GURPS, Whitewolf, Werewolves, and Vampires Oh MY!

[malichai]

If you were going to start up a brand new game playing Garou (werewolves), and were choosing to ignore Whitewolf canon and play pre-apocalypse, what rule set would you use and why?

In 16 some-odd years of gaming, I've never used GURPS, read GURPS, or had any experience with GURPS. How well does it work? Has anyone tried GURPS: Werewolf?

If you knew the game would be relatively combat heavy, would that cause you to lean more towards Werewolf Revised, 2nd edition, or the GURPS ruleset?

Thanks folks!

 

[The Lost Muse]

GURPS and WW

In my opinion, GURPS would work best for crossovers of Whitewolf games. Depending on which rules you use for combat, it may work well. ON the other hand, combat in GURPS can run fairly slowly.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

GURPS 3E doesn't have good shapeshifting rules. Fortunately, the newly released 4E rules work very well indeed for this. So you'd have to do some conversion work, but it should be pretty easy to do...

GURPS combat in my experience works very well. Depending on how powerful the characters are, it can be pretty cinematic - but even so, the system rewards intelligent tactics. Getting surrounded by enemies in melee combat is a bad idea, and you should try to get some cover during a firefight...

 

[DragonLancer]

I'd use WW's Werewolf rules, since they are set up for this sort of game.

From what I have seen of the GURPS versions, they were not a patch on the original WW games.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Personally, I'd purchase the World of Darkness core rulebook (for the new WoD that was released in August...completely separate from the original WoD), then wait 'til the new Werewolf: the Forsaken was released (February, IIRC).

The new ruleset is brilliant, smoooooooooth, easy to learn and very flexible. Also, one good thing they're doing (IMHO, YMMV) is getting rid of the "metaplot" stuff, like the Apocalypse or Gehenna. That's right, the new games don't have an "end times" scenario, unless your Storyteller adds one in.

 

[dreaded_beast]

Sorry to hijack, but I always wondered:

Were the Storyteller games (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc.) compatible with one another?

For the GURPS version, it assumed that you would only be playing in one particular genre and not really mixing and matching. By mixing and matching, I mean all the PCs would be either Vampires, Mages, etc. At least, that was my understanding from the GURPS version.

I really like the "flavor" and background of the World of Darkness. I can see retaining the "flavor" elements and using normal DND rules without any tweaks, IMHO.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Sorry to hijack, but I always wondered:

Were the Storyteller games (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc.) compatible with one another?

The answer for the Original WoD was...sorta but not really. Technically, they all took place in the same world (in that there were Vampires and Werewolves and Mages..and Wraiths..and Changelings..and Hunters...and Fomori..and..) but, as most of the developers said, they weren't really designed to be run in crossovers. Each game used slightly different rules that weren't too conducive to crossover (only Vampires had Humanity, for example).

That being said, I ran many MANY successful crossover games. It took a bit of tinkering here and there, but it was doable.

The New (and highly superior IMHO..and I LOVED the original WoD) WoD was designed for the ground up to be much friendlier to crossovers. For one, the core rules are in a single book (the World of Darkness); combat, skills, basic character generation, etc. The phatsplats (Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken and Mage the Awakening) all concentrate solely on that supernatural type and the things pertaining to them. Each also provides a "template" to apply to the mortal chargen rules using the WoD core book.

Thus, you can play a mortals-only game with the World of Darkness. If you get Vampire the Requiem, you are picking up 300ish pages of vampire-only (well, vampire and ghoul) info (the rules from the core book are NOT reprinted in the phatsplats).

If you've ever played Exalted, it follows that setup...Core book gives you all the basic systems rules, phatsplats give you rules and background pertaining just to that phatsplat.

 

[LoneWolf23]

First of all, I'd recommend getting the 4th edition Gurps Books, as it has a much better character creation system, with simplified shapeshifting rules for weres. Heck, the Characters book has a great, customizable template for vampires which includes most of the traditional vampiric powers. You could make a less powerful vampire just by removing some of the powers from the template.

Next, I'd recommend getting GURPS Blood Types and GURPS Shapeshifters, which are a more generic treatment of vampires and werewolves without all of WW's backstory baggage. GURPS Cabal makes for a more interesting setting to me anyways.

I've been tinkering with the notion of a "World of Darkness" style campaign using Cabal, Blood Types, Shapeshifters, Undead, Faeries and Dragons for the supernatural side, opposed by Black Ops equipped with ultra-technology and psionics.

 

[Mercule]

Well, first choice would be to wait until December(?) and use the new Forsaken rules. Second would be to use the WoD 2.0 rules and piecemeal the Apocalypse rules into it. Third choice would be to use the Apocalypse rules. Nothing else is even close, IMO.

If I had to dig deeper, I'd think about either HERO or mucking with d20 Modern.

I wouldn't use GURPS. Then again, my experiences with GURPS have led me to believe that actually using the system is only marginally preferable to peeling all the skin off your body and swimming in lemon juice.

 

[malichai]

Well, I don't have a rule problem with tinkering with rules. The problem is that the game would be starting in February/March, and Forsaken doesn't come out until February, and the more we can prepare for a game, the better the game will be. I don't mind tinkering with rules, so perhaps I'll pick up a bunch of Apocalypse stuff, maybe try to fit it into WoD 2.0, then we could convert it to Forsaken when that comes out.