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 Back in the ancient past (1986), Steve Jackson looked out across a field of setting-specific role playing games and wept. "So many rulesets!" he cried. "All different!" he wailed. "Random rolling of stats is terrible!" he gnashed. But did he despair? No! He did not despair, because Steve Jackson isn't a despairing sort of guy. Instead, he developed a system of rules that could be used with any conceivable setting, so that players could learn one system and use it across all of their games, whether those games were set in the distant past, the far-flung future, or some sort of crazy in-between place (the eighties, I guess). Thus, GURPS. This story may have been lightly fictionalized. What is GURPS? GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role-Playing System. It's the "Generic" and "Universal" parts that make GURPS really cool; it can be used with any setting in any time period or genre. Modern-day supernatural horror? Sure. Roman legionnaires? Okay. Superheroes? Yup. 40s Noir? Fine. I hope you are beginning to get the idea, here. GURPS is currently in its fourth edition, which was first released in 2004. Fourth edition simplifies and streamlines some of the quirks of third edition. As far as I know there aren't any 3rd edition grognards out there grumbling about how 4th is terrible, but that might just be wishful thinking. How Does It Work? If you're used to D&D or something like it, there are a few things you need to know about GURPS: Point Buy. Every player starts out with the same number of Character Points. You spend your points on Attributes, Advantages, and Skills, while Disadvantages give your character some quirk or limitation in exchange for more points. The point buy system puts everyone on a level playing field, at least to start. No classes. GURPS doesn't have character classes.To make your character unique, you buy advantages and disadvantages that provide the flavor and abilities you're looking for (a wealthy alcoholic, or an automaton with no sense of humor), then buy the skills that support the job you want to do. If you want a neat job title or something, you can just make one up. No levels. You don't gain XP, you get more Character Points, which you can spend on new skills and advantages when the GM says it is okay to do so. If you follow rules-as-written, your character has to spend X amount of in-game time learning a new skill before he can use it. In more cinematic campaigns, this is generally thrown out the window. Guided character creation. Some systems allow the GM to just hand the players a copy of the book and say "come back next week with a character." GURPS doesn't really work that way, most of the time. The GM needs to explain in some detail what he wants from his players and lay out what is and is not allowed. If you don't, you might have a player show up to your World War 2 game with a freshly-made Wizard1 or an action-movie badass in your survival horror game. Since GURPS can be anything, you need to set boundaries on what this game is about. Only as complicated as you want it to be. GURPS catches a lot of flak for being a big complicated bitch of a system, and that criticism is not without merit. It is complicated, but here's the important bit: aside from the basic success/fail mechanic and I guess character creation, all of the rules are optional. The official position of the GURPS editors is that you should use as many rules as you and your players are comfortable with and that maximize the amount of fun you're having. If you really enjoy having a super detailed combat system, GURPS can give that to you. On the other hand, if you want something more quick and dirty, they encourage that sort of thing. There are even some very popular product lines (Action!, Dungeon Fantasy, Monster Hunters) that strip out huge sections of the rules in order to provide a more fast-paced sort of game. How Do I Get Started? The first thing you'll want to pick up is GURPS Lite, a free PDF that lays out the basic rules of the game. You can find it here. It has enough material to allow you to play a rudimentary game, but it's missing the extensive lists of Ads/Disads/Skills which make GURPS truly Universal. If you've decided that you enjoy the system and want to take a crack at a game of your own, you'll need the Basic Set, consisting of Characters and Campaigns (links go to the sjgames online store). You can run pretty much anything just using the rules found in the Basic Set. The other books are great and I encourage you to pick some up, but understand that they are totally optional. All of the GURPS books are available in PDF form without any copy protection or any of that annoying junk; SJG asks you politely not to share the poo poo with strangers on the internet but that's the extent of their anti-piracy scheme. Gotta love a company that treats you like an adult. This looks hard. Why Bother? Here's a few reasons why I think GURPS is cool. There are more, but this is a good start.
