Nerd Butter: LAN Parties

Nerd Butter: For everything, there is a qualifying level and then there is another, superlative, exemplary level. There are many Olympic athletes, but only a few medalists. You might be a sports fan, or you can be the guy in the stadium with baseball stitching painted in his beer belly. And so it is with being a nerd. There are nerd requisites--what I call Nerd Bread--and then there are nerd specialities--Nerd Butter. While just about every nerd should be into Nerd Bread, Nerd Butter is what sets you apart as a nerd of a special caliber. And in the end, it's the specialties that make being a nerd so much fun.

Tonight I'm going to talk about a very special piece of Nerd Butter: LAN parties. Ten years ago, I would've classified these sorts of get-togethers as Nerd Bread, but today it's a concept you have to explain to more and more people, even ones who consider themselves active gamers. A LAN party is an event where a bunch of people bring their video game devices (either consoles or computers) all to one location to play multiplayer matches over a Local Area Network--hence the term LAN party. It's a shared experience where gamers pool their resources together and condense a lot of play into a small amount of time and space.

Back in the 90s and even early 2000s (oh I feel old), LAN parties were pretty much your only safe bet to play most games with full sessions composed of your friends. Few games had dedicated servers supporting online play. Even fewer had more than the most rudimentary matchmaking systems to allow players to meet and gather on whatever servers were available. And worst of all, network connections were so spotty that playing anything more ambitious than a small strategy game was out of reach for a lot of people. Online play was prohibitive gaming for the most part. This was especially true of consoles as recent as the Gamecube/Xbox/Playstation 2 generation, where playing online was a bare-bones, on-the-rails experience without nearly as many options as gamers have today.

So LAN parties thrived as a sort of video gaming potluck. You bring your gaming rig over to a mutual location, usually packing them in side-by-side in someone's basement, and get to play your game in a totally singular experience--large scale gaming with only your friends. Usually there's also a lot of junk food and Mountain Dew involved, too, so it's even more potluck-like in that way as well. Plus, cussing out a twelve year-old over a headset is a poor substitute for being able to punch the person next to you or air-hump their head after a particularly gratuitous win. (What? Not everyone does that?) Today, LAN parties are a lot more rare due to how streamlined online gameplay is, but for a great condensed gaming experience there's still nothing like it. You can pool together 4 TVs and console easily enough, and that might support up to 16 people playing a game like Halo, for instance, allowing a lot of people who don't own the game to get a chance to play in a friendly ravenous environment.

Last month, I hosted a LAN party at my house as a small celebration of having a functionally clean basement for the first time since we moved in to our house a year ago. And if you're wondering, a functionally clean basement in this case means clearing out the den by choking out the game room with stacks of books. We were able to set up a couple of gaming rigs in the den setup side by side, and with our system setup in our living room, we were able to have up to twelve people playing at once. Halo 4 was the order of the evening, as we've all been fans of the franchise and got through our teen years making at least a couple of Halo matches a staple in every party. With a bunch of frozen pizzas and twelve packs stuffing our fridge, and bags of chips flanking it, it was a recipe for a bunch of twenty-and-thirty-somethings to relive their high school and college gaming days.

Flatulence and smack-talk included.

Since we had a pretty good setup for asymmetrical teams, with two experienced Halo players and the rest varying from moderately experienced to sheep-with-guns. We got in a few intro matches to get the sheep worked up and sharpen the wolves' teeth, and then we picked teams for that we stuck with for the rest of the night. And if that's sounds like the sort of social brutality of kids picking teams for sports, that is accurate and by design. I'm a nerd, and turnabout is sweet. Game modes played varied from Grifball to Capture the Flag and Dominion, but we also got in some fun custom matches in as well. Over the weeks leading up to the game night I'd made a couple of custom Halo 4 game and map variants. The one set was an extremely ambitious large-scale map with a variant on the Flood game type. I'd spent hours working on the map and testing quirkier game dynamics. And it pretty much flopped. After getting everyone to try it out they pretty much begged for Team SWAT. The other map and game variant, however, was a much bigger hit. It was a free-for-all game mode where the players where equipped with nothing but gravity hammers and thrown into a small symmetrical arena of death. The tight confines of the space made for great twitch gameplay that actually narrow the gap between the good and the bad players in our gaming group.

