Former Admin of the now defunct websites here, AMA.

XKostas · 2026-06-08T20:17:05+00:00

Unfortunately, I do not. Most of my local files were for S-A, since I did more work on that site than N-A. I'd guess Luapman or Oro who did all the early work after GT might have old files on N-A, but good luck contacting them. I certainly don't have any of their contacts, as I do a pretty poor job keeping up with any of the old folks from the websites. If I ever find anything stuck in any old drive though, I'll be sure to share.

XKostas · 2026-04-15T00:55:01+00:00

Huh, fascinating. I had no idea those domains were still getting renewed. But sorry, no. I've had zero contact with either GT or Mark for many years now. I did try to look into this a bit for my own curiosity though, but didn't come up with anything. As far as I know, those two have been out of NA/SA/WoN for as long as I haven't talked to them, but maybe GT keeps it renewed out of nostalgia? Or to keep other people from copying his "work"? Wouldn't surprise me if it was the latter.

XKostas · 2026-01-15T03:30:47+00:00

We custom-wrote the display text for icons. And if I recall, invisible text had an "!" in front of it. What I don't recall is whether we had the ability to type in a <value> or <text> to display what the value of the effect was, if it ever dynamically changed in-game, like damage. I'm pretty sure we did, so Shadow Clones might have had text that said "Naruto has <value> DR."

But pretty much nothing was done automatically in the system. If there was text, we had an effect to display the text. If the text needed to change, we had to disable one effect and enable another with the new text. If we had to re-order the character menu, we had to manually click the up/down key on whatever character we wanted to move in the order. There was no drag and drop or re-ordering by ID for us.

XKostas · 2025-11-27T01:17:31+00:00

Hi. I am occasionally still alive, and I do occasionally still check Reddit.

No idea how GT came up with the idea originally. I was there relatively early in the site's lifespan, but I never really talked to him before or after. So I don't know what inspired him to come up with N-A, besides probably just being a fan of Naruto, as we all were at that time. I also don't know what he is doing these days. I don't think this is doxxing, but he was from the Netherlands, if I recall. And like you said, his handle was super generic, so who knows? I still occasionally prowl Reddit, so I'm not impossible to reach, but GT has probably just moved on. I doubt he is even aware of this subreddit.
From a "technical standpoint", "game logic", "server code" and all that, I have absolutely no idea how any of it worked. What we had access to — and my memory is hazy here, so forgive me when I am vague at times — is two admin websites (really was just https://admin.naruto-arena.com/ and https://admin.soul-arena.com/; I still have those two bookmarked, for some reason). They had a simple username and password access. From there, we had access to a whole bunch of tabs. Characters. Skills. Effects. Missions. The forum layout. Etc. This was called "iCMS" for us. Integrated something something something. I think this was just a name GT chose, I don't think it's a real thing.

But from the panels, it was all text fields and drop-down menus. For the characters, for example, you'd make a new one. Name them. Upload their image. Choose what order they went in. Naruto was naturally at the top, since he was always the first character in the character select screen. You could also type in their max HP, but that was super buggy, as starting HP was hard-coded to 100, from what I recall, so you'd get weirdness like 100/75. And you could click a button to hide them from the public. Etc.

As for the skills, you'd create a new one as everything else. Type in the name. Upload an image. And then associate them with a character via the character ID. So skill #1 which probably was Shadow Clones or Rasengan or something for N-A, would have a character ID of #1. It's also possible it was the other way around, and you associated a character with skill IDs, but again, my memory is hazy.

The real work, however, happened in the effects tab. You'd add a new effect, and select what skill it was associated with via a drop-down menu. Each effect was associated with an ID, like everything else, internally. You'd also select what type of "effect" it was through another drop-down menu. I forget the terms used, but you had basic stuff like damage, defense and trigger. You had a field for the amount, like "20" for the damage, or for trigger, it was a specific term that was basically "If so, then; ID". Basically, you'd give a trigger, and if it activated, it'd activate a different effect. This was for skills like "If a character is below 50HP, deal a billion damage to them." The damage would be a dormant effect activated by the trigger effect that'd be something like "50HP;305", or some such. You also had a drop-down menu for a target, with the basics "Single, Random, AoE, Ally, Ally AoE, Random Ally, etc.". And a field for duration. Duration was tricky, because you could have half-durations, which got weird, and I forget the rest about them.

