GURPS

[Chamomile]

So what is the Den's opinion on GURPS? I'm curious because I feel like I lack some vital context for the latest OSSR. I'm aware that Frank consider its fundamental concept to be flat-out undoable for the reason that characters from cyberpunk must necessarily be far more powerful than characters from fantasy, in that a regular dude with a laptop with internet connection, a handgun, and a consistent source of ammunition is mid-level by most fantasy standards.

But that doesn't really give me a good idea of what the merits and flaws of the system itself is. Does GURPS work for any of its settings? Which ones and why? Does GURPS work well for all of its settings as self-contained games, and breakdown primarily when people try to mix and match? Ignoring the thematic goofiness such a scheme would suggest, would it be possible to have characters "level up" from one tech level to the next and maintain a semblance of balance, or is GURPS terribly balanced even within tech levels/individual splats? Does GURPS fail in interesting or enlightening ways? Does GURPS have any redeeming qualities or interesting sub-systems which might be interesting in a game that does not base its mechanics on an impossible goal? Do any later editions of GURPS fail less or more than previous editions?

[Ancient History]

Each self-contained GURPS product tends to be fairly balanced within itself. The problem comes with mix-matching - which is the entire point of GURPS, and in general it highlights the problem of determining what is worth points.

For example, in GURPS Time Travel you can have characters from different Tech Levels operating in the same party - and there's no way that the TL6^ guy from the 1600s with a steampunk calculator is as versatile as the TL8 guy with a laptop and an internet connection, even if they're worth the same nominal amount of points.

Add in magic (of whatever flavor) and things get even weirder, in part because these are all plug-and-play rules and you don't have the setting or mechanics development behind different systems - the magic system in GURPS Magic is the basic magic system for the bulk of the game, regardless of Tech Level, setting, &c. There are some alternatives, but it showcases TL disparity - at the point where you have a mobile phone with a built-in camera, you have exceeded the vast bulk of magical clairvoyance/telecommunication spells.

And, let's just go out and say it, different settings are weird with their own idiosyncratic mechanics and really don't play well when mixed with others. Frank pointed out in the OSSR GURPS Cyberpunk thread that the recommended minimum for cyberpunk characters was 150 points - I think the usual minimum for GURPS Fantasy or something is 100 points. It just goes to show that different settings have different relative power levels, and while the mechanics might be the same it really might not be possible to effectively game very well together. The classic example of that is mixing GURPS Supers with...well, anything. Imagine dumping a Mutants & Masterminds character in a generic D&D dungeon and see how long that adventure lasts.

It's not that the books are bad. GURPS puts a lot of work and actual research into the rules and settings. But it's a bit of a Sisyphian effort, and the whole approach is ultimately unworkable. There really can't be one system to govern all settings and imaginary worlds.

[mlangsdorf]

I think whether or not GURPS succeeds or fails depends on the design goals.

If the design goal is a mathematically rigorous reality simulation with a guarantee that two characters of equal point values can overcome the same challenges, then GURPS fails. Without guidelines from the GM, two different GURPS characters of the same point level (even at the same tech level and in the same genre) are not at all guaranteed to pass an SGT.

If the design goal is a mostly consistent of rules that lets one adapt fictional settings (including settings from other games) and play them without constantly having to learn new rules, then GURPS is a mixed success. Some people find the adaptions bland. The necessity of adding optional rules to the core engine can be off-putting. Some adaptions are just too difficult (point accounting breaks down at 500-900+ points, in my experience, just because it's too much to track. So high end super-hero games don't work).

I wouldn't say that mix-matching is the entire point of GURPS. There's not much support for taking a PC made with the highly realistic Tactical Shooting and SEALs in Vietnam (optional) rules and mixing him with a PC made with the (optional) Furious Fists rules from the (optional) Action series and then giving them a 12th century knight made with the (optional) Low-Tech rules for metal armor as a companion. You can do that, but it's not really advised. (Yes, I know the Infinite Worlds setting does this, but IW has 1 book, while Dungeon Fantasy and Monster Hunters have easily twice the word count published.)

The various sub-lines (Dungeon Fantasy, for dungeon-crawling fantasy; Monster Hunters, for modern day Buffy/Supernatural monster hunting; Action, for modern day team action movie heroics) mostly work on their own. While you can't readily transfer characters between them, you can use the knowledge learned in one sub-line to play a character in another. An MH Commando is more powerful than an Action Sniper and both are differently capable and have better technology than a DF Scout, but the basic mechanics of playing a ranged combatant are the same in all 3. Is that really any better or any different than playing a Dawn Solar in Exalted, a Brujah in Vampire (1st ed), and a Get of Fenris in Werewolf (1st ed)? It's up to you, I suppose.

