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James Bond

2017-06-21T05:25:33Z

2601:843:C200:8E80:1538:4103:F3A5:E95B:

For those who have been living under a rock since birth, '''James Bond''' was the eponymous main character in a series of novels, later brought to life and to the public consciousness by Sean Connery, the greatest Scotsman to ever live, in ''Dr. No''. Bond was a British spy working for MI6 and a legendary badass. He was suave and charismatic, easygoing and living high on gambling, smoking, cars, drinking considerably more than was advisable, and couldn't get more tail unless he signed up with the local [[Slaanesh]]i cult. He was also a stone cold motherfucker who would put a round through a Soviet spy without a second thought and walk away to carry on with his [[martini]].

The books were written by a British author Ian Fleming, who drew heavily on his experience in British intelligence. Fleming wrote up until 1966, when his literary career was interrupted by a serious case of death. Various authors have picked up the property since then, writing Bond novels to this day. The movies have also continued: there have been seven actors who played Bond in about twenty-five different movies. Several fan theories have been waved around, as have many hands waved regarding the apparent immortality of Bond, and why he looks and sounds differently each decade.

Bond gets his own page here (beside the writefaggotry below) for two reasons: this wiki includes pages on things [[Neckbeard|we]] like and influences us; and that Bond does show up time to time in RPGs. James Bond has produced [[Drizzt]]-like clones and character ideas, though a considerably smaller number than there were Drizzt clones. When done poorly, you get a publicly known "spy" with a bad British accent, a towering inferiority complex, and a wristwatch with an inbuilt plot device for every situation that he would (in)conceivably come across. When done well, you could get a charismatic, possibly minimalist character that can leverage a situation… to surprising outcomes (see below).

==An Eyewitness account of James Bond==
[[Image:JamesBond.jpg‎|300px|thumb|A rendering of what the elusive James Bond is believed to look like.]]

''It was late on a [[Tuesday]] night. The kinda night a detective can't get any answers and a hooker can't get any johns. Normally I'd be relaxing at my desk with a shot of whiskey and a view of the city being rained on like God's own piss was cursing the place, but tonight I had work to do. He was a nervous man, an ill-fitting trench coat and shaky hands being the first thing I noticed. All that was forgotten as he pulled up a seat at the diner and started telling me about Bond. James Bond.'' "Freeform roleplaying. Ah, what the hell. I used to roleplay on AOL, back when I had a seemingly terminal case of The Dumb. It's currently in remission, or at least it seems to be. Anyway, I had been observing one of the chat rooms for a while, trying to decide what kind of character I'd try to play to best fit in with the setting and the players that had already gathered."

''He shifted in his seat, a weary glance cast around the place.'' "As far as the eye could see, it was just god-level characters. One had telekinesis and some kind of prescience. Thief characters would probably be killed off by this guy before they had a chance to steal anything. Another was "the best [[wizard|spell-caster]] in the world," with the side-power of being able to cast spells by just thinking about them. Well, that eliminates being able to play as a bumbling mage. Yet another was a [[Vampire:_The_Masquerade|fifth Generation Malkavian]] that seemed to have the curious ability to use people's profiles to his advantage. Anything you wrote in there, the player would grant his character knowledge of and the character would act accordingly. Irritating, but I guess it was creative enough.

"The characters that paraded through were each trying to have dark and mysterious pasts, but were too busy trying to enthrall each other to listen to one another's story.

"But then someone entered as a crab. A crab that smoked cigars. A crab that drank martinis. A crab whose name was apparently 'James Bond.'"

''He took a sip of his coffee, the swirling steam casting his face out of view as he took a deep breath and continued his incredible tale.'' "Understand, I had planned to join this. I did. But when this crab entered, the place was immediately and irrevocably altered. The spell-caster didn't like that the crab was smoking, and attempted to put the cigar out by blasting it with water. James Bond's player's response was that it didn't make sense for a crab to have cigars that wouldn't work underwater. The mage was stymied.

"The crab then revealed that it could speak, and did so, uttering the words 'I pinch.' The telekinetic/prescient one was then grabbed in the pincers of the crab. Apparently, he didn't see it coming, because the player accepted the action and acted accordingly. He telekinetically lifted the crab and dramatically demanded to know what the fuck he thought he was doing.

"'I pinch,' spoke James Bond, blowing a crabby smokering into the face of the psychic.

"Then the Malkavian spoke up. 'His name is Bond. James Bond.' I checked the crab's profile. That was all that was written."

''By this point the man was so engrossed in his own story he hadn't noticed the silence descending over the run down diner. Waitress, cook, patrons of cheap food and broken upholstery, all had stopped what they were doing and listening. I admit I was taken myself by the image of this crustacean causing such havoc.'' "The antics continued, and all I could do was watch. The psychic desperately tried to get the attention off of James Bond by changing the subject. The attempt failed when the crab whipped out a tiny martini kit and began mixing a drink for himself. The mage tried, oh so very hard, to thwart this attempt by setting fire to the martini with a magical spark. The crab stoically blew the fire out and drank it, saying unto her, 'Delicious.' The Malkavian tried to confuse the crab with his dementia. The crab nodded along with him, adding one or two words where it deemed appropriate, and continued to wreak social havoc with the supposedly all-powerful characters as if nothing had happened.

"Before the end of the night, the crab had singlehandedly derailed the roleplaying. The mage was pregnant with the child of the psychic, who, despite being male, carried the child of the Malkavian, albeit with a little help from the vengeful mage. The crab suggested it. The bar had been completely destroyed, after the crab said that the alcohol in it sucked. The psychic did it for him."

''I cleared my throat, almost to remind myself I was there, rather then seeing this incredible scene unfold on that fateful night.'' "James Bond was played by a goddamn genius, it seems."

