What's your opinion of GURPS?

[Henry]

Dru, odd thought: Have you ever looked at Savage Worlds from Pegasus? ( www.peginc.com )?

Your mention of time constraints is touted to be a major advantage of that system, and their fast-play rules seem to bear that out. (Well, that, and the fact that ALL the games at Gencon seem to be two hours instead of the usual four.)

Just thought I'd point it out. If nothing else, it looks like a great game for one-shots where there just isn't time to set up for a full-on D&D game.

 

[kengar]

BTW, Henry, it's Pinnacle Entertainment Group, not Pegasus.

They're the folks who did Deadlands & Great Rail Wars and -as I've stated previously in this thread- my group & I have dumped 3e/d20 after 3 years of playing for Savage Worlds. The system is quite simply the best I've seen in over 20 years of playing & GM-ing oodles of different systems and campaigns.

 

[Geoff Watson]

I dislike GURPS. It seems like a good idea with bad implementation.

It seems inherently unbalanced.
Even the basic ability scores aren't balanced. Strength is vastly overpriced unless you have a huge amount of melee combat, and even then Dexterity is probably better. Everything mental is based in Intelligence, so a smart character also has eyes of a hawk, iron will, and great person skills, unless you take lots of disadvantages.

The way they calculate costs for things varies: some things are priced on usefulness, others on time to learn, others on rarity; they just seem to pull numbers out of thin air.

Some things should vary by genre but don't: eg combat magic in Fantasy is more or less balanced with archery; in Technomancer the combat spells are the same as in Fantasy and are absolutely pathetic compared with guns.

It's easy to get a high enough defensive roll that combat drags on, waiting to see who gets the lucky critical hit first, which usually takes out the victim, so combat is much more luck intensive than most other games.

Geoff.

 

[Blasphemonkey]

I have to say I am most favorable on this subject. Much great joy. Makes a nice noise. Sometimes tastes better than when it went in. Especially in the case of fiendish dire bananas, the taste when it comes out...what?...no, you're kidding! Ack! GURPS? I thought we were talking about BURPS! Eeep!

{Monkey ducks down and hides}

 

[WizarDru]

Hey Wizardru, did you ever post to GURPSnet or rgfg? I get the feeling I've seen you around the place.

Yes, I did, but it's been a while. About 3 years, as it happens. I never did finish my GURPS Falkenstein website...and then I didn't need to.

Dru, odd thought: Have you ever looked at Savage Worlds from Pegasus? ( www.peginc.com )?

I haven't, but based on what I'm hearing both from you and at least two other posters, I definitely need to check it out. Thanks!

 

[kengar]

Dru,
Download Savage World's free "Test Drive" rules and give it a look-see. Remember that these free rules don't include character generation specifics, but you can also grab a free adventure online like "Red Swamp" complete with pre-generated characters so you can get a feel for how PCs work in the game.

 

[takyris]

If I could just make one prissy side note:

Having a ton more hit points in D&D does not mean you can "survive a dagger through the heart". It means that you get out of the way of the dagger and take a tiny slash across the shoulder -- or that only your clothes are ripped, leaving you a bit nervous and tired from dodging the blow (and if you "get tired" more and more from additional hits, eventually, the last one IS through your heart, and you die).

Hit points in GURPS and hit points in D&D are two different animals with different flavor texts attached. It's okay to like one or the other, but don't try to compare them directly. In D&D, you don't do basic parrying and blocking because those are all accounted for in hit points -- if you want "two trained duelists whose blades ring back and forth until the final blow, when one of them is killed with the first strike to draw blood", then you simply flavor-text it that way.

 

[Conaill]

So whereas a D&D DM might say "No, you can't do that, because you don't have feat X", a GURPS GM would be much more likely to say "Hmm, that seems like a very complicated maneuver. Your attack will be at a -5. Still want to try?"

A strange thing to say. Gurps just about invented feats. There are things in Gurps that you can't do untrained or without the feat (EDIT: oopsie, it's advantage) or skill. "It try to read his mind" DM: "Dude, you aren't psychic" "I still try, just make it a hard roll!!"

In case you didn't know even some skills have no default. That makes your statement untrue.

Guess I should have clarified that a bit more. As I already mentioned above, advantages in GURPS tend to be of an innate nature. Things like being a psychic, or being a mage, or being double-jointed. That's how I feel it should be.

When D&D decided to adopt the advantages/feats idea they messed it up IMHO, because they seriously blurred the line between innate talents and learned skills. For example, I don't think weapon proficiencies should be feats, because it's something you learn to use. You pick up a spiked chain one day, and you train with it. When you get good enough, it starts to become an effective weapon for you. And the more you use it and train with it, the better you become. Of course, you're probably neglecting your longsword training while you're doing this, so you may wind up being a master with the spiked chain, but you don't really advance in longsword.

Even worse, there are some feats which LIMIT what a character can do without those feats! That is what I was referring to above. For example, a regular chracter cannot hamstring an opponent if he doesn't have the appropriate feat. Or you cannot toss sand in someone's eyes because you don't have Dirty Fighting . You cannot jump back after an attack unless you have Spring Attack. In Gurps, all of those would be acceptable maneuvers (with the possible exception of Spring Attack - because movement is much more fine-grained in GURPS), provided you make the attack penalties and/or some additional skill checks (with a high Acrobatics check, I might allow a Spring Attack type move even in GURPS).

The whole trained vs untrained skills is an entirely different matter. And one that IMHO GURPS deals with fairly realistically. No, I don't think any yokel should be allowed to try his hand at brain surgery. Nor do I think any yokel should have a small chance at being able to use psionics or magic without having the inborn ability. And I am quite happy with the way GURPS deals with this

 

[LGodamus]

I tried gurps years ago , but I never seemed to be able to run a game smoothly with it. Everything took twice as long as it felt like it should. The details are almost too much, but its not what I would call a bad system...its just not for everyone.

 

[Zappo]

I played GURPS several times, with several settings, but I find it is more than a bit too detailed for my taste. I wouldn't compare it to D&D; they are two entirely different creatures, with different objectives and different ways to achieve them.