Steve Jackson’s Concept of Adventure Circa 1986

Well, Steve Jackson had evolved into a story gamer by the time that the mid-eighties rolled around. He just comes right out and says it, right after he poo poos dungeon style gaming.

• “When you design an adventure, you are writing the outline for a story.”
• “The ‘plot’ is your plan for things that are supposed to happen during the adventure.”
• “The purpose of the introduction is to get your players’ characters into your plot so that the game can begin.”

Honestly, I hate that he makes out like this is some kind of quantum leap forward in gaming. And who knows, maybe hack-and-slash adventure really isn’t all that “mature”. But at least the players doing that have a genuine sort of autonomy. Players caught up in the GM’s story or plot don’t.

There is one unusual design choice within the tightly scoped 1986 Basic Set: the players have a chance to build out the broader game world by defining their character’s patrons, enemies, and dependents. D’Artagnan could build himself out to have Monsieur de Treville as a patron, the Cardinal’s Guard as an enemy, and Constance Bonacieux as a dependent. When the player of this character joined the session, the DM would roll dice to determine whether the guys in red tabards show up and/or whether Constance is in trouble. If at some point during the adventure the player elected to contact de Treville for assistance, the DM would dice again to determine whether or not that NPC comes into play. Who knows? It might even be fun to try.

But this is an unusual system. In practice, it codifies what would today be treated as arbitrary and static backstory elements. When the player works up his character, he is essentially outlining the frequency that their broader cast of NPC’s will be incorporated into session adventures at the table. Of course, knowing GURPS players in general and my players in particular, I could imagine everyone coming to the table with characters which each have significant numbers of ancillary NPCs associated with them. I would like to think I could come up with an idea for an adventure on the spot just based on which enemies and dependents turned up for the game!

Alas, I am certain that the intent of the game is for the GM to take a strong hand in outlining what character types are okay for the players to play. The sample characters have only one incidence of these rules referenced on them: Dai Blackthorn’s enemy of the thieves’ guild which shows up on a six or less. The sample adventure included with the game suggests a couple of patrons: the merchant’s guild and a mercenary company. If these examples are any indication, then Steve doesn’t expect too much more than an occasional combat encounter, a patron mission, or else possibly a friendly NPC to turn up due to these rules– certainly not enough to disrupt the rather strict adventure plot of Caravan to Ein Arris.

Sifting through the rules and the last page of the sample adventure, it’s clear that Steve Jackson’s assumption with this game is that adventures are generally going to be missions that are presented to the players by some kind of patron entity. Character points are awarded based on how well the players roleplay and how well they succeed at their assigned mission. The idea that the players would be driving the game, coming up with their own ideas for what their missions should be is nowhere to be found within the pages of the rules.

At the end of the day, my 14-year-old self could barely even read the sample adventure straight through, much less create an adventure of this sort from scratch based on what the players had decided they wanted to play. While I would eventually go on to create a set of sample GURPS characters for a convention game and then make up an original adventure of my own of this sort for people to play through, I have to say… once I did all the work required for this I never wanted to do it again. As such, this ruins GURPS as a system for long-running campaigns, at least for me.

If Steve wasn’t so hard against hack-and-slash adventure he could have described how to set up an area map with a range of lairs, dungeon scenarios, and factions stocked upon it. Of course, that wasn’t at all the sort of game he was going for here. In retrospect, it’s too bad that it wasn’t. GURPS might have turned out a lot different if its original set had come with a scenario that people would actually want to play!

Maybe this explains why that yard of GURPS supplements was ultimately so useless. It was always up to the referee to wade into it and then make a de facto railroad out of it. If that was the assumed use case, then none of it had to work. And none of it had to be relevant for creating game situations for the players to interact with.