''A half-hearted laugh burst from the man's throat for a second, but his eyes were focused on nothing in the diner. He was away, back at the night it happened.'' "You have no idea. I wish I had the presence of mind to save the log of the events that transpired that night. As it stands, I can only try to describe it with my simple grasp of English.

"When told of the psychic's traumatic and dark past of being locked away in an insane asylum for having hallucinations that seemed to almost always come true, followed by his daring escape, with guns blazing and syringes jabbed into the throats of hospital workers and explosions all around, James Bond smoked his cigar, then replied "Very exciting."

"At which point the other two tried their DAMNEDEST to impress this crab in the same way.

"I'd never seen that much chaos from a single, simple character before. I left the chat at six in the morning, having learned a lesson.

"I fucking hate players that are charismatic online. I hate them to death."

==See Also==
* [[Alpharius]]
* [[Martini]]
* [[Inquisition]]
* [[James Bond 007|James Bond 007 the RPG]]

[[Category:stories]]

GURPS

2017-06-21T03:10:10Z

2601:843:C200:8E80:1538:4103:F3A5:E95B:

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[[Image:GURPSlogo.gif|center]]
{| width=90% border=0
|- align=center
|[[Image:Gurps3rd.jpg|thumb|right|3rd Edition]]
|[[Image:Gurps4thPHB.jpg|thumb|right|4th Edition Characters]]
|[[Image:Gurps4thDMG.jpg|thumb|right|4th Edition Campaigns]]
|}
[[File:GURPS_spellcharts.makingbreakingspells.png|thumb|right|The magic system in GURPS is simple (page 21 of 38)]]
The '''Generic Universal RolePlaying System''', usually shortened to '''GURPS''', is a [[RPG|roleplaying game]] made by [[Steve Jackson Games]]. It has loads of numbers and expansion books. GURPS is the quintessential universal system; it is so flexible that you can bend it in half and fold it inside itself. It is the paragon of the [[simulationist]] category of games. All simulationist games since GURPS secretly aspire to kill GURPS and wear its skin while drinking the blood of its delicious heart. Its detail is surpassed by [[I.C.E.]]'s [[Rolemaster]] series, but GURPS doesn't suffer from the Table Within a Table Within a Table Within a FUCK YOU problem inherent in the game of Rolemaster.

The basic premise behind the system is that you create your character and customize all of his abilities using points that you get both at creation and as your character progresses. There are assloads of physical, mental, and social defects that can be used to get more character points to channel right back into your advantages. It uses the d6 exclusively, generally pressuring you to roll under your relevant ability score to succeed in a given task. This can be augmented in difficulty by increasing or decreasing the target numbers. A roll of a 3 or 4 is a critical success, while an 18 is always a critical failure. SJG put out a free .pdf synopsis of the rules called "[http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/ GURPS Lite]", which is enough to play a barebones version of the game.

[[Image:KALI_MAAAAA.JPG|thumb|left|KALI-MAAAAAA!]]
GURPS' simulationist bent results in it being regarded as excessively complicated by many gamers, earning it the humorous moniker "Generally Unplayable RolePlaying System". Using its third edition vehicle creation system will make you want to eat your own face, and possibly devote the whole process to one or more elder gods. (Fourth Edition vehicles are just regular characters with extra stats.) Game Masters of the franchise experienced a downgrade in complexity following the release of Fourth Edition, but its inherent complexity still puts it behind [[Dungeons and Dragons]] in terms of ease of play.

Much of the complexity in GURPS is front-loaded: character creation tends to take longer because of the staggering amount of detailed options. Forget just rolling a character like you would in D&D, you need to set aside a session to build one. That's the price you pay to evade [[Linear Build Quadratic EXP]].

As the campaign progresses, however, the consistency and relative elegance of GURPS makes Dungeons and Dragons seem like a pile of kludge. The sandbox nature of character creation is appealing to players who have a concept of a character in their heads and want to reproduce it as faithfully as possible.

== GURPS Books ==
Generally, anything can be done with just the base starter set of GURPS and a good head on your shoulders, but if you're too busy to do that the guys at SJ Games have it all figured out for you ahead of time. All of the books for GURPS simply tell you how to do things within the core system without the need to spend an additional day to set up an innovative campaign. For example, there is a book on Vampires. It explains how to create vampire characters and NPCs easily without dealing with the issues of balance and customization that bogs down new players. There is even a Dungeon Fantasy book you can get off E23, the Warehouse 23 PDF site, that allows you to play Dungeons and Dragons without the need to buy [[Dice|polyhedrals]]. In fact, you can play this game by simply using the dice you swiped from Monopoly and Yahtzee. One irritating fact you'll discover as you collect GURPS books is that although the system uses real-word measurements, the different authors have never agreed on whether they should use Imperial or metric units. Keep a conversion chart handy. Fortunately the main book includes one.

In the game's rather long lifespan, a truly impressive amount of settings and sourcebooks-usable-with-many-settings were made, including but not limited to [[Alpha Centauri]], settings where you play Men In Black, Fantasy (including Discworld), multiple SF settings (notable licensed one: GURPS Vorkosigan Saga), several books on conspiracies, historicals covering WW2, Ancient Rome, multiple other ancient cultures, joke settings (GURPS: IOU illustrated by Phil Folgio!), adaptations of a couple other games, (Notably the Classic World of Darkness (Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf) Traveler and Castle Falkenstein) and a couple books that are just collections of multiple settings. For starters. If you've got a group who feels like playing something different every month, GURPS has got you covered for the next decade or so. New stuff occasionally still comes out, but it's slowed to a trickle compared to the old days.

[[Category:Roleplaying]]