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.

 

[dbm]

So, a couple more things have been clarified by Kromm over on the GURPS forums, though we still don’t have a formal press release on what SJG are doing.

A major aim seems to be addressing accessibility as a technical concept, by which I mean accessibility for people with visual disabilities and so. Presumably that will be most beneficial for people using a PDF. There was allusion to re-flowing the pages away from a three column format to presumably a two column format and perhaps moving the call-out boxes to help in this regard, too.

Secondly, the changes seem to be really, really minor in terms of wording. For example they considered switching to neutral pronouns throughout but the extra characters this would require started to push references into new pages. Outdated terminology will be revised, however, such as group names which are no longer considered acceptable. Disadvantages may be re-described.

 

[Staffan]

Just a side comment on one branch of this discussion, since I've seen it come up in other discussion:

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.

I think Troubleshooters does a fairly good job there. In Troubleshooters, Complications are fairly standardized. For 3 Story Points, you get some sort of short-term disadvantage: -2 to certain rolls in a scene, or turning a success into a failure, or letting the villain get away because of your code of honour, or things like that. For 6 Story Points, you can't participate in one scene. If you're Young, you can't get into the club because you're underage. If you have a Criminal Background, the police show up to take you in for questioning. If you're a Drunkard, you're out drunk.

A huge amount of work has been done to create templates for many major genres or types of games. There are still decision to be made but it is a lot more manageable IMO. And there is GM guidance on how to make more templates to support your campaign concept, too.

And those templates look like this (this particular one is for GURPS Technomancer in 3e, but 4e is fairly similar):

That's certainly easier than digging through all the books, but it's far from easy.

 

[Panzeh]

Yeah, the templates are helpful if the sole barrier to entry is making decisions in a big picture, but i don't think they fix a lot of the problems with getting into the game. This is also, why, i think Dungeon Fantasy didn't work very well- it was a self-contained, baked-up GURPS product... but the characters are 250 point characters with templates a mile wide, which is really no place to start in the game as a beginner, even if it might seem from the concept that it should be easy to accomplish.

I think it's a lot easier and more effective to try to make a fantasy world work in GURPS than to try to make GURPS play like D&D, or another game, really.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think Troubleshooters does a fairly good job there. In Troubleshooters, Complications are fairly standardized. For 3 Story Points, you get some sort of short-term disadvantage: -2 to certain rolls in a scene, or turning a success into a failure, or letting the villain get away because of your code of honour, or things like that. For 6 Story Points, you can't participate in one scene. If you're Young, you can't get into the club because you're underage. If you have a Criminal Background, the police show up to take you in for questioning. If you're a Drunkard, you're out drunk.

Still a little coarse for my taste; probably because I come from a Hero background, I'd prefer at least three buckets, not two.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it's a lot easier and more effective to try to make a fantasy world work in GURPS than to try to make GURPS play like D&D, or another game, really.

This is true with a lot of games, honestly; almost any game, generic or not, carries certain kinds of fundamental design assumptions that will color how settings designed for it work out. You can make it work with systems derived from each other most of the time, but past that its always kind of a crapshoot.

 

[The Soloist]

I bought the two core books three months ago.... same bad luck as with Numenera 3e.

I started creating a GURPS 4e fantasy character but never finished it. Had to ask for help on the GURPS Facebook group. It felt like the game was written for people who have prior knowledge of GURPs. That is not a good look for an RPG. I'll give it another try this Winter.

 

[VHawkwinter]

I bought the two core books three months ago.... same bad luck as with Numenera 3e.

I started creating a GURPS 4e fantasy character but never finished it. Had to ask for help on the GURPS Facebook group. It felt like the game was written for people who have prior knowledge of GURPs. That is not a good look for an RPG. I'll give it another try this Winter.

I am inclined to agree with you, I like GURPS, but the GURPS corebooks are like dense reference manuals that assume you're already deeply familiar with the system from GURPS 3e. It was a very odd choice.

I would suggest starting with a "Powered By GURPS" game, IMO they're more accessibly written. I liked Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Then treat basic set as expanded rules for stuff DFRPG doesn't cover, to be added in on demand.

 

[The Soloist]

I am inclined to agree with you, I like GURPS, but the GURPS corebooks are like dense reference manuals that assume you're already deeply familiar with the system from GURPS 3e. It was a very odd choice.

I would suggest starting with a "Powered By GURPS" game, IMO they're more accessibly written. I liked Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Then treat basic set as expanded rules for stuff DFRPG doesn't cover, to be added in on demand.

I looked into Dungeon Fantasy first and concluded my money would be better spent on the core books as I like the solo various genres. I'll just have to put more work into it to get the return on my hard earned money. I hate not playing an RPG leaving it to collect dust on the shelf.

 

[VHawkwinter]

This is true with a lot of games, honestly; almost any game, generic or not, carries certain kinds of fundamental design assumptions that will color how settings designed for it work out. You can make it work with systems derived from each other most of the time, but past that its always kind of a crapshoot.

Yeah, I like GURPS, but I wouldn't for example want to use it to run Forgotten Realms. I think it's ill-suited to the task.

 

[VHawkwinter]

I looked into Dungeon Fantasy first and concluded my money would be better spent on the core books as I like the solo various genres. I'll just have to put more work into it to get the return on my hard earned money. I hate not playing an RPG leaving it to collect dust on the shelf.

I found it a bit overwhelming until the DFRPG boxed set came out and I played a couple sessions of that, then I got it. I wish you luck wrapping your head around it.