How do you get to GURPS?

DMMike said:

This is, stated in the rules or otherwise, a GM's job. But I think there's a turning point, when managing the rules FOR the players becomes counter-productive. There are also the players (like me) who will want to know and use the rules without GM assistance, because there's the possibility that the GM says he knows the rules, but doesn't.

Still, that's another way to get to GURPS: hold the players' hands until they can make it on their own.


Yes, it's a style choice. Maybe one game clamps down on damaging moves while another allows easy whirlwind attacks. But I wouldn't say GURPS is just as simple as the next game. I mean, this is from the Basic Rules FAQ:

Wait, what? The answer for a simple game would be "a 3 or 4 is always a Critical Success." Or better yet, "a 3 or 4 is always a Success."

Personally, you'd have to twist my arm to get me to play D&D 5 right now, but I'd do it because my dusty knowledge of 3rd edition rules would probably fill in the gaps. If a GM said, "hey, let's play GURPS!" I might think about it if she meant "GURPS Lite," otherwise my reaction would be "you know, I've really been eager to get another D&D 5 game going..."

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I'm not going to argue the simplicity of this. But the 3 and 4 rules is broken into two groups, you can always roll defense rolls, but other rolls won't succeed.

This isn't really that far off of people who think that rolling a 1 or 20 on a skill check or saving throw are auto fails or auto succeeds. (They are not, but too many people think they are.)

As it happens, I am doing this right now. We are about 10 hours into a GURPS campaign, and my group predominantly plays D&D 5e. The real question here is ‘how do you get people to pick up a new, crunchy system’ but I will stick with the specific example [MENTION=6685730]DMMike[/MENTION] picked.

First, GURPS is the proverbial elephant that you don’t eat all in one go. I am sure this is also the case with other complex systems, but for a generic system this is even more so as there are rules you will never need in the campaign you are running. So, as the GM, step one is to pare back the rules to what you will actually need. For GURPS specifically there are series aimed at this: Dungeon Fantasy, Monster Hunters, Action!, After the End and Steam Punk.

You can go a bit further with GURPS, too, in that there are a couple of completely stand-alone games ‘Powered by GURPS’. We are using the Dungeon Fantasy box set which both pares down the rules and builds up templates and specific options. So, in the DFRPG box set there are advantages you can buy for your character and you just get the total cost. Traditionally, a GURPS product would give you a breakdown of the components and modifiers the make up the cost.

So: initial set up is to decide on the rules and options in play.

Next, help the players make characters. Given the D&D baseline of ‘pick one of these N options’ where N can be somewhere between a dozen and 50, new systems may be more or less complex. That is worth keeping in mind: their game of choice may already be big and complex, just with a different set of parameters that they have already internalised.

In play, the GM needs to be operating the system more than usual as the players don’t have the personal knowledge to run everything themselves. This is especially important when a new game runs on a different set of parameters or assumptions than the usual game. Interestingly, I think that GURPS is potentially easier than many, here, as it is baselined on real-world as much as practicable. An example: the party faced a creature that was an animate cloud of poisonous gas. It was absolutely kicking their butts, so I pointed out: you can just hold your breath and fight it. This wouldn’t necessarily work with all noxious effects but it was definitely an option. This didn’t even enter their heads as something to try as it isn’t a factor in 5e, for example. If they had been playing old skool where personal creativity was expected, or had no experience of gaming at all they would perhaps be more likely to try these things.

Even in the space of just 10 hours at the table we sped up on the process for a combat turn dramatically, including calculating range penalties, hit location penalties and so on. As the GM, the biggest load was remembering what the special features of a monster meant (things like ‘unliving’ or ‘homogenous’) since the effects are not spelled out with every monster and it takes a while to internalise them. (I am rusty as a GURPS GM)

By the end of the session the guys had much better appreciation of the options available to them and were making better decisions in-game to address the problems in front of them.

And that is just in a dungeon crawl context. As the game widens out, the bigger set of tools available will allow me to add detail and drama to a wide range of scenarios that aren’t necessarily addressed by other games or which are addressed by a simple, universal process. Universal processes are something my group really dislike. We like a degree of crunch and we like it to be relevant to the task at hand. We really didn’t get on with the high level of process streamlining that Fate brings to the table, for example.

So, in summary:

• GM needs a good grasp of the rules
• Pick a game premise you are confident the players will enjoy
• Help players make good characters for the game at hand
• Help players make good choices in-play based on the options the game presents
• Aim to highlight the strengths of the new system in a way that will produce a fun game.

If the players are enjoying the game, the rules will come to them pretty quickly in my experience.

dbm said:

So, in summary:

• GM needs a good grasp of the rules
• Pick a game premise you are confident the players will enjoy
• Help players make good characters for the game at hand
• Help players make good choices in-play based on the options the game presents
• Aim to highlight the strengths of the new system in a way that will produce a fun game.

