Grade the GURPS System

[Eyes of Nine]

You're not wrong. Since so much of GURPS' business model is centered on selling rules, I view it as a major misstep that Steven Jackson Games hasn't prioritized making it easy for GMs to find/buy/publish adventures for players to use those rules within. SJG has instead chosen to keep approximately 100% of the revenue and creative control over GURPS-oriented adventures at the cost IMO of shrinking the GURPS player base including their own market for rules.

Yup, 100% of a shrinking not much is... not much. While 20% of a growing pie is a growing 20%

 

[MGibster]

You're not wrong. Since so much of GURPS' business model is centered on selling rules, I view it as a major misstep that Steven Jackson Games hasn't prioritized making it easy for GMs to find/buy/publish adventures for players to use those rules within. SJG has instead chosen to keep approximately 100% of the revenue and creative control over GURPS-oriented adventures at the cost IMO of shrinking the GURPS player base including their own market for rules.

I think SJG wisely read the writing on the wall and made the decision to pivot their business to concentrate on Munchkin and other more profitable games. Maybe GURPS would be a bit more popular had they made it easier for third parties to use it, but I kind of doubt it.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I think SJG wisely read the writing on the wall and made the decision to pivot their business to concentrate on Munchkin and other more profitable games. Maybe GURPS would be a bit more popular had they made it easier for third parties to use it, but I kind of doubt it.

I agree that Munchkin is a better business, but that's why it's hard to understand SJG's decision to jealously guard both its IP and its non-IP, as well as the GURPS authors' community's decision to even more zealously defend SJG non-IP on SJG's behalf. It's toxic and also drives away players and GMs. I got "non-punitively banned" from the GURPS Discord by GURPS author Christopher Rice for "being a bad fit" with other GURPS authors who wished to remain anonymous, and I don't think it's a coincidence that that happened a day after a bunch of people jumped on me for saying I wasn't going to use SJG IP in a GURPS autofight combat simulator I wrote for fun and therefore had no plans to ask SJG for permission to not use its IP. The timing and some of the language used in PMs smell fishy.

Contrast this BTW with how the ACKS community + primary author reacted to the idea of me adding ACKS support: "ACKS II will be an open game license so no problem whatsoever. Support would be great."

The GURPS community is excessively focused on protecting publisher short-term revenue and in the long run that's bad for everyone, even SJG.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I agree that Munchkin is a better business, but that's why it's hard to understand SJG's decision to jealously guard both its IP and its non-IP, as well as the GURPS authors' community's decision to even more zealously defend SJG non-IP on SJG's behalf. It's toxic and also drives away players and GMs. I got "non-punitively banned" from the GURPS Discord by GURPS author Christopher Rice for "being a bad fit" with other GURPS authors who wished to remain anonymous, and I don't think it's a coincidence that that happened a day after a bunch of people jumped on me for saying I wasn't going to use SJG IP in a GURPS autofight combat simulator I wrote for fun and therefore had no plans to ask SJG for permission to not use its IP. The timing and some of the language used in PMs smell fishy.

Contrast this BTW with how the ACKS community + primary author reacted to the idea of me adding ACKS support: "ACKS II will be an open game license so no problem whatsoever. Support would be great."

The GURPS community is excessively focused on protecting publisher short-term revenue and in the long run that's bad for everyone, even SJG.

Sorry that happened to you. It's a very late 20th century mindset around IP...

 

[MichaelSomething]

The GURPS community is excessively focused on protecting publisher short-term revenue and in the long run that's bad for everyone, even SJG.

If memory serves, many years ago the video game Fallout was meant to use GURPS as its base system. However, SJG withdrew from the agreement due to how the violence the game was.

Today Fallout is a major gaming IP with four iterations and several spinoffs to its name. And GURPs is more footnote then franchise.

 

[MGibster]

From 2008-2014, Lego had a crowd sourcing platform where fans could suggest sets for the company to build.

Many years ago there was some sort of pretition to get Lego to produce a set based on Joss Whedon's Firefly television series. Some of the sets to come out of this platform included the NASA Mars Rover, the Ghostbusters car with figures, and the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Fans petitioned for Lego to create a set based on Joss Whedon's Firefly television series and the company rejected it outright despite the 10,000 signatures. Lego didn't think a franchise the heavily featured a space hooker was in line with their brand. (Anakin murdering a bunch of kids is okay but we draw the line at space hookers.)

A friend of mine argued that Lego was stupid for rejecting this because they were leaving money on the table. This was back in 2012, Serenity/Firefly was still hot, and she believed this was a product Firefly fans would eat up even if they didn't normally buy Lego bricks. While I agree with her that it would sell well, I sided with Lego because I thought preserving their values was worth more than whatever extra scratch they'd make with the Firefly set. (I later learned the decision to start producing Star Wars sets was very divisive in the company and caused a lot of internal strife becaues many the license violated some of their founding principles.)

Steve Jackson and the other folks running Steve Jackson Games seem to know what they're doing. I imagine they're fully aware they might have squeezed out a bit more with GURPS by doing things differently, but this way they keep total control over it. At the very least they're not going to pull a Wizards and create their own rival to their flagship game.

 

[RareBreed]

I feel like I never gave GURPS a fair shake.

