GURPS 4th Edition Revised Announced

GURPS is getting a revised 4th edition. Steve Jackson Games has quietly announced a revised version of GURPS current edition, with a focus on cleaning up wording and layout. Announced at Gamehole Con and further detailed in this thread on the Steve Jackson Games server, the revised edition will be fully compatible with all existing 4th edition GURPS material, right down to preserving page references in existing books. There will be rule changes in the form of additions that will be added via addenda, with players able to bring in those rules as they see fit to their existing 4th edition games.

GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System and is intended to be a rules system that can be used for any kind of story or genre. Steve Jackson has long-hinted that a new edition of GURPS was on the way, although it appears that they opted to keep the current edition rather than rebuild the game or make significant changes to its mechanics.

From DouglasCole on the GURPS forums:

Since the GURPS Fourth Edition Revised monkey is out of the sack:

Zero. It won't be years. Most of the work is already done.

1. By far the biggest differences are major changes to physical layout and design. I'm not sure what SJ leaked at Gamehole Con, so I'm not going to go into detail here beyond saying, "The thing will be easier to use and read." It will not look the same, despite #3 below.

2. It is definitively not GURPS Fifth Edition, or even a GURPS Third Edition to GURPS Fourth Edition-level change! It is a GURPS Third Edition to GURPS Third Edition Revised-level change. It will not make edition-level changes to point costs, modifiers, prices, weights, etc. All rules changes will be additions, in clearly marked addenda "chapters," so that people can easily decide what to retcon into Fourth Edition campaigns.

3. Top priority is to preserve page references so that whether you use the Basic Set, Fourth Edition or Basic Set Fourth Edition Revised, an internal "p. 00" or external "p. B00" points you to the same rule. This brooks little to no rewriting outside of the addenda mentioned in #2.

4. Inasmuch as there is some rewriting, as in #3, it will be to remedy some particularly offensive or unclear passages. Not to change rules!

5+. And other minor stuff while we're at it. The above will inevitably change the size, shape, and location of art and quote boxes, so expect art and quotes to change, too. We'll update the credits to reflect additional material in the addenda, and the creatives who created the revised book. I'm sure there are 100 things like that.

#3 is the single most important element in living up to the promise of compatibility. There are literally millions of page references in 21 years of supplements and articles, not to mention community discussions. Invalidating them would mean a huge slap in the face. But #1 is the main reason to do the thing. So, it isn't a conflict . . . it's a visual upgrade that doesn't insult customers, while still providing both enhanced readability AND some extra "best of" addenda.

I can say without shilling or exaggerating that it is far, far more than a new printing. It just isn't a full edition. There are things between the two. A revision is one of those things. If all a reader cares about is the rules . . . well, there will be lots of addenda, but no, not a full revision. However, lots of readers care about readability, sensitivity, design aesthetics, being aware that it's 21 years later, etc. even if not a single rule changes.

Well, that's it for my needless leaks to follow SJ's leaks, but the takeaways:

• Better, more readable layout with different art and quotes.
• Mostly less controversial words, excepting indefinite pronouns (for economic reasons).
• More than 25 pages of "best of" rules skimmed from 21 years of system growth.
• Incidental glitch cleanup (e.g., mistaken "damage" for "injury," or "than" for "that").
• Promise of NO rules or page-reference changes to maintain total compatibility.

 

[coyote6]

Ever thrown a grenade in GURPS?

Oh, yeah; we ran some Special Ops-ish games, so many grenades were thrown. We had someone with a Milkor MGL fire full RoF into a horde of charging orks. It was impressive, in both amount of effort and effect in game.

 

[Staffan]

yes

Full damage from direct impact.
Damage is less if farther away from the explosion.

That makes sense.

Some grenades create shrapnel, which is treated roughly the same as a rapid fire projectile weapon (margin of success determines hits)

In short: standing at ground zero of an explosion is bad for your health; being farther away or having cover increases your chances of survival

