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.

 

[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.