Love it? Hate it? Curious, but haven't decided yet? Discuss. 1I would totally play this game, btw.
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Jun 10, 2011 08:37
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King Hotpants posted:Love it? Hate it? Curious, but haven't decided yet? Discuss. This is my favorite system because of how goddamn flexible it is. I only wish it didn't scare away people new to role-playing so easily. Even if I go in options light and hold their hand it can take a while to get a group going where I am. Right now I'm converting my D&D 4e game to GURPS in an attempt to get my current players to switch systems... please work. 
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Jun 10, 2011 09:04
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GURPS goes beyond your normal character-focused role playing games too. The Mass Combat rules let you play war games based on potentially anything in history or fiction, and allows for player characters to have an active and influential role in large battles. Want to throw Napoleon's army from Waterloo up against a matched point value modern mechanized infantry unit? Doable, and probably a lot of fun. Want to run an engagement between a platoon of reserve infantry caught in an ambush by an undersized platoon of irregulars and rebels led by player characters? I actually ran one of those to completion here. GURPS also has the Spaceships series, which details rules for space combat, and for building space faring vessels that aren't small enough to be modeled as characters. You can reconstruct your favorites from science fiction (Lexx vs the Enterprise? Sure!) or build your own originals. The separate GURPS Space book has a planet and system creation guide as detailed as anything you'd see in Traveler, for instance, and allows you to make completely original venues for your space ships to fight over (and provides lots of ideas for people who want to run a less violent space campaign, like interstellar merchants). There's also GURPS Cities, a little pdf supplement that's very handy for helping a GM build original cities and adapt existing ones as adventure locations, and pick out the most important and game-relevant features of them for his campaigns. It's a great example of how all the GURPS rules can tie together too, since Cities has several features that make it very easy to use with Mass Combat (the siege rules in particular, though everything ties into the city's ability to make war), and takes all the standard questions a player could have about a city into account. Something King Hotpants didn't mention, but that is notable to someone who has never been exposed to GURPS before, is its concept of Tech Levels. The basic idea is that technology progresses in plateaus, building on previous technologies, with key developments marking the next tech level. For instance, TL:4 in medicine is most notable for the discoveries made by scientists with access to better optics. Microscopes allowed them to examine individual cells and single cell organisms. Which leads to a major new concept in medicine of TL:5, the germ theory of disease. Tech levels are a generalized shorthand, and often old technologies will remain in use indefinitely. Entire civilizations can be summed up by their tech level, with special notation and rules for wildly divergent core technologies being used to achieve the same ends. The way many modern concepts are played out in Discworld by using magic solutions is a good example. Chemical photography first shows up in TL:5 and really matures as a consumer technology in TL:6. In Discworld they use magic imps with paint sets in portable boxes to do the same thing. So while the baseline technologies of Discworld are in the TL:4 range of the most part, their photography technology could be classified as a TL:6 equivalent, or TL:4+2 to use the special notation for it.
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Jun 10, 2011 09:46
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There's a couple of neat GURPS things here created by headlor.
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Jun 10, 2011 14:48
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Thelonious Funk posted:There's a couple of neat GURPS things here created by headlor. And I quite enjoy making stuff like this (because I am a crazy person), so if anyone has any requests for specific crib sheets let me know. I recently ran a sci-fi game with the players as space adventurers. The various Spaceship books contain an extremely neat and tidy system for creating the stat lines of various spaceships. From chemical rocket two stage, to faster than light bioships. It's complex, without being actually hard to create stuff. There are even 2 different combat systems, one very loose and free form (similar to the Mass Combat system if anyone has used that) and the other which is extremely tactical. Worth a look if you want to run a space based game. I bring this up to point out that there is a wealth of pdf only stuff on e23. It's got loads of stuff that would never be published as a book, but might be just what you are looking for for your game. Though I have thought it a bit overpriced sometimes.