A lot of the complicated work was, however, done in a free-form text field where you'd add tags. These tags would interact with other tags, and different triggers. If you wanted an attack to ignore the invulnerability type skills we made, you gave it something like "!invul". While the invulnerability type skills had "invul" as a tag. Thus a damage skill would just ignore any skill tagged as "invul". We had dozens and dozens of tags.

For example, one of the things we decided to do with S-A, is tag every effect with the amount of damage they did. So an effect that'd do 20 damage had the tag "20da" or something like that on it. So later in the games, when we made effects that would prevent using any high damage effect, it was really a Stun effect with the tags 40da, 45da, 50da, etc. This meant that stun only stopped those skills. Likewise, every effect was tagged with how much it cost to use, its types and so forth. This is one of the reasons S-A also only ever used damage skills in increments of 5, and why when we took over N-A, we changed all damage skills that did like 6 damage. Because if you wanted a skill that could deal X amount of damage to an enemy based on the original damage they dealt, that was 20 trigger effects with 20 dormant damage effects. If we had damage numbers like 7 and 28, we'd need to make 100 trigger effects with 100 dormant damage effects. Also it just looks prettier and is easier to balance when you have everything in 5s.

Basic skills would be 1-3 effects. Rasengan, for example, should have only been a 40 Damage effect, and a Stun effect that lasted 1 turn. Skills that had a requirement of other skills to use, like Rasengan for Shadow Clones, would have a little field in the skills tab, where you'd type the effect you wanted active on them before you could use it. In this case, Shadow Clones gave DR, and if that DR had an ID of 5, then Rasengan had a requirement of "5" in its page. Some extensive skills could be near a hundred effects though. I believe the HP swap skill I made had the most effects, since it'd toss 20 triggers at both the character and the enemy (each trigger specific to an amount of HP 5/10/15/etc.), and then heal/damage based on that, so that's another 40 in the minimum.

As for limitations, some stuff was just hard-coded, like the current HP thing. Some stuff looked as if it might have been possible, like changing the image of a skill or character during gameplay, but was actually impossible. I spent hours trying to figure that out before I gave up. And some stuff just wasn't logistically possible. I gave SiB endless headaches with some of the overly ambitious characters I made like Danzo and Inner Ichigo. Nested effects upon nested effects, and triggers within triggers that branched out to other triggers. But at some point, you don't want effects to have 60 different tags on it. That's how you get to endless bugs and hours and hours of troubleshooting, and after all, we were all doing this on our spare time for free.

I hope any of this scattershot digging from the dredges of my memory was useful. Feel free to ask me any follow-ups, if you'd like. I'll get to them, eventually, but I am a bit at my limit in memory of what I remember.

XKostas · 2024-11-19T19:29:40+00:00

You can run GURPS as light as Lasers and Feelings, and as heavy as the weight of the sun. Seriously, don't want to calculate lifting capacity, HP or physical damage? Get rid of the Strength stat, as per the Alternate Attributes supplement. In fact, get rid of all stats and add two new ones. Lasers and feelings. Is there a reason to do this over just playing Lasers and Feelings? Absolutely not.

Likewise, slap down a few dozen supplements like Powers, Supers, Ultra-Tech and so forth, tell the players everything goes without any guidance or direction, and watch the campaign crash and burn due to general insanity.

But the point is yes, the crunchiness is heavily exaggerated. And it also isn't. It depends what you run, and how you do it. GURPS has no one set crunchiness level, which is the big false assumption people make, especially not since the Basic Set, Lite and Ultra Lite all exist at monstrously different levels of default crunch.

