Updates & Improvements In Progress

As I've seen the current version of the PDF recently downloaded more than ever before, I wanted to write a little bit about the ambitious rewrite of the system that I've started on. I've played a lot more tabletop role-playing games since I first released the GUTS+ System, and my rewrite takes a lot of things into consideration that I simply wasn't thinking about when I first wrote it.

The rewrite focuses primarily on the system and how playing it works, making it a little more clear when and how success works and taking a little bit of pressure off of the game master to deal with absolutely everything. The key to success still relies on the number of successes you get, but now the game master can be more explicit about how many successes and at what level your character will need to succeed. I am also revamping the way that contested rolls work, making it about success level comparison instead of simple addition, plus the process of assisting another character plays a little more cleanly into the concept of rolling doubles, which has also been reworked to feel better to play with.

The thing I'm wrestling with right now is deciding how complicated I want to allow the system to become. One of my original goals was to make the system simple, which ended up putting a lot of cognitive burden on the game master, but as I have been adding more mechanics for variety and better certainty, I'm struggling to keep simplicity as a goal because I think the extra complexity will make it more enjoyable overall. I'll keep working at it to see if I can combine things to make them less confusing while keeping them distinct enough to keep it more interesting to play with.

Aside from mechanical changes, I'm also updating some of the terminology like changing "Game Master" to "Guide" and "doubles" (for dice) to "pairs". I haven't gotten to the character creation rewrite yet, but I am also changing the "T" and "S" in the GUTS acronym from "Thought" and "Slyness" to "Tact" and "Senses", which I feel encapsulates the idea of the original qualities a little better even though it swaps their places. Finally, the last thing I've actually updated so far is changing "Learning Experiences" to "Practice points" to more clearly indicate how you earn them, but there's a lot more to come for the "Getting Stronger" chapter that I haven't started yet.

This rewrite process might still take me a long time to complete, so there's no need to start changing how you play yet, but I'm excited for the changes and how they'll improve the experience of playing GUTS+. It will be a free update for everyone, but you'll need to re-download the PDF if you're using that instead of https://guts.plus directly.  So stay tuned for the new version over the next few months!