Discworld Roleplaying Game: An Octobereview

No, not the new one.

The old one. Not that old one, either. The GURPS one.

Actually, the GURPS 4e one, Version 2.0 from 2021. So it's practically new.

The Discworld Roleplaying Game, by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters; illustrated by Paul Kidby and Sean Murray.

 

My background with Discworld

I was given a Discworld book (Sourcery) as a young teen and I suspect that it changed the trajectory of my life. I sought the novels out zealously, and for a long time it was the only series I had a complete set of, even as they started to number in the dozens.

I have of course read all the books in the series, most of them five or more times. If you're not familiar with Discworld, do yourself a favour and give it a go. Traditionally at this point a Discworld fan makes a big deal of recommending a starting point (and sometimes a stopping point, given the precipitous decline in quality at the end presumably due to PTerry's illness).* But almost any book you pick up will tell you whether you'll like the rest of them.

* The short version is that the first five (The Colour of Magic through Sourcery) are good, the next 30 (Wyrd Sisters through Wintersmith) are superb (although Interesting Times is, uh, a product of a bygone era), #36–38 (Making Money through I Shall Wear Midnight) are okay-to-good, and #39–41 (Snuff through The Shepherd's Crown) sadly read like unremarkable Discworld fanfiction.

I played the heck out of the Discworld MUD for a long time, and I vaguely remember reading the manual to Discworld Noir but I never owned it. That's my net experience with Discworld games, though, so I was excited to dig my teeth into something intersecting multiple key interests.

About that whole GURPS thing

GURPS isn't my system of choice, but I follow a few GURPS blogs, and I'm interested in the engine as an experiment in what can be done on the simulation end of TTRPGs.

I am fascinated by the choice to use it as the basis for a Discworld game. The claim (p 22) that "GURPS is ideal for Discworld games" surprised me. I think of GURPS as being very crunchy and consistency-angled indeed, and I think of Discworld as being narrative-driven and inconsistent (in that (1) the narrative is literally an important in-universe part of Discworld metaphysics, and (2) the background rules of the setting mostly feel like they were added 'as needed', and (3) some of the metaphysics has changed, dramatically, over the course of the series). I'd go so far as to assume the default for any Discworld TTRPG would be to build it as a collaborative story-telling game.

As we'll see, the writers did a good job in operationalising it for GURPS, even without that incongruity. And they also did their best to implement quite thorough in-universe-controllable story-telling game rules for Narrative within the GURPS framework (p 197-198; 213). They're not really to my personal taste from a TTRPG angle, but they're certainly necessary to get a Discworld feel.

The (410-page!) book is laid out in chapter order:

Introduction

Part 1, background setting detail

Part 2, character creation

Part 3, character templates

Part 4, equipment

Part 5, doing stuff

Part 6, further setting detail

Part 7, Ankh-Morpork

Part 8, the supernatural

Part 9, dramatis personae NPCs

Part 10, a bestiary of sorts

Part 11, campaigns and scenarios

Glossary/Bibliography/Index

As many people have pointed out, there is basically no winning with structuring TTRPG books, which have to be explainers and rules references and character generators and setting guides all at once. I nevertheless find it funny that someone unfamiliar with GURPS has to read through 165 pages of this book before they will actually be told how to play and what those terms they've been reading actually mean in practise.*

* And someone unfamiliar with RPGs has to read as far as page 218 to get to "the basics of playing a roleplaying game".

I jotted notes as I went, so I'll go through all this book's parts in turn.

Part 1: Background setting detail

The first big thing the reader will notice* is that this book is exceptionally well cross-referenced and has an excellent index. I call that starting out on the right foot.

* Unless they're an editor or layout designer, in which case they will first notice the non-traditional decision to indent the first line after a section heading.

The second big noticeable thing is that there are patches, necessary ones, to make it all work as a TTRPG. For example, the Agatean gold exchange rate post events of The Last Hero is kind of papered over* on page 20. The staff-as-magical-battery rules (p 192) are familiar from other bits of GURPS, and are a fairly good fit (see e.g. blowing stuff up in Reaper Man); I'm not familiar enough to say exactly how much they've been adapted for the setting.

* No pun intended.

The rulebook has to cover the full gamut of Discworld; I've noticed content from at least as far as Snuff. I assume the authors drew on Stephen Briggs' excellent companion work, because a lot of little details end up in the rulebook. Indeed, there are rules for really minor things from the books that I would never have thought to do, so kudos for that.

On the flip side, there are some interesting gaps. For example, there is just one dwarf bread weapon specified, other types all "counting as" a regular weapon.

It also occurs to me that the Discworld Roleplaying Game diligently discusses and operationalises all this highly specific content from the books, but does very little extrapolation where you might expect that.

• The interaction between salamanders and octarine light (rules on p 159) is a niche thing that comes up maybe twice in the Discworld, novels; there are no rules for comparable interactions.
• There are rules (p 160) just for enchanted doorknockers and neon signs, which are single-instance jokes, but those rules don't really generalise to all the other objects we ought to infer exist.
• The troll + siege engine combination is an obvious possibility that any player playing a troll would ask about, and is just waved away (p 155).
• A magical GPS ("DPS", p 146) is an extrapolation of the imp-based tech jokes from the books, but it's just descriptive text, with no rules crunch given!

This is I think part of an overall design criterion. The book makes as few canon-relevant decisions as possible where the series left those opaque. For example, it doesn't commit to any of the possible causalities for the troll name-substance-nature question (p. 230): "no one is sure".

It is also, perhaps, a good thing. The Discworld Roleplaying Game draws heavily on Discworld content and quotes the books extensively, but at points it needed to come up with in-world fiction of its own, for game purposes. I found this a little stilted, and the dialogue/characterisation of canonical characters feels slightly off (see e.g. p 21, 85), but they're big shoes to fill.* I will say that "Hunchbroad Modoscousin" is an exceptionally Discworldy name; well done there.

* It's certainly plausible that my deep respect for the canon is getting in the way.

In the next part, I discuss parts 2, 3, and 4: the character-building bits.