I generally find GURPS 4e to be a marked improvement over the previous editions, but most of the mechanics haven't changed that much in 30 years.

[Username17]

Everything AncientHistory said, with the following caveats:

Firstly, I don't think anyone from 2013 could honestly look through a period GURPS book and conclude it was balanced internally. This was the era when it was considered appropriate to allow people to take a character disadvantage where they were going to die at the end of three adventures and got a big pile of upfront power right now to compensate. That's unbalanced if the game goes for more than three adventures and it's unbalanced if the game doesn't. GURPS is hardly alone in making that error, like I said it was the era. Vampire and Shadowrun both got their own versions of "borrowed time".

Further, as was touched on slightly in the OSSR, some things cost points because they are mechanically good, while other things cost points because "realistically" they should be hard to get. This leads to places in the system where you have to pay points for flavor (even disadvantageous flavor), and places in the system where two things of roughly equal power are considerably different in cost or vice versa. The most obvious place is probably Intelligence. Being smart makes skills easier to learn. By which I mean that it costs less points to learn them up to a specific level. But being smarter costs points. So there's a no-shit cost curve where there is an optimal smartness to have in order to have the skill values you want, and being more intelligent or less intelligent than that optimal value costs more points.

But I would go beyond even what AncientHistory said about book quality. It isn't that the books are individually "not bad", they are individually great. Steve Jackson brought in consultants, experts, and focus groups for these books. If there was a GURPS Asparagus, it would be written by someone who knew Asparagus backwards and forwards and not only liked Asparagus, but really cared about Asparagus and "doing it right". The irony of course, is that these people often don't know GURPS from a hole in the ground, so the presented GURPS mechanics are generally much clunkier and less lovingly crafted than the setting information. GURPS Asparagus is probably one of, if not the best Asparagus sourcebooks for Dungeons and Dragons. Or any other Asparagus related campaign you intended to run with any system.

-Username17

[tussock]

GURPS

Wall-of-answers to series of questions. Enjoy.

SETTINGS

The secret 3e GURPS setting is grim modern action/horror movies (hero spends six months in physical rehab and descends into revenge fantasies fuelled by alcoholism? Check) and brutal low-fantasy (like, 2nd level AD&D with no Clerics that never goes anywhere and then you die, almost exactly). Both with drawn out death scenes and missing limbs all over the place.

The secret 4e GURPS setting is Star Wars (where you sneak around for fucking ages and then there's three seconds of fight and you lose a hand and spend a week in a bacta tank).

Oh, and they require that "pretty" characters always be broadly social skilled because otherwise that's a serious waste of points. Your beautiful but snobbish computer nerd who knows jujitsu and industrial chemistry will always suck at everything, so that is of course what most of the sample characters look like.


MIX-AND-MATCH

GURPS rates itself for time-travel and alternate dimension games, but can't really handle the value of ubiquitous technology. Most of the points are based on "how hard it is for people to learn" and also "how rare it should be". Being a college grad means you're supposed to use more points to build the character, to pay for for the extra wealth and status and skills and IQ. Life ain't balanced.

Anyway, having guns is either worth arbitrary large number points because you're in a place where most people don't, or you ignore it because everyone has guns (and really, pull the trigger enough times and you'll kill someone). But if you're a medieval swordsman who travels to the modern world it's all penalties for even looking at one. Literally, you can fail fright checks and go a bit mad, which just means your character is now worth less points forever, so fuck you.

They do, however, give sample points for what being from a different tech level is worth to characters. Supposedly useful for balancing stone-age folk encountering the renascence for the first time as Columbus lands, only not really because the result will be the same as history. They have guns and steel, you lose.


FAIL SNAILS

GURPS fails in that it lets you spend big points on shit that doesn't help at all, and lets you spend small points on shit that wins everything. This is less of a problem in 4th edition because they fixed a lot of those particular problems, but the general one remains. There's no real in-game structure for what stuff keeps you in the action and where the RNG gives up and dies, and canny players can do horrible things on less points than you'll use just to get an action in the first second of combat.

Some of the books are like GURPS Vehicles, in that they are an awesome idea and quite an interesting idea mine, but they don't work and you can't actually play GURPS with them at all. Like, in V there's a wall of math (which is wrong in important ways that mean it breaks when you do anything interesting) that produces three small numbers that plug into a mini-game you won't want to play anyway and doesn't interact with the rest of the system at all.


