DungeonMaester said:
I am looking to get into gurps, deciding to take a break from D&D from after 15+ years of playing.
I chose gurps because I all ready failed to get my players into Palladuim, Throwing Stones, and WoD. Its a last ditch effort, where do I begin?
By downloading
GURPS Lite and printing it out for each of your players. That should provide a starting point.
Run an adventure with just these rules, and see if they like it. If you are planning on running a fantasy game, they could create 25 point characters in some remote village that encounter some sort of monsters (a zombie plague, perhaps?) and try to survive through it. Limiting these characters to 25 points should make the players familiar with character creation without too much effort, and having such characters face monsters will make them familiar with the combat system before they design their
real characters. (The real characters then can come and investigate the village later on...)
For running a campaign, you should get the two-volume Basic Set. The first book is almost completely about character creation, and you can create pretty much
any character with these rules. However, so much freedom can be overwhelming, especially to first-time players. Thus, you need to establish some ground rules.
First of all, remind them that you have final approval over any character concept. If they object, tell them: "There is nothing in the GURPS rules that prevent you from purchasing Social Status 7 and creating the President of the United States as a player character, but that doesn't mean such a character will be appropriate for most campaigns." That should hopefully do the trick. Don't approve SF characters (with future weaponry) in fantasy campaigns just because they are theoretically possible under the rules.
Go through the lists of advantages, disadvantages, and skills. Decide which are appropriate for your campaign, and which aren't - and give the players a list with the appropriate ones.
You don't really need additional books - the Basic Set is perfectly serviceable for campaigns, especially if you have an existing setting to draw upon (you can use GURPS for pretty much any published setting - for example, I have used it with Eberron, and you can see my conversion file
here. But several other books might be of interest to you:
- GURPS Magic: If the spell list in the Basic Set is insufficient for your tastes, buy this book to get several hundred additional spells.
- GURPS Fantasy: Has generic campaign advice for fantasy world-building and campaigns, and quite a few racial templates, including most of the "standard" fantasy races. You don't really need them to - as long as you know what kinds of abilities your PC races are supposed to have, you can stat them with the Basic Set and calculate their point totals - but it does save some time.
- GURPS Powers: If you want to come up with customized supernatural abilities, this is the book for you. There aren't actually all that many new
rules in it when compared to the Basic Set, but it provides so many clear explanations and worked examples that you will find that this is
the GURPS book you never knew you had wanted your entire life. You can create entire new magic systems in a matter of
minutes, from demon-summoners who require lengthy ritual preparations to psionicists who work their powers with their mind alone, from Earth priests who need to be in contact with the naked earth to shape their element to paladins who are protected by their god as long as they adhere to their code of honor. This book is by no means mandatory, but so brilliant that you'll want it nonetheless if you can afford it and your campaign goes underway.
- GURPS Banestorm: A fantasy world that has most of the standard tropes - magic, the usual bunch of nonhumans and monsters, etc. - but still has a slightly unusual setup in that it mixes real world religions and history with fantasy. In this world, humans from 11th century Earth arrived thanks to a major magical mishap, and they brought their religion and knowledge with them, and eventually created kingdoms of their own. I like it, but it's not to everyone's taste.
Some other GURPS advice:
- 150 character points is a good starting value for more or less "heroic" campaigns. The PCs can be compared to 5th level D&D characters - competent, but not overwhelmingly powerful.
- GURPS isn't actually all that lethal like it has sometimes been claimed - while it is relatively easy to get incapacitated, actually killing someone takes longer, especially if he has a high Health value. Encourage your melee fighters to invest in HT 11 or 12 at the least.
- Armor is vital for melee fighters (and useful for other characters, too). Unlike D&D, it doesn't make the PC harder to hit, but instead substracts from the damage a character receives. Without armor, a character will go down after one to three hits.
- Don't bother with point totals for your NPCs. Unlike the "Challenge Ratings" of D&D, there is simply no point in calculating them, since CPs don't represent combat effectivity - they are only an accounting tool for player characters. Just give NPCs (and monsters, for that matter) whatever abilities seem appropriate.
- Don't use all the optional combat rules right from the start, or else you will overwhelm your players.
- Don't give you "mook" opponents - those that the PCs are supposed to mow down by the dozens - high combat skill or high HT. Either of these will make a combat drag on for a long time and frustrate the players. As a rule, only "named", major NPCs should have combat skill values above 12. If you want to make "nameless" opponents more fearsome, I suggest giving them a higher Strength. They won't hit often, but when they do hit, it will
hurt - and that will keep the PCs on their toes.
- GURPS characters can become very powerful at high point totals as well (and high-point campaigns work much better with the 4th edition than with the 3rd), and such games can get quite cinematic. However, even highly competent characters should use sound tactics, like making use of the terrain so that they don't get surrounded. Letting a character get surrounded by enemies is a
very bad idea...