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Jun 10, 2011 16:30
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I found the best way to play GURPS is to ignore or rework the rules you don't like. GURPS can be bloated, but it is a wonderful, wonderful character based system underneath all the rules and minutia. Be willing to handwave away rolls, or else you'd be rolling for EVERYTHING. More than I think any other system, make sure you have a reason to roll/ask for a roll. If the failure would be "try again", call it a success and don't bother. Also make sure you and your players are on the same page. If everybody works together, GURPS is a great system that can let players write plot hooks for you. If there isn't any discussion, players can create characters ill suited to your campaign. Also! Definitely give a ton of time for character creation, both to work out kinks related to advantages/disadvantages, (patrons, dependents, codes of honor, clerical levels, etc) and just so players don't feel rushed.
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Jun 10, 2011 17:51
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The book tells you to only ask for a roll when a character's life, wealth, or reputation are on the line, and I think that's good guidance. But CCKeane makes a good point. As a GM you need to come up with consequences for failure beyond "well, too loving bad, then." To use a stereotypical example, say a thief is trying to lockpick a door. One approach would say "you failed; try again," but that's just putting a roll in as a roadblock instead of making it fun. You could impose a time limit until the guards come around again and have each attempt take a minute, or maybe the failed attempt makes a noise that someone comes to investigate. That's less of a system problem and more of a general GMing problem, I think, but it's good advice either way. If there's no way to impose interesting consequences for failure, skip it. Getting everyone to work together is crucial. I'm a bit of a lazy GM, so I like to run games where everyone is on the same team from the get-go and it's an established part of the setting so I don't have to finagle a way for them to meet and agree to work as a party. You can enforce this sort of thing mechanically with Duty and a matching Patron, but this is a social problem first and foremost. If you get all of your players on the same page, the rest will take care of itself. Oh boy, character creation. In my latest campaign, I had players start chargen a month before the first session. This gave me one-on-one time with everyone to talk over what they wanted to do, give them some gentle advice on how to do it, and then audit their sheets and help them optimize a little. They appreciated it since I found them some extra points, and I appreciated it since I was able to work on plot hooks for a full month before game start. Also, since GURPS lets you do whatever you want, it can be all too easy to either break the game or have a useless character unless the GM takes an active role in chargen. You don't want to find out six sessions in that one of your players took Unkillable 3 and you just never noticed. This goes back to setting appropriate guidelines for character creation, too.
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Jun 10, 2011 18:32
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Another high point of GURPS is the source books that SJG has put out for the game. There are books for nearly any feel you want. Here's the world list for GURPS. A lot of the books are for older editions, but that isn't too much of a problem with GURPS. You can convert most of the rules up to 4th edition or you can just use the setting information. The books have a lot of setting information. I even bought GURPS Y2K before I knew GURPS because I thought the setting information was so good.
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Jun 11, 2011 01:46
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I always thought GURPS Cabal was neat, it's a great use of GURPS and turns out to be a neat setup.
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Jun 11, 2011 02:19
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GURPS is pretty great, people should play it.
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Jun 11, 2011 02:54
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One thing to remember about GURPS is that the characters and the campaign need to mesh. The example of Wizards in WWII was brought up, but even stuff that would technically fit inside the same setting needs to be tailored. You can make a master fencer who is incredibly quick, skilled with at least a couple weapons and having great social skills and he'll have serious problems against a lower point character that just has full plate, a battle axe and the strength and skills to use both with a reasonable level of proficiency. His advantage is that he can fight at near perfect skill with just a reasonably sized stick while his opponent needs a hundred lbs of gear, but if you're going into a dungeon there's no reason not to wear the armor. GURPS lacks DnD's sense of fairness but makes up for it by allowing specialized characters to do cool things.