CRITICAL SUCCESS

Other books are like GURPS Reign of Steel and I kinda want to play every other campaign there for the rest of my life. Holy fuck that book is inspiring. Totally builds on GURPS kitchen-sink setting with variant tech level approach too. In reality, get disgusted trying to build characters and put it away for another year.

I think GURPS4's use of DR and damage scales is very good and supports all their wounding stuff well. 3e was kinda terrible, like megadamage only in extremely fine detail. But 4 works across a great deal of the scale you'd hope it would. It's still unreasonably expensive to punch tanks like Hulk, but you can do it, there is totally support for that (and all sorts of other random things).

The abstract wealth system is pretty functional with all the package options, you can totally start as a poor man with a capital ship (and if someone torpedos it, fuck you).

Hell, timesheets, where you quickly document your PC's downtime for some free build points in whatever you're doing off-screen, like your day job or whatever. Between adventures.


WARS of EDITIONS

GURPS4 is better than GURPS3 in almost every way that it's different. It's maybe just not different enough to matter. The most functional GURPS stuff basically builds your characters for you, and your opponents too, and tells you what gear you're all allowed, and once you do that the editions don't much matter.

[echoVanguard]

I have to confess that I am very fond of GURPS. It is a hideous abomination of rules at the best of times, but it is lovable for all that.

That being said, you can have some fun with the GURPS Lite ruleset (edition 4) for playing low-magic medieval fantasy (around TL3 or so). Be careful, however, because the rules are lethal as hell. I ran a game with it a few years ago and characters were unbelievably skittish, because everything was dangerous to them. One character broke his leg and nearly died after falling down a well. Another nearly starved when he got stranded and couldn't afford to eat for a few days. Later, they both nearly froze to death in the mountains. They were often relieved when combat broke out because while being stabbed with a sword was still incredibly lethal, at least they could try to surrender or talk their way out of it!

echo

[Ancient History]

Actually, that reminsd me there was a question I wanted to address:

Ignoring the thematic goofiness such a scheme would suggest, would it be possible to have characters "level up" from one tech level to the next and maintain a semblance of balance, or is GURPS terribly balanced even within tech levels/individual splats?

It's relative, but generally you only deal with the Tech Level of a given setting, or the differing TLs of different civilizations (in a steampunk-Atlantis-attacks-electropunk-London kind of way, or aliens-vs-cavepeople) or different worlds (time traveling between parallel earths). However, the big thing about TL is that it mostly just gives the available technology and determines a limitation on certain skills - so yes, you could have your cave warriors (TL2) equipped with alien weaponry (TL9) and have them face off in the galactic arena, and yes a punch card programmer (TL6) can be trained up in C++ (TL7), and yes a magesmith (TL4^) can learn to cast spells drawing on the strange powers of electronic devices (TL6+; yes some spells used TLs too).

The big problem is the immediate fish-out-of-water issue - in a world where you have to light the beacons to summon Rohan, a set of walky-talkies can be fucking gamebreaking. Merlin doesn't cease to be a bad-ass magician when he time-walks to London 2030 CE, but his ability to predict the weather accurately is much less impressive when every bastard on the planet can dial in the WeatherChannel to their headphone - an ability that cost him years (and points) to master costs the kid on the street picking his nose until blood comes out practically nothing.

[Vebyast]

The interesting thing that I see about GURPS is that most of these problems can be solved by having a GM that knows enough to say "you can't do that".

"Power now for power later? No, you can't do that."
"Telecommunications magic is dominated by cell phones. You really don't want to do that."
"That's reserved for supers. You can't do that."
"This is a supers game. You really don't want to do that."

Games tend to have fundamental and structural problems, things like a bad resolution mechanic, a bad class architecture, or an unavoidable half of the game being balanced badly against the other half. You can't fix DND4e's classes just by saying "no, you can't do that". Compared to that, I find "all major problems fixable at runtime" to be a solid recommendation, particularly since the developers themselves understand the problem and mention it up front.

[Surgo]

Short but sweet opinion: GURPS is basically a shitty version of HERO.

I tried playing in a GURPS fantasy game once. The rules were completely impenetrable, and the point costs of things were apparently generated by consulting a dartboard. Subsystems had little interaction with each other, and the whole thing was in bad need of the flavor-mechanical separation that defines the core of how HERO works.

[Chamomile]

Okay, so looks like the prevailing opinion is:

1) GURPS is a game of lovingly crafted fluff paired with mechanics that range from playable to outright borked. The horribly balanced point costs for different things seems to be the main source of the borkedness. GURPS 4e has upgraded the series to being only mostly broken, and mostly broken means slightly functional.