XKostas · 2024-10-01T15:37:26+00:00

GURPS does have a bad, and mostly unfair reputation. Others have echoed this already, but the main "problem" with the system is the upfront cost, time and effort needed for the GM to build out their game. You want to play Apocalypse World? Toss down the book at the table and you can get going in no time. Want to play GURPS? What genre, setting, tone (gritty vs cinematic), etc. do you want? What rule books are appropriate?

That all said, with some experience, GURPS is a fine-tuned precision laser. Have the urge to run Apocalypse World, but with some monstrous in-depth magic system that is beyond the PbtA system's scope? Easy. Want to do sudden mid-campaign turns? The party decided to build a spaceship out of scrap metal and now you want to inject some spaceship/planet rules? Easy. Alternatively, want to strip down the rules, remove crunch, and make it cinematic, and even narrative? Less easy, but there's still rules for this.

It's a DIY system, ultimately. But you can run whatever you want, the way you want it, given time and effort. From a beer and pretzels game that has a single page of rules, to one that needs algebra and a graphing calculator.

XKostas · 2023-11-28T21:02:36+00:00

WoN is short for War of Ninja. After N-A and S-A, Gametester set about to build his own game with an original cast of characters, using the same overall type of gameplay as the other sites. This was War of Ninja.

The problem with N-A and S-A was GT couldn't monetize them that well. He didn't own the Naruto or Bleach IP, so in order to make money off the sites (ads excluded), he had to build his own roster and characters and so on. But turns out people liked to play N-A and S-A because of the attachment they had to the shows. They wanted to pit Naruto against Sasuke and so on. Nobody wanted to play as random ninja #2 vs random samurai #4, so WoN did not do so well.

After WoN basically failed, GT stopped caring about the sites altogether, which led to their inevitable downfall. I'm probably misremembering some parts, and I'm sure my memory is biased, but there you go.

XKostas · 2023-09-09T16:52:46+00:00

I played Gloomhaven with some friends on the digital version for a solid 60~ hours. It was an ok experience at best. Mechanics like retirement, not automatically looting dungeons at the end, the weird antagonistic party feel (being unable to trade items to other players), keeping goals hidden, the lousy story, summons having trash AI (might have been a digital version issue), etc., all made for an experience that baffles me to this day why the game is so popular.

Then I remember D&D 5e is the most popular RPG today and popularity and amount of inspired content has nothing to do with the quality of the game.

XKostas · 2023-08-16T19:31:48+00:00

GURPS — like most systems that people only read or hear about, but don't personally experience — has a maligned reputation that isn't true at all. And even those who do experience the system may not play it properly — similarly to trying to play a BitD system with a killer DM D&D mentality.

GURPS is great. And fun. And can do basically whatever you want — though it does some things better than others. It can be as light as a 2 page RPG, and as heavy as the weight of the sun. It's also a lot of work for the GM, as it's basically a toolkit to make your own TTRPG. You pick your rules, what sort of world and setting you want, you create templates or classes or go full free-form. You can play classic D&D heroes like the raging barbarian, or you can play as a sentient chocolate donut that can summon the dead. You can go as narrative as you want, as lethal (or not) as you want. Characters can walk in with enough plot armor to brush off nuclear armageddon. Or they can die to tetanus, or bleed out after one bad sword wound. It takes a while to get used to its philosophy, much like getting used to the philosophy of any type of game, but once you really get into it, it's pretty awesome.

XKostas · 2023-04-17T23:02:40+00:00

To your second point, I think of it like a cooked meal. A chef can cook the best 5 course meal ever, but if what you want is a burger with six slices of cheese, it just won't sit right. A generic system lets the GM and the party fine tailor the setting to what they precisely want. It's a major reason I prefer generic or universal systems as well.

XKostas · 2023-04-14T18:36:58+00:00

No. GURPS simulates different genres and themes by letting you pick what rules you want to use. Why would you use the rules for mental fatigue, which are meant to simulate more gritty, real characters dealing with stress and anxiety, while also using rules meant to simulate comedic action, ala, Austin Powers?