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Jun 11, 2011 04:43
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My favorite part of the GURPS line is the amount of care and detail they put into their sourcebooks. I'm a history major (and nerd), and while I wouldn't quite use their books for research they very rarely have anything egregiously wrong with them and they do a great job of getting across what's important about the time period/technology/whatever in both a historical AND a roleplaying sense. For an example, you can look at a book like High Tech. While it's centered around a huge-rear end chapter on guns and other weaponry, it also has detailed looks at things like the development of canned food, including things like how at Tech Level 5 a can-opener is still a piece of equipment that has to be bolted to a table.
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Jun 11, 2011 05:02
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Or Low Tech as another example. It has information on things like what happens to rope that's left out in the elements (and what happens if it's treated rope instead of regular rope), the methods for making metal wire, at what tech level you move to charcoal or coal, common luxury goods or when survey tools allowed for accurate predictions of area. This is in addition to the dozens of weapons, the rules for armor that allow you to create literally hundreds of different sets of armor (ie, if you want a gladiator with a full face helm and metal gauntlets but no other armor it can do that, and if you want a northern warrior with fur over chain it can do that, and if you want a nobleman wearing a mixture of light plate and fine chain it can do that easily as well). You can very easily do a classical campaign with it and have as much realism as you want.
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Jun 11, 2011 05:15
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I feel it important to note some of the "pick up and play" variants which GURPS provides. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy - It's the GURPS answer to what D&D is. Focused primarily on loot, killing monsters, and getting swole, there are about 11 splatbooks out with enough choices that nobody really will be left wanting for versatility at the start or through levelup options. GURPS Action - Be an action movie badass! This is designed for a contemporary setting game that is designed to play out like an action movie. Features rules for simplified ammo tracking, performing stunts, and creating mooks to mow through en route to actual difficult encounters. GURPS Monster Hunters - Also contemporary, but supernatural in nature. Thinking of action-meets-supernatural shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and so forth, it features a different angle towards handling magic that I hear people are fond of. It is important to clarify, of course, that these sourcebooks are not self-contained, and require the Basic Set to function. Aside from that they will also recommend certain other rulebooks to provide such as GURPS Martial Arts, GURPS Magic, etc. depending on the book series.
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Jun 11, 2011 05:44
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I heard there was a Hellboy expansion for GURPS a few years back. Was it any good?
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Jun 11, 2011 07:11
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aldantefax posted:I feel it important to note some of the "pick up and play" variants which GURPS provides. All of these are really great, and I think a big thing to note is that while the second book in each of these series looks like "the GM book" for that setting, they have a lot of really good info and rules for players, too. I am a huge fan of Action's BAD rules, which take all kinds of things like enemy training/morale/equipment/etc and mash them all up into one general penalty to rolls and sets the combat skills of general mooks you'll encounter. I think it's a really great way of speeding things up while still taking specifics into account when needed.
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Jun 11, 2011 07:55
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I happen to have a near complete set of all the books released during the 2e time period.. might be missing one or two but I was wondering if anyone has written a good guide to getting these up to 3e ? Also have boxed basic sets .. first edition, along with boxed copy of car wars and more... Bonus round: ask me about owning every traveller book ever
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Jun 11, 2011 09:19
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Sticky Beethoven posted:I heard there was a Hellboy expansion for GURPS a few years back. Was it any good? Pretty much all the licensed books are essentially labors of love, so if you like Hellboy you will probably like the book. That said it is third edition so all of the mechanical poo poo would be wierded but I am assuming it would be pretty adaptable.
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Jun 11, 2011 09:35
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The "plug and play" GURPS books like Dungeon Fantasy are, frankly, the best idea SJGames has had since Munchkin. GURPS is a great toolbox but a lot of people just want to kill an ork in a ten by ten room, and DF does that type of game so well it makes D&D look like a pale imitation of itself.
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Jun 11, 2011 21:03
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crossposting from the crappier thread:aldantefax posted:For people attempting to ease into GURPS it depends on what the knowledge of your players have. In my case, I will be running GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.