2) Crossovers between different splats may or may not be as much the point of GURPS as I first thought. Either way, it is definitely the case that it does not work out at all.

3) GURPS sourcebooks are pretty awesome as general information sourcebooks even when they spectacularly fail to be good sourcebooks for actual GURPS gameplay.

Hm. Maybe I should check some of this stuff out.

[fectin]

I may be wrong, but I read "crossovers are not balanced at all." that subtly different from "does not work," and means e.g. That you could run SEAL team 6 vs space aliens, as long as all your players were one or the other.

[Chamomile]

Yeah, when I said crossovers don't work, I'd meant crossovers where party members from different splats team up with each other. That may not have been clear.

[Archmage]

I have not ever assumed GURPS was even intended for people to kitchensink "splats" and run space cowboys alongside dinosaur mechanoids alongside steampunk inventors alongside barbarian warlords. I realize that there might be a temptation there to do that for some reason, but it honestly confuses me that anyone would even think it was a good idea or that the secret purpose of GURPS was to be RIFTS. You pick a genre, you present players with a list of abilities and skills that are suitable for the genre, and you let the players build PCs within the specified parameters. Nobody even considers getting laser eyes or techno-claws or playing a magician in Rainbow Six because you sit everybody down beforehand and go "we are playing TL3ish sword-and-sorcery" or "we are playing TL7 special forces operatives working for the U.S. government."

To do otherwise strikes me as immensely silly.

I never played 4th ed, but I did play 3rd ed and honestly found it kind of cumbersome. I ran a fantasy game and concluded that it felt too gritty and dangerous. I ran a mecha anime game (wrote my own very simple mecha rules instead of using GURPS Mecha because the official rules are kind of cumbersome) and concluded that high tech armor versus high tech weapons was a wacky setup where you either couldn't hurt someone at all or you vaporized them with a single shot and that wasn't especially fun or interesting either.

[Hadanelith]

3) GURPS sourcebooks are pretty awesome as general information sourcebooks even when they spectacularly fail to be good sourcebooks for actual GURPS gameplay.

This. Very much this. GURPS Ultra-tech is my tech bible for sci-fi games; Bio-tech is grand; and the stuff from Transhuman Space is thought provoking (seriously, go read Cities on the Edge and think about the cities of the future, it's awesome). That said, as a game...eh? Lots of ideas, but execution isn't terribly well-suited for sci-fi gaming. But seriously, awe-inspiring idea mine.

[CCarter]

Only played this a few times. The first time it was a supers game, missed the fine print on the mind switching power from GURPS Horseclans book that the target needed to be unconscious, which ended with one of the PCs taking over the body of the planet's equivalent of Superman after an attack on the President, and getting basically a several-hundred free CP boost. Then world domination because at that point I gave up. Also played a couple of Reign of Steel sessions; GURPS worked well for that setting though its fairly depressing.

Anyway...as a system the mechanics really irk me personally; partly the roll under, but I particularly found having to do a table lookup on ST to find melee damage values inconvenient (as GM - for a player this wouldn't vary so much, obviously). The system really seems set up for fantasy in as much as it assumes that ST is worthwhile as a stat, whereas with modern or higher-TL weapons, not so much; 4E I guess does fix that to a point by making STR the stat that yields hit points instead of Health. The STR system also doesn't work so well for the superhero genre since a high STR character gets Real Physics (TM) ability to pulp other characters, and has to pay commensurate points for it - characters who can throw around large weights are unmodellable without a huge number of points (unless I've missed some specific super-lifting power that does the job).

By D&D standards expect character advancement to be slow and laborious, and the system often handles stuff like titles or contacts game mechanically (the village you saved last session should continue hating you unless you spend some character points adding them as a contact).

I'd agree with the general assessment as to the value of the sourcebooks as a reference, though.

[hogarth]

I realize that there might be a temptation there to do that for some reason, but it honestly confuses me that anyone would even think it was a good idea or that the secret purpose of GURPS was to be RIFTS.

I think the line of reasoning goes: "If you're not supposed to be using stuff from setting A in setting B, then what's the point in using the same game system for A and B in the first place?"

[virgil]

I realize that there might be a temptation there to do that for some reason, but it honestly confuses me that anyone would even think it was a good idea or that the secret purpose of GURPS was to be RIFTS.

I think the line of reasoning goes: "If you're not supposed to be using stuff from setting A in setting B, then what's the point in using the same game system for A and B in the first place?"

