Re: [HOE] GURPS DEADLANDS DELAYED!

[Darrin Bright <darrin@neobright.net>]

At 06:00 AM 1/16/01 -0800, you wrote:
>January 16, 2001: Deadlands Delay

>Straight from the www.sjgames.com website. Seems those folks just CAN'T
>HANDLE using cards with a RPG. D6 reliance is the only thing I can
>stand about my favorite RPG system.

Hmm... I guess I can understand why they pulled it. The author wasn't
directly accessing the playtest comments himself, and I got the feeling
that a great majority of GURPS Gearheads were pretty upset by his
insistence on some Deadlandisms that didn't quite mesh with the One True
System to Rule Them All. The final manuscript when it left playtest struck
me as being a little "patchy", and not quite up to the quality most GURPS
sourcebooks are expected to achieve. A great deal of GURPS players were
extremely confused by the historical setting (a GURPS player miffed about
historical accuracy is truly a sight to behold), and I didn't feel the
author had done enough to explain the backstory and setting without
confusing the hell out of all the GURPS people. 

The wars over the huckster mechanics were probably the most involved, but
last time I saw the manuscript the card rules were still intact as the
standard huckster mechanic. Mapping poker odds, much less Deadlands poker
odds, to a 3d6 roll is a whole metric buttload of headaches, but I thought
I'd proposed a fairly clever system of tables to handle it, but I had no
idea if the author decided to use it or not. 

The greatest tragedy that I could see was what happened to the shamans,
which were all done using GURPS Ritual Magic rules (from GURPS Voodoo I
think, not sure), and not being a GURPS player there was absolutely nothing
in the shaman rules that I could even recognize as being from the Deadlands
setting. Shamans were divided into three different tiers of power levels,
and none of the really cool stuff from Ghost Dancers was in there, like
favored medicine paths and guardian spirits. The material that was there
was specific to only one single indian tribe (I think Lakota but I'm not
sure) and I didn't like the fact that language and symbols from one
specific tribe were being used and applied to all indian tribes, many of
which wouldn't be caught dead speaking the language of another tribe, but
whatever. But nobody really wanted to talk about the shamans... for all I
know, the GURPS ritual magic system is a lot easier to use than the
Deadlands appeasement point system.