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Jun 11, 2011 22:32
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As far as loot goes, there's two books for loot. One is basically the giant treasure chart, the other has more specific magic items and artifacts. One of those two books does touch on intelligent weapons, I don't remember which book or to what extent though. The treasure table book also has a section at the start about pacing your rewards based on group expenses and rough estimates of how much money to reward players with (in both currency and items). For example, an adventure reward around $500 + expenses lets players get small upgrades immediately, or more significant ones after a handful of excursions. Based on that you can adjust the speed of equipment-based advancement as you see fit.
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Jun 11, 2011 23:37
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I'd recommend picking up Low Tech I and II. That has rules for almost any kind of armor you can think of, probably 50+ weapons, with rules for wielding them in different ways (ie. a Longsword can be wielded as either a broadsword in one hand or a two handed sword in two, and additionally has rules for both thrusting and swinging attacks), and a bunch of useful period stuff.
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Jun 11, 2011 23:41
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NovemberMike posted:I'd recommend picking up Low Tech I and II. That has rules for almost any kind of armor you can think of, probably 50+ weapons, with rules for wielding them in different ways (ie. a Longsword can be wielded as either a broadsword in one hand or a two handed sword in two, and additionally has rules for both thrusting and swinging attacks), and a bunch of useful period stuff. But does it have triple-heavy dwarven forged meteor armor? Cause it's dungeon fantasy, not historical low tech.
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Jun 12, 2011 00:05
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Can't I use both to get proper stats for a triple-heavy dwarven-forged meteoric glaive-guisarme?
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Jun 12, 2011 00:16
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Twobirds posted:Can't I use both to get proper stats for a triple-heavy dwarven-forged meteoric glaive-guisarme? Yes
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Jun 12, 2011 00:26
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The Oldest Man posted:But does it have triple-heavy dwarven forged meteor armor? Cause it's dungeon fantasy, not historical low tech. Yes. Aren't those all based on modifying a base equipment? You'd just use the low tech stats instead of the Basic Set stats.
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Jun 12, 2011 01:06
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The last thing I would do for a group of new players, some of which are dumb as hell, is slap down a 200+ page book and say "feel free to pick swords from here" when getting ready to play dungeon fantasy, a game that is all about getting your poo poo ready fast and going. I might allow it for people who know what's going on that want something special, but the basic list is perfectly fine for people who have never used GURPS before.
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Jun 12, 2011 01:14
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Lynx Winters posted:The last thing I would do for a group of new players, some of which are dumb as hell, is slap down a 200+ page book and say "feel free to pick swords from here" when getting ready to play dungeon fantasy, a game that is all about getting your poo poo ready fast and going. I might allow it for people who know what's going on that want something special, but the basic list is perfectly fine for people who have never used GURPS before. Eh, it's not a huge deal and most of the weapons are pretty similar, but it's nice to be able to equip the Orcs with Khopesh, Gada, Dueling Halberds and Kukri instead of shortswords and axes. Even if they never use it, it's a nice reference to have when designing a fantasy campaign.
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Jun 12, 2011 01:27
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I imagine it would be fun to introduce eventually, if certain weapons allow for particular maneuvers and such. It would work well to have new players build on top of their Dungeon Fantasy template characters once they've advanced a bit.
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Jun 12, 2011 01:45
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If I did decide to include more sourcebooks for players to get crap from I would basically award it to them as adventure loot and award them with item cards. That way, we don't have to keep referring back to the book for special rules, and having something concrete for players to keep a hold of means that the rewards are a little more important. Maybe! I mean, the guys who I am referring to as morons come from a heavy D&D and Magic: the Gathering background.
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Jun 12, 2011 02:28
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One of the big things it does is add little touches to medieval campaigns. You might have clerical work done on clay tablets rather than paper, or you might need to know how the fortifications of an army outpost would differ from a large town, or what kind of identification you would be given. It just gives little tidbits that are easy to add into your campaign.
