Sean's Picks of the Week (1113-1117) - Get Your GURPS Week!

Those in the know spent this week checking the temperature in the Nether Realms and wondering if Beelzebub might not be trying on ice skates. Why? Because that which never seemed possible came to pass - Steve Jackson Games is now on DriveThruRPG, currently selling 4th Edition GURPS products. They are also challenging the notion that PDFs must inherently be devalued (which, for those of us who strive to make a living at this, is a pretty big deal). Onward!

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GURPS BASIC SET: CHARACTERS

Gotta admit, I did not see this coming. Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS (Generic Universal Roleplaying System) is actually up on DriveThruRPG! In celebration of this surprise shift in my universe, I’m declaring this Get Your GURPS Week!

Naturally, I think opening up with the core book is the right move here – GURPS Basic Set: Characters.

GURPS is the most flexible roleplaying system ever created. With just this book, you can adventure in any world you can imagine. Use all types of weapons from clubs to lasers . . . magic and martial arts . . . psionics and superpowers.

Create exactly the character you want to play . . . your favorite fictional hero, or your own invention. Choose from over 400 advantages and disadvantages, over 350 skills, spells, and techniques. Customize your character with individual perks and quirks, and you’re ready to go.

No more switching game systems when you change campaigns! GURPS gives you one set of clear, comprehensive rules to cover any background. This new Fourth Edition is based on 16 years of gamer feedback from the Third Edition, and is faster and easier to play than ever before.

GURPS makes the Game Master’s job easy and fun. All rules are carefully organized, indexed, and cross-referenced. Charts and tables are clear and legible. And to help you introduce new players to the system, there’s a “Quick Start” section which covers the basics in a few pages.

This is Book 1 of the two-volume Basic Set. Only this book is necessary to play. Game Masters, and players wanting more detail, will find Book 2 valuable.

GURPS Characters is the companion book to GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns. The two provide everything you need to play or run a GURPS campaign.

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GURPS BASIC SET: CAMPAIGNS

Get Your GURPS Week continues with the other half of the GURPS Basic Set duology, this one focused on all the campaign-oriented stuff you’ll need to do pretty much “all the things” in GURPS.

With GURPS, you can be anyone you want – an elf hero fighting for the forces of good, a shadowy femme fatale on a deep-cover mission, a futuristic swashbuckler carving up foes with a force sword in his hand and a beautiful woman by his side . . . or literally anything else! GURPS has been the premiere universal roleplaying game for almost two decades. Fourth Edition makes it even better!

GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns combines information from the Third Edition GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Compendium II – plus our new core setting, with infinite possibilities for timeline-hopping adventure! (You don’t have to play in the core setting – there isn’t some game-altering metaplot – but it’s there if you want it.) This 240-page, full-color PDF contains everything a GM needs to create and run a GURPS Fourth Edition campaign.

GURPS Campaigns is the companion book to GURPS Basic Set: Characters. The two provide everything you need to play or run a GURPS campaign.

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GURPS: HIGH-TECH

As we roll on with Get Your GURPS Week, let’s look at one of the most popular GURPS releases ever. How this system handles varying levels of technology is one of its strongest design foundations, and the various books that cover the many options for gear in the nigh-infinite number of games you can play is a huge selling point. Along with this one – GURPS High-Tech – there’s Low-Tech, Ultra-Tech, and Bio-Tech, giving both players and GMs massive options for their campaigns and characters. The fact that immense research goes into these books makes them useful to any game, regardless of system (in fact, that’s why this one, in particular, is so beloved by gamers across the decades).

