Incline GURPS in 2023

[HeroMarine]

Let's have a thread about GURPS?

I played some GURPS in my teenage years in high school, but never after it, as I only played WoD games in my youth and OSR-types in my adulthood. In my childhood days I had played basic D&D, Rolemaster 2, and MERPS, then in my early teens I played Marvel Super Heroes and a ton of homebrew systems from kids in school. I don't have much contact with the current GURPS community but I imagine they are a big step above the regular RPG.net decline popamolers and larpers.
At the time, GURPS seemed like the most advanced and complex system I had ever played and my ground of teenager friends were really into all the calculations and what we thought were more mature themes that can be achieved with the system. We played in Modern era, Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Time Travel and Superheroes. I wish I never stopped.
I'm interested in going back to the hobby and considering GMing some adventures in the Cyberpunk/Modern and Fantasy/Mythology genres. Going to read this book to remind myself of how to GM this.

PS: I'm not sold on the Fourth Edition and I am open to using Third Edition which is the one I know from back in the day.

Talk about your experiences with the system and your thoughts.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Never played it. Some of the books rusty_shackleford mentioned seemed quite the read. Like the one on SPEHSS.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

GURPS is for retards that can't handle real math or a crunchy system.

Mind explaining? What would be a crunchy system to you?

 

[Alex]

Let's have a thread about GURPS?

I played some GURPS in my teenage years in high school, but never after it, as I only played WoD games in my youth and OSR-types in my adulthood. In my childhood days I had played basic D&D, Rolemaster 2, and MERPS, then in my early teens I played Marvel Super Heroes and a ton of homebrew systems from kids in school. I don't have much contact with the current GURPS community but I imagine they are a big step above the regular RPG.net decline popamolers and larpers.
At the time, GURPS seemed like the most advanced and complex system I had ever played and my ground of teenager friends were really into all the calculations and what we thought were more mature themes that can be achieved with the system. We played in Modern era, Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Time Travel and Superheroes. I wish I never stopped.
I'm interested in going back to the hobby and considering GMing some adventures in the Cyberpunk/Modern and Fantasy/Mythology genres. Going to read this book to remind myself of how to GM this.

PS: I'm not sold on the Fourth Edition and I am open to using Third Edition which is the one I know from back in the day.

Talk about your experiences with the system and your thoughts.

Well, if you want my opinion.

I would stay away from what Sean "Kromm" Punch might write about being a GM. Nothing against the guy, but his approach to GMing GURPS always seems to be to try to make things as simple as possible, preferably by making any action that falls outside the normal scope of the system amount to a +2 or a -2 on a dice roll that does fall in the scope.

As for 4th edition or not, I don't much like how they tried to clean up the system. Having different prices for different values of attributes in 3rd edition might not have made much sense, I agree, but they tried to retro-fit all to fall into the powers system. For instance, how psionics work now. Thankfully magic still works the old way, although not from lack of people trying to make new magic systems based on powers. If you want a robust powers system, 4e is not a bad choice, but it still falls short of Hero, so you could play that instead.

All this said, 4th edition is not bad in itself either. It can mostly be used with 3rd edition, although it might be annoying to convert stuff from GURPS Vehicles or similar books where the old ST system is used. In 3e, strength (ST in GURPS) rose linearly. An ST of 20 meant you were as strong a two normal men, for instance. In 4e, it rises quadratically, instead. Presumably because it would be proportional to increases of size; that is, a creature built like a man, but with twice our size would be as strong as 4 men on average (and weigh as much as 8, which would throw off how it walks and runs and such, but it is still an useful basis) so in 4e you could just give it a strength of 20.

So, for a Cyberpunk campaign, if you are going to go deep into the hardware aspect of it, 3e might be better (or you could just use what is available for 4e, it is not bad by any means, although there is no equivalent to GURPS Vehicles). With a fantasy game, 4e won't give you much problem because that part didn't change much. I still think 3e is better than 4e there for passive defense, which doesn't, it is true, make much sense in reality; but ends up being a way to account for the DR of most armour being lower than it should be.

 

[Humbaba]

You should DM a game about a mysterious jungle kingdom, populated exclusively by white people.