If the players are enjoying the game, the rules will come to them pretty quickly in my experience.

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Solid list. We should all print this out and hang it in our GM lair.

Update following a big session on Sunday: three character deaths but the guys are still enjoying it.

There are two sides to this, first we are committed to playing several sessions before making a decision. I put this as a good sign, however, as we have tried other games that got canned much more quickly. At least GURPS seems to fit with our baseline style as a group.

Second, it allows people to play multiple character concepts and experience different bits of the rule system. With a big and crunchy system it’s hard (pretty much impossible) to experience all aspects of the game with a single character. This is definitely true when you consider sub-systems like different power sets and even playing a character focused on ranged combat can be very different.

dbm said:

Update following a big session on Sunday: three character deaths but the guys are still enjoying it.

There are two sides to this, first we are committed to playing several sessions before making a decision. I put this as a good sign, however, as we have tried other games that got canned much more quickly. At least GURPS seems to fit with our baseline style as a group.

Second, it allows people to play multiple character concepts and experience different bits of the rule system. With a big and crunchy system it’s hard (pretty much impossible) to experience all aspects of the game with a single character. This is definitely true when you consider sub-systems like different power sets and even playing a character focused on ranged combat can be very different.

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So you got 'em to GURPS? Congrats!

Just had a thought, when dbm mentioned range penalties: since D&D 5e is a sort of 3.5e-lite, could 5e be a precursor to a 3.5e reboot? Is WotC already trying to get players to GURPS, or in this case, 3.5e when it was at its full, glorious, bloat?

In response to your original post, it will come down to time and interest from those who you game with, otherwise seek out those online or locally who might wish to play a game system with more complex rules.

It's an odd thing to say, but, in some ways, I find GURPS less complex than D&D.

For me personally, a lot of that comes from the system generally producing results which just kinda make sense. While there are certainly oddities born of the game rules, most of it seems relatively intuitive. Even when dragons, magic, and laser pistols are brought in, there's still some manner of general ballpark in both intuitiveness of results and plausibility of results in comparison to how I imagine even a fantastic situation might play out.

For example, one of the first campaigns I ran for my friends was a street-level Supers game, and an early combat turned into a high-speed chase and a combat on a moving vehicle. I didn't know the rules well enough to know exactly what I was doing, but following the general rules upon which the game is built and (being transparent about) making a few guesses about how things should work to keep the game moving produced results which were palatable and serviceable to the group. Later, I went back and compared to my notes to the better understanding of the game I had acquired with time and found that I wasn't too far off from what the game would have said I should do anyway.

In addition, a lesson I learned from D&D 4E which I applied to GURPS is that enemies don't necessarily need stats for everything. I have a good enough grasp on the system that I can mentally hash out a police officer, shopkeep, or orc mook without too much trouble. I only need a general idea of what I feel their 4 primary stats should be and a guess at 2 or 3 skills which make sense for their primary skills. I may need a few minor adjustments based upon genre... say an extra point of strength or some fancier weapons for a high fantasy town guard versus the same dude in a low fantasy or sword & sorcery game, but it's all relatively consistent regardless of what I'm doing.


In contrast, even after years of playing D&D, I have a hard time being able to make decisions from an in-game perspective because (after a certain level) the way in which the game world works and functions only really makes sense in the context of D&D (and becomes strongly divorced from how I would even guess to mentally imagine the situation playing out in a movie, book, or real-ish situation). In some editions of the game, knowing how to play the game didn't translate into knowing how to run the game at all. I certainly didn't find creating a NPC spellcaster in 3rd Edition (or Pathfinder) to be easier than GURPS; I'd argue that (in many ways) building something for GURPS is simpler.

I can try to guess at numbers when building something (and both 4th and 5th had okayish guideliness for doing so), but there are still a lot of extra steps to consider. What level are the PCs? What classes and abilities do the PCs have? What do they not have? How many encounters have they had today? What feats, skills, items, powers, etc, etc do they have? Sometimes (depending on the edition), the game works drastically differently depending upon which pieces of the game are being used. I'm pretty good at remembering formulas, and I eventually got the hang of a lot of the things under the hood of how the various editions built things, but there are still a lot of variables. The biggest one is level.

I do believe that, to some extent, 5th is better at this, but there's still a point at which (to me) certain things aren't exactly intuitive.

For example, I mentioned vehicles in my first GURPS game. As I did with GURPS, I can (and have) made judgement calls about how something should work. Vehicles, mounts, and followers always seem to work in a somewhat wonky way in D&D.