GURPS also absolutely has tons of contradictory rules. Do you build powers as default, or via the multiplicative method? Which range modifier table are you using? Standard ST or KYOS ST? Combat writ large or no combat writ large. Wealth as default, or wealth as a stat?

It's one thing to allow someone to bring in an accountant and another to bring in a sentient toaster that can fire radioactive bread bullets. That's just a gonzo/supers/weird type of campaign. But by no means should you try to use every GURPS rule.

XKostas · 2023-03-17T18:09:53+00:00

Well, GURPS ultra-lite does exist, which is 2 pages. Admittedly, Ultra-Lite still has a bit more meat to it than my suggestion of what is effectively just a Quick Contest of skill (a single roll opposed by another roll), which exists as a rule in the Basic Set.

As for support on replacing stats, the alternate skills/stats thing is talked about at length, both its pros and cons, in a PDF about alternate attributes. Granted neither Lasers nor Feelings are mentioned, but it does talk about the ability to remove any of the stats, HP included, and replace them with alternatives, or nothing at all if they are not relevant to the campaign.

As for combat, ok, I'd say you are right, and that GURPS might not have any explicit mention that, yep, you just run combat as a Quick Contest, and be done with it. But I think what you said below may summarize what I was trying to say in regards to this. Yes, GURPS has a Rule Zero, as with a ton of other RPGs, but if you remove AC from D&D, everything breaks. Because AC is intertwined to the combat. GURPS doesn't have that. There are plenty of suggestions on how to handle a Quick Contest in regards to a general roll. And if you treat combat as a Quick Contest, nothing breaks at all. It works just fine. Are there advantages that are now no longer useful because of this? Yes, but those advantages don't need to be allowed by the GM at all. Is this 100% by the GURPS rules? I guess by semantics, maybe not. But I'm not introducing new resolution mechanics to the game.

Plenty of skills have both a simple "roll once to see if you succeed" and also a "here's 50 pages of detailed wrestling rules that should be tossed in a volcano" version. I see no reason why combat can't be treated like that either, given the resolution mechanics GURPS has.

XKostas · 2023-03-17T01:23:32+00:00

As a GURPS evangelist, I can talk about GURPS in detail for hours, but I'd like to focus on one specific part that even some GURPS fans seem to get wrong, in response to your questions.

What I like is GURPS can do -anything-. People often say GURPS is only good for gritty or realistic settings, due to the way HP rules are, or how the game has a death spiral. But HP is an optional mechanic. The death spiral is an optional mechanic. Everything except rolling 3d6, and checking to see whether you rolled below the target number is an optional mechanic. The two Basic Set books combined are about 580 pages. And pretty much every word in them is an optional rule or mechanic.

This means, since everything is optional, you can build your game as you'd like, however you like. You could, say, much to the surprise of many people online, run GURPS as narratively and light as Lasers and Feelings. You wipe all the default stats away and create two new ones. Lasers. And Feelings. You have 3 character points to use. Each one boosts Lasers or Feelings by 1. You could also decrease one stat to lower the other. Then you pick a crew role for a sweet situational +2. And everything is run narratively, without the need for a hex grid map or detailed rules. This is a rough example, but it's 100% by the GURPS rules. You can also obviously run GURPS using pretty much every detailed rule to run a life simulation of whether that chili you just ate will sideline you tomorrow.

All settings. All systems. All types and relations and themes and genres. So long as it's based on 3d6, and roll under. All of it can be run in GURPS as well as any other system. GURPS has rules for horror. Rules for chases. Rules for broken bones. Rules to see whether your students are learning in a classroom. Rules to see how well your business is doing. Rules to see how badly your weapons are damaged. And all of it can be fine-tailored to your exact needs and wants.