 

[JamesDixon]

My now deleted post was the result of mistaken identity. I thought that Iren was Soggy. I'm sorry bro anything you want to for insulting you.

 

[WhiteShark]

If you use all the rules for it, GURPS has the deepest combat of any system I've tried. Even 1v1s, while necessarily limited in their tactical scope, become much more entertaining for all the outcomes that simply are not possible without GM fiat in other systems. In how many other games can you render an enemy berserker entirely ineffective by crippling his hand? How many incorporate facing as a crucial element? How many model the immediate negative impact of suffering even a non-lethal wound? And so on.

The game isn't perfect, of course. My experienced GM friends have a bevy of houserules they've built up over years of play. For example, they don't use the critical fumbles table because of how absurd some of the outcomes are; it clashes with their immersion. Another is that instead of making active defenses impossible after an All-Out Attack, they are possible but heavily penalized; under the default rules the use-case for an AOA is just too narrow. There are also some bits that are simply unclear in the Basic Set, but God forbid you ask the wrong grog about that or you'll get an earful about how actually it's all perfectly clear if you make huge inductive leaps based on minor implications from unrelated rules on pages X, Y, and Z...

Regarding 3E vs 4E, I can't give any firsthand advice because I never played 3E. That said, the conventional wisdom among the experienced GURPS players I know is that 4E is overall superior, although Vehicles is missed. Apparently you can substitute the spaceship building rules from Spaceships for other sorts of vehicles to a degree, but it isn't as comprehensive as the rules from Vehicles. It is also allegedly possible to simply build vehicles under 3E rules and then convert, so it all depends on how much effort you want to put in.

 

[saint amchad]

I played GURPS in a LOTR setting in my youth. I was amazed at how I could one shot enemies through criticals, then found out everything is criticals, and lost all my characters by the second fight to criticals. Still found it fun tho. I like systems that are deadly.

 

[WhiteShark]

I played GURPS in a LOTR setting in my youth. I was amazed at how I could one shot enemies through criticals, then found out everything is criticals, and lost all my characters by the second fight to criticals. Still found it fun tho. I like systems that are deadly.

I hear this kind of thing a lot from my GURPS buddy who used to play D&D 3.5:

WhiteShark: Oh, since I guess today is the day after, how did your Saturday game go?
Friend: Mostly set up, one random encounter innawoods
Friend: I needed 'something' to fight for fun and, on a lark, pulled up the ol' Grey Render. Which was hilarious, because
Friend: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/grayRender.htm
Friend: I stat this guy up as close as I can. Fuckin' CR 8 huge ass ripperbeast
And the result going from D&D to GURPS is that it gets shot in the head with a flintlock and dies.

 

[JamesDixon]

I played GURPS in a LOTR setting in my youth. I was amazed at how I could one shot enemies through criticals, then found out everything is criticals, and lost all my characters by the second fight to criticals. Still found it fun tho. I like systems that are deadly.

I hear this kind of thing a lot from my GURPS buddy who used to play D&D 3.5:

WhiteShark: Oh, since I guess today is the day after, how did your Saturday game go?
Friend: Mostly set up, one random encounter innawoods
Friend: I needed 'something' to fight for fun and, on a lark, pulled up the ol' Grey Render. Which was hilarious, because
Friend: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/grayRender.htm
Friend: I stat this guy up as close as I can. Fuckin' CR 8 huge ass ripperbeast
And the result going from D&D to GURPS is that it gets shot in the head with a flintlock and dies.

I find that those that played DANDINO, in all iterations, lack brains to figure out that you're not supposed to fight everything in your path. That's why I love True D&D™ because your DM may decide to throw an adult black dragon at you when you're 2nd level just to see how you respond. The DMGs for AD&D 1E/2E make it abundantly clear that the goal is to overcome the obstacle or creature. It doesn't say you need to kill the creature in order to overcome it. Parlaying with said dragon or running away are both valid ways of overcoming said encounter. You also still get full xp for overcoming it.