Took us like 10 minutes to figure out first time, and we probably got some things wrong regarding timing (grenades generally have a timer fuse instead of going off on impact). Plus, while I'm not an expert on explosives, I think this is one of those areas where detailed rules don't lead to greater realism. For example, a WW2 (TL 6) concussion grenade deals 6d damage, which is an average of an impressive 21 to anyone directly hit. Someone 1 yard away? Divide that by 3 for an average of 7. 2 yards away? Divide by 6 for an average of 3 (since you round down). 3 yards gets you a divisor of 9 for 2 points, and 4-7 yards gets you a measly point. I'm no expert in grenades, and I gather that concussion grenades generally don't have huge AOEs, but 1 yard for significant damage and 2 for more than a hard tap seems low. In other games, it would be something like "6d in a 2-yard radius and 2d in 3 more around it", and with frag grenades just having bigger AOEs instead of going "OK so you're 5 yards away, that's -2 to the shrapnel so skill 13, it rolls 8 so that's a margin of 5 which means you get hit with two fragments." for everyone nearby.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Gurps should stay crunchy
Gurps Lite is good too, or whatever the modern version of that is
SJG however should open Gurps up to some sort of open license model. There's just not enough "out of the box" adventures/campaigns that showcase the entire width of what Gurps can do. In addition to stuff published by SJG. Trust me, the WotC model would work, and well.
I would run a Gurps game again if I didn't have to do so much of the work.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Took us like 10 minutes to figure out first time, and we probably got some things wrong regarding timing (grenades generally have a timer fuse instead of going off on impact). Plus, while I'm not an expert on explosives, I think this is one of those areas where detailed rules don't lead to greater realism. For example, a WW2 (TL 6) concussion grenade deals 6d damage, which is an average of an impressive 21 to anyone directly hit. Someone 1 yard away? Divide that by 3 for an average of 7. 2 yards away? Divide by 6 for an average of 3 (since you round down). 3 yards gets you a divisor of 9 for 2 points, and 4-7 yards gets you a measly point. I'm no expert in grenades, and I gather that concussion grenades generally don't have huge AOEs, but 1 yard for significant damage and 2 for more than a hard tap seems low. In other games, it would be something like "6d in a 2-yard radius and 2d in 3 more around it", and with frag grenades just having bigger AOEs instead of going "OK so you're 5 yards away, that's -2 to the shrapnel so skill 13, it rolls 8 so that's a margin of 5 which means you get hit with two fragments." for everyone nearby.

You'd be surprised. Concussion blasts trail off pretty fast. An old demo stunt was to put on a helmet, then set off a concussion charge sitting on top of it because most of the blast would just go upward.

Antipersonnel shells are mostly just concussion, but they're a lot of concussion.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

And yeah if you just straightforwardly built, say, the main cast of Star Trek the Next Generation, most of the characters would be roughly in a bracket of points level and then Data would be a massive outlier at a zillion points. I don't think it's that big a deal in the context of a show because they can just not write Data solving all the problems and having all the adventures, even though that might be optimal, but i wouldn't let someone make Data, at least as he is in the show, in a TTRPG party with the same theme.

A random thought that occured to me -maybe a TNG GURPS game would need to use a new kind of rule that allows the players to lend some of their character build points to another player (or to build an NPC under control of all the players?). You could adopt that for DS9 (you gotta pay for Odo's shapeshifting, and maybe Jadzia's past lives?) and VOY, too (in VOY, they split points on the Holodoc and Seven of Nine I guess. Neelix' player probably gave a lot of points away!).

 

[Panzeh]

A random thought that occured to me -maybe a TNG GURPS game would need to use a new kind of rule that allows the players to lend some of their character build points to another player (or to build an NPC under control of all the players?). You could adopt that for DS9 (you gotta pay for Odo's shapeshifting, and maybe Jadzia's past lives?) and VOY, too (in VOY, they split points on the Holodoc and Seven of Nine I guess. Neelix' player probably gave a lot of points away!).

It's an interesting idea though honestly if you had players willing to do that i'd just let somebody make the more powerful character without having to make sacrifices elsewhere. If i had that kind of group, i might be willing to just say 'to hell with the points, we're going to implement the concept you've given me'.

The closest i've seen in a real game that got to that was the GM fairly generously considering occupation/species template disads not part of the disad limit so it was a bit easier to make characters of expensive species like elves in the setting. You almost always have to do that in a game if someone wants to be a robot/android character to reflect their capabilities unless the points are sky high.

 

[BrokenTwin]

I'll probably get this, my old 4E books were water damaged recently (and survived shockingly well, all things considered), so a new print with better text and art is an easy sell for me.
Kinda thrown off by all the calls to simplify the game, honestly. They've got their core demographic they seem quite content serving, who are quite happy with the product they're being served. Why change that?

 

[Argyle King]

Took us like 10 minutes to figure out first time, and we probably got some things wrong regarding timing (grenades generally have a timer fuse instead of going off on impact). Plus, while I'm not an expert on explosives, I think this is one of those areas where detailed rules don't lead to greater realism. For example, a WW2 (TL 6) concussion grenade deals 6d damage, which is an average of an impressive 21 to anyone directly hit. Someone 1 yard away? Divide that by 3 for an average of 7. 2 yards away? Divide by 6 for an average of 3 (since you round down). 3 yards gets you a divisor of 9 for 2 points, and 4-7 yards gets you a measly point. I'm no expert in grenades, and I gather that concussion grenades generally don't have huge AOEs, but 1 yard for significant damage and 2 for more than a hard tap seems low. In other games, it would be something like "6d in a 2-yard radius and 2d in 3 more around it", and with frag grenades just having bigger AOEs instead of going "OK so you're 5 yards away, that's -2 to the shrapnel so skill 13, it rolls 8 so that's a margin of 5 which means you get hit with two fragments." for everyone nearby.

I wouldn't say that I'm an expert on grenades, but I have tossed a few over the years.

The reason that fragmentation was added as a feature is because, while the shape may be great for throwing, it's not very effective for a concentrated blast. In trench warfare or when assaulting a bunker, they're great because confined quarters magnify the effect.

As for the timer, that is also a thing. I was trained to "cook off" the grenade before tossing it. Too early and you give the target a chance to toss it back; too late and you're missing a hand.

