GURPS 4th Edition Revised Announced

GURPS definitely could benefit from a streamlined/reduced single volume basic edition. HERO Sidekick is a good example of what such a book could look like. The Dungeon Fantasy RPG could have been cut down into a single volume hard back with a lower price. Either of those books would be better for starting players/groups than the current massive two volume "basic" set.

Staffan said:

TORG, in addition to having Possibilities as metacurrency as well as cards that let PCs influence things, has built-in narrative mechanics. The biggest is that each invading realm has its own Axioms and World Laws. Axioms determine how advanced that realm is in various ways (Spiritual, Magical, Technological, and Social), which is what sort of thing its natives can do, and what sort of things interlopers can do easily. For example, the Living Land is limited to stone age tech, so when someone comes along with an M-16 it does not work. At least not for long. On the other hand, it is full of the spiritual power of the goddess Lanala, allowing the natives to work amazingly powerful miracles... but only inside the Land. In addition, each realm has World Laws which determine things in addition to the axioms. For example, the Living Land loves life and abhors dead things. So living things heal faster, and dead things decompose and are destroyed faster. Your clothes will tear, your gear will rust, and your food will rot. The natives use miracles to make plants grow into weapons and equipment that are still alive and can be replanted, but interlopers will usually not have such advantages.

Similarly, other realms have their own world laws. Nippon Tech/Pan Pacifica (slightly advanced intrigue-filled realm with a good dose of Hong Kong-style action – it was renamed in the reboot) has the Law of Betrayal, stating that any organization large enough will have at least one traitor. Aysle, the fantasy realm, has the Laws of Honor and Corruption which state that being honorable or corrupt will show, and can grant certain benefits. The Nile Empire (30s pulp action) has the Law of Action, which makes everything even more action-filled than the default. And so on.

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Never played TORG. That much narrative mechanical weight seems a little off-putting to me, though I'm sure others like it.

Thomas Shey said:

The value of the disadvantage should at least be reduced, however.

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Why? The purpose of a point buy character system is to be able to build a custom character. The point cost of telepathy is offset part/fully by the point gain of deafness. Would you lessen the cost of deafness if the character had the sign language skill?

The classic example of 'free' points is taking the disadvantage of Sense of Duty for a character with a military background. Or a doctor(duty to patients).

Staffan said:

TORG, in addition to having Possibilities as metacurrency as well as cards that let PCs influence things, has built-in narrative mechanics. The biggest is that each invading realm has its own Axioms and World Laws. Axioms determine how advanced that realm is in various ways (Spiritual, Magical, Technological, and Social), which is what sort of thing its natives can do, and what sort of things interlopers can do easily. For example, the Living Land is limited to stone age tech, so when someone comes along with an M-16 it does not work. At least not for long. On the other hand, it is full of the spiritual power of the goddess Lanala, allowing the natives to work amazingly powerful miracles... but only inside the Land. In addition, each realm has World Laws which determine things in addition to the axioms. For example, the Living Land loves life and abhors dead things. So living things heal faster, and dead things decompose and are destroyed faster. Your clothes will tear, your gear will rust, and your food will rot. The natives use miracles to make plants grow into weapons and equipment that are still alive and can be replanted, but interlopers will usually not have such advantages.

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Its actually a bad example for what we're talking about though, because the mechanical oddities in TORG are simulations in the sense Micah is using it; though not everyone understands it, people who understand how the Cosms work know that possibility energy is a thing (and thus, Possibilites aren't really a metacurrency; they're just a currency) and that the world laws exist and produce various narrative-like effects.

What we were talking about is games that have rules to produce various genre conventions that normally people in the worlds involved wouldn't recognize as special rules of the setting, and in many cases wouldn't recognize were true at all. Even in TORG most of the individual cosms are full of people who don't recognize these things as such, it takes people who travel from cosm to cosm to do that.

Micah Sweet said:

Never played TORG. That much narrative mechanical weight seems a little off-putting to me, though I'm sure others like it.

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I'm not entirely sure its really narrative weight the way you usually use it; as I said, it a set of worlds some of which overtly work by genre conventions and the like that people who travel across them are well aware of. Probably a good comparison is some of the baked in horror rules Ravenloft deals with.

Koloth said:

Why?

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Because the point value of a disadvantage is to represent the problem it causes. If it doesn't cause as much problem because you've papered across it with other abilities (which, after all, are still providing the benefit they always provide), its simply not the same degree of problem.

Koloth said:

The purpose of a point buy character system is to be able to build a custom character. The point cost of telepathy is offset part/fully by the point gain of deafness. Would you lessen the cost of deafness if the character had the sign language skill?

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Probably not, but that's because of the "minimal benefit" value for the most part; a lot of the people the deaf person wants to communicate (probably most) won't be able to take advantage of his knowledge of sign, so the offset is minimal. Telepathy, on the other hand, substutes for all but the technical remote-communication part of that, and there's already technical ways.