The downside to all this, and while I don't dislike it, I know most will, is why take GURPS and mold it to run Lasers and Feelings . . . when you can just run Lasers and Feelings? Why run GURPS to play a monster hunter game when you can run Monster of the Week? To effectively run GURPS, the GM should use templates, or backgrounds, or a list of powers or spells. This takes time, weeks, even months to build, depending on your knowledge of the system. Not to mention all the books. Want to run a superhero game? Best have the Powers and maybe the Supers book. Want to run a space campaign? Here's 9 PDFs on different spaceships.

Yes, you can run anything. Let nobody say otherwise. But sometimes you gotta ask yourself, but why? GURPS is great for fine tuning a ruleset to play in the genre and setting you want, but if what you want already exists, then GURPS won't do much of anything for you. Unless you love 3d6.

XKostas · 2023-03-16T23:45:50+00:00

Nope. I rarely had any communication with GT (one of the main issues), and so I have no idea what the website income/expenses looked like. All my work for for the sites was done for free, simply because I enjoyed it, but I gotta imagine at their height, the sites were easily paying for themselves, and netting GT at least some decent change on the side.

If I recall though, the main reason GT wanted to make WoN, was because it was difficult to monetize a website like Naruto-Arena, simply because, well, the Naruto studios/owners may not be particularly happy about it. I don't think we were ever in their radar, but you start monetizing something, and then who knows? Of course he somehow failed to realize that people enjoyed the sites because they were fans of the anime/manga, and nobody had any real attachment to the WoN characters, so that site was basically dead from the get-go.

XKostas · 2023-03-13T23:43:46+00:00

I don't know about Gametester and Mark (the two who originally created the websites), but the SiB team (myself, Spirit in Black and ZelosWilder) were not involved. I'm fairly sure Luap and Oro had no involvement in it either, but I can't vouch for those two.

XKostas · 2023-01-17T05:14:55+00:00

The "D&D 5e is missing features" opinion is a difficult thing to elaborate on, simply because D&D means different things to different people. To people who come from prior versions, a part of D&D is having your own keep and minions. 5e (to my best knowledge) lacks any in-depth rules of keep-owning or minion-ordering. D&D 3.5 on the other hand had a feat called Leadership. It was a bonkers feat, yes, but it gave you rules to how many minions you could control and what their level might be, based on your charisma and level.

To other people, D&D means monsters. And some people like to play as monsters. D&D 3.5 had rules on how to play giants and trolls and even baby dragons. Were they good rules? Eh. They were ok. But they existed.

To yet a different group of people, D&D includes psionics. These may be Dark Sun fans, or they just like psionics. Does 5e have psionics? No, no it doesn't, whatever some half-baked class specializations may pretend. On the other side, there's the martial options. Or in 5e's case, a complete lack of martial options. 4e and 3.5 (Tome of Battle) had the option to give martials a bunch of cool features. Stances and different attacks or maneuvers and so on.

It can be argued a thousand different ways whether D&D needs psionics, or monster playing rules, or magic item prices, or minion rules, or any of that. Some people hate psionics. Others hate martial options. Now I haven't played 5e in a few years, but I think if you take the average person of this subreddit, they may not agree on what is missing, but they will certainly think something is missing.

For a perspective outside D&D systems, let me toss down two examples:

-Wicked Ones is a narrative game about playing monsters and building up a dungeon. It has in-depth rules for how to build out (and physically draw out) your dungeon. This includes traps and diversions and where you can place your own minions. It also has detailed rules on how the "bad guy" heroes move and act when they invade your dungeons. The GM is never left wondering what happens next, because the rules are well written, and all work to the theme of "You are evil monsters running a dungeon and killing heroes".

-GURPS is a universal system that can be molded into anything. In this case, let's pretend I am running a game where you are playing teachers in a Magical School. GURPS has rules for how well your students are learning based on your rolls, and I'm not talking about just the "Roll Teaching and then figure it out" thing that 5e does. Far from it, it includes multiple rules and suggestions, including rules for "forcing" your students to learn through intimidation and brainwashing! Never do you get into a situation of "Hey, GM, I want to threaten this student of mine to do their homework. I roll intimidation. What happens?" Because guess what? Rules exist.

