What is your Opinion of GURPS?

[Staffan]

Don't know who you've been playing with, but they don't seem to have spent many points on Hobby Skill: Min-Max GURPS Character. Most wizards I've seen buy as much cheap Extra Fatigue as they're allowed, rather than taking the much more expensive route of buying up ST itself - often, they'll LOWER their ST for more points to buy the Extra Fatigue. True GURPS munchkins will even gain no actual physical benefit at all from this Fatigue, as it will be bought at even cheaper rates with the "usable for spellcasting only" Limitation. See GURPS Myth for some sterling examples here.

I was thinking along the lines of just using GURPS Basic (3rd ed, or rather 2nd ed plus GURPS Update which has all the stuff that changed in 3rd ed) and GURPS Magic. I'm pretty sure Extra Fatigue isn't in Basic (at least not pre-revised).

 

[Cowpie Zombie]

I really like GURPS. The big advantage of GURPS is that you can play just about any character you can imagine. D&D often limits characters to archetypes, but GURPS can allow for non-stereotypical characters. Want a mage that fights in armor and uses swords? GURPS can do it!

So can D&D. Try a Fighter/Wizard.

Want a barbarian that was touched by the gift of magic? GURPS can do it!

So can D&D. Try a Barbarian/Sorcerer.

Want a gun-toting, psionic, cyberpunk mutant? Ditto.

Easy for D20 Modern. Try a Moreau Fast hero with levels in Telepath.

But I see your point. GURPS really does lend itself to colorful and unique characters, whereas in D&D (and to a lesser extent d20 Modern) you have to deliberately go past the narrow confines of the class archetypes to come up with something unique.

If only I could find more people to *play* GURPS, though.

 

[Gutboy Barrelhouse]

Almost all of the evaluations and commentary about the strengths and weaknesses of GURPS in this thread are spot on, IMO. (Except of course for the ad hominem attack on the staff of SJG.)

I heartily agree that you use only the GURPS Lite rules to start.

GURPS is a very different beast from all of the D&D games.
3e is closer than any of the others, but be prepared for large differences, particularly the highly granular, slow-play combat engine in the full game.

My evaluation is that GURPS is a fine piece of work that is just not my personal cup o' tea.

It all boils down to what you and your players like. Hope you have fun!

 

[SSquirrel]

There are five reasons I don't play gurps. My players. They Need a class based system to keep them in line. They don't really come up with character concepts, more so play a class and let the concept come to them.

The rest of your description about your players sound like good reasons for a classed system without disads, but this isn't really that big a problem IMO. Sometimes you just aren't exactly sure WHAT you want to play, but you can eventually narrow it down to some class. This happens to me frequently. Hell I was designing a giant unfettered tonight for an upcoming AU game and kept redoing his feats b/c I kept having different ideas of how I wanted him to work.

Once I have the class picked out, I start rolling up the character and picking skills. Usually by this point (or during feats at least) a character concept has started to materialize as I see his stats and his skills and such come together. Next thing you know I have a pretty solid idea about exactly who this guy is, what his motivations are, etc. If your players just need a helping kick in the pants to start their creative juices then its fine. I tend to not play point buy systems largely b/c I know that I CAN do what your players do and just browse forever. I won't do the completely laden down with disads thing (except once in Mage and the ST thought it sounded like a nice acting challenge) but I could easily sit there redesigning the character in my head forever.

Rolemaster is kinda fun the same way. Friend of mine started us in that again last year and I made a character..my first RM guy in 2 or 3 years. So I had a nice refresher for making characters with that first one and immediately set about to making a backup character b/c the way this group was shaping up I REALLY expected to die soon *grin* Went from taking 4 hours for the wizard to 1 1/2 for the thief.

Hagen

 

[Calico_Jack73]

While Gurps can be realistic, it also does a very poor portrayal of characters. You only get 4 stats, of which 2 are massively important in modern games (IQ and DX). But in any event, thanks to the point buying nature of Gurps, most characters have scores very similar to each other.

I think it makes sense that IQ and DX are the most important stats the higher in Tech Level you get. Think about it, when was the last time you had to swing a sword around to keep yourself from getting killed? In a modern day situation having a steady aim or getting some piece of broken machinery to work is far more important. You get even less dependent on ST the higher you go in tech level. ST and HT really isn't that important if you are wearing powered armor.

I like it okay and I actually prefer it when I play Traveller than the new T20 system. I guess the key to RUNNING a GURPS game is to lay down the law at the beginning of a game as to which books you will be using and stick to it. Don't let your players introduce concepts you don't want in your game just because there is a source book out for it.

 

[WizarDru]

I think it makes sense that IQ and DX are the most important stats the higher in Tech Level you get. Think about it, when was the last time you had to swing a sword around to keep yourself from getting killed? In a modern day situation having a steady aim or getting some piece of broken machinery to work is far more important. You get even less dependent on ST the higher you go in tech level. ST and HT really isn't that important if you are wearing powered armor.

