GURPS-Share your thoughts

[Aust Diamondew]

I'll agree with the chorus here:

GURPS Suppliments: Great source material, great references, great stuff on genres often not covered much by other RPG's. You rarely go wrong picking up the GURPS sourcebook on a subject you are interested in.

GURPS rules: Blech, overcomplicated, bland, and tedious. Character creation takes hours, and the learning curve is daunting to say the least. Rules for things that might actually come up in games like vehicles, magic, psionics, or space travel get overwhelmingly complex (as it was pointed out to me, you have to perform calculus to determine the hit points of a vehicle, since it requires calculating the exact surface area of the entire vehicle to derive its HP).

I've known two GMs who actually run GURPS and tried it out, and apparently there are two different ways to actually make GURPS playable (each one did one):
1. Become an absolute expert on the system, preferably backed up with computer programs to calculate a lot of things, have a big library of GURPS books you can quickly access, and know them by heart.
2. Discard most of the rules, use just the free "GURPS Lite" simplified rules, and use it for rules-light roleplaying-heavy games.

Honestly, d20 in some ways became what GURPS tried to be, a universal multi-genre system. There isn't one single "d20" book for all genres, but it's a system that just about every gamer is at least passingly familiar with, and it's been adapted to virtually every genre and setting out there (either officially or unofficially). GURPS strength is in the suppliments, not the rules.

Ditto. My experience is more or less the same. I use to like GURPS more before Wizards made the d20 system but after d20 was made I felt that GURPS really lost it's nitch.

 

[maggot]

Regarding combat in GURPS, there are a couple issue playing a role: (1) yes, not much happens in a GURPS round compared to D&D round. However, this also means rounds go *much* faster, which keeps people more engaged in the ongoing combat.

Not my experience at all. Low level D&D rounds zip by, high-level D&D rounds can drag, but GURPS rounds are excruciating. I remember playing an eight-second combat that took all night, and many I ran from place to place while others took actions. Could have been my group with a combination of lack of knowledge of the rules (the players, not the GM) and many GURPS options thrown in.

Let me second Mutants&Masterminds as a terrific generic system. I'm working with a friend on creating a cyberpunk game out of it, and it's working great. (If my friend had suggested GURPS cyberpunk, I would have fled in terror.)

 

[Darkness]

Rules for things that might actually come up in games like vehicles, magic, psionics, or space travel get overwhelmingly complex

Magic? Weird; I didn't find magic in GURPS more difficult than, say, magic in D&D. Possibly even less - and I have played/run considerably more (A)D&D than GURPS...
(Assuming GURPS 3e/4e; I'm not familiar with earlier editions.)

By the way, what did you dislike the most about the GURPS magic system?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I love GURPS - both the system and its supplements. To answer your questions:

a) All in all, the system is much more cleaned up and balanced. Skill and attribute costs were streamlined, advantages and disadvantages cleaned up and modified to become more coherent, the number of damage types were reduced... It'S a big improvement. The only thing to beware of is the Giant Skill List of Doom. In the end, the GM should go through all the advantages, disadvantages, and skills and decide which are useful for his campaign and which aren't.

b) Rather smooth. I'm running a GURPS Eberron campaign right now, and it works pretty well. Yes, fights between two highly skilled opponents can get rather tedious. Just remember that highly skilled opponents are supposed to be rare and send larger numbers of less skilled mooks against the PCs. As long as they superior in number and do enough damage to harm the PCs, they are still a threat - even the best swordsman is in trouble if he lets himself get surrounded.

During the last session, the PCs fought five ogres, and the fight was rather spectacular. The ogres rarely hit (their low Dexterity and weapon skills saw to that - in GURPS, ST does not translate into hitting more frequently...), but they did so much damage when they actually did hit that the players were sweating during the whole fight.

This brings me to another issue: The injury system for GURPS. In D&D, you are basically either "alive", "dead", or in a small boundary zone where you are unconscious and dying. In GURPS, you are either "mostly healthy", "dead", or in a rather large intermediary zone where you are really badly injured, but still hanging on somehow and trying not to fall unconscious. Very healthy characters can struggle along for a long time, but even they will worry that sooner or later they will blow a roll and fall unconscious or even die. IMO, this causes more dramatic tension than the D&D damage system, with its rather linear hit points...