 

[saint amchad]

I played GURPS in a LOTR setting in my youth. I was amazed at how I could one shot enemies through criticals, then found out everything is criticals, and lost all my characters by the second fight to criticals. Still found it fun tho. I like systems that are deadly.

I hear this kind of thing a lot from my GURPS buddy who used to play D&D 3.5:

WhiteShark: Oh, since I guess today is the day after, how did your Saturday game go?
Friend: Mostly set up, one random encounter innawoods
Friend: I needed 'something' to fight for fun and, on a lark, pulled up the ol' Grey Render. Which was hilarious, because
Friend: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/grayRender.htm
Friend: I stat this guy up as close as I can. Fuckin' CR 8 huge ass ripperbeast
And the result going from D&D to GURPS is that it gets shot in the head with a flintlock and dies.

I find that those that played DANDINO, in all iterations, lack brains to figure out that you're not supposed to fight everything in your path. That's why I love True D&D™ because your DM may decide to throw an adult black dragon at you when you're 2nd level just to see how you respond. The DMGs for AD&D 1E/2E make it abundantly clear that the goal is to overcome the obstacle or creature. It doesn't say you need to kill the creature in order to overcome it. Parlaying with said dragon or running away are both valid ways of overcoming said encounter. You also still get full xp for overcoming it.

That's whats great about GURPS. As 12 yr old kids, we were like "what happens when 3 dwarves try to take a goblin fortress head on?" In Dandino, they would win the day by seducing the Goblin Queen and enchanting the whole fort with bardic abilities. In GURPS, they get violently murdered. As would happen in a real scenario.

 

[WhiteShark]

I find that those that played DANDINO, in all iterations, lack brains to figure out that you're not supposed to fight everything in your path. That's why I love True D&D™ because your DM may decide to throw an adult black dragon at you when you're 2nd level just to see how you respond. The DMGs for AD&D 1E/2E make it abundantly clear that the goal is to overcome the obstacle or creature. It doesn't say you need to kill the creature in order to overcome it. Parlaying with said dragon or running away are both valid ways of overcoming said encounter.

D&D 3.0 onward is designed to encourage that sort of play, so it's not surprising. That said, neither my friend nor his group are fools. He, being the GM, just takes inspiration for monsters sometimes. His group does their very best to only fight when they have overwhelming advantage, which was the case here as well. In this case the group attacked from ambush and crushed the encounter in the opening salvo.

A topic we've often laughed about is the way monsters that are meant to be scary in D&D 3.5 are often only so because they have big sacks of HP, but that doesn't matter much when one good hit to the head can take somebody out regardless of remaining HP. On the flip side, some D&D monsters have qualities that become outright terrifying in a more grounded game. For example, any monster with a heat aura that does damage to those nearby. GURPS characters don't have that many meatpoints so they can't just tank it. Couple of rounds in that and you're toast.

 

[JamesDixon]

To piggy back off of my last reply, here's what happened to myself and the group I played with doing AD&D 2E Dragonlance.

The party is 9 people and we're between the levels of 5-7 depending on class. I was playing a Knight of Solamnia. We're heading down this dirt road that's big enough for two lanes of traffic. There's heavy woods on either side. We hear a dragon scream overhead and an adult black dragon lands about 60 feet from the party directly ahead.

My character wins initiative and charges the dragon. She runs and gets right near it only to be swatted with its tail. The DM rolled a natural 20 and did a critical (house rule).

He plotted the course back that my female knight would fly. The trajectory took her back 100 feet and would hit a massive tree. He tells me that my character goes flying backwards then he rolls damage.

He used the falling damage rules to determine the amount of d6's he needed. Since it was 100 feet the dice he rolled was 10d6.

My 5th level Knight had about 45-ish hit points. I'm thinking that I've got a reasonable chance to survive this.

The DM rolled 55 damage on the dice.

He looks at me and says, "Your character goes flying back 100 feet to hit a tree. Due to the sheer amount of damage you take your character gets shoved into an owl's nest hole and get liquified.

One by one the entire party fell to this dragon, except for my sister in law's cleric. When it was her turn, she was like fifth in the order, she sits down in the road. Her character puts her hands over her eyes then begins to recite, "If I can't see you then you can't see me."