But don't take my word for it. Check out this little video I made of some of our game footage from that evening:

Yes, I was the thunderer in brown armor that dominated the match. And no, I didn't pick on the noob players deliberately. I'm not saying I didn't pick on them; I'm just saying I didn't do it on purpose. Also, if the game and map variants look fun to you, search for them online--I've uploaded them to my file share for general use. The map is called "grifophrenia" and the game variant is "grifophrenic". I'm always up for playing more custom matches, too, so if you enjoy them, feel free to invite me to a game some night after 9PM CST.

LAN parties. Good nerdy fun. Nerd Butter.

Nerd Butter: Cosplay

Nerd Butter: For everything, there is a qualifying level and then there is another, superlative, exemplary level. There are many Olympic athletes, but only a few medalists. You might be a sports fan, or you can be the guy in the stadium with baseball stitching painted in his beer belly. And so it is with being a nerd. There are nerd requisites--what I call Nerd Bread--and then there are nerd specialities--Nerd Butter. While just about every nerd should be into Nerd Bread, Nerd Butter is what sets you apart as a nerd of a special caliber. And in the end, it's the specialties that make being a nerd so much fun.

Starting off a new month, and I can also say that the Facebook page companion to this blog is now up and running. If you want to, head on over to FB and lookup Ben's Nerdery. I'll be putting up photos there--some from the blog, and some from the cutting room floor as I add more and more coverage of conventions and other events. In particular, I've got about 30 pictures under my coverage of C2E2's cosplayers that I didn't get to share in the C2E2 2013 Roundup. Check it out, and feel free to share the pics around your Facebook (or Google Plus) circles to help spread the love.

Today's topic is cosplay. That stands for "costume play" for those of you scrunching up your faces in confusion right now. Cosplay allegedly comes from Japan, because they formalized the portmanteau and made a sub-culture of it. But portmanteaus and sub-cultures are what the Japanese do best, so I don't give them much credit for that. No, costume play has been an informal part of a lot of non-Japanese societies long before they made it sexy and called it cosplay. I'm thinking of the 60s and 70s fans of The Lord of the Rings doing dramatic readings of Tolkien's works in costume. Heck, even Tolkien himself was known to occasionally burst into lecture hall in chainmail and shouting "Hwaet!" to start class*. And this sets aside the western halloween tradition of costume parties and masquerades in general, which are similar but aren't quite cosplay. Cosplay is about appreciating and exploring the characters you dress up as, in addition to being a social dialog between fans. Characters from books, comics, shows, movies, and games are all fair material for cosplay, but comics and games are probably the more common expression at a general event these days. Although I must have seen about 100 Jayne Cobb beanies at C2E2--I even caught a few staff wearing some. Cosplay is fundamentally about exhibiting the fandom that went into the costume's planning, creation, and display, and that makes it different from Halloween parties where the costume is still the secondary identity. That's why it's customary to identify a cosplayer more like an actor playing a role, and it's not unusual to address cosplayers as their characters at cons and events.

Cosplayers approach the hobby from all different angles. Most of the time cosplay begins in relation to conventions. As I'm sure you guessed from my cursory coverage of the cosplay at C2E2, you could go to a convention like that and do nothing but cosplay-related events. Heck, I could very easily have sat outside the event itself and done nothing but take pictures of the fabulous cosplays as they arrived. I'm pretty sure some people did, and I've heard stories of people doing that quite deliberately (sometimes because they've been kicked out, but whatever). At C2E2, I was absolutely blown away by the Ms. Marvel cosplay you see in the gif here, and I kick myself that I didn't get any decent still pictures of her or her sister, who was a perfect Kasumi. I remember seeing them just outside the venue on Friday, and only the rugged lure of Ron Perlman and his autograph kept me going. Which is good, because later I was pretty certain that if I talked to them I'd have made a bigger boob of myself than when I met Ron. I'm pretty sure I made the right call, because Imma stoopid.

Other cosplayers get into it from a performance angle, and since they're dressing up in costumes for photoshoots for modeling or acting anyways, they adapt to the cosplay sub-culture. I find it hard to respect this angle, as some people seem to use cosplayers as a way to milk the nerd community for support and enthusiasm without actually enjoying the nerdiness itself. They also make it more difficult to distinguish regular cosplay from the fetishist elements of it--because a lot of the cosplay that gets noticed these days only gets recognized for being sexy, and many of the other fun aspects of the hobby get pushed aside for...mammalian enthusiasm. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mammal. I'm a huge mammal. I could probably talk mammals all day. But when exhibitionist types insist on reducing cosplay to that level, they also make it harder for people to get into it for just the cosplay and not the sensuality of it.