From the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Age, GURPS High-Tech lets you outfit adventurers of all stripes, be they a pioneer party just trying to survive or a SWAT team taking down bad guys. Its meticulously researched TL5-8 hardware includes:

• Weapons. Descriptions and stats for hundreds of historical weapons – small arms (from muskets to assault rifles, plus oddities and prototypes), light artillery, explosives, and more – with new rules for guns, gunmen, and “Gun Fu.”
• Armor. Head-to-toe protection for every budget.
• Vehicles. An essential selection of rides. Cover ground by stagecoach, jeep, or tank . . . cruise the coasts by kayak, surfboard, or patrol boat . . . cross the skies by glider, plane, or helicopter . . . and more.
• Tools. Complete tools of the trade for such specialists as detectives, divers, firemen, medics, spies, and thieves.
• Electronics. From early telegraphs to modern computers, medical scanners, and surveillance devices . . . if it beeps or blinks, it’s covered.
• Survival Gear. Camping equipment, first-aid kits, rations, and everything else explorers need.

GURPS High-Tech requires the GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition. The notes on real-world equipment will enhance any game set after 1730.

Bonus! Includes a free copy of GURPS High-Tech: Weapon Tables! No need to go through 256 pages of troublesome words when all you need is a Colt Python’s Bulk and Rate of Fire rating.

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GURPS: FANTASY

Ray Greer of Hero Games fame told me the story of how he convinced Steve Jackson to push his deadlines and include guns in the original release of GURPS; Steve was just going to stick with fantasy-level support, since a lot of folks loved the core rules for just that (and its roots in the game-changing The Fantasy Trip didn’t hurt that impression, either). GURPS Fantasy establishes beyond question the strength of the system for the most popular genre of gaming in the world.

At the same time, there’s lots of other genre-support material for GURPS fans – GURPS Horror and GURPS Supers, as examples.

Fantasy – from ancient myths to popular films, stories of heroes and magic have captured the human imagination. Now GURPS offers roleplayers a comprehensive guide to the entire Fantasy genre. Building on the flexible, streamlined Fourth Edition rules, it helps you develop a campaign to explore the world of your favorite book or film – or create a new one from your own dreams. The main emphasis is on historical fantasy, in settings from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance, but the principles apply to any fantasy setting, from the prehistoric past to the remote future.

A complete campaign setting, Roma Arcana, is ready to use in your own campaign. It can stand on its own, or fit into the Infinite Worlds campaign framework from GURPS Fourth Edition. Send a band of adventurers on impossible missions in a magical Roman Empire, as they struggle to hold back the darkness from their native city and win honor.

You’ll find help in running your campaign in Roma Arcana or any other setting – advice on creating balanced parties, devising scenarios to challenge them, and using the game systems to achieve dramatic effects.

Take the most flexible, most consistent game rules system available, and use it to run the campaign of your dreams.

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GURPS: BANESTORM

I’m closing out Get Your GURPS Week with one of the many campaign-oriented books Steve Jackson Games publishes. Banestorm is a complete world book to get folks started with the fantasy-oriented aspects of the system. For other campaign-enhancing books, check out GURPS Zombies, GURPS Dragons, and GURPS Infinite Worlds. No doubt, a lot more of the SJG campaign books will start showing up on DriveThruRPG soon.

Welcome to the land of Yrth, a magical realm of incredibly varied races and monsters – including people snatched from our Earth and other worlds by the cataclysmic Banestorm!

Whole villages were transported – from such diverse locales as medieval England, France, Germany, and the Far East. Now humans struggle with dwarves, elves, and each other. The Crusades aren’t ancient history here – they’re current events!

Characters can journey from the windswept plains of the Nomad Lands – where fierce Nordic warriors seek a valiant death to earn a seat in Valhalla – to Megalos, the ancient empire where magic and political intrigue go hand in hand. Or trek south to the Muslim lands of al-Wazif and al-Haz to explore the forbidden city of Geb’al-Din.

This book provides GMs with a complete world background – history, religion, culture, politics, races, and a set of 16 detailed, full-color maps – everything needed to start a GURPS campaign. Phil Masters (GURPS Discworld and Hellboy RPG RPGs) and Jonathan Woodward (Hellboy RPG and GURPS Ogre) have added new peoples, places, and plots, as well as lots more on magic and mysticism, all of which conforms to the just-released GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Magic.

