These are digital #microscope photos of a camel from a 15th-century Persian manuscript in the @subugoe (Cod. MS pers. 14). The purple image was taken with ultraviolet light and the grey picture with infrared. Because infrared goes right through most pigments, it reveals the preliminary sketch of the camel underneath the pigment (which you see in the UV photo). Really interesting for the history of art!
so I was trying to get a feel for how universal #GURPS really is, and specifically how combat-oriented it is. and I found a forum post about "can you run games about intrigue or politics, with no combat, in this system?"
and the replies were like "but surely there'll be at least a little combat, right? it would be so weird not to have combat. you know the vast majority of the rules are about combat and it'd be such a waste not to use them"
so yeah ugh. I guess it's a "generic universal roleplaying system" only if you want to kill things? that's so disappointing
I think #Fate might be very rare among generic roleplaying systems in that the rules are so abstract that they can be used for literally any game you can imagine. my appreciation for this system's elegance increases the more I learn about other #TTRPG systems
@ericmpaq At that point, you've essentially said that you don't want conflict in your game – at which point it's a travelogue and you probably don't need mechanics, either.
It may, in fact, be impossible to create a game without conflict – any conflict – or if it is possible I can't figure out how to do it right now.
Actually, that's not true. I can absolutely figure out how to do it and have it be rather fun: #Microscope is a perfectly valid example of a game which doesn't have "conflict" in the mechanical sense… Though it definitely has wars, death, arguments, debates, and on a good day genocides.
(Technically that's a cheating example; there is a mechanism for resolving conflict between creative visions, it's just a simple vote of people at the table. It's not intended to be invoked often at all but rather a process of last resort.)