(You do know what I mean by mammalian enthusiasm, right?)

And then there are those who get into cosplay from a production side--they might get asked to help someone make an element for a costume and in the process get wrapped into the excitement. (Note: you have to be kind of weird to get excited about most of the process of cosplay; most people find the work of it incredibly tedious.) I mean, if you're going to enjoy sewing, prop or wig-making as a hobby in itself, you might as well turn into a service for your fandom too, right? 

In a big way, this last option is my story. I've always loved cosplay and had a vague idea of wanting to get into it somehow and someday, but I never really felt comfortable enough with it to commit myself to it. Then Star Citizen came along (don't worry, that post is coming before the blog sprint ends) and it got a crazy notion into my head. Several crazy notions, but one of which could be helped by getting advice from cosplayers. And so at C2E2 I began talking to the awesome Cosplay4UsAll about their process and ideas, and mentioned my own, and I soon realized that I might be able to not only do the crazy idea I had, but also help them with their own costume. And if I'm going to help someone else make a costume for cosplay, I'd be gorrammed if I wasn't going to cosplay as well.

The very best cosplay, in my opinion, is about dedication, attention to detail, and ingenuity. You take a costume and analyze it. Then you research construction methods, sometimes learning entirely new skills. You pull out all the small elements and make them into something really specific and accurate to the inspiration. And, most of the time, you have to cheat to do so, because the character you're cosplaying is made up and sometimes their appearances are just BS. So unlike a reenactor, who is specifically recreating something that has been made and probably could have its construction eventually nailed down, there's no manual for making an Optimus Prime costume. You just pull something out of thin air and shoot for awesome.

This kid shot for awesome and ended up making me have an absolute guano-insane fit of hoarse-throated screaming. It didn't matter that the contest was driven by audience participation--I would've screamed myself silly out of excitable nerd sensitivity. He may not have been the best cosplayer of the weekend, but he was the most impressive and definitely got the biggest reaction from me and the rest of the audience. And yes, the camera is shaking at the end because my cheese is starting to slide off my cracker.

The other thing that really appeals to me about cosplay is...wait for it...wait for it...the role-playing aspect of the hobby. Yes, it's not an essential aspect of cosplay. A lot of people never step fully into character, and if they do it's only for momentary photo ops. But I love seeing people become their characters when they step into their costumes, and as I start plotting my own cosplay, that sort of stuff is really enticing--romantic**, really--to me.

I'm still in the early stages of cosplay--that is, the entirely fictitious planning and pipe-dream stage. But now that I am announcing it here on the blog, where possibly up to a dozen people I don't know can read it, I am at least somewhat committed to this course of action. Plus, here's a little teaser of what I'm thinking of for my first costume. That's right, I'm going to cosplay as the Ren Faire albino Geralt of Rivia, from the series The Witcher. It's a fantasy series I've been more and more interested in since I bought The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings for Xbox 360, and one of the first things that really struck me about the game was the gritty and layered costume design. Where many fantasy games make outlandish and out-proportioned outfits for their settings, The Witcher costume design was largely reasonable and inspired by historical outfits. The main hero of the series, Geralt, sported some of the neatest costumes--worn and utilitarian, and not afraid to be somewhat shabby. Which fits the character so well, as Geralt is a raggedy, beaten, and brutalized hero that is so abused that he's virtually inured to it.



*"Hwaet" is the Old English precursor to our word "what", and it also is the first line of many Old English poems, including Beowulf.

** Alright, wisenheimer. I mean romantic in the traditional, emotionally affected and disconcerted sense. Not in the lusty sense. Settle down.

Nerd Bread and Butter: Conventions

Nerd Bread and Butter: There are a lot of things that go into making a nerd. Nerd bread describes things that are absolutely necessary to qualify for the title. The corollary, nerd butter, deepens the nerd experience to something much more profound, much like butter does to bread.