When it first hit the shelves in my local game store, it was the late 1980s and my friends and I were still playing the heck out of some red-box Basic adventures...and we were having trouble finding the Expert, Companion, and Masters sets that we needed to keep playing our characters. TSR had discontinued that whole product line, and were trying really, really hard to get folks to switch to AD&D. I ended up having several frustrating encounters with the game stores around town, where one clerk in particular told me that "the little kids version" had been discontinued but he had these "advanced" books for "older kids" instead. Also, look at this one, it has a seashell on it that's also a spaceship! And this one has ninjas! Isn't that awesome?!

No sir, it is not "awesome," it is frustrating. I didn't want "the new stuff," I wanted to continue playing the game I already had, and getting told repeatedly that I needed to move on was annoying.

At one point a store clerk, who was probably just trying to be helpful, offered an alternative: there is a new game called GURPS that will let you play any kind of game you can imagine with it. It can be as caked up or as stripped-down as you wanted, it could be historic or fantastic or futuristic or mythic as I needed, etc. And I was hearing none of it. By this point, I had been to every comic shop, game store, and used bookstore in town looking for exactly one used copy of the Expert Rules, and my interest in literally anything else could not have been at a lower ebb.

So for the longest time, GURPS was imprinted in my mind as "something else I don't want" and I never really challenged it until the Pathfinder/4E edition wars soured me on D&D. I bought a PDF of GURPS Fantasy in PDF format, and read through it, and took it for a spin. I enjoyed it a lot more than my friends did--they were pretty much bored with the whole idea of it and kept clamoring to "just play D&D already," but I had a lot of fun. It was a refreshing change of pace from the rigor of 3.5E.

I never went back to it, though.

This is an interesting perspective on something I've always pondered: why so many gamers only play D&D?

When the OGL fiasco happened, I was kind of stunned going to many YouTube sites where different creators were offering alternatives to D&D. The number of comments of people who said that they didn't even know other RPG's existed kind of blew my mind. I thought, "do these people only play on VTTs or at a friend's home? Why don't they know of other games through a FLGS?".

Then I suppose there are people like yourself, that just loved D&D and didn't really give other games a chance. Fair enough. But I had the opposite experience.

My very first RPG game was around about 1980 and I was very young. Believe it or not, I started out with AD&D and learning it as well as I could on my own. We only played a handful of games with 3 other school mates before there was a long dry period until 1983. At that time, I started playing historical miniatures with my father, mostly American Civil War and Napoleonics. One fateful day, the other gamers couldn't make it, and the hobby store owner where we played at had a son about my age. I had just bought Car Wars because it seemed cool (remember Mad Max was pretty new), so we wound up learning/playing Car Wars and creating our own little gaming group.

Another boy who was about our age who had just started playing the historical miniatures also played with us. After a few Car Wars sessions, another slightly older boy in his mid teens got us playing RPG's again. But not AD&D. He got us into playing Champions which we loved, which then got us into Justice Inc. Two other older guys joined us temporarily, and we did play a few AD&D sessions, but by this point, we realized there were so many other fun games out there. In the mid 80s, Twillight 2000 was our jam. But if it came out in the 80s, there was a very good chance we played it.

And speaking of GURPs, technically it came out in 1986, but, its true direct descendant was a game called Man to Man that came out in 1985. It was meant to be a mostly hexagonal based tactical mini game and had pretty much all the basic combat rules from GURPS. And unlike its direct ancestor The Fantasy Trip, it had the same 4 attributes that GURPS does, and the same passive and active defenses that GURPs did.

I didn't play GURPs a lot, but I did like all the supplements that came out for it. As I recall, we played a couple of Vietnam era game sessions with it before I came up with a homebrew using the Phoenix Command Combat System. The thing that kind of troubled me about GURPS though, was that they billed themselves as the generic system, and yet, it seemed like you needed some specialized one-off rule for everything. But I kind of viewed GURPS like I viewed Osprey books for historical gaming: you bought it for background information and ideas, not for playing itself.

 

[Staffan]

This is an interesting perspective on something I've always pondered: why so many gamers only play D&D?

When the OGL fiasco happened, I was kind of stunned going to many YouTube sites where different creators were offering alternatives to D&D. The number of comments of people who said that they didn't even know other RPG's existed kind of blew my mind. I thought, "do these people only play on VTTs or at a friend's home? Why don't they know of other games through a FLGS?".

This mindset has always been pretty weird to me, mainly because of the gaming situation here in Sweden in the mid-80s when I started. At the time, the domestic RPG market was absolutely dominated by a single company, Äventyrsspel. And while their flagship was definitely Drakar och Demoner (the precursor to today's Dragonbane), they published several other games: both the domestically produced post-apocalyptic game Mutant and various translated games like MERP, Chill, and Star Wars. Not only that, but their promotional magazine even had articles presenting various foreign RPG. So the environment in which I started playing has always been one of an abundance of choice.

 

[dbm]

This is an interesting perspective on something I've always pondered: why so many gamers only play D&D?

That’s sort of why GURPS exists, in a roundabout kind of way. It is very common for people to only want to learn one rule set and then be reluctant to learn any others. If that ruleset is limited in scope then the games you can more easily play are also constrained. If that ruleset is expansive however then the range of games you could run are almost limitless in scope. So the aim of GURPS (and other flexible systems) was to be the one system you needed which allowed you to play any game you wanted. Obviously this is a task where it is impossible to be all things to all people, but you can potentially be all things to enough people to support your game line…

 

[Wolfpack48]

thanks for this. I always enjoyed GURPS for its sourcebooks and adventures but didn’t really take to the system.

Will you possibly be adding Basic Roleplaying (BRP) to the grading polls? that’s the one that really hooked me.