So … it appears that I will likely be returning to Red Sky, my GURPS Monster Hunters game set in the Dresden Files universe, instead of GURPS Traveller: The Verge based on the changing metrics of the face-to-face group. One of my primary reasons for shifting from Red Sky previously was group stability – it isn’t that we’re changing the group makeup a lot, but rather, half of the group was likely to end up missing sessions with very little warning. Volume 3, for example, was … five session? Maybe six. But at no time did we have back-to-back game nights due to Player 1 & 2 bailing because of family, and then Player 3 missing due to work, then 2 and 3 missing due to family emergencies, and so on. We’ve lost one of the problem players (and I use the term ‘problem’ loosely – he wasn’t actually a problem; his attendance performance was through no fault of his own) and picked up another who is far more of a GURPS veteran.
Unfortunately, that means I have to juggle some PC stuff straight away. The now absent player was running one of the OSBI characters – a kind of blatant ripoff of Iron Fist – so that character will depart, though thankfully, the actions of the PCs in volume six gives him a good explanation for doing so. I still don’t have a character concept from the new guy yet – he’s floated a couple of ideas thus far with at least one of them being what amounts to a holy man of some sort. We had one of those in previous runs but the player had to permanently leave the group because of family scheduling stuffs and I ended up killing the character off in volume five. So currently, what I’m thinking is that, if New Guy decides to go with this take, I’m likely going to ripoff Dean being pulled out of Hell by Castiel in season 4 of Supernatural and have this PC be the old one, just with Amnesia (to explain why his skillset is different) and some sort of weird caveat about his soul being stuffed into a different body to explain any recasting.
I am a little concerned about a couple of issues, though and really need to figure out how to proceed.
- The Wizard PC is using RPM as well as Sorcery … but the player has continued to struggle locking onto GURPS. As a result, her character really isn’t as capable as she should be and when she is, I feel like I’m hand-holding her. I sort of shot myself in the foot as well when I removed her mentor as early as I did – what I should have done is used him to teach the character (and thus the player) the system…
- That player’s husband may or may not be rejoining us – if not, that’s due to grad school – and his character … well, I retooled him to be a gunslinger shooter type and I’m really starting to second-guess that because, like his wife, he hasn’t quite locked onto GURPS yet either and he absolutely is not a gun guy. Thankfully, his upgraded gunslinger PC hasn’t officially been introduced, so I guess I should reach out to the player and consult him. We could rejigger him again, but refocus so he better suits the player.
- A third player – who is definitely the other GURPS veteran/expert in the group – has expressed his concern that the characters have become too complicated now that they’ve hit the 400-point level. Not for him, but for those who are not experts … and I don’t entirely disagree with him. Outside of some strange continuity Reboot – which isn’t out of the question – I’m not sure how to fix that though.
- We have a fourth player who hasn’t chimed in – I expect he’ll just shrug and roll with it; he’s usually just there to beat people up – and a fifth that I’m expecting to bow out of the game because he’s not a fan of GURPS (even though he hasn’t played it in like a billion years and the stuff he wants in a game system are all in GURPS) as well as suffering from a serious case of narcolepsy (which is … interesting to say the least.) This means I’ll likely have five players total with the sixth “New Guy.”
Interesting things are afoot at the Circle K…