Game WISH 98: What's New

Game WISH 98 asks:

What are three games or settings that you've bought or seen recently (in stores or previews) that you'd really like to try? What interests you about them and why?

First: GURPS 4th Edition. I've been a GURPS player for fifteen years, but was considering dropping GURPS as my system of choice in favour of something simpler, possibly FUDGE. The announcement of a long talked-about 4th edition has very much rekindled my interest in the game.

While at it's core GURPS 3rd edition is a still a very good game engine, it's not quite perfect. More significantly it's suffering from a lot of accumulated cruft; the accretion of rules from a plethora of supplements, many of which were created on an ad-hoc basis with little consideration on how they'd impact the system as a whole. SJG promise to clean up and streamline the system, to produce something for the '00s rather than the 1980s. I like what I'm seeing in the sample characters and 'rules leaks' appearing in Pyramid Online. They make me very optimistic that game will be what it promises to be.

Second: Infinite Worlds, which will be the official 'house setting' for GURPS 4th. I loved the two Alternate Earths books (I even reviewed the second of these on RPG.net), although I struggled with trying to come up with a good campaign framework to use them all. Infinite Worlds builds on the concept and promises to add some more exotic new ones, some including the sorts of magic and weirdness omitted from the hard science based originals. While lesser game writers might turn such a multiverse into a horrendous munchkinised mishmash, I'm confident Infinite Worlds will turn out much better than that. That's largely because it's being written by Ken Hite.

Finally, for something completely different, FATE, something I've downloaded, but I'm intrigued to see how it actually plays. It's a implementation of FUDGE, but with some intriguing ideas borrowed from a couple other games. It has what looks on paper to be a very elegant way of handling attributes in relation to skills, and a very clever lifepath-based character generation system.