07 August 2015

You've Never Even Tried To Play

Yonder on Facebook...

It's no secret I am a fan of GURPS.



And it's always by someone who obviously didn't actually play it.



Do you know what the complaint is really about?















With GURPS the power level stays fairly flat.


*GURPS has actually been through 6 editions.

1e and 2e are nearly identical. (1986)
4e is 3eR pruned back and rationalized.  (2004)



It's the scope they don't like.




  1. One of the things I like about GURPS is its versatility. If I want a thief-type who can fight in a pinch, I give my character points in lockpicking, climbing, stealth and combat skills. Instead of cookie-cutter fighters, thieves, magic-users and what-not, you can create individual characters that are more like real people.

    I've mulled a conversion of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to GURPS...the main problem would be coming up with templates for the beginning and advanced careers. Reason I'd want it would be that I love the background world of WFRP (it gets a lot farther from Tolkien than other fantasy role-plays I've seen, and could be brought even farther by completely replacing Orcs and Goblins with Beastmen; you could say that the Beastmen and mutants just out-competed the greenskin races) and eliminating Halflings (replace them with Gnomes; rules exist for them even though they aren't in the main books). But WFRP is a brick-and-a-half to play, rules-wise.

    Another thing that's fairly easy to do with GURPS is to mix-n-match. Take your fantasy party and plop them down in the world of the Horseclans, and see what happens.

  2. Google is your friend!


    If you look long enough, someone has done the work for you converting to GURPS.

  3. Actually, the name during playtesting was Great Unnamed Role Playing System.

    They even had a contest through The Space Gamer magazine to come up with a name for it.

  4. "Champions 1e"

    THAT takes a girl back. Wow. I'd almost completely forgotten about Champions...

    1. Did your copy have "The Superhero Role Playing Game" or "The SUPER Role Playing Game" on the cover?

      Our GM had a first printing (box set not the ORIGINAL from the convention) before Marvel and DC sued over their trademarked word.

  5. Whenever someone complains about GURPS being too complicated, I tell them the same thing "It's pretty much 3d6 for everything, or however many dice it says for damage, and all the complexity is in character gen." I've got a few players who can manage the gameplay but just don't quite get the character gen stuff, who are content to just tell me what they want and let me take care of it for them. Thanks to GURPS' helpful convention of naming things what they do rather than getting creative with it to show off, a sheet pretty much gives most of the info needed to use it even to someone with no knowledge of the system.

    On a system conversion note, I'm presently in the process of fixing up someone else's WH40k RPG conversion where they handled a few things in relatively questionable but easily fixed ways. Most of the party for a potential Dark Heresy has wholeheartedly agreed to run it in GURPS instead, with its much better done, more resilient rule set.

    1. Plus people who come in at 4e never see how bad the various optional rules interacted with the several world-specific alterations.

      4e is far more comprehensive and simpler than 3eR, yet I still hear complaints about rules that were broken in 2e. 2e lasted all of two years before being replaced by the substantially different 3e.

