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.

 

[pawsplay]

I know the books say 12 is what most people realistically have, but that always struck me as a bit low. Even after the +4 for mundane tasks, that would mean the average person fails to drive their car every other month. An untrained character with 11 IQ or DX has a 50-50 chance of doing the same task successfully. I think that gap should be a bit wider, but ultimately it doesn't matter because no one ever plays as realistic average humans.

Even swerving around an accident is a Driving roll at +4.

 

[MGibster]

I know the books say 12 is what most people realistically have, but that always struck me as a bit low. Even after the +4 for mundane tasks, that would mean the average person fails to drive their car every other month. An untrained character with 11 IQ or DX has a 50-50 chance of doing the same task successfully. I think that gap should be a bit wider, but ultimately it doesn't matter because no one ever plays as realistic average humans.

In most games back then, you weren't expected to roll for mundane tasks like walking across the street, going for a Sunday drive, buying a cup of coffee, or anything else whose outcome was a given. You were supposed to roll the dice when something exciting was happen. Driving grandma to church doesn't warrant a roll, but driving her to church in a category 5 hurricane while being chased by cultist likely warrants a roll.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In most games back then, you weren't expected to roll for mundane tasks like walking across the street, going for a Sunday drive, buying a cup of coffee, or anything else whose outcome was a given. You were supposed to roll the dice when something exciting was happen. Driving grandma to church doesn't warrant a roll, but driving her to church in a category 5 hurricane while being chased by cultist likely warrants a roll.

Most games I've seen recently say much the same thing.

 

[stonehead]

Car accidents are the leading cause of "preventable" (whatever that means) deaths for ages 5-22. If that doesn't count as the PC's health, wealth, or equipment being at risk, I don't know what does.

---

Jokes aside, the disagreement might be because there's no consensus on what a "standard adventuring challenge" means for mundane everyday skills like driving, engineering, or makeup. And I hold that the gap between "an average human's greatest skill" and "a completely untrained average human" isn't wide enough. Like, take the thing your are best at. Whatever you are most confident with your skill in. Imagine a task so difficult that you have a 1 in 4 chance of failing to complete it. Would someone who has never done this before have a 10% chance of succeeding?

Other sections of GURPS seem to agree. A college student will spend roughly around 6240 hours studying (40 hours a week, for 39 weeks per year, for 4 years). In the Improving section on p290, it says you can learn skills at a rate of 200 hours for 1 point. So even if you say half of the time was wasted on general credits (a vast overestimate), a fresh college grad would have about 16 points, or enough to raise an average skill up to attribute+4.

Actually, the downtime training rules lead to some weird results on the other side too. If you spend 30 minutes every day practicing something, it would take more than a year to raise that skill above its default.

And to reiterate, I don't think any of this is a flaw in the system. It's not a game about slowly practicing chemistry, it's a game about adventuring. D&D doesn't have realistic starvation rules, but that's not a flaw with the system. I just think it's kinda funny.

 

[Staffan]

The average person doesn't roll to drive every month, or every other month; you don't roll for your daily commute. They roll to drive when they are in a dangerous situation, and how often that happens to the average person isn't defined by the rules.

Unless everyone has a much more exciting commute than I do, that is.

Some skills specify that you do roll for everything though. Piloting is one: you need to roll for both takeoff and landing, as well as any hazardous situations. There are some safeguards built in – a failure by 1 just means "a rough job", and a crit fail requires a second confirmation roll that also has to be a failure in order to actually crash (otherwise it was a "near miss averted by experience"), but still.

But I'm going to bow out of the thread, because we're clearly talking about matters of taste more than anything else. Have fun.

 

[pawsplay]

Some skills specify that you do roll for everything though. Piloting is one: you need to roll for both takeoff and landing, as well as any hazardous situations. There are some safeguards built in – a failure by 1 just means "a rough job", and a crit fail requires a second confirmation roll that also has to be a failure in order to actually crash (otherwise it was a "near miss averted by experience"), but still.

