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.

 

[Keith Ammann]

Sometimes the Zeitgeist has a point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sometimes the Zeitgeist has a point.

View attachment 421070

I've always seen that meme as a way to "playfully" jab at the preferences of others. It's not as funny IMO as it appears to those presenting it.

 

[GobHag]

I've always seen that meme as a way to "playfully" jab at the preferences of others. It's not as funny IMO as it appears to those presenting it.

Disagree with you there, it's really funny since you fit with it so well considering your anti-zeitgeist stance.

 

[Panzeh]

I will say, I think the way GURPS works in chargen does kind of necessitate a very different approach to a lot of other TTRPGs- it works best if you come up with the concept and work out the details of the character first, and then sit down with the GM and make the character 1 to 1. You can't just do like D&D where you just throw the players handbook at people and they can bring something to you with no big deal, trying to run GURPS like that is a fast way to hit everyone's analysis paralysis.

If you think of it as a way to implement a concept, I think the granularity serves the game quite well. And the advantage is, in play, if somebody makes a dragon, it's more than a couple of modifiers like a D&D game, if you've given people the point budget, they really do feel, in almost every mechanic, like what they've made. When you do things like massively simplify skills, I think you lose a lot of the way to differentiate between mundane humans at a normal level, whereas they do have ways to have simplified skills for superhero-level games in the wild card system.

With the skill system, i can make 4 normal doctors feel very different in the things they're good at as medical professionals, i can make a variety of SF operators who feel very different because a lot of the soldiering skills are broken out.

Though definitely, the zeitgeist leans more toward, less character creation in general, books with very evocative art and strong playbooks to let you know what kind of characters make sense in the fiction. But GURPS is trying to be universal, so, this isn't something it can really do.

 

[dbm]

Kromm mention Power Ups 11: Roll Your Own Skills again this week, in the GURPS News update. Should arrive early next year, so likely at a similar time to the Revised book.