GURPS-Share your thoughts

[Agback]

Wow, thanks for all the opinions/input. I am still deciding. The game seems good, but I am having trouble getting over the idea that each second is detailed. Seems like un-needed complexity I guess. Am I wrong here?

I think so. The thing that makes for unnecessary detail is not whether the combat turn is called a 'second'. Rather, it is whether that action of that turn is simple to resolve and decisive.

A system that calls its turns '60 seconds', but that tends to generate 75% air-swings, and in which it takes ten solid sword-hits to put an enemy down, generates the detatil of eighty blows in a typical fight. (And a system in which there is a separate roll and table lookup to determine exactly which finger is severed by a roll of '45' on the 'D slashing criticals' also gernerates a lot of detail.) But a system in which 60% of swings typically hit and three hits tend to put someone down will tended to generate detail on only eight blows in a typical fight, whether the turns are called seconds or minutes.

 

[TGryph]

Guys;

First off, I have been running a Gurps Low Fantasy campaign for over a year now. A 25 year D&D player, my group switched to HARP for a year, then tried Gurps, our current (and so far unchallenged) system of choice. I am going to chime in on some of these posts...

First off, I gotta say to those guys who can say what is wrong with Gurps when they haven't even TRIED it..loosen up and give it a shot. Gurps Lite is all you need for a decent try...hell, you could run a long-time campaign using nothing else. Don't be like a virgin trying to tell me what sex feels like

Second, true the Major Combat rules are in Campaigns, but there is a Combat Lite section at the tail-end of Characters that is quite sufficient to run a Fantasy campaign.

While it is true you don't HAVE to have Magic to run a fantasy campaign, I found it to be FAR easier to use it and have access to the pre-made spells rather than to make up a bunch myself. Plus, some of the alternate magic systems are pretty cool. You could literally run a long term fantasy campaign using just Gurps Lite and Magic.

As to the fact that Gurps is rules-heavy, I get a kick out of reading this on a D20-ruled board. I find Gurps to be much less rules-heavy than D20. Oh it CAN be a bugger if you use all the options, but basically it is just roll 3d6 under the skill level. You can add options as you wish, but they are just that...OPTIONS.

Now to the poster who was wishing for a Bestiary..oh yeah, I feel your pain. I have the old Bestiary and Fantasy Bestiary, but I will be the Happiest Camper on the Block when the new 4th Edition Bestiary comes out.

The one-second combat rules weren't a big issue with my group, nor was the alleged lethality of combat...maybe because Gurps puts a much smaller emphasis on combat than D&D. Heck, that was the major change I had to get used to in running my Gurps campaign. We sometimes go a session or two without a single melee...and I gotta say I don't miss it. Oh, and so far we have yet to lose a character..been close a couple of times, but no fatalities.

My group loves the flexibility and detail of the character generation system..it was the biggest selling point to them. Yeah, chargen can take a while, but that what options do to a game. And remember...the GM can eliminate the ones he doesn't want in his campaign.

So go to the SJ Games website and download the free Lite rules and give 'em a shot..you might be surprised


TGryph

 

[B9anders]

GURPS stats are one example. Steve Jackson started from the beginning with the axiom that a 'modern' (this was 1984 or thereabouts) RPG would have no more than four character stats. He therefore shoehorned cunning, book-learning, perceptiveness, empathy, firmness of resolve, etc. inot one mental stat: IQ. And he shoehorned agility, manual dexterity, and hand-eye co-ordination into one physical stat (DX); strength, and (at one stage) charisma and good looks into another (ST), and size, physical toughness, stamina, and good immune system inot a third. Don't get me wrong, that can work fine in a simplistic and quirky system. But Steve Jackson didn't want simplistic and quirky. So he introduced a bunch of advantages and disadvantages such as wealth, social status, appearance, some of which partially modify the effects of stats (eg. to reduce agility skills below DX but leave manual dexterity skills alone or vice-versa). Some of these in effect optionally increase the number of stats. Others represent a compulsory choice (eg. of welath, status, physical attractiveness) that is just like a stat except for not being on the same numerical scale as the stats, and therefore not being suitable to base a skill on or to roll against. GURPS has in effect about 12 stats, but eight of them are kludgey special cases, and four or five of them don't do things they ought.

That is the elegance of it. You can have several layers of complexity, but they are very easy to break down into those four basic stats. As TGryph says, gurps is basically 'roll 3d6'. If you don't feel like using those layers of complexity, you leave perception, will, fatigue points, et al as they are and have them covered your basic stats.

The 'compulsory' choices are no more compulsory than a player can entirely ignore it in character creation (and ever after, depending on what type of game is being run), with the only effect of maybe not having as much money to buy equipment as a few others. They are mostly roleplaying options to delve into the character and shape him, not a necesary stat block.