Thomas Shey said:

Because the point value of a disadvantage is to represent the problem it causes. If it doesn't cause as much problem because you've papered across it with other abilities (which, after all, are still providing the benefit they always provide), its simply not the same degree of problem.

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I'm pretty sure GURPS 3e had a specific mention of how getting around Cannot Speak/Mute via telepathy meant you didn't get any points for Cannot Speak (but I can't be bothered to look it up). I did check 4e and it does not have such a mention, and it even implies that compensating for it is OK – it says "All communications with others must be nonverbal: writing, sign language, Morse code, telepathy, etc."

In this particular case it sort of makes sense, because (depending on the specifics), telepathy doesn't fully cover for mute. For one thing, it likely won't be picked up by microphones and the like, it might have a limited range, and it might be limited to 1-on-1 communication.

On the other hand, Blindness does specify that you can't take it along with compensatory vision abilities (notably Infra- and Ultravision, because they have variants that replace normal sight with the advantage), but you can combine it with Scanning Sense and Vibration Sense because those aren't vision.

There's a new edition of GURPS coming out and I can find Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and BattleTech on the shelves of my local game store. Obviously Star Fleet Battles is poised for a big comeback.

Swanosaurus said:

TBH, I still consider Dungeon Fantasy a weird choice to draw in new people ... While I can see why anyone who already plays GURPS might like a ready-made powercrunch fantasy implementation, but I do not know why someone should choose it over D&D, or DCC, or any other more classic Dungeon RPG.

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It’s for much the same reason GURPS drew many of us in during the late 1980s, completely customizable characters with mechanics that made sense both in terms of how life works and, in some cases, how fiction works.

Starting with AD&D 2e’s Skills & Powers and really hitting stride with D&D 3.0, D&D “fixed” the issue of character customization, and that approach continues through 5e. But D&D still sits firmly on the fantastic side of fantasy. Some folks prefer a system that offers the same range of options but within a more grounded framework.

Because GURPS is a toolkit, you can dial the fantastic elements back in when you want them, but in a measured way that stays consistent with the tone or realism your group is after.

Swanosaurus said:

Infinite Worlds and Banestorm are settings that seem to be much more in tune with the implications of GURPS and could be sold as something exciting and different. Presenting either of them (or something else along the lines) as a full-fledged, curated mid-crunch GURPS would have seemed a lot more promising to me and could have re-established a recognizable and appropriate core identity for GURPS. Like "GURPS is that dimension hopping RPG, but you can also buy the full, setting-agnostic rules encyclopedia, and it has lots of other setting and rules supplements, which goes really well with dimension-hopping."

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(shrug) GURPS never really excelled at original settings, in my opinion. Banestorm was fine, but just fine. Infinite Worlds felt too heavy-handed, leaning too much on the “mission of the session” concept, and it didn’t get enough support from freelancers to make it truly come alive.

For my part, I used GURPS to run my Majestic Wilderlands, based on Judges Guild’s Wilderlands of High Fantasy and City State of the Invincible Overlord. I had a lot of memorable campaigns that really developed my setting. GURPS worked great not only for traditional adventuring parties, but also for campaigns centered on mages, city guards, the criminal underworld, or residents of a single neighborhood.

One of my favorites involved just two players, one was an agent of the Black Lotus (the Overlord’s secret police), the other a blacksmith. They were sent to investigate strange goings-on in a rebellious duchy. The blacksmith was there because the rebel Duke was hiring an unusual number of smiths, so his expertise mattered. GURPS allowed both characters to be fully realized people, not just adventurers defined by combat abilities.

The problem with SJ Games is that their long-standing resistance to independent third-party publishing has stifled much of GURPS’s potential. At the end of the day, they’re still one company with limited resources and time, especially for a product that, while profitable, doesn’t pay the bills.

On the other hand, these days, with GURPS Lite, Dungeon Fantasy, extensive use of templates, and the few 3PP products out there like Delver to Grow from Gaming Ballistic, it’s far easier to get started than it used to be.

Thomas Shey said:

Its actually a bad example for what we're talking about though, because the mechanical oddities in TORG are simulations in the sense Micah is using it; though not everyone understands it, people who understand how the Cosms work know that possibility energy is a thing (and thus, Possibilites aren't really a metacurrency; they're just a currency) and that the world laws exist and produce various narrative-like effects.

What we were talking about is games that have rules to produce various genre conventions that normally people in the worlds involved wouldn't recognize as special rules of the setting, and in many cases wouldn't recognize were true at all. Even in TORG most of the individual cosms are full of people who don't recognize these things as such, it takes people who travel from cosm to cosm to do that.

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Ok, I didn't know that's how TORG works; like I said, never played it. If those are the laws of the setting, then IMO the mechanics are simulation and get a pass.