I've been a long-time player of role-playing games, and my favorite gaming system is one called GURPS. I frequently visit the Forum boards on the website of GURPS's publisher Steve Jackson Games, and today I found a discussion thread that was weirdly prophetic. More beyond the jump.
GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role-Playing System, and it's function is to provide general, all-purpose rules that can simulate any type of genre imaginable, from traditional Gygaxian dungeon crawling, to super-heroes, to spies, to space opera. The joke amongst GURPS players is that if you want to build a character who is sentient psychic blueberry muffin, then GURPS is the game for you.
Well, about a year ago, my friend Jürgen Hubert, (who incidently also wrote a gaming suppliment called Doomed Slayers which I illustrated), posted a thread on the GURPS message boards on a similar topic: President Chair
"GURPS isn't like D&D 4E, where pretty much any character build with the rules will likely be a reasonable character for a fantasy campaign.
In GURPS, you could build a chair which is also at the same time the President of the United States. The rules permit this, since it's not the job of the rules to prohibit particular character concepts. This is the Game Master's job, who would also be fully justified for slapping you silly for that idea."
And from there he went on to wonder how one would go about making "Presidend Chair" an interesting character concept.
The post generated a discussion which lasted about a day or two, and then dwindled off.
Until this week when Clint Eastwood suddenly gave the thread new relevance.
Now I'm wondering if Jürgen is psychic...