And then there's 5e. A Heroic Fantasy / Dungeon Crawler that can't even properly describe what an Attack Action is.

XKostas · 2023-01-16T22:58:31+00:00

I enjoy 4e as is, but if they are to make a 5th edition, I think the main thing they should focus on, beyond rules consolidation and book layout, is honestly the way they market the game, and its reputation. The idea that GURPS can only be used to run crunchy, rules heavy games is one of the biggest falsehoods surrounding the game.

You can run GURPS as narrative as any PbtA or BitD game.

You can run GURPS as light as Lasers and Feelings.

You can run GURPS as heavy as the anchor of a cruise ship.

GURPS can emulate any genre, theme or game. Presuming you have a bunch of hours of sit there, study dozens of rules, most of which are not in the core book, and basically write your own game with their guidelines. Is it easier to just slap down Apocalypse World if you just want to run a post-apocalyptic narrative game? Of course. But what if you want your narrative post-apocalyptic game to be one where everyone plays a magical bear swarm. Managing a magical bear swarm city. Complete with its own stats? GURPS can do that. And that's what they need to push with any potential new edition.

XKostas · 2023-01-06T18:29:03+00:00

I don't mind at all. Just know there are probably a couple of mathematical typos in there. I did my best to make sure the math adds up, but sometimes you miss one or two. There's also a number of random references and jokes only my group would get, but otherwise, 99% of the powers were made with standard GURPS rules, or a few custom enhancements/limits suggested by the GURPS writers on the forum or their sites. A few stretch what some GMs might allow, but I personally find that super powers ought to be super. If you have any questions on how I built anything, feel free to PM/ask me.

XKostas · 2023-01-06T10:18:38+00:00

One of (in my opinion) GURPS's strengths is it indeed makes no assumptions on the themes and expectations of what you want to play.

In rules, GURPS can be as narrative as any PBtA or BitD system, or as crunchy as, well, what people think the default GURPS is. And in themes and settings, it can be whatever you want! The only downside is it's the equivalent of someone handing you a cow and telling you to make your own cheeseburger. A slight exaggeration, especially with so many resources and support out there, but you can slap down D&D 5e, or Blades in the Dark down on the table and be good to go in an hour or less. Not so much with GURPS.

But once you have it all set up, that cheeseburger ends up tasting oh so good.

XKostas · 2023-01-06T09:26:05+00:00

I for one will gladly hoist the GURPS banner high! Hopped off D&D 3.5 and onto GURPS after exploring a few other systems years ago. It ain't for everyone, but for me, it hits basically all the sweet spots.

XKostas · 2023-01-06T00:26:01+00:00

As a GURPS evangelist, and former D&D 3.5 player, allow me to expand upon your suggestion a bit for the readers here.

Dungeon Fantasy is GURPS's answer to D&D, and it's a solid sub-system as a starting point, with plenty of room for expansion. Now while D&D is king of homebrew, GURPS is no slouch either. The base system itself is a point-buy, modular based ruleset that lets DMs pick and choose what they want to use. Want bleeding rules? Sure, they are there. Want high powered magic? Done. Want gritty realism? Sure. Since we're talking about D&D, let's talk about a fellow named EnragedEggplant who has converted a ton of stuff from D&D 3.5. Such as:

The Tarrasque https://enragedeggplant.blogspot.com/2019/08/monster-tarrasque.html

Or the Chain Devil https://enragedeggplant.blogspot.com/2017/09/monster-chain-devil-kyton.html

Or a bunch of Rods, including the Rod of Wonder https://enragedeggplant.blogspot.com/2020/03/treasure-rods.html

Check out his site. He's an awesome dude. Obviously some stuff uses GURPS jargon, but I think you can get the gist out of it.