The issue isn't whether or not IQ and DX really ARE more valuable or not, but that the cost of ST and HT are the same, and that having only two important stats results in homogeneity, something that Psion hit on earlier. All GURPS mages eventually had all the same spells, regardless of the system's flexibilty. All fighters ended up taking the same stock advantages, and many folks always took certain disadvantages. I played GURPS for 15 years, and enjoyed it (and yes, we had an 8-year running GURPS Supers game). But I recognized many of its flaws, as I have discussed on this topic each time it periodically comes up. Heck the last time it came up was just before they announced that a 4th-edition was finally going to be made. Further, this imbalance in stats made certain advantages and disadvantages extremely unbalanced (Eidetic Memory comes to mind).

There are some strong ineherint advantages to GURPS, and some serious flaws in it. My first reaction to D&D 3e was that they had ripped some of the best parts of GURPS, without taking some of it's inherent flaws. 3e took GURPS off of our gaming lexicon and marginalized it.

As for SJG's staff, I have met several of them, and they were decent folk. I will say that I've met SJ about four times, and he's an OK guy. He can be contentious and arrogant at times, a fact he himself readily admits. But as an industry survivor for what, 25+ years now? I think he's allowed a little.

 

[VirgilCaine]

Thanks for all the help guys. I will not modify the system until I have used it sufficiently.

 

[woodelf]

This sounds more munchkiny than the GURPS standard rules, not less. Munchkins will simply refuse to take Disadvantages, and still have the same number of points as the role-players who took them. And if players are forced to take Disadvantages, the system winds up being little different in practice than the regular rules, except for reduced flexibility - 100-point characters forced to take 20 points of no-benefit Disadvantages are just 80-point characters. Munchkins will still gravitate towards Disadvantages that can be easily compensated for - say, Enemies who can be easily killed off, or bad Reputations that they would likely acquire soon anyway with their munchkiny actions.

In that situation, i recommend borrowing a page from Hero System: until you spend the XP to "buy off" the disad, it's still with you. Kill off your Enemy? Her daughter takes up the banner of hunting you down. Bad Reputation? That's their baseline--they still get worse than the other PCs, assuming equally-bad actions. And so on.

But, you raise a good point about the munchkins simply not taking disads--i've never run into it personally, but it makes sense. Only one counter: who cares? If everyone knows up front what the rules are, then everyone is playing the way they want to: the munchkins aren't forced to take disads they really don't want, and the roleplayers get to have all the cool personal quirks, foibles, and flaws that they *do* want. Yes, the characters might not be balanced, but if everyone's having their share of fun, no problem: the munchkins get to be powerful and have fun hacking, and the roleplayers get to be 3-dimensional and have fun interacting.

"Story importance"? I don't believe this should ever be something the PCs have to pay for - they should always be important in some way to every story they are involved in, otherwise, why would they bother to run the risks of being involved in it at all? They don't always have to be the most powerful or important characters in town, but minimizing their importance too much will turn a campaign into one long session of "well, why don't Elminster/Khelben/Drizzt get off his fat keister and do something about this problem?"

Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear--of course the PCs, collectively, are the center of the story/game, even if tehy aren't the center of teh world they're in. Even if they're a bunch of nobodies doing nothing (Clerks immediately comes to mind), they'd still be the center of the story/game, by definition.

PCs might perhaps buy "story importance" relative to each other, but that sort of thing gets very close to cans of worms that are better left closed, especially with munchkiny players. The only "disadvantages" that I could reasonably see charging for are those that give enough extra role-playing opportunities to allow a character to rack up lots of "good role-playing" bonus experience points. Such "disadvantages" would be something of an investment, accepting lesser abilities now (because of points spent on the "disadvantages") for the chance of quicker advancement in the future through display of one's mad role-playing skillz. And I don't think it would be an easy thing to balance out point costs and experience awards for that sort of thing, especially if multiple players take them and compete for the spotlight in hopes of making their "investment" pay off.

Edit: Forgot to mention Spycraft as an excellent example of the principle. It has "Backgrounds" which are pretty much all of the classic disads that involve other people (hunted, dark secret, romantic attachment, etc), and each one costs points (skill points, in this case) and earns XP. It works really well, from everything i've heard, and is no more unbalanced than feats, skills, or class abilities in general are. And don't players already compete for the spotlight in hopes of making their investment in character abilities pay off?

This is precisely what i'm talking about: story importance relative to one another. Isn't that what every RPG is really doing with "game balance" already? Why does it matter if the various classes in D&D are balanced, for example? Precisely so that everybody gets to contribute equally to the game. I contend that that's ultimately what game balance is about. But most games try to balance a proxy (power) rather than the actual concern (spotlight time), and so rely on assumptions of game style and the like, and thus lose balance as soon as those change.