So prepare to make your own mark on Yrth. Plunder elven ruins while evading the desert natives. Play a peasant-born hero . . . an orcish pirate . . . a Muslim double agent commanded to infiltrate the Hospitallers.

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Back when I worked for OBS (the company behind DriveThruRPG and RPGNow), we tried extensively to get SJG to consider putting their stuff up. Naturally, they wanted to focus on their e23 site. I am guessing the sheer advanced volume of traffic that DriveThru continues to show changed the winds, so here we are...

This is a low-gaming, high-social-geekery weekend for me. While we have our Prowlers & Paragons: Epic Age campaign on Sunday, tonight features low-stakes poker. Tomorrow is "Justice League," followed by... not even sure. Sunday is also the birthday celebration of my dear friend and Freedom Squadron: Global Operations Force co-conspirator, Chris Parks.

Here's hoping you have great things planned!

The Adventure Continues!

Note that I use affiliate links in all my posts as a way to generate additional revenue for my efforts; I make my Picks and other article choices, however, based on the desire to share a wide variety of things with you. Thank you for your support.

Sean Patrick Fannon
Writer & Game Designer: Shaintar, Star Wars, Savage Rifts, much more
Please check out my Patreon and get involved directly with my next projects!

 

[TrippyHippy]

I think SJGames have the right to price their own books and PDFs as they wish. Nobody is obliged to buy them. Maybe, if they are deemed too expensive, people won't buy them in great numbers but maybe SJGames aren't that bothered about electronic sales and are more focussed on long term sales of Physical Books. Maybe that's why they took this long to sell them on Drivethrurpg also.

 

[Morrus]

I think SJGames have the right to price their own books and PDFs as they wish. Nobody is obliged to buy them.

Nobody was disputing their legal right to sell things at whatever price they wish. Odd strawman, there.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Nobody was disputing their legal right to sell things at whatever price they wish. Odd strawman, there.

They are, however, complaining about it. Not a straw man at all.

 

[Lord Rasputin]

I think SJGames have the right to price their own books and PDFs as they wish. Nobody is obliged to buy them. Maybe, if they are deemed too expensive, people won't buy them in great numbers but maybe SJGames aren't that bothered about electronic sales and are more focussed on long term sales of Physical Books. Maybe that's why they took this long to sell them on Drivethrurpg also.

Uh, no. The reason is that OBS takes a 35% cut of all sales while not only does Warehouse 23 take a lower cut, SJG owns Warehouse 23. SJG has been selling primarily PDFs for GURPS for many years.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Uh, no. The reason is that OBS takes a 35% cut of all sales while not only does Warehouse 23 take a lower cut, SJG owns Warehouse 23. SJG has been selling primarily PDFs for GURPS for many years.

Well, that doesn't explain why the same books have been sold for the same price over at SJGames-owned Warehouse 23 for years. They have set the price to what they want - the 35% cut is irrelevant to that, from the consumers perspective at least.

 

[Lord Rasputin]

Well, that doesn't explain why the same books have been sold for the same price over at SJGames-owned Warehouse 23 for years.

That GURPS has been mostly PDF sales, with only a few high sellers going softcover (Dungeon Fantasy 1-4, Supers) after being on Warehouse 23 in PDF for a long time pretty well disproves the idea that SJG isn’t bothered about electronic sales. Six of the PDFs up on RPGNow are PDF-only; two more are PDFs that later got a softcover print run.

 

[TrippyHippy]

That GURPS has been mostly PDF sales, with only a few high sellers going softcover (Dungeon Fantasy 1-4, Supers) after being on Warehouse 23 in PDF for a long time pretty well disproves the idea that SJG isn’t bothered about electronic sales. Six of the PDFs up on RPGNow are PDF-only; two more are PDFs that later got a softcover print run.

That just means that, over the course of the 10-15 years since some of these books were published, putting them through extra printing runs is overly costly, whereas the overheads are less on PDFs. The actual number of units sold on PDFs, however, is a fraction of what is sold in hardcopy.

