My opinion of Gurps has always been that it's pretty good as far as their "original" settings are concerned (playing Gurps Fantasy, or Gurps Japan, or whatever), and really sucks when it comes to their "copy" settings (Gurps Vampire, Gurps Cyberpunk). Especially if you have any experience with the "original" settings.
What is your Opinion of GURPS?
Tratyn Runewind
First Post
Hello,
Cinematic stuff can work just fine in GURPS if both the PCs and NPCs are built properly for it. In addition to properly cinematic stats, PCs will need a healthy dose of that most cinematic Advantage, Luck - preferably, at the maximum 100-point "Ridiculous Luck" level. NPCs will need to be as incompetent as they are in the movies, as well, with even the more competent "boss" NPCs having easily-exploited cinematic Disadvantages such as Megalomania, Overconfidence, or Unluck of their own. With just these simple guidelines, you can run a pretty cinematic campaign even without using any of GURPS's special little cinematic rules tweaks.
Outright four-color superhero stuff will require a bit more rules tweaking, and unfortunately, the tools provided for that in GURPS Supers mostly bite. Hard. Still, characters with superheroic point totals can work fairly well if they avoid the worst of the rules from that book - the mighty Galactic Patrol members of GURPS Lensman are a decent example, being built more from GURPS Psionics than GURPS Supers.
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.
"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?" 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.
Yes, this idea defies all logic - "I'm thoroughly nearsighted, so of course I decided to become the party's archer." Yet D&D uses it quite a bit because it feels it has to keep its Classes balanced against each other (especially since all Classes now use the same XP advancement table). 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...
I always get a laugh out of this - two common gripes about GURPS, "combat is too slow" and "characters die too easily". Huh? If dudes are dropping dead so easily, what's slowing things up? Perhaps it's the fact that players used to the hack, hack, hack of D&D fighting haven't learned proper use of the "Feint" action, which lowers those annoying high defenses.
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.
All too true, alas. Sad was the day when so many of the poorly thought-out concepts from that work were effectively incorporated into the core rules in other supplements, and, eventually, the Compendia.
May it be so; please, o Powers of Gaming, let it be so...
This clears up one of my biggest annoyances with GURPS - the brutal kludges used to prevent giants, centaurs, and other non-stupid high-ST races from being spellcasting machines. The reduction of the need for every differently-sized-than-human monster to have "split HT" and the "Extra Hit Points" Advantage or the "Reduced Hit Points" Disadvantage is another benefit of this welcome change.
That system is workable, but I really hope they have at least as an option in the new GURPS Magic a system similar to the "Ritual Magic" system from GURPS Voodoo, with the seperate Colleges as skills ("Fire Magics", "Healing Magics", "Metamagic", etc.) and the individual spells as Maneuvers defaulting from those Skills, and executable only by characters with appropriate pre-requisites, similar to the current GURPS spell pre-req webs.
Other things I'd like to see in the book include the ditching of the "hard-coded" Magery, damage, and effectiveness limits, and the inclusion of the excellent "Unlimited Mana" rules mentioned a time or two above (which truly deserve a place in the book). The "Hermetic Magic" rules from GURPS Cabal, or at least guidelines for adding similar flavor-rich systems atop the deliberatly-generic standard magic rules in your own campaigns, would also be a welcome sight.
Hope this helps!
Cinematic stuff can work just fine in GURPS if both the PCs and NPCs are built properly for it. In addition to properly cinematic stats, PCs will need a healthy dose of that most cinematic Advantage, Luck - preferably, at the maximum 100-point "Ridiculous Luck" level. NPCs will need to be as incompetent as they are in the movies, as well, with even the more competent "boss" NPCs having easily-exploited cinematic Disadvantages such as Megalomania, Overconfidence, or Unluck of their own. With just these simple guidelines, you can run a pretty cinematic campaign even without using any of GURPS's special little cinematic rules tweaks.
Outright four-color superhero stuff will require a bit more rules tweaking, and unfortunately, the tools provided for that in GURPS Supers mostly bite. Hard. Still, characters with superheroic point totals can work fairly well if they avoid the worst of the rules from that book - the mighty Galactic Patrol members of GURPS Lensman are a decent example, being built more from GURPS Psionics than GURPS Supers.
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.
"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?" 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.
Yes, this idea defies all logic - "I'm thoroughly nearsighted, so of course I decided to become the party's archer." Yet D&D uses it quite a bit because it feels it has to keep its Classes balanced against each other (especially since all Classes now use the same XP advancement table). 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...
I always get a laugh out of this - two common gripes about GURPS, "combat is too slow" and "characters die too easily". Huh? If dudes are dropping dead so easily, what's slowing things up? Perhaps it's the fact that players used to the hack, hack, hack of D&D fighting haven't learned proper use of the "Feint" action, which lowers those annoying high defenses.
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.
All too true, alas. Sad was the day when so many of the poorly thought-out concepts from that work were effectively incorporated into the core rules in other supplements, and, eventually, the Compendia.
May it be so; please, o Powers of Gaming, let it be so...
