What is GURPS?

[HelloChristian]

The main reason I went from a decade of GURPS to 3E was the great selection of support material from guys like Green Ronin, Goodman games, and Necromancer.

I wish SJG would allow others to publish under a royalty free license similar to the d20STL/OGL. I'd love to see what others came up with. Hell, It'd be great to buy a GURPS Monster Manual.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I wish SJG would allow others to publish under a royalty free license similar to the d20STL/OGL. I'd love to see what others came up with. Hell, It'd be great to buy a GURPS Monster Manual.

GURPS did ok with items (Magic items books), critters (bestiary and fantasy bestiary) and the one book of general fantasy adventures was pretty cool. (I was a playtester for Fantasy Adventures 2 and was greatful it never got published) What would be cool would be scenarios for lots of different sourcebooks especially the historical settings.

 

[robconley]

Well, there are a few on e23. But in general, Steve Jackson Games learned that adventures simply don't sell all that well for GURPS.

Because they write crap adventures. No wait hear me out. The adventure are written like mini sourcebooks. So they fail both as adventure and as a sourcebook. It sad because most have good quality writing.

Adventures should be ready to run with little or no prep. The closest that comes to that ideal is Orcslayer.

The lack of ready to run adventures, and a decent fantasy monster manual means GURPS suffer in attracting players of the world's most popular role-playing game.

I think it is a shame as I think GURPS could do better especially internally vs sales of munchkin. As for putting my mouth where my money is I have submitted proposals to e23 and the regular route and they all seem to go down a black hole. I suppose I should try submitting to Pyramid.

For what is worth my recent project "Points of Light" for Goodman Games is systemless (http://www.goodman-games.com/4380preview.html). I ran a fantasy gurps game for nearly 20 years and a lot of themes I used for Points of Light were developed in that campaign.

If you see a level like (Ftr3) multiply the level by 20 and apply the closest template and you will roughly get the character points I used for my GURPS campaign. HD I would use as a rough indicator of power level.

 

[robconley]

1. AFAIK, GURPS prices advantages after their game usefulness, right? Then how come skills are priced after how easy they are to learn vs. how useful they are?

One of the purpose of GURPS is to translate real world stuff. They have rules for taking X hours of experience and turning it into skill points. There is also an option for earning skill points over time for campaign that like to leap ahead in big chunks of time.

2. Why are there three rolls in combat, i.e. why is either the attack roll or the defense roll there? Without any particular I have more or less a 50% of missing someone with a baseball bat. That's ok if the other guy is doding as crazy. But hey, after I make my 50 % attack roll - then the other guy gets to dodge!
So basically I stepping on my own toes and such to justify my immense miss chance or what.

1) Because defending against a blow is an action that takes skill. Having a defense roll accounts for that. GURPS doesn't have Armor Class or Hero's Defensive Combat Value to abstract type of skill. In GURPS a roll = a single swing of the weapon. A defense roll represent the counter the defender choose to take.

2) This is a big debate among GURPS fans as to when the defense roll is taken. It revolves around the fact that the defender gets an advantage by knowing the attacker hit or miss. I am not going to rehash that argument but the current method is considered the most playable by SJ Games.

A variant that is easy to implement is just have teh defender annouce what defense she is using and charge that defense to the number of times a parry, block, or dodge can be used regardless if the attack hits or misses. There are other variants as well.

 

[robconley]

Again, that's fixed in 4E.
.

Technically but it is still not ready to run for any particular genre. I love the game but it's myopia in trying to attract D&D players is hurting it.

 

[robconley]

Nah, 3E indeed had some problems in that regard. But again, most of this has been fixed in 4E. And while there are still only four base stats, it's easy to modify derived values with advantages. Want more hit points than your base ST implies? Buy some levels of Extra Hit Points. The same is true for Will, Perception, Carrying Capacity and so forth. And all of these have flat costs per level, so it's much harder to min-max them.

4th edition GURPS is a better game than 3rd especially for fiddling with stuff to get the campaign you want. I like HERO too but GURPS wins on allowing the causal player to fiddle with the system. i.e. the math isn't as scary.

 

[robconley]

Thats why letting others publish adventures for those specialized markets would be so great. Requiring that such publications advertise that they are NOT SJ Games products, include no rules for play, and that they require the use of the GURPS basic rules(and whatever source/worldbook the adventure is for). Having a large base of scenarios available from 3rd party publishers may help core book sales.

It not just that. We need the core rulebooks, we like to have specialized supplements, but we also need a true GURPS Fantasy that is a complete RPG that geared toward D&D players. Maybe when the Dungeon Fantasy series is done it could do that when complied but right now there is nothing that in the gamestore that allows a D&D group to pick up GURPS and just run a game.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

If you see a level like (Ftr3) multiply the level by 3 and apply the closest template and you will roughly get the character points I used for my GURPS campaign. HD I would use as a rough indicator of power level.

My personal guideline for D&D 3.X was:

GURPS character points = (D&D level + 1) x 25

A 150 CP "heroic adventurer" would thus be the rough equivalent of a 5th level D&D character, which sounds about right.

 

[robconley]

I mistyped I meant timse 20 but time 25 works as well.

 

[Mercule]

That's now pretty much true for the GURPS 4e Basic Set. Granted, that's now two books - but I don't think the page count is that different from Hero.

One book or two, my meaning was "core".

It sounds like GURPS 4e might have fixed some of the biggest issues and wouldn't aggravate me (or maybe it would). If given the opportunity, I'll try it again. Still, I know Hero works if I want detailed, but flexible, so I'm unlikely to go GURPS. If I want easy and flexible, I'll go for Savage Worlds.