SJG were late-adapters to PDF, even on their own site, but have gradually caught up with other companies. When Drivethru first became a thing, they expressly stated concerns through editorials on the SJGames site about the impact on the three-tiered model and skepticism towards the idea. They have released PDFs at a slower rate than other companies accordingly, and not done an awful lot about promoting them through lower prices, etc. This last move is probably just an acknowledgment that their GURPS hardcopy sales are diminishing in recent years (hardly surprising), and they are trying other avenues as it makes minimal impact on the sales of physical copy.

But does it mean that the see PDF as a primary format for selling their games? No.

 

[prosfilaes]

SJG were late-adapters to PDF, even on their own site, but have gradually caught up with other companies.

The Wayback machine says the e23 website first appeared in August 2003*, which said they were working on it, and finally came to life in March 2005**. RPGNow started in 2001 and and DriveThruRPG in 2004. Compared to other major print publishers, the first White Wolf books were out on DriveThruRPG in April of 2004, Palladium started releasing PDFs in 2013, and I can't find the entire history of WotC PDFs, but IIRC, they started in 2006-2007, they stopped in 2009 and started again in 2013. So, no, I don't think they were late-adopters.

When Drivethru first became a thing, they expressly stated concerns through editorials on the SJGames site about the impact on the three-tiered model and skepticism towards the idea.

When DriveThruRPG first became a thing, they already had plans for a website for RPG PDFs.

They have released PDFs at a slower rate than other companies accordingly, and not done an awful lot about promoting them through lower prices, etc. This last move is probably just an acknowledgment that their GURPS hardcopy sales are diminishing in recent years (hardly surprising), and they are trying other avenues as it makes minimal impact on the sales of physical copy.

But does it mean that the see PDF as a primary format for selling their games? No.

Within a few days of opening E23, they had 50 GURPS books available through it. By 2007, they had 120 GURPS books and 40 Car Wars books. That seems like a reasonable rate of PDF release. They've pretty much posted their backlog without licensing complications (and some with); if they haven't been posting more PDF books for 4th Edition, it's because 4th Edition GURPS isn't selling well enough to pay people to write for it.

"Lower prices" is not a form of promotion. Sales are, but that requires other forms of promotion. And optimal pricing is hard; selling 1 copy at $8 is more profitable than 3 copies at $2, and GURPS may not get the spontaneous sells at a low price that the Pathfinder name can get.

Paizo doesn't produce PDF-only works, besides Society adventures. Steve Jackson Games produces most of its RPG releases (plus its magazine Pyramid) as PDF-only releases. I'd say they see PDF as the primary format for GURPS.

* http://web.archive.org/web/20030814005617/http://e23.sjgames.com:80/
** http://web.archive.org/web/20050303173024/http://e23.sjgames.com:80/
*** http://web.archive.org/web/20070425184716/http://e23.sjgames.com:80/browse.html

 

[TrippyHippy]

The Wayback machine says the e23 website first appeared in August 2003*, which said they were working on it, and finally came to life in March 2005**. RPGNow started in 2001 and and DriveThruRPG in 2004.

So, by your own research, e23 started later than RPGNow and Drivethrurpg. This also doesn't refute my point that they were skeptical about e-book sales in their editorials at the time.

Compared to other major print publishers, the first White Wolf books were out on DriveThruRPG in April of 2004, Palladium started releasing PDFs in 2013, and I can't find the entire history of WotC PDFs, but IIRC, they started in 2006-2007, they stopped in 2009 and started again in 2013. So, no, I don't think they were late-adopters.

Palladium are a case unto themselves, really, as are WotC who withdrew their drivethru sales on account of their continued fear of copyright infringement and piracy. Some entire companies began through e-book releases, however, including many D20 companies. White Wolf essentially shifted their entire back catalogue to PDF/POD as the entirety of their business which reflected the trends. GURPS, by comparison has gone through this process at a much more leisurely pace. They only just released selected GURPS books on drivethru, lest we forget.