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Jun 12, 2011 02:39
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So I found a nice easy walkthrough for GURPS Combat with all the options. Now you too can go through one character's action in 135 easy steps: http://crgurps.comuv.com/sites/default/files/Combat_Chart_bicolored.pdf
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Jun 12, 2011 07:14
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aldantefax posted:So I found a nice easy walkthrough for GURPS Combat with all the options. Now you too can go through one character's action in 135 easy steps: http://crgurps.comuv.com/sites/default/files/Combat_Chart_bicolored.pdf Imagine what a thing like that for DnD would be like. Consider Grappling, Consider Full Attacking, Consider casting a damage spell, consider casting a buff spell, consider casting an AOE spell, consider activated abilities, consider using the familiar, consider using the animal companion, consider dual wielding, consider attacking with only one of your weapons... The list would probably be as long or longer. That thing looks like a complete breakdown of possible actions split across at least three or four different books.
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Jun 12, 2011 07:40
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One of my favorite things about GURPS is the ability to say "yes" to my players. You want a Mosin-Nagant? Sure, here are the specific stats for that very rifle. You want to suicidally attack the dude? Yay! Here's how that works. You want to make a dude who is just really, really rich? Awesome! Here's the Wealth advantage, and here's a pile of books to buy poo poo out of. No fudging, no "oh well let's just represent that with this," actual answers. If you like that sort of game, then GURPS is a godsend.
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Jun 13, 2011 08:37
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I guess I should offer a discussion topic or two so we have something to, you know, discuss. What are some games you're thinking of starting? What are some character concepts you've either always liked and never had a chance to run or are having trouble putting together mechanically? I've been trying to put together a compelling fantasy setting for ages, it feels like, but I've never really gotten it to a point where I'm comfortable with it. I ran an abortive PbP fantasy game late last year that died on page two, and I realized that there's a certain threshold I need to cross regarding backstory and world-building before I feel comfortable letting it into the wild. Some guys (Winson I am looking at you) can start a game on five minutes' notice and have it go pretty well despite almost zero world-building. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
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Jun 13, 2011 23:36
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King Hotpants posted:I guess I should offer a discussion topic or two so we have something to, you know, discuss. For me, lots of worldbuilding means I wear myself out on how super cool ideas are long before we get to them in play. Relying on improvisation is cagey too, but I find the best games are generally the ones where everything just falls into place as you need it to exist.
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Jun 13, 2011 23:43
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Plus! Worldbuilding almost seems necessary in GURPS due to having to stat NPCs and abilities and etc, but as long as you get the key stuff done (how psychic powers work/what kind of stuff they do in your PsiOps setting), I find knowing the system well means you can improvise most stuff on the fly. And of course NPCs very rarely need anything like full statblocks!
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Jun 13, 2011 23:45
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I should add that I find myself doing less world-building for pbp games, because if the players do something sneaky or unexpected or just explore in a direction I hadn't considered I have hours to think about my reaction instead of seconds. It is sort of uncomfortable the first time you get caught at the table with nothing to say and five expectant faces staring back at you, waiting.
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Jun 13, 2011 23:49
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King Hotpants posted:I should add that I find myself doing less world-building for pbp games, because if the players do something sneaky or unexpected or just explore in a direction I hadn't considered I have hours to think about my reaction instead of seconds. Yeah, I have a background in stage improv, so I am pretty comfortable with that too, honestly! And when I run live the systems tend to be rules-light (not GURPS), so improvising what would otherwise be a complicated mechanical proposition in PDQ/Trail of Cthulhu/nWoD helps.
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Jun 13, 2011 23:59
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Yeah, the prep issue is one of the reasons I've been so scared to run Transhuman Space at the tabletop. In PbP, I have enough time to research and compose responses to whatever the characters are doing. The ease by which a character can simply say "I have my NAI index all similar incidents by type, with a listing of affiliated persons by real name and pseudonym" and have it be a legitimate GM request scares me a little. There's just so much power in the hands of the players, especially in regards to information. It's sad, too, because THS is the one GURPS setting (other than World War II) that my friends are interested in.
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Jun 14, 2011 00:08
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