From the player side of things, I also find there are times when it's difficult to make an informed decision based upon in-game information. On one hand I can skydive without a parachute, into the the middle of the BBEG's fodder troops, and survive. On the other hand, I might die after failing one save. The game narrative and how it relates to the way the game works can create a thin line between cakewalk and TPK, without much of an indication either way from what my character can observe of the world around him.

Johnny3D3D said:

It's an odd thing to say, but, in some ways, I find GURPS less complex than D&D.

For me personally, a lot of that comes from the system generally producing results which just kinda make sense. While there are certainly oddities born of the game rules, most of it seems relatively intuitive. Even when dragons, magic, and laser pistols are brought in, there's still some manner of general ballpark in both intuitiveness of results and plausibility of results in comparison to how I imagine even a fantastic situation might play out.

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Actually, I agree with you completely here and so I don’t think it’s an odd thing to say. But many people will find it a surprising thing!

One of the big challenges my group has faced is unlearning the strictures that are placed on them by our usual system. They are looking at ways to reduce an enemy to ‘zero hit points’ (which could be a deep negative number in GURPS terms) when actually they could be lopping off hands or similar and rendering the opponent a non-combatant without needing to slice through lots of hits. Another example would be things like feinting or attempting a disarm. These are either not covered by some games or locked behind a feat / talent. So many people don’t think about them. But in GURPS anyone can try these things.

GURPS’ focus on verisimilitude means (in my opinion) that if you can imagine something happening in real-life or close-to-it then your character can attempt that. This isn’t the case in every system, crunchy or otherwise.

I guess the wider take-away is to remember that your game-of-choice encourages thinking about play in a certain way and your new-game may easily have different underlying concepts. You need to help the players see this and adapt to it.

I played in a great DFRPG game last night that highlighted some of the strengths of the GURPS tactical combat system. It was a scene in a bar where we were trying to impress a sea captain who we wanted to book passage with. One of our characters volunteered to engage in a drinking game against a regular, a massive dwarf. Each of them removed any weapons and received a large tankard of ale, filled to the brim. Then they faced off in a makeshift ring, the goal being to cause the other person to spill their beer before you spilled yours. The first empty tankard would lose.

It was a remarkably fun scene, with the rest of the players acting as the audience (cheering and jeering) while the PC attempted various maneuvers to cause his opponent to slip up. It was the perfect scenario to drop into the "bullet time" of one-second turns, where every attack and defense mattered, feints were common, and hit locations were vital. The GM required DX checks after every maneuver, with applicable penalties depending on the circumstances. There were Will rolls to maintain composure after suffering insults from the other combatant (or the audience). Losing the checks made you spill beer portions equal to your margin of failure. (Each tankard had ten portions.) It was hilarious and tense. Our PC ultimately won the match by basically taunting his opponent into an all-out-attack (attacking twice). This nearly went badly because one of the attacks landed and our guy nearly spilled his whole tankard, but his countering kick (against a defenseless foe) knocked the dwarf's tankard into the roaring crowd.

Even though this wasn't the most important narrative element of the session, and nobody's life was on the line, the stakes were real and the system delivered. We all agreed (players from a variety of other systems) that this was an example of GURPS at its best.

uzirath said:

I played in a great DFRPG game last night that highlighted some of the strengths of the GURPS tactical combat system. It was a scene in a bar where we were trying to impress a sea captain who we wanted to book passage with. One of our characters volunteered to engage in a drinking game against a regular, a massive dwarf. Each of them removed any weapons and received a large tankard of ale, filled to the brim. Then they faced off in a makeshift ring, the goal being to cause the other person to spill their beer before you spilled yours. The first empty tankard would lose.

It was a remarkably fun scene, with the rest of the players acting as the audience (cheering and jeering) while the PC attempted various maneuvers to cause his opponent to slip up. It was the perfect scenario to drop into the "bullet time" of one-second turns, where every attack and defense mattered, feints were common, and hit locations were vital. The GM required DX checks after every maneuver, with applicable penalties depending on the circumstances. There were Will rolls to maintain composure after suffering insults from the other combatant (or the audience). Losing the checks made you spill beer portions equal to your margin of failure. (Each tankard had ten portions.) It was hilarious and tense. Our PC ultimately won the match by basically taunting his opponent into an all-out-attack (attacking twice). This nearly went badly because one of the attacks landed and our guy nearly spilled his whole tankard, but his countering kick (against a defenseless foe) knocked the dwarf's tankard into the roaring crowd.

Even though this wasn't the most important narrative element of the session, and nobody's life was on the line, the stakes were real and the system delivered. We all agreed (players from a variety of other systems) that this was an example of GURPS at its best.

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That sounds like a blast and a half. Kudos to you and your group, and that is definitely the kind of thing GURPS does well. It seems fair to say GURPS makes it easier to bore down to second-by-second actions that D&D does.