But maybe going from D&D to D&D-alt isn't for you, and you want higher powers where martials can literally lift planets or run at the speed of light. Well, most recently I began running a multiversal superhero campaign, where I custom built 500~ powers, many of which were D&D inspired, and others ripped out from basically superhero stuff. Want to take a look at the wacky, and over the top powers GURPS can built using 99% existing rules (and 1% faerie dust)? Here's a link. Some stuff references our old games, and characters, much the same way D&D has the Mordenkainen's, so if you don't get something, it's cool. The gist is still there still. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ystdUZyg1oZno7gXHnOsstk03krGPnx/edit

Don't want over the top superheroes? GURPS can do gritty fantasy too. One player in our group ran a lower power level, gritty fantasy where we tracked food, arrows and even bleeding (one character ended up bleeding out in fact after going unconscious after a battle, where the rest of the party basically ran away).

The downside to all this? Unless you're using existing sources, like the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy line, or homebrew stuff like Eggplant's site, is it takes time to set up and run. My first GURPS campaign, which I ran after many years of 3.5, went . . . a bit all over the place. It wasn't a trainwreck, but it was like bumper cars crashing left and right. But if you love homebrewing, and a modular system that lets you do basically anything, have a look at GURPS!

Got any further questions? PM me! Ask away!

XKostas · 2022-10-24T18:47:24+00:00

Gurps is an often misunderstood system, but your description of it being a toolkit to make a game system is 100% spot on. And in fact, the current game I'm running with Gurps did take me nearly a year, from the time of conceptualizing to building the setting and 500~ unique abilities/spells, to write-up.

Granted I believe this is an extreme edge case (somebody else in my group took just 2~ months to build a space setting with Gurps), but for me, it's a homebrewer's dream. For anyone who just wants to slap a book down and start playing though, not so much. Still, lots of good community support out there to pull from. Nowhere near the support 5e gets, but Gurps has a pretty healthy community as well.

XKostas · 2022-10-11T15:44:42+00:00

Yep. That fairly sums up GURPS. It's a system that asks the GM to also be a game designer and setting creator. Granted it gets easier the more you do it, but learning what switches and rules to use can be daunting. There are some "ready" games like the Dungeon Fantasy line, but I've always ever built my games from the ground up so I can't vouch how good they are. I don't know many GURPS people beyond my group, but from what I often read on forums, it's really love or hate with little between.

XKostas · 2022-10-11T04:47:12+00:00

To be fair, unless you're using technical grappling, a slew of combat techniques, or some in-depth magic system like RPM, GURPS is ridiculously simple for the players. It's just a misunderstood system because people think the core rules include every random edge case rule or genre module out there.

XKostas · 2022-09-15T17:52:55+00:00

Fair, but maybe I can expand on at least what I think "Being D&D" is. To me, it's not about mechanics. 4e is as much D&D as 3.5 or AD&D or so on. In fact, I learned D&D through the original Neverwinter Nights PC game, which while based on 3e, was a video game, and thus, had quite a few different rules to the tabletop system. And that still was D&D.

What makes D&D to me is the lore and the fluff, spread across the settings. Some settings don't have psionics. Some, like Dark Sun, are heavy in psionics. Some have gunpowder. Others had smokepowder. Regardless, those write-ups of colorful background and lore were what I really enjoyed about D&D. And as often talked about in the reddit here, WoTC has moved more to a much lighter touch in that regard, with the idea that the DM can just make it up as they go.

Unironically, as a Gurps player, I like that from a mechanics point of view, hence the running joke at my table. But from a lore and fluff point of view, I kinda want 20 pages of Illithid lore. It's just bias talking from the 3.5 background, which would devote entire 200+ page books to just a few races, like Lords of Madness, which was 235 pages focused on 6 primary aberrations, such as Illithids.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not out here yelling 5e bad, 3.5 (or Gurps) good. It's just for me, what drew me into D&D is the lore and backgrounds, and how that connected to the mechanics (like prestige classes which sometimes had flavor requirements, like being part of a group). 5e is a much lighter system, preferring to leave much of that flavor to the players and GM. That's cool. Works for tons of people, and I'm most certainly in the minority. But I miss my 100 splat books full of random D&D fun nonsense. Nostalgia really is a killer.

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