But I'm going to bow out of the thread, because we're clearly talking about matters of taste more than anything else. Have fun.

Sure, but for clarification:

In nonadventuring situations when you have lots of time to prepare and face minimal risk, the GM may give you +4 or more to skill. (The GM might even declare such actions successful instead of wasting time on a skill roll; see When to Roll, p. 343).

So you needn't worry about falling out of the air when you fly the friendly skies. Also, Piloting says it is used for take-offs and landings, not every time you take off or land.

 

[dbm]

I suspect commercial pilots have a higher than 12 in Piloting. You could probably work it out using the rules for points via training and calculating the amount of flight hours someone needs to achieve / maintain certification.

That is an exercise left for the reader…

 

[MGibster]

Most games I've seen recently say much the same thing.

Another thing to consider is a failure on a skill roll, even driving, isn't necessarily a catastrophic failure. A failure could mean I was unable to switch lanes and take my exit off the highway, maybe I swerved a bit and now I've attracted the attention of a police officer, or perhaps I'm stuck on an icy patch because I can't get any traction.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Jokes aside, the disagreement might be because there's no consensus on what a "standard adventuring challenge" means for mundane everyday skills like driving, engineering, or makeup. And I hold that the gap between "an average human's greatest skill" and "a completely untrained average human" isn't wide enough. Like, take the thing your are best at. Whatever you are most confident with your skill in. Imagine a task so difficult that you have a 1 in 4 chance of failing to complete it. Would someone who has never done this before have a 10% chance of succeeding?
...And to reiterate, I don't think any of this is a flaw in the system. It's not a game about slowly practicing chemistry, it's a game about adventuring. D&D doesn't have realistic starvation rules, but that's not a flaw with the system. I just think it's kinda funny.

I brought that up in a previous post in the thread. Fate and the like are good at modelling 'dramatic' people or people on the most exciting days of their lives and showcase this with things like incentivizing people to fail at their personal weaknesses. GURPS looks like it models real people in normal lives (or 'normal lives in a world where _______'). However, since most people will still be using the system to emulate people in exciting times, it has to set the mechanistic frequencies to have failure rates which will be entertaining in gameplay, and then remedy mundane living with guidance such as the +4 for regular tasks or not calling for checks at all.

This is as good a time as any to discuss the point about realism and exactitude. Now, firstly it is important to note that the GURPS text itself and SJG don't go around overselling how realistic the system is (that seems to be more of a meme that kept growing). That taken care of, the game isn't necessarily realistic so much as it has verisimilitude with the real world. Default numbers for physical acts (particularly for characters with attributes in the 1-20 range) fall closer to realistic numbers (ex. running long jumps in the 5-10 yard range) than cinematic or mythic ranges. Basic assumptions tend to model real world realities (wounds make it harder for you to succeed at your actions, having multiple opponents really reduces your effectiveness, cover is really effective, etc.). That said, numbers were placed to make a playable game first and foremost. No one (to the best of my knowledge) sat down with a bunch of real-world expertise and made sure that the action that nets you a -4 on the illumination penalty chart was really equal in terms of IRL-change-in-challenge as a -4 on the wind condition chart, etc. That's not what the game does, or purports to do.

So, fundamentally, you are right (about the situation). I'm just not sure exactly how it is funny (it is worth mentioning), in that it kinda has to be that way (assuming most of us do in fact want to play characters during exciting times).

 

[pawsplay]

. GURPS looks like it models real people in normal lives (or 'normal lives in a world where _______'). However, since most people will still be using the system to emulate people in exciting times, it has to set the mechanistic frequencies to have failure rates which will be entertaining in gameplay, and then remedy mundane living with guidance such as the +4 for regular tasks or not calling for checks at all.

How is that different from any other game? Rifts doesn't even bother defining what your % skills do in non-adventuring situations.