So today marks another "should've blogged this a long time ago" entry in my current sprint of posts: conventions. Now, a convention (or "con" as they are invariably known) straddles the dividing line between Nerd Bread and Nerd Butter. On the one hand, cons are still an alien and intimidating thing to a lot of long-standing nerds. I myself didn't go to my first (sorta) con until 2005, and after that it was years until I went to another (which ended up being my trip to Fire and Ice last year). But cons are definitely an integral part of any nerd experience, and there are such a wealth of them in America (and elsewhere) today that you can find a con catering to just about any particular interest--many without traveling that far, either.

But there is an element of Nerd Butter, to be sure. Cons are still seen as a niche or elite event for a particular classification of nerd. For instance, I can have a Sideshow Collectibles Smeagol statue on my desk flanked by 3D printed ODSTs at three different scales, but once I mention I'm going to a convention over the weekend, I get the raised eyebrows and chin-nod:

"Oh, you're one of those guys."

"That's right, I'm that kind of nerd. I'll wear it on my work badge until I can get it tattooed on my forehead."

A large part of this is probably the slanted coverage of conventions in popular media. To most people, cons are places for nerd-kinky cosplay (because that's practically the only kind that gets shown) and insanely awkward over-enthused smelly fanboys gushing over genre celebrities. As you might guess, this isn't particularly accurate, and it doesn't even come close to capturing the spirit of a lot of cons out there.

What are Conventions?

Conventions at their core are about social interactions. There are a number of shows and/or conferences out there that masquerade as conventions and vice versa, but for the purpose of this article a con is an event where a minority tries to pool resources and interests into one event at a singular time so that they can be the majority in one small sphere. If a con is more about mere commercial previews, sales, and formal showmanship than it is about connecting nerds together, it might as well be a show. Or a Games Day--ouch! burn heretic, burn! And if a con is more about events and panels, it might as well be a school workshop. No, the core and highest aspiration of a true con is to be a distillery of local nerds, letting them ferment just long enough to make a truly lasting impact on each other through networking and shared enthusiasm.

Did that last metaphor circle around to the stinky fanboys stereotype?

Types of Conventions:

There are several types of conventions. There are commercially organized ones that revolve around the products of the organizers. Some of the big hobby game companies are starting to do this a lot more. Mantic Games, Games Workshop, and Fantasy Flight Games all have several conventions a year focused on their products' demos and tournaments. Now, since these commercially-run conventions are about getting more players buying more of their stuff, I considered these sorts of conventions the most watered-down experience for cons. And, for me, the only con of this sort I ever went to I found to be the most unsatisfying. Then again that was Games Day and so it might have just been the start of my anti-Games Workshop roots finding their soil.

There are also commercially sponsored conventions, and since this is what San Diego Comic Con falls under, it's probably the most recognizable category of con. These ones are organized and run independently, but with a good number of sponsors behind various panels, events, and guests they bring to the con. Other cons I'd put in this category are C2E2 (Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo) and Gen Con. Any one of these cons offer a large array of activities and opportunities to explore different hobbies. There's also a large commercial presence at any con like this, but the diversity usually means that you don't have to notice it unless you want to.

Finally, there are the hobby-scale conventions. These are conventions without any high-profile sponsors, often organized as much as a community event as anything else, and they normally feature groups from the scores to hundreds rather than the big commercial cons' which often have thousands of guests. This sort of con really lends itself towards open gaming sorts of conventions--such as Fire and Ice, or dozens of other small cons going on all across the country every month. They usually sport a few local vendors for sponsors, and since they are more localized events you're a lot more likely to meet people in your immediate sphere than the larger cons which tend to pull people from all over.

Conventions I've been to...

As I said earlier, conventions are a relatively new part of the nerdery. Way back in the day I took my future wife to Games Workshop's Games Day, and while I enjoyed it quite a bit, I didn't feel compelled to attend any of their future events. This was kind of nailed to the ground for me by the fact that Games Workshop has pretty consistently ground my bag the wrong way with nearly every decision they've made for the past ten years, but I digress. If you're into only one or two of Games Workshop's products, I imagine that Games Day could easily be a let down. But if, like I was, you're into multiple games and love seeing new models and have lots of available product thrown in your face like a bad alley in Las Vegas, then by all means, it is a blast.