This clears up one of my biggest annoyances with GURPS - the brutal kludges used to prevent giants, centaurs, and other non-stupid high-ST races from being spellcasting machines. The reduction of the need for every differently-sized-than-human monster to have "split HT" and the "Extra Hit Points" Advantage or the "Reduced Hit Points" Disadvantage is another benefit of this welcome change.
That system is workable, but I really hope they have at least as an option in the new GURPS Magic a system similar to the "Ritual Magic" system from GURPS Voodoo, with the seperate Colleges as skills ("Fire Magics", "Healing Magics", "Metamagic", etc.) and the individual spells as Maneuvers defaulting from those Skills, and executable only by characters with appropriate pre-requisites, similar to the current GURPS spell pre-req webs.
Other things I'd like to see in the book include the ditching of the "hard-coded" Magery, damage, and effectiveness limits, and the inclusion of the excellent "Unlimited Mana" rules mentioned a time or two above (which truly deserve a place in the book). The "Hermetic Magic" rules from GURPS Cabal, or at least guidelines for adding similar flavor-rich systems atop the deliberatly-generic standard magic rules in your own campaigns, would also be a welcome sight.
Hope this helps!
LoneWolf23
First Post
Barak said:
Uh, GURPS Cyberpunk isn't a conversion of the Cyberpunmk 2050 game, but is actually a generic sourcebook for roleplaying in the Cyberpunk genre using the GURPS system. Mind you, it's pretty much been supplanted by Transhuman Space powered by GURPS.
Sir Brennen
Legend
2 cents
Being a long time GURPS player (even before it was GURPS - anyone remember Wizard and Melee from SJG?), just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.
First - I love hex maps for combat. My next 3E campaign, I will probably use the UA hex map variant.
GURPS is indeed a complex combat system, especially with something like a modern-setting gunfight, but I've been finding DnD 3E combat to be approaching that complexity, especially at higher levels, when one has to keep track of what stacks with what for each character, round-to-round, as different magical effects and conditions come into play.
But, as others have stated, it depends on how many of the rules you use. There is a Basic Combat system in GURPS which will probably work just fine in many cases.
My own gripe is the Gun skill for modern games. I've found I have to use every legal penalty in the Advanced Combat rules to keep gun combat from being a series of automatic hits. There should be some level of uncertainty in a die roll other than "did I get a critical?". Besides being an Easy skill (low point cost), a decent IQ gives an auto +1 or +2! And many characters buy better guns and stack on hardware (laser sights), find situations to give themselves time to aim for more bonuses, etc. This is not just a PC problem; as a DM, I don't like having to fudge 80% of the rolls for guns just so I don't kill the PCs.
Disadvantages: not allowing them at all removes a big chunk of what makes GURPS different, and gives it flavor. I have to second Tratyn's opinions above with regard to this. IMC, I'd take a look at disadvantages selected by players on a case-by-case, and if I didn't think they would come into play, I'd disallow them. Or, once the aware of Disads selected, I can make a point of bringing them into play, especially if I suspect they are being used for purely min-maxing (like one PC who choose a Phobia of loud noises, and didn't think about the implications of using his shotgun...)
For one shots I often disallow disads (or even ads) that involve NPCs... enemies, allies, dependents, etc. For extended campaigns, these can serve as great plot hooks.
I have a mature group of players that see the adventure/role-playing potential in their Disad selection. For a horror campaign, one character took Weirdness Magnet and a Phobia of the number 13. Of course, he went adventuring off on his own, and got trapped in an elevator that only opened to a phantom 13th floor in a high rise. Another character had a teenage son as a dependent, as the campaign plot ended up revolving around the disappearance of her son.
And God Bless the PC who took Bad Luck as a Disad...
Being a long time GURPS player (even before it was GURPS - anyone remember Wizard and Melee from SJG?), just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.
First - I love hex maps for combat. My next 3E campaign, I will probably use the UA hex map variant.
GURPS is indeed a complex combat system, especially with something like a modern-setting gunfight, but I've been finding DnD 3E combat to be approaching that complexity, especially at higher levels, when one has to keep track of what stacks with what for each character, round-to-round, as different magical effects and conditions come into play.
But, as others have stated, it depends on how many of the rules you use. There is a Basic Combat system in GURPS which will probably work just fine in many cases.
My own gripe is the Gun skill for modern games. I've found I have to use every legal penalty in the Advanced Combat rules to keep gun combat from being a series of automatic hits. There should be some level of uncertainty in a die roll other than "did I get a critical?". Besides being an Easy skill (low point cost), a decent IQ gives an auto +1 or +2! And many characters buy better guns and stack on hardware (laser sights), find situations to give themselves time to aim for more bonuses, etc. This is not just a PC problem; as a DM, I don't like having to fudge 80% of the rolls for guns just so I don't kill the PCs.
Disadvantages: not allowing them at all removes a big chunk of what makes GURPS different, and gives it flavor. I have to second Tratyn's opinions above with regard to this. IMC, I'd take a look at disadvantages selected by players on a case-by-case, and if I didn't think they would come into play, I'd disallow them. Or, once the aware of Disads selected, I can make a point of bringing them into play, especially if I suspect they are being used for purely min-maxing (like one PC who choose a Phobia of loud noises, and didn't think about the implications of using his shotgun...)