One thing I also appreciate GURPS for is that it is possible to create pretty much the character you want with far less hassle than in D&D. It doesn't have any strange effects like a very skilled diplomat being also very good in combat and capable of withstanding large amounts of injury. You can build precisely the character you want - without going beyond the core rules.

Of course, D&D has its advantages as well, or else I wouldn't play it. But this thread is about GURPS, after all...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Not my experience at all. Low level D&D rounds zip by, high-level D&D rounds can drag, but GURPS rounds are excruciating. I remember playing an eight-second combat that took all night, and many I ran from place to place while others took actions. Could have been my group with a combination of lack of knowledge of the rules (the players, not the GM) and many GURPS options thrown in.

That's a common GURPS newbie GM mistake, and one I have been guilty of myself in the Bad Old Days.

How did that old quite go? "GURPS is like a cow; you can't eat it in one go."

Too many GMs forget that all those cool new rules are optional, and that it is not a good idea to throw all of them at newbies who haven't even become familiar with the basics. The actual basics, as represented in GURPS Lite, are actually not complicated at all.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

I love GURPS supplements; I am annoyed with the system.

[snip]

So currently I own over a dozen GURPS supplements, but no longer own the core rules.

Ditto. Well I'm not annoyed with the system, but just found it too fiddly (especially the one-second combat round).

On the subject of people who don't like GURPS nonetheless buying GURPS rulebooks, I once did a survey on the subject (inspired by finding that I owed 23 GURPS rulebooks plus a boxed set).

http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue9/feedback1.html

The most interesting result here was that of people who said that they actively disliked GURPS (33% of our survey), 52% of them still owned at least one GURPS rulebook (although only a fifth of those owned more than 5 books).

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Magic? Weird; I didn't find magic in GURPS more difficult than, say, magic in D&D. Possibly even less - and I have played/run considerably more (A)D&D than GURPS...
(Assuming GURPS 3e/4e; I'm not familiar with earlier editions.)

D&D magic is relatively easy in the beginning, but it really gets tedious once you reach higher levels and have to decide every day what your caster is going to prepare...

 

[Aaron L]

QUick question for anyone who has it: is CthulhuPun worth getting? Im a CoC fanatic, and a cyberpunk mix with Delta Green seems so cool, is the book worth getting for a good read? Ive never read any GURPS suppliments. Ive seen it for a few years now, but every time I run into it Ive been out of money, should I go ahead and order it? Ive had this and CthulhuTech on my mind for a while now, m just waiting for Tech to finally come out, if it ever does...


[edit] HAHA, after doing a bit of googling, I found some info on multiple related topics to cthulhupunk, and found Jurgen all over them [/edit]

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

QUick question for anyone who has it: is CthulhuPun worth getting? Im a CoC fanatic, and a cyberpunk mix with Delta Green seems so cool, is the book worth getting for a good read? Ive never read any GURPS suppliments. Ive seen it for a few years now, but every time I run into it Ive been out of money, should I go ahead and order it? Ive had this and CthulhuTech on my mind for a while now, m just waiting for Tech to finally come out, if it ever does...


[edit] HAHA, after doing a bit of googling, I found some info on multiple related topics to cthulhupunk, and found Jurgen all over them [/edit]

Yup, I'm everywhere. Don't think too hard about how I do it, or you will loose 1/1D6 SAN.

I think it is a good read. Its cyberpunk timeline is getting a bit dated now (since there was no plague that killed off 10% of humanity in 1997), but still, I think it's worth it. There is plenty of advice for mixing the two genres and how the themes interact with each other, and gives a nice feeling for the sheer bleakness of the background.

And I've always wanted to do a Delta Green campaign which slowly moves into the Cthulhupunk/Cyberworld future. I want to see the reaction on the faces of the players as Boris Yeltsin gets assassinated in 1995...

 

[johnsemlak]

And I've always wanted to do a Delta Green campaign which slowly moves into the Cthulhupunk/Cyberworld future. I want to see the reaction on the faces of the players as Boris Yeltsin gets assassinated in 1995...

Given the abount of Yeltsin's live appearances since, there no way to prove that didn't actually happen