My sister in law actually acted this out at the table.

She repeats this the entire time we're in combat. When the cleric is all that is left the dragon flies away.

If we were smart, my character would have parlayed with the dragon to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and to live another day. But I wasn't smart. I was a murderhobo and deserved to have my character killed for playing Lawful Stupid.

D&D 3.0 onward is designed to encourage that sort of play, so it's not surprising. That said, neither my friend nor his group are fools. He, being the GM, just takes inspiration for monsters sometimes. His group does their very best to only fight when they have overwhelming advantage, which was the case here as well. In this case the group attacked from ambush and crushed the encounter in the opening salvo.

A topic we've often laughed about is the way monsters that are meant to be scary in D&D 3.5 are often only so because they have big sacks of HP, but that doesn't matter much when one good hit to the head can take somebody out regardless of remaining HP. On the flip side, some D&D monsters have qualities that become outright terrifying in a more grounded game. For example, any monster with a heat aura that does damage to those nearby. GURPS characters don't have that many meatpoints so they can't just tank it. Couple of rounds in that and you're toast.

When I moved to DANDINO 3.0 the DM had us doing an adventure. I don't recall the details, but I do remember that I came up with a unique solution to the problem we were facing. The DM asked, "Do you have the skill to do it?"

"Nope," I replied.

He told me that I couldn't do what I wanted to do. I asked about using my attribute for the roll and he flat out said the rules prohibit it. That left a sour taste in my mouth and I've never touched DANDINO again.

GURPS has the hit point and 4 stats problem. You'll run into issues like that. I found Hero to be much more forgiving. It's still lethal, but you have better tools to mitigate what you're facing. Combat in Fantasy Hero is downright scary.

 

[saint amchad]

Sounds like you had an unreasonable DM. 100 feet sideways is not the same damage as 100 feet straight down. And armor should have cushioned some of the blow. Falling down, the ground hits 100% of you, whereas flying sideways the tree does not hit 100% of you, unless its a massive tree.

 

[JamesDixon]

Sounds like you had an unreasonable DM. 100 feet sideways is not the same damage as 100 feet straight down. And armor should have cushioned some of the blow. Falling down, the ground hits 100% of you, whereas flying sideways the tree does not hit 100% of you, unless its a massive tree.

It was a new DM. I'm not unhappy with what happened as I got an awesome story out of it.

To make up for it he offered to resurrect our characters or to have us create new ones. I chose to create a Kender Thief. He was an interesting fellow. We went to one of the planes of Hell. He got married to a demoness. Stole the party cleric's holy symbol by "accident" that lead to us almost wiping in Hell because she couldn't heal any of us in combat.

 

[saint amchad]

In my eyes, it comes down to the system philosophy. Too many modern players act like their starting characters are just unrecognized hero's, where in real life, hero's are the peons that survived a lot and became too tough to die.
I once met a heroin addicted 60 year old prostitute in real life. She had her lower left arm and lower right leg shot off by shotguns in TWO SEPERATE INCIDENTS. I wondered, did she piss off two different people that badly or just one twice? She was indestructible.

What's the Hero system like? I never tried it.

 

[saint amchad]

Sounds like you had an unreasonable DM. 100 feet sideways is not the same damage as 100 feet straight down. And armor should have cushioned some of the blow. Falling down, the ground hits 100% of you, whereas flying sideways the tree does not hit 100% of you, unless its a massive tree.

It was a new DM. I'm not unhappy with what happened as I got an awesome story out of it.

To make up for it he offered to resurrect our characters or to have us create new ones. I chose to create a Kender Thief. He was an interesting fellow. We went to one of the planes of Hell. He got married to a demoness. Stole the party cleric's holy symbol by "accident" that lead to us almost wiping in Hell because she couldn't heal any of us in combat.

Married a demoness and went to Hell? Sounds like my first wife.....

 

[JamesDixon]

In my eyes, it comes down to the system philosophy. Too many modern players act like their starting characters are just unrecognized hero's, where in real life, hero's are the peons that survived a lot and became too tough to die.
I once met a heroin addicted 60 year old prostitute in real life. She had her lower left arm and lower right leg shot off by shotguns in TWO SEPERATE INCIDENTS. I wondered, did she piss off two different people that badly or just one twice? She was indestructible.