Then last year I began attending Fire and Ice, and with my family attending Fire and Ice 2013 this year as well it is officially an annual family tradition. It's small compared to what you expect from cons based on popular representation--filling up a warehouse-sized room with tables of specific games, open game tables, and local hobby shop vendors. But in a con of that size it's still amazingly easy to find yourself lost in all the options if you've got an appetite for playing a large variety of games (board games, miniature games, role-playing games, and even the occasional video game gets brought in). For a lot of people who enjoy playing epic, involved board games like Twilight Imperium, it's probably one of the only places you'll get a chance to play a full eight-player game.

This past month I attended C2E2 for the first time. I've long been out of the active comic-reading loop (a long and heart-rending story I'm sure I'll blog about eventually), but my wife won two weekend passes and, though reticent, I couldn't pass up the chance when I found out Ron Perlman would be a celebrity guest for the weekend. Now, while saving a few details for my upcoming Con Roundup of C2E2 2013, let me just say that it was awesome. Like a cross between New Year's Eve and a good first date, there's lots of elation, awkwardness, pledges to do more, and at least a little willful denial regarding embarrassing moments that totally never happened. I'm going to make C2E2 an annual thing.

Conventions I'm going to (someday)...

At the top of my list of conventions I need to attend is SDCC, the San Diego Comic Convention. It is the closest thing to prestigious when it comes to this topic, and if every half-baked Youtube channel and television network in the country is going to cover it in some degree, then I need to go to there to vet it myself. Wow, that sounds pathetically pliant and puerile, doesn't it? Oh well, hopefully my frakkin' awesome alliteration will ameliorate that assertion. Alright, seriously, I'm done now.

Gen Con is another one I've been meaning to go to for some time now, and with it being so close to where I've lived the past quarter-century, I really have no excuse to have not gone already. Other than being a homebody. And cheap. Okay, so I've had some excuses in the past, but these days they're starting to thin out in the face of getting old. Old, I say. Old. But yeah, it sounds like a lot of gaming fun that might be too much for the kids, which means that if I go in the next year or two I can make the wife stay at home sitting on the nest while I nerd-it-up in Indiana. Hmmm, I really am running out of excuses not to go...

There are others, but the long and short of it is that I lean towards the cons that promise more chances to dive into hobbies that I find it difficult to indulge in on a week-to-week basis. Video game heavy conventions appeal to me, since I am a big video game fan, but they don't seduce me the way a chance to play four role-playing games in one weekend does. Or the glittering opportunity to meet Ron Perlman and totally make a jackanape of myself. That kind of stuff I can't resist. And, with a new hobby of mine on the horizon, I foresee a whole new level of nerdiness drawing me out to more conventions in the future. Filmatleven.

Nerd Butter: GURPS, the start

Nerd Butter: For everything, there is a qualifying level and then there is another, superlative, exemplary level. There are many Olympic athletes, but only a few medalists. You might be a sports fan, or you can be the guy in the stadium with baseball stitching painted in his beer belly. There are readers, and there are people who read their favorite book on every vacation and obsess over it when you think you've misplaced it but then you find Starship Troopers sandwiched between your unused socks. And so it is with being a nerd. There are nerd requisites--what I call Nerd Bread--and then there are nerd specialities--Nerd Butter. While just about every nerd should be into Nerd Bread, Nerd Butter is what sets you apart as a nerd of a special caliber, and as a qualified nerd of a special caliber--just browse around the blog for evidence--I will review a few of these nerd specialties. And in the end, it's the specialties that make being a nerd so fun. Hence, nerd bread and butter.

Since the first Nerd Bread entry was on RPGs (that's role-playing games, if you don't remember), the first Nerd Butter entry will be on a specific RPG. This RPG is little known, but powerful and dangerous. Many have only heard of it, and fear it when they do, but those who try it often become hopelessly addicted to it. In fact, it's a little like another fabled object of occult power and dread.

Three games for dungeon-delvers leveling high,

D&D, D20 and Pathfinder true,

Two games for others where their sanities die,

World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu,

One for the nerd who wants all in one rules-system to lie.

One RPG to rule over all, one RPG to guide them,

One RPG to build them all and in the basement find them,

In the game of GURPS where all characters may live and die.

GURPS is the the Generic Universal Role-Playing System, developed by Steve Jackson Games. It is the love of my gaming life, and its current edition (the fourth) has the stamina to last for many more years.