For one shots I often disallow disads (or even ads) that involve NPCs... enemies, allies, dependents, etc. For extended campaigns, these can serve as great plot hooks.
I have a mature group of players that see the adventure/role-playing potential in their Disad selection. For a horror campaign, one character took Weirdness Magnet and a Phobia of the number 13. Of course, he went adventuring off on his own, and got trapped in an elevator that only opened to a phantom 13th floor in a high rise. Another character had a teenage son as a dependent, as the campaign plot ended up revolving around the disappearance of her son.
And God Bless the PC who took Bad Luck as a Disad...
Jürgen Hubert
First Post
LoneWolf23 said:
Not exactly. For one thing, TS is far more optimistic than Cyberpunk - it portrays a world where most people have far more control of their own destinies than in any period of history - including our own. For another, the technology is much more advanced - artificial intelligences are no longer cutting edge, they are everywhere, human genetic engineering is no longer controversial but standard in most nations, space has been heavily colonized, and so forth...
TS is more of a post-cyberpunk setting - the world went through all of the issues of a cyberpunk setting, and solved most of them admirably.
Jürgen Hubert
First Post
Sir Brennen said:
Do you use the range penalties? These reduce your hit chances dramatically...
The IQ bonus seems to be gone from 4E, BTW.
Ondo
First Post
Tratyn Runewind said:
They apparently won't have Ritual Magic, but they will have an option that has spells as Techniques (the new name for Manuevers).
The Magery limit is gone. Unlimited Mana is not in - the comment was something along the lines of "as good as the rules are, it's not worth dealing with their author".
ThoughtBubble
First Post
I like GURPS, and I was glad when 3E added feats in, which supplied a method of character and skill differentiation, because it felt a little more gurps like.
Gurps is about the only system I've used where I can comfortably make my estranged prince, heir to the imperial throne who was raised by a group of holy-men in the mountians, where he studied religion, history, and myths. The last of his knights taught him how to fight with a sword, a staff and a bench. He's also personable, and has a natural way with words that will only improve as he grows.
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. And gurps is one of those games where just about every advantage is cool, and they'll look through the book for hours, ending up with a gigantic list of things they WANT for their character. They want it because it's cool, not because it fits. Then comes the hunt for disads to try and let them get as many of those cool abilities as possible. My players are the sort to make the ridiculous characters and load them down. Far better to bootstrap them more tightly into an idea.
The skill system has always felt a little strange to me as well.
I also had a much easier time making throwaway NPC's in GURPS than I did in any other system so far.
Gurps is about the only system I've used where I can comfortably make my estranged prince, heir to the imperial throne who was raised by a group of holy-men in the mountians, where he studied religion, history, and myths. The last of his knights taught him how to fight with a sword, a staff and a bench. He's also personable, and has a natural way with words that will only improve as he grows.
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. And gurps is one of those games where just about every advantage is cool, and they'll look through the book for hours, ending up with a gigantic list of things they WANT for their character. They want it because it's cool, not because it fits. Then comes the hunt for disads to try and let them get as many of those cool abilities as possible. My players are the sort to make the ridiculous characters and load them down. Far better to bootstrap them more tightly into an idea.
The skill system has always felt a little strange to me as well.
I also had a much easier time making throwaway NPC's in GURPS than I did in any other system so far.
Doc_Klueless
Doors and Corners
This sounds very, very good.Ondo said:
shadow
First Post
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! Want a barbarian that was touched by the gift of magic? GURPS can do it? Want a gun-toting, psionic, cyberpunk mutant? Ditto.
The main problem with GURPS is that combats often tend to be deadly. A 500 point character can be taken out by a 50 point goon with a rifle. There are cinematic rules (such as the stun rule) that decrease player deaths, but it's still not like D&D where a high level character can fight through hordes and hordes of goblins.
Also GURPS combat rounds are based on one second intervals, so it might take several rounds to do some actions. This might be frustrating to players wanting fast and furious combats, where players can do several things in one round.
Finally, the disadvantage system can be abused. I personally think that disadvantages make the game fun by providing role-playing incentives. However, there are players who like to take advantage of it by getting extra points for disadvantages that they hope won't come into play very often. This takes a little GM incentive (No you can't take this disadvantage in my campaign!), and a little trust between the GM and players.
Well, just my 2cp.
The main problem with GURPS is that combats often tend to be deadly. A 500 point character can be taken out by a 50 point goon with a rifle. There are cinematic rules (such as the stun rule) that decrease player deaths, but it's still not like D&D where a high level character can fight through hordes and hordes of goblins.
Also GURPS combat rounds are based on one second intervals, so it might take several rounds to do some actions. This might be frustrating to players wanting fast and furious combats, where players can do several things in one round.
Finally, the disadvantage system can be abused. I personally think that disadvantages make the game fun by providing role-playing incentives. However, there are players who like to take advantage of it by getting extra points for disadvantages that they hope won't come into play very often. This takes a little GM incentive (No you can't take this disadvantage in my campaign!), and a little trust between the GM and players.
Well, just my 2cp.
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