contribute to Steve Jackson Games be familiar with the Golarion world and writing content that could be used in Pathfinder would not be bad for either party. It’s certainly quite lucrative to dip toes into the world of Dungeons and Dragons-based games (my casual forays into talking about D&D5 broke daily records in views for me), and I think the material that would come of such a thing would be very good stuff.

We know perfectly well that some families are playing with it, and that’s great, and one of these days there will be a Munchkin game aimed at the younger set. But that’s going to be our answer, rather than to…I don’t want to say it, but everybody will understand, but better than to dumb down Munchkin.

Oh, you mean like THIS one?

+Andrew Hackard noted that he nearly spit out his drink when Steve dropped this utterly opaque-to-me-at-the-time hint as to this game that was released a short time later. 

Yousa gots to watch that tricksy Steve – he drops hints and you have to be on your toes to pick them up.

And here is where I read the implicit statement that GURPS as GURPS will be sustained as long as it can be done with at least its level of current success. What it won’t likely do is have extra resources thrown at it that could profitably be deployed to Munchkin, Ogre, or likely Car Wars when it comes out.

This is both good and bad. Good because my system of choice will continue to be supported at least at some level. Bad because the pipeline, as it’s called, will likely remain fairly tight, with risks that a larger market segment might take being minimized. 

We’ll see – +Sean Punch‘s LiveJournal makes noised about at least four projects currently going through for eventual release (more, actually), which is a nice haul. As this gets through, I hope people realize that this is definitely a case where being a collector tells SJG that “more please!” is a good answer. 

We’re about to get to some really interesting stuff about Virtual TableTops and GURPS. Given that this is a reasonably controversial topic on the SJG Forums right now, I’ll save this for a post of its own. In short, I think that a VTT for GURPS would be Just Ducky, and the key is more about how to ensure quality control and IP protection. The former harder than the latter, I think.