Why others fear it
At first glance, GURPS looks like it's about the same size as any other RPG basic set. Like D&D, the basic rules are divided into two books--a character-oriented book and a campaign-oriented book. But whereas the D&D books are cluttered with setting fluff and pretty-pretty pictures, the GURPS basic set is much more concentrated. Taken together, the basic set is 576 pages, and the character book--which consists of 336 pages--pretty densely presents players with all the choices to make their character. This is quite a bit more character-creating meat than most role-players are accustomed to, and having choices can be scary. Seriously.

Most veterans of RPGs come from Dungeons and Dragons, where there's just a few options. Pick a race, pick a class, and then make a few pretty obvious choices to allocate some randomized attributes. There's more variation introduced through advancement, but creating a character offers little in the way of choice. Because of that, any game of D&D will feature an assortment of races and classes that looks pretty ridiculous from a narrative perspective--an orc shaman, dwarf fighter, elf cleric, and human rogue, for instance. This is purely mechanical, because in D&D the rules don't offer much incentive for the players to make a party of four elf rangers, even if they all want to do so.

In GURPS, the granularity is turned up to the max so that a GM could dictate "make a human slave gladiator" and four players could come up with characters that fit the limited description but still be vastly different in game functionality and role-playing 'flavor'. This comes at the cost of strict game balance and of the feeling of large, discrete chunks that you get in D&D. In GURPS, it is possible for a 50 point soldier character to be more effective in combat than a 250 point policeman, because that policeman likely has a lot of points sunk into investigation and other characteristics not related to fighting. In the finely balanced D&D system, however, a first level Rogue is almost always going to be close to a first level Sorceror in terms of combat effectiveness, and generally no fifth level character will be remotely threatened by a first level character. And in D&D, since you have these large, discrete choices for character roles, it makes forming a party a cut-and-dry process--"Okay, we have a healer and a ranged attacker, who's going to make a tank and who's going to be our support fighter?" But since GURPS has finely tuned granularity, players have a much more vague sense of whether they've capably covered a field of threats, and they almost certainly won't if the GM knows what he is doing and appropriately evil.

Why it is dangerous
It may sound silly when you consider the superficial content of systems like D&D, but GURPS features a dangerous combat system. In a game that is highly based on artificial balance--the hallmark of D&D since its beginning--you can expect that no one hit from an enemy will immediately imperil a player's character. The opposition is not always so lucky, and it creates a gaming world where being labeled as a 'player character' means that the character is automatically in a different league than the rest of the world. This is not the case in GURPS, unless the GM so desires it that he really nerfs the stuffing out of the system. GURPS is designed with dramatic, or cinematic, realism in mind, and it's not uncommon for the first hit in combat to disable a fighter.

GURPS has rules for limb hit locations, crippling, and dismemberment. That means that even a basic slavering orc--through luck or guile--can chop your foot off in combat. That's a finisher, nine times out of ten. It also means that if you take on three brigands at once, relying on your staff mastery to fend off the attacks, that a lucky backstab from the third guy can end your moment of glory right quick.

Not to mention that the standard methods of healing in GURPS take time. In a game of D&D, it's not unusual for a fighter to drop "unconscious", be revived, and help to finish off the baddie who dropped him in the first place. In GURPS, though, even magical healing or superscience resurrection will generally take a while, and if you don't have those going for you, you could take weeks to heal from a nasty wound incurred in session one of your campaign.

"...even a basic slavering orc--through luck or guile--can chop your foot off in combat. That's a finisher, nine times out of ten."

This, coupled with the fact that the GM can use the environment and good tactics to make that 25 point midget into a deadly threat, means that GURPS combat can be very tense and uncertain. In my games of GURPS, the players have all developed a healthy fear of martial conflict with anyone, and it makes for an interesting dynamic when just being a braggart can be a truly hazardous trait.

The other great thing about GURPS is that the core rules dynamics account for a lot of things that are largely ignored in other systems. This is mostly done through the Fatigue stat, which can be affected by deliberate exertion that represents you straining yourself while pushing your limits. If the GM wants the resolution to be cranked up, though, Fatigue can also be reduced due to severe hunger, deadly thirst, and sleep exhaustion. In my current gritty fantasy campaign, for instance, the players hesitate to leave town and continue their journey, since it's a serious risk when your group might run out of food mid-journey. Other game systems can be tweaked to represent these elements at the GM's discretion, but only GURPS accounts for these elements in the Basic Set.