If you got it wrong, it's no big deal. The general idea is that being at the center of the blast is bad. GURPS produces results that you'd mostly expect and find intuitive, even when you don't get it exactly right.

Also, as a modular system, you could completely change how grenades work, and it wouldn't break the game. One of the strengths of GURPS design is that it claims to be modular and actually is. Some other games that I've played claim the same, but then one minor change causes a plethora of unforeseen problems down the road.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Kinda thrown off by all the calls to simplify the game, honestly. They've got their core demographic they seem quite content serving, who are quite happy with the product they're being served. Why change that?

I don't think that most of this is serious calls for the game to be massively changed (they've already said they are changing so little that the page references won't change), so much as 'this is what I think they would need to change about GURPS to make it preferable to me.'

This makes a lot of sense, I never thought about it in this way - I always took it for granted that if you take a disadvantage that has any worth in terms of story, of course you'll want it to come up; trying to minimize its impact would feel like cheating to me (not saying that it IS cheating; it's just a feeling I have never questioned before).
Which also means that GURPS would need a slightly more antagonistic GM who knows your disadvantages and brings them up, at least if there is supposed to be some balance (meaning you paying one way or the other for that extra lump of CP).

I've certainly heard complaints about this in point-based or advantage/disadvantage-bearing systems. Kind of like white-room min-maxxing, it's always unclear how representative the complaints are, and whether it's something the complainer has seen frequently happen or simply sees as a real possibility. There's also the issue (like min-maxxing in, like, D&D 3e) that it's not necessarily unambiguous where the line is and two reasonable people can disagree on what is/isn't 'cheating' (let's call it violating the spirit of the mechanic). This is especially true for penalties in situations that might come up, but probably won't (and/or wouldn't natively, but 'I wouldn't have chosen it if I didn't want the GM to include situations where it came up.'). Or (and I'm honestly still on the fence about this one) the situation of behavioral disadvantages where one get points for playing a character how you had wanted to play them in the first place.


I think, more importantly, is that you've uncovered the other major factor of GURPS-style disadvantages -- the GM has to know them, remember them, and bring them up. In a large group with characters with multiple disadvantages, this can be difficult and one or more can often fly under the radar. Systems where the disadvantage coming up has the person-most-invested-in-the-character-that-has-it actively looking for opportunities for it to rear its head have an advantage with this specific issue.

So Fate is more about people who are both dramatically awesome and dramatically flawed, but ultimately come down on the awesome side; while GURPS is maybe more about, well ... people?

Well, awesome in either the modern or archaic sense, for sure.
Overall, yes, GURPS kinda creates 'people' (or 'people, if the universe were such that...') as they exist in their everyday lives*, whereas Fate creates people as they exist in stories, or just in the most eventful days of their lives. Mind you, since we generally are playing the most exciting times of a character's life, GURPS then has some workarounds (ex. scores that wouldn't statistically work if applied to everyday life, but then guidance to only require a check under challenging situations) to get halfway back there.

Disadvantages that work by yielding metacurrency instead of up-front points have some virtues: they're more or less good at automatically regulating frequency since they come up as often as, well, they come up.

I've rarely seen a take on them that's good at regulating intensity, however, because in most systems they're a binary yield/not yield choice. There's nothing that says that can't be done (if your metacurrency isn't super-chunky, you can have the trigger yield different amounts), but for the most part it simply isn't done, and I think for some purposes that's a problem. My suspicion is that's because most games that do this sort of thing think in fairly broad strokes, so doing that would seem perversely finicky, but not everyone wants broad strokes.

Yeah, I don't see any inherent reason why you couldn't do so with a Fate-like system (although it would be a re-build and re-playtest). I think that the reward-when-disadvantage-comes-up mechanic simply came to the fore at the same time as when granularity was in decline.

In other respects, sometimes I think the real virtue of point build systems ... one thing they do do is set a finite list on character resources and set it for everyone, so if if players A and B want similar characters, either one of them can get there because there's not character gen mechanics that will allow one but not the other to do it. That doesn't mean a build system as fine gradient as GURPS or Hero is necessarily what you want, but it means even if the value comparisons to cost within the system fail, its still serving a purpose.

Oh, let's be clear, even as just an artificial economy of traits, the GURPS point system is serving a purpose. It's just not the one that one might think it serves (communication and consistency would help in this matter), or want it to be. Being an alternate to other system's bespoke character creation mechanisms certainly is true.

 

[MGibster]

I've certainly heard the complaints about this in point-based or advantage/disadvantage-bearing systems. Kind of like white-room min-maxxing, it's always unclear how representative the complaints are, and whether it's something the complainer has seen frequently happen or simply sees as a real possibility.

The thing with GURPS, like most other RPGs, is you need a GM to run the show. If a player tries to take a Disadvantage that's not really a Disadvantage, then the GM should say no, but assuming the player is working in good faith, try to work with them to bring their character concept to the table. I don't remember having big problems with it when I used to play GURPS, but it's a subject I've seen brought up since 3rd edition, and an issue SJG has addressed when people wrote them about it. I'm inclined to think it does happen from time-to-time.