Which is stupid. I have at least three players who hate having to read and learn a pile of new systems. System mastery is a restricted resource, be it because of time or interest or even familiarity. Playing a space-faring campaign means you're mastery of 3.X is not being used, making that earlier effort to learn it wasted until an uncertain future.

That is the draw for universal systems, where the mechanics are treated as a console platform, and all of the settings/genres as programs you just load on the reader. Sure, you deal with a little tutorial to know the particular options, but after a few games you can frequently skim most of it and start gaming already.

[talozin]

It's worth mentioning that GURPS made somewhat more sense in the era when it was developed. The games that came out in reaction to D&D tended toward the baroque, and switching back and forth from RuneQuest to Traveller to Champions to Top Secret was a nontrivial amount of effort not only for Mister Cavern but for the players -- rolling up a RuneQuest character using the rules circa 1986 could take up literally a whole gaming session if you were new to the game. In this light there's a certain logic to having just one complex set of mechanics to learn, rather than n = the number of different settings you wanted to play in.

[Archmage]

I realize that there might be a temptation there to do that for some reason, but it honestly confuses me that anyone would even think it was a good idea or that the secret purpose of GURPS was to be RIFTS.

I think the line of reasoning goes: "If you're not supposed to be using stuff from setting A in setting B, then what's the point in using the same game system for A and B in the first place?"

My assumption there was that the point was that you could play a new game in a different genre without having to learn a new set of rules.

I think it's been well-established why that doesn't work, but it's sort of a laudable goal if you don't understand the role mechanics play in making a game feel the way it's supposed to, particularly when it comes to genre emulation. To its credit, GURPS has a lot of toggles for that--for example, with a few points in the relatively-inexpensive Hard to Kill advantage, PCs actually die pretty rarely, despite the apparent lethality of combat. If you want people getting incapacitated but not actually dying, you can hand out 3-4 levels of that for free at chargen and character death becomes pretty rare outside of a TPK. It's houseruling in the sense that I don't think the books actually suggest doing that specific thing anywhere, but GURPS is a toolkit for assembling your own game anyway, not a game in itself (but it's not as toolkitty as HERO).

[tussock]

The example characters in GURPS4 are a team of mixed-genre world-hoppers. I'm pretty sure SJG thinks the point of GURPS is to be RIFTS.

But using it for their Dungeon Fantasy line (as a much more grim Epic6 game), or something where the gun nuts get to spooge over 2d6 vs 2d6+1 with -2 concealment on their pistol options while shooting you in the brain for quadruple damage vs your ten hit points, that's totally where it works best. Hell, the WWII line for GURPS3 was pretty good in a "take hard cover or die" kinda way.

"you can't do that"

Yes, if you happen to be able to figure out every single way the ten-thousand free-association options game is broken before using it extensively, you can help people build useful-but-not-broken characters.

I recommend going to the SJG GURPS boards and asking for examples for your specific campaign idea (because people there are fairly helpful), or downloading their example character portfolios for real money, or strictly using the examples and "lenses" or whatever they call the character classes they "don't have" these days in the supplements. Treat any guidelines you can find as very firm indeed, because going outside them will often be very bad for your game.

[Ancient History]

GURPS4e basically uses Sliders as its default setting, so calling it "to be RIFTS" is a bit unfair. RIFTS is one possiblity, but it's not the entire point of the exercise, and shouldn't be taken as such.

[icyshadowlord]

I've never been bored playing GURPS, though that just might be because of the awesome MC we have.

Edit: I have little to say outside of that on the game itself, sadly.

[downzorz]

Personally, I love GURPS. I have never been able to convince my gaming buddies to get on board with it. The mechanics take a while to get a grasp of; I figured out After Sundown and D&D 3.5 in probably a week each, while it took a month of going over the GURPS Basic Set rulebook to understand everything. That might just be me though. That being said, I find that, despite the many intricacies, GURPS is altogether quite fun; I would probably pick it over D&D for a dungeon fantasy campaign any day. And echoing what Frank has said, most of the sourcebooks are great reads. Even past their value as being helpful in game design, they are well-written. Hell, I honestly enjoy Infinite Worlds for entertainment value as much as a lot of novels I've read (but that might be because the parts of many novels I enjoy most is learning about the world, and that's a sourcebook with nothing but worlds). The flaws pointed out are definitely there, and GURPS probably requires more pre-game planning than anything else, with an extensive list of "yeses" and "nos" for each Advantage and Disadvantage. However, at its core, GURPS is a functional system, which is more than I can say for some games.