Why it is awesome
If you're asking how GURPS can be awesome after all this, it's probably not the system for you. I mean, if deadliness, versimilitude, and tremendous granularity are negatives to you, GURPS can be daunting. That's why GURPS is Nerd Butter and not Bread--it takes a special kind of nerd to want to dive into this system, but those who do generally decide that it is inimitable and indefatigable.

Every game system has one or two traits that really stick out to me, defining the game's mechanics and the flavor of playing in it. For D&D, that would be the class-system and three-word description for most PCs--'fourth level paladin', for instance. For World of Darkness, it's the morality and madness dynamic of the storytelling system. For GURPS, it's Basic Lift and encumbrance. Most other games leave your strength attribute as an abstraction, and weights, even if ostensibly called pounds, mean very little. A D&D human of average strength, for instance, can carry a hundred pounds on their back and fight without penalty. But in GURPS if you have average strength and twenty-one pounds of chuck on your back, it'll slow you down a bit, forty-one pounds a bit more, and so on.

"If you're asking how GURPS can be awesome after all this, it's probably not the system for you."

It's not just that I love incremental encumbrance (but I do, I really do!), but that aspect of GURPS represents a dedication to maintaining a certain fidelity to reality that I love. If I don't know how strong--in terms of game-abstract numbers--a character is, I can visualize how much he can carry and figure his strength based on that. It's very telling that the GURPS forums are filled with people talking about how they would assign this real-world person or that movie character stats--the system is versatile and tangible enough that players with a bit of experience feel comfortable tackling such issues.

The other awesome thing about GURPS is that its versatility lends itself to any genre, and this means that the library of GURPS supplements is huge and accommodates everything from Star Trek-style play to frakkin' Watership Down. Heck, if you had a weird enough GM, you could even combine the two and have phaser-wielding bunnies transporting between burrows in their never-ending quest to escape Bigwig and find out a way to destroy his shield-equipped farm combine of death.

If you do this, please send me an account of it.

There are supplements for half a dozen distinct science-fiction settings and play styles, historical World War II combat or Indiana Jones-style 'Weird War II' stuff, fantasy ranging from Conan-style barbarian play to Dungeon Fantasy--GURPS' answer to those wanting more instanced, D&D-style campaigns--and more. GURPS is quite literally the system you can play again and again without ever repeating your setting unless you want to do so. But it has the depth and resolution to make playing in one long campaign thoroughly engrossing as well.


In Conclusion...?
If you've ever heard of GURPS before, you might notice that I don't really discuss GURPS in terms of complexity or learning curve. The system certainly has a bad rep among gamers (admittedly, mostly D&D players) as being the RPG of math majors, but this is generally a false reputation. Sure, addressing GURPS and all of its options at once can be daunting, and trying to remember everything that comes up during your game session or craft a specific PC effect in the 'best' (read: cheapest) way possible is difficult and takes some practice. But that's beside the point.

GURPS is still a very simple, elegant system at its core. Roll 3d6. You almost always want low results. That's the core dynamic for a player. The other is really common to all RPGs: describe your actions in specific detail so you and your GM can figure out what applies best. This is true for deciding what combat mechanic fits your Wolverine death-leap or Legolas surfing schtick, but it also applies to GURPS' character creation. If you don't bother to describe that your character has an infirm mother, you might miss out on the fun of adding a Dependent as a role-playing disadvantage that can have sweeping ramifications on the course of the game.

For the GURPS GM, the most important rule is to learn when to drop optional rules or fuzz over the details. If it isn't important, don't make your players worry about the details of equipment weight. Use the rules as they matter, and you'll find that GURPS gives you a good level of scaling resolution--when you want more crunch, more specifics, they're there for your use.

In the end, GURPS is a dream system for players and GMs. Players have something that can match up to the outrageous description and details of their characters, encouraging them to better realize their game avatars than any other system I've tried. And Game Masters are equipped with a broad set of exhaustive tools that can be used to fit whatever setting--original or long-established--in which they wish to place their campaign. Unlike just about any RPG system out there, you can fine tune your particular Fantasy campaign to have major mechanical differences from the next, but still keeping it well within the customization bounds of the published rules.

As you can imagine from my long-winded style and GURPS' everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to gaming, this will be the first of many GURPS-related articles.