Game Wish 90: Upgrades

Game WISH 90 is about System Updates

What do you think about system updates (Paranoia XP, Amber 2.0, DnD 3.0/3.5) and conversions (d20 Silver Age Sentinels, GURPS Traveller)? What about world/setting updates that result in system reboots (the end of the Age of Darkness)? Do you buy them, run them, or use them for resources? Why or why not?

As ever, it depends on the update. I'm very much looking forward to the fourth edition of GURPS; the third edition is now sixteen years old, and the system is in danger of collapsing from the weight of accumulated cruft of additional rules from the literally hundreds of supplements SJG have published over those sixteen years. The new edition should cut through this accretion of rules to give us a new streamlined ruleset that will hopefully last another sixteen years.

On the other hand, I'm sure D&D version three-and-a-half is no more than cynical money making exercise. Was 3.0 really that broken to need a new edition that soon? Not that I'm going to buy it; I don't play enough d20 in any form to justify purchasing. And I wonder if the upcoming sixth edition of Call of Cthulhu will have enough changes to justify my buying it.

Heroquest is an interesting one. It's really the second edition of Hero Wars, which in turn was the new game system for Glorantha, the world for RuneQuest. Hero Wars suffered from appalling layout and editing problems, bad enough to all but cripple the game, and has to rank as one of the most disappointing releases I've ever bought. Heroquest has kept the same core game engine, but they're totally rewritten the rules, so that the result now makes enough sense to be able to play the thing. The rule system bears little or no resemblance to Runequest at all, which is likely to be a turn off for many old school RQ players; it's a much simpler and more freeform game, Dramatist rather than Simulationist.

Conversions, again depend on the system. Traveller has gone though a great many systems, some of them good, some awful (remember T4? Ick!) GURPS Traveller works at least as well as classic Traveller or Traveller: New Era. I haven't seen the d20 version, so I can't comment. On the other hand, d20 Cthulhu brings out the garlic and crucifixes. And as for Deadlands, any conversion has to be better than that the awful, awful original system.

Setting reboots: Who remembers Traveller: The New Era with it's Virus? This is a textbook example of How Not To Do It. A pity in some ways, the post-holocaust Virus background was actually an interesting setting with a lot of possibility for adventure; it's just that most fans didn't like the way they had to blow up the Third Imperium to do it. Who can blame GURPS Traveller for setting that game in an alternate universe where the Third Imperium never fell?