What's your opinion of GURPS?

[Goodsport]

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I like GURPS. It's modular enough to be as simple or as complicated as the GM and the players desire, and the sourcebooks are a good read even when not applying them to the game.


-G

 

[Numion]

I'll be the odd man out, and say it:

GURPS is a better game than D&D 3e. IMNSHO.

When I GM, I use GURPS exclusively. I do not like, as a GM, the silliness of the D&D class/level/HP/alignment system, and prefer grittier games. GURPS does that well, and with a graceful core mechanic to boot.

Gurps has silly things all of it's own. Due to blow-through rules you can't kill someone with a single bullet to the chest. It'll blow through and leave target at zero health.

Realistic indeed. Just don't try it at home

 

[Numion]

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.

EDIT: I don't know why some people consider this bug instead of feature. I know full well that if I try complex brain surgery it's gonna fail. Zero possibility of succes. Why should it be a succes in a game, just roll natural twenty! (or three ones in Gurps)

 

[drnuncheon]

Gurps has silly things all of it's own. Due to blow-through rules you can't kill someone with a single bullet to the chest. It'll blow through and leave target at zero health.

Realistic indeed. Just don't try it at home

This is one of those 'Murphy's Rules' that doesn't stand up on closer inspection of the system. Here's how it really works:

You won't kill someone instantly with a bullet to the generic chest region. They will go to 0 health and begin to make rolls every turn (that's every second) to remain conscious. If you're trying for realism, then you're probably using the bleeding rules, which means they've got a few minutes before they bleed to death.

If you shoot them in the vitals, on the other hand, then the blow-through is limited to HTx3 - which means that the average person (HT 10) is going to be at -20 and immediately making 3 rolls (trying to roll under HT on 3d6) to stay alive.

Now, I guess you could argue that shock does funny things, and pople have died from shooting themselves in the foot - but I think that most gamers would complain if that were part of the rules set.

J

 

[WizarDru]

Re: Re

Personally, I liken to GURPS to the Mac/PC wars that evenutally the PC won.

GURPS is inherently a better system than D&D. Its rules are better and more realistic. Its character creation system more adaptive and creative. It gives the GM alot of latitude in adventure creation. It allows you to play any genre.

Where did they go wrong? GURPS was supported and marketed poorly. D&D was supported and marketed very well.

I think that you're oversimplfying things a bit, and leaving a lot of factors out. One major attraction for D&D versus GURPS is the simplicity of character creation. A novice in D&D can make a 1st level character fairly quickly, and can understand that character's abilities without too much trouble. Creating a GURPS character is a serious investment in time, even to an experienced player. That fact alone makes D&D more attractive to lots of folks, and while 3E takes longer to make a character, it's not nearly as staggering to the novice as the huge amount of material needed for GURPS.

Does this mean novices don't play GURPS? No, I introduced several to it, myself. But I liken it to a comment Joe Straczyniski made about Babylon5 and Star Trek...in which he essentially pointed out that "most Babylon 5 viewers have seen Star Trek, even if all Star Trek viewers haven't seen B5." I would expect the same is true of D&D.

You could also argue that D&D was there sooner, and had the better system of it's peers early enough on that it came to dominate.

My biggest problem with GURPS rapidly became the mind-numbing 'sameness' of everything. After 18 years of using the system, it seemed to stagnate, since most mechanics in the game essentially felt like they were being shoved into the tiny box that GURPS 3ed had become. Creating organizations with members who had similar characteristics was tiresome and never terribly satisfying. Prestige-classes in 3E provided me what I was looking for in GURPS 'Packages'. Many of GURPS advantages and disadvantages simply aren't balanced against each other well, and often players will end up taking the same dozen disadvantages, for example. And certain ones will be outlawed, such as Eidetic Memory...and don't start me on the language rules.

Some truly innovative material for GURPS has appeared, such as the magic system in GURPS Voodoo. GURPS Vehicles is an interesting study in how to spend twenty minutes generating a ox-drawn two-wheeled cart or a super-tanker. And of course, GURPS worldbooks and supplements are of some of the finest in the RPG industry.

Further, GURPS allows you, as a GM, to really roam free with your imagination. Back in '86, I ran a game that would now be called GURPS Anime (though back then, anime wasn't the super-cool cultural touchstone like it is, now). I was able to have a mecha pilot, Jigen-like gunman, super-powered ESPer, shape-shifter and someone who shared his soul with a giant Machine-god all in the same game. That's a hell of a thing to do in a system, especially since this predated GURPS Psi, GURPS Mecha, GURPS Firearms and a host of other supplements by months to years.

Ultimately, though, I only use one watermark to determine whether or not a system is good, and whether one system is better than another: the amount of fun I have using it. I used GURPS for longer than some posters on this board have been alive, so I think that should give you an idea. The fact that I enjoy D&D 3E more doesn't make it a bad system...in fact, I still love GURPS...it's just no longer an unconditional love.

 

[Halivar]

Somebody made the comment that GURPS requires more time investment than D&D.

I suppose I find that inherintly attractive, since our group does that anyway. We never buy modules, we write our own campaign from scratch, and often write houserules to do something cool we saw in a splatbook.

Since we do everything from scratch anyhow (and spend as much as three days on character creation), I think I may pick up the GURPS 3e basicset and see if my DM is interested in running it. I showed him GURPS-lite and seemed very interested, indeed.

We'll see how it turns out.

 

[Numion]

This is one of those 'Murphy's Rules' that doesn't stand up on closer inspection of the system. Here's how it really works:

You won't kill someone instantly with a bullet to the generic chest region. They will go to 0 health and begin to make rolls every turn (that's every second) to remain conscious. If you're trying for realism, then you're probably using the bleeding rules, which means they've got a few minutes before they bleed to death.

If you shoot them in the vitals, on the other hand, then the blow-through is limited to HTx3 - which means that the average person (HT 10) is going to be at -20 and immediately making 3 rolls (trying to roll under HT on 3d6) to stay alive.

And IIRC you can't hit the vitals unless aiming for them. Pretty strange that I couldn't kill someone with a snapshot to the chest. When one round is one second it's pretty much not killing if the target bleeds to death in minutes.

 

[WizarDru]

Since we do everything from scratch anyhow (and spend as much as three days on character creation)

Wow, I haven't had that kind of free time since college. With a group of players will full-time jobs, children and a host of other responsiblities, I can't even imagine what it would be like to spend three days making a single character.

 

[hong]

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

 

[drnuncheon]

And IIRC you can't hit the vitals unless aiming for them. Pretty strange that I couldn't kill someone with a snapshot to the chest. When one round is one second it's pretty much not killing if the target bleeds to death in minutes.

Vitals are 17-18 on the random hit location chart - or you could aim for them specially at -3.

And really, does it matter that much if they're dead or not, as long as they go down? Remember at 0 HT you're rolling to remain conscious every second. Unconscious and bleeding to death is as good as dead for purposes of the combat.

I notice that a lot of people who have problems with the GURPS firearms rules are either thinking of movie guns or aren't grasping the 1-second timeframe. I had a group armed with pistols once who complained that they could not hit anything - but they were essentially just spraying the area with random fire, and not even taking one second to aim. When you consider that the targets were 50 feet away, you realize that you'd have to be an incredible shot (or just darn lucky) to actually hit under those conditions.

A couple things to think of:

There's a reason why police departments teach the 'double tap' technique - too often, one bullet isn't enough.

I believe that the statistics are that 80% of people shot with handguns survive - and the 20% that don't includes the folks who did not die the second the bullet hit, but who (for example) bleed to death before medical care is given.

I think GURPS is just fine on these accounts.

J