There is a similar nest of horrors surrounding the interaction of weapon type with armour type. The original system had three types of damage so that it would need different types of armour (clever). But it worked back-to-front and had a nasty trap in which you had to work out what part of your target you would hit before your could determine whether you did hit. In tidying that up without ever acknowledging that any of the initial design decisions had been misguided, GURPS has ended up with a hideously involved procedure in which the weapons' damage roll is modified by the armour's DR, which has previously been modified by the weapons armour divisor, with a special qualification for whether the armour is flexible, and then by the weapon's damage type. And the procedure is modified in many cases by notes for specific wepons and specific kinds of armour. There are 13 types of weapon damage (only eight if you disregards 'afflication', burning, corrosion, special, and toxic, considering only mechanical damage), besides armour divisors, and some types of armour still need different DRs against listed damage types.

Again, there are only as many layers of complexity in gurps as you want there to be. The mentality behind the rules is very different from D&D in that gurps is designed with the aim of empowering the GM to customise the game exactly to his own needs.

If you leave out the complex parts of the combat system, it isn't going to leave a hole in the system. There is a very neat an orderly hierarchy of progressive complexity.

 

[B9anders]

Now to the poster who was wishing for a Bestiary..oh yeah, I feel your pain. I have the old Bestiary and Fantasy Bestiary, but I will be the Happiest Camper on the Block when the new 4th Edition Bestiary comes out.

Is the fantasy bestiary any good for a 4th ed campaign?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Is the fantasy bestiary any good for a 4th ed campaign?

Well, some of the stats would need minor alterations, but they truly are minor - nowhere near as dramatic as (say) conversions from AD&D2E to D&D3.X.

And yes, it is a good start. Its critter selection is a bit unusual in that it mostly represents creatures from real world folklore, but to me that's part of the charm. Another good book would be GURPS Creatures of the Night, a collection of very unusual horror critters...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Actually, this is something I would love some feedback on, from those of you who actually have the 4th edition material...

- How essential are GURPS Magic and GURPS Fantasy for playing a fairly standard fantasy game (and I'm not talking a standard D&D-style fantasy game ).

GURPS Magic: That depends on your approach for magic. If you want a vast variety of individual spells that can be learned as skills, then you probably need GURPS Magic. On the other hand, the Basic Set already has a pretty good selection - perfectly suitable for low-magic campaigns or campaigns where magic is not the main focus.

But if you want to see magic as a selection of supernatural powers that can be learned by certain people - not a vast variety of spells, but a certain number of "supernatural tricks" that can be learned individually - then the Basic Set is more than enough. For example, if you want a "mage" who has a few abilities related to healing, or one who focuses on "fire magic" in all its forms, or one who has the ability to control plants, then you can model all of these with GURPS Basic Set: Characters in minute detail.

Though in that case you will probably want GURPS Powers. Not because you need it (you don't - there is little in the way of actual new rules material in it), but because it is bloody brilliant. It is full of all kinds of examples on just what kind of abilities you can do with GURPS. It will inspire you to think of lots of cool character concepts which you hadn't even considered before reading the book...

- How does this compare with the modularity in 3rd edition? Do you feel you need fewer or more books in 4e?

Fewer. Still, I'm not about to get rid of most of my 3e books - most of them can still be used with little change.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

For those of you willing to try out GURPS, we are currently trying to set up a multi-GM online game set on Eberron here. You do need to be familiar enough with the system to create a character, though...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Great game system, but too much work to run.

Well, it does require some initial thought from the GM on what is and what isn't appropriate for player characters. But after that, it is smooth sailing.

Especially creating NPCs is a snap. With D&D, I have to figure out hit points, saving throws, BAB, skill bonuses, and much more when I create NPCs. With GURPS, I just give them some numerical values that I feel are appropriate and they are almost always rules-legal...

 

[Conaill]

GURPS stats are one example. Steve Jackson started from the beginning with the axiom that a 'modern' (this was 1984 or thereabouts) RPG would have no more than four character stats. He therefore shoehorned cunning, book-learning, perceptiveness, empathy, firmness of resolve, etc. inot one mental stat: IQ. And he shoehorned agility, manual dexterity, and hand-eye co-ordination into one physical stat (DX); strength, and (at one stage) charisma and good looks into another (ST), and size, physical toughness, stamina, and good immune system inot a third.

Jeesh man - how many stats do you want? You've already listed 15 right there. You make it sound like you would consider 6 stats only a marginal improvement over 4 stats...

 

[prosfilaes]

What I like about GURPS is that it's simple to check whether a character is built right. To figure out whether a skill level is correct, you simply have to look at the attribute and the points put into it, plus any defaults from other skills.

Whereas for D&D3, you end up having to go level by level trying to figure out what feats and what skills were taken at each level to figure out whether things were legal or not. Boosts to skills can come from classes, races, feats and synergy bonuses.