When DriveThruRPG first became a thing, they already had plans for a website for RPG PDFs.

Which they delayed, with expressed skepticism, on the grounds that they wanted to protect existing markets (i.e retailers) and prevent copyright infringement. In other words, they wanted to see how other companies coped with drivethru first, before they launched their own model.

Within a few days of opening E23, they had 50 GURPS books available through it.

There is no point opening an online PDF shop if you aren't going to put PDFs on it, but they didn't put their current GURPS core books on for some time (just books that were supplemental or out of print, essentially) and then only at the same price people are complaining about here. They still sell them at the same price because they aren't that interested in generating mass sales of PDF in the same way, say, Fate books are. They are just providing an avenue for the continued existence of GURPS as a product....maybe with POD to follow. It's a lot cheaper to do this than it is to do another print run. Again, physical GURPS books sales are most likely not as large as they use to be, and probably not quite as significant to their overall business either. PDF is a safe option as there is little overhead involved.

"Lower prices" is not a form of promotion.

If you advertise them as such they are, and it's an incentive to buy over the option of more expensive physical books if that is a medium you are happy with.

* http://web.archive.org/web/20030814005617/http://e23.sjgames.com:80/
** http://web.archive.org/web/20050303173024/http://e23.sjgames.com:80/
*** http://web.archive.org/web/20070425184716/http://e23.sjgames.com:80/browse.html

You're links provide information that is not especially useful to this debate, so I'm not sure why you included them here, and I've already answered the point about why GURPS books are not aiming for new print runs instead of PDFs above.

 

[prosfilaes]

So, by your own research, e23 started later than RPGNow and Drivethrurpg.

A year later than DriveThruRPG. And that's not comparing game companies, that's comparing PDF marketplaces.

Palladium are a case unto themselves, really, as are WotC who withdrew their drivethru sales on account of their continued fear of copyright infringement and piracy. Some entire companies began through e-book releases, however, including many D20 companies.

And I compared Steve Jackson Games to the other major RPG publishers, not the new upstarts. Given that Palladium, Steve Jackson Games and WotC still exist and most of those D20 companies don't, perhaps they're the examples to follow.

GURPS, by comparison has gone through this process at a much more leisurely pace.

Within three years they had the bulk of their back catalog on e23. That doesn't strike me as leisurely.

They only just released selected GURPS books on drivethru, lest we forget.

Which shows their dedication to PDFs, because they chose to stay in the business of providing a PDF marketplace independent of DriveThruRPG.

They still sell them at the same price because they aren't that interested in generating mass sales of PDF in the same way, say, Fate books are.

Which Fate books? Each world book release generates $3000 from Patreon subscribers, which means sales are more of an afterthought.

Steve Jackson Games sells them at that price because they are interested in maximizing profit from the PDF, which is more important than sales. If they believed reducing prices would increase profits, they'd reduce prices.

Again, physical GURPS books sales are most likely not as large as they use to be, and probably not quite as significant to their overall business either.

"Most likely"? "Probably not"? Please. Steve Jackson Games publishes an annual "Report to the Stakeholders"*, and while 2017's report isn't out, 2016's says "sales are no longer strong enough to make traditional distribution work for GURPS hardcovers." They list the top selling products by dollar amount; 35 out of the 40 are Munchkin, and the other 5 are not RPGs.

If you advertise them as such they are, and it's an incentive to buy over the option of more expensive physical books if that is a medium you are happy with.

Advertisement is a form of promotion. Companies don't want to compete with themselves; they don't want to offer an incentive to buy PDF instead of traditionally-printed physical books if they do both. I would bet that way too many PDFs in the industry are subsidized by the writer's day job.

You're links provide information that is not especially useful to this debate, so I'm not sure why you included them here

I've seen people here get upset when I ask for evidence of their claims, but this is a new low, to get upset when I provide citations for my claims.


* http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/