Frex, assuming the D&D3.5E core classes are balanced for the intended "adventuring" style of play [if they aren't, ignore that fact for the sake of argument], all you have to do to radically alter, if not "break" the balance is play a campaign set in a civilized royal court, where fighting is never an option, using magic on others in any way is legally restricted and often warded against, and diplomacy and social interactions almost always decide the course of the day. Suddenly, the bard is *way* more powerful than any other class, period, without changing one thing about the abilities of the various classes. and this stems from the fact that fighting ability is a measure of character power, and thus only relevant when fighting prowess is effective. To take the opposite extreme, look at Over the Edge, where everyone has 4 traits with the same ratings (4d, 3d, 3d, flaw). One person could have a trait like "Immortal swordsman" at 4d [think Highlander], while another could have "Cooking-show host" at 4d. The important thing isn't that they are both equally "powerful", it's that they both have a trait of about the same scope, and are equally good at it, and so can potentially contribute to the adventure about equally. It might not matter to the player of the cooking-show host if she gets to contribute in a fight at all, so long as there is a time when her character is the important one to the scene. That's also why the approach to balance used in games like D&D3E falls down when niches aren't protected. It's no fun being the 2nd rogue in the party, because you only need one rogue to disarm the trap, and of course the best character will try first. But it's fine being the 2nd fighter, because more than one person can fight the monster and contribute meaningfully. [Obviously, this can be worked around--traps that require two simultaneous actions on opposite sides of the room to disarm them. But, in general, some niches in D&D are best singly-occupied, while others can easily accomodate multiple characters.] Thus, according to power balancing, being a 2nd-string combatant, plus a 3rd-string healer, plus a 2nd-string spellcaster, plus a 2nd-string skillmonkey, should "add up" to being as good as being the 1st-stringer in any of these. However, as many a bard player has observed, and as spotlight-time balancing would predict, this often isn't the case, and the bard player feels disproportionately left out. Only the fact that the bard is also the "frontline" social monkey saves it--but then only in a campaign where social interactions are significant. In a dungeon crawl, it probably won't cut it.

The Archmage, for example, balances its new and powerful magical abilities by giving up its old and powerful magical abilities (permanent high-level spell slots). Heaven forbid a class called "Archmage" should actually be outright superior in spellcasting to other spellcasting classes...

Yeah, howabout giving up all BAB and save progression, instead? That's an even better example than the Traits in Unearthed Arcana--thanks for pointing it out.

 

[woodelf]

I tend to run the game favored by my players.

My favorite game system is Ars Magica, tweeked for taste, of course. Ars Magica has the best Magic System for any game, and I have yet to figure out how to combine it with 3x successfully.

Look at the various spellcasting templates added via feats in Arcana Unearthed. Expand the concept significantly, and you could have much of the feel of magical flexibility of Ars Magica, though without anywhere near the actual flexibility. But it'd be much more D&D-compatible. It also depends what elements of the Ars system you specifically like. If it's the casting based on fatigue (or other regenerating limit) rather than fire-and-forget spell slots, take a look at the "recharge magic" option in Unearthed Arcana. If it's the noun-verb spell classification system, take a look at The Elements of Magic. If it's the magic item creation, i'd suggest The Artificer's Handbook--much of the same feel, with completely different methods to get there. If it's the research-oriented nature of magic, i just don't think that's compatible with the high-fantasy style of D&D gaming. If it's the spontaneous spell creation, that's *really* tricky--i ran a game using "Ars Fantasia" (same crossover, but in inverse: D&D feel with Ars mechanics, so techniques and forms based on the D&D spell lists), and that was the biggest balance problem. Problem is, the D&D spells aren't based on an underlying logical progression. So even after you do your best to extrapolate one, the spells you then interpolate from it often are wildly out of whack, balance-wise. Nonetheless, if you want to see what i've done [it's a very workable system, just requires some GM finesse when dealing with spontaneous casting], check out http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/old/ars/ .

 

[RFisher]

I forgot to mention that when I didn't give points of disads, I did raise the point total. Players still got 145 points to spend.

Oh, and I do enjoy GURPS character creation. I also enjoy GURPS combat.

Min/maxing and munchkinism aren't problems with the game; they're problems with the player. (to quote Tri-Stat dX)

Min/maxing has never been a problem. It is, rather, good play. My commentary was on what the game encourages/discourages.

Although 100+45 is really only a suggestion anyway, so it isn't really a problem with the game, as the game allows the GM to limit disads. Still, this, I think, was exactly the sort of info the original poster was looking for.

Actually, i'd go a step further: i think that a lot of "disads" should *cost* points.

Why had I never thought of this before? I like it!