jdrakeh said:
Yeah, I'm leaning heavily towards GURPS 4e, as I'm currently playing in a game based in Half-Life's post-incident Earth that uses GURPS Lite 4e. Out of curiosity, how playable 'out of the box' is the Character book? What kind of genres could I easily cover with it, as is?
It works perfectly fine for most standard fantasy, historical, Supers, and modern-day campaigns. If you want to use it for equipment-heavy science fiction campaigns, you might need to make up some equipment - there are plenty of example weapons, armor, and devices in the book, but SF is such a huge field that it is impossible to cover every possible gadget in just the basic book.
The spell list in the Basic Set is not ultra-detailed, but the number of spells is large and self-contained enough to keep most mages occupied for a long time. As for nonhuman races, as long as you can envision them, you can easily make up appropriate racial templates (though GURPS Fantasy has quite a few sample templates).
If you have a specific genre in mind, say it and I will tell you if you need anything more than the Basic Set.
Also, is the Campaigns book a necessity (like the old Compendiums eventually came to be), or is it purely optional?
A near-neccessity.
Characters has some very basic combat rules, and if the GM is good at making up rules on the spot
Characters is probably going to be sufficient, but the division is pretty clear -
Characters has all the rules information for character creation, and
Campaigns everything else.
[Note: Incidentally, I've been meanign to ask - is there an Urbis PDF or other print-friendly file?]
Sadly, no. Urbis is still in development (though I have unfortunately been busy with work in the recent months - but I hope to change that soon), and increasing the amount of material available is a higher priority than offering different format.
But thanks for asking - it is always nice to hear other people taking an interest!