What's the Hero system like? I never tried it.

Hero System is pretty unique in that you can model pretty much anything in it. Combats can be slow if the people you're playing with aren't too familiar with it. The game plays like you and your group are the stars of a movie/tv show/comic book. The impact of your characters really depends upon the points the GM allows you to have.

As you can see there is a wide range of character types and the amount of points you can use to build a character with. Every superhero game I've ran and played in we did 350 points. That was 250 points base plus 100 points in Complications. For normals games we did 50-100 point characters.

 

[JamesDixon]

Sounds like you had an unreasonable DM. 100 feet sideways is not the same damage as 100 feet straight down. And armor should have cushioned some of the blow. Falling down, the ground hits 100% of you, whereas flying sideways the tree does not hit 100% of you, unless its a massive tree.

It was a new DM. I'm not unhappy with what happened as I got an awesome story out of it.

To make up for it he offered to resurrect our characters or to have us create new ones. I chose to create a Kender Thief. He was an interesting fellow. We went to one of the planes of Hell. He got married to a demoness. Stole the party cleric's holy symbol by "accident" that lead to us almost wiping in Hell because she couldn't heal any of us in combat.

Married a demoness and went to Hell? Sounds like my first wife.....

His demoness was a sex fiend and never left him unsatisfied. Was your first wife the same way?

 

[saint amchad]

Oh, I played Champions back in the day. I thought Hero took out the superhero aspect to be a more generic system.

 

[JamesDixon]

Oh, I played Champions back in the day. I thought Hero took out the superhero aspect to be a more generic system.

Nope, the superhero stuff is all there. It's just that they added in all the genres to make it a toolkit system now.

 

[saint amchad]

Sounds like you had an unreasonable DM. 100 feet sideways is not the same damage as 100 feet straight down. And armor should have cushioned some of the blow. Falling down, the ground hits 100% of you, whereas flying sideways the tree does not hit 100% of you, unless its a massive tree.

It was a new DM. I'm not unhappy with what happened as I got an awesome story out of it.

To make up for it he offered to resurrect our characters or to have us create new ones. I chose to create a Kender Thief. He was an interesting fellow. We went to one of the planes of Hell. He got married to a demoness. Stole the party cleric's holy symbol by "accident" that lead to us almost wiping in Hell because she couldn't heal any of us in combat.

Married a demoness and went to Hell? Sounds like my first wife.....

His demoness was a sex fiend and never left him unsatisfied. Was your first wife the same way?

Unfortunately no, she was a bigtittygothgirl who turned into a Solamith rather than a Succubus...

 

[ERYFKRAD]

you're not supposed to fight everything in your path.

 

[Alex]

you're not supposed to fight everything in your path.

Nah, look, you are having the pessimist attitude. Think of it like this: "You are not supposed to fight everything in your path yet".

 

[L'ennui]

GURPS is a terrific system if you want to create highly granular characters with lots of personality and differenciation between them. It's also widely scalable and adaptable to different settings, campaigns, power levels, etc. Even the level of complexity of the rules being used can be adjusted by the GM for any given campaign or adventure, so it can play as lightweight as any OSR game or as crunchy as HERO, depending on what the GM has in mind.

In play, everything feels more real and immersive because the game's baseline "action-movie realism" feels very solidly grounded – incidentally, this makes it feel even more special when you play at higher power levels, since the departure from normal human capabilities creates a very stark contrast. The combat system is also one of the best I've enjoyed in a tabletop RPG so far, highly tactical, with lots of options for all character types. I can see why they would have wanted that for Fallout.

On the down side, the system is let down by antiquated (i.e. non-existent) marketing and the company's stubborn refusal to do anything else but put out more and more autistic, hyper-focused mini supplements that can only ever interest a small niche of GURPS experts.

Visually, the presentation is also very dry and soulless for the latest edition (Fourth Edition) when compared to the previous one. The layout and the tone of the text sometimes makes reading the Basic Set an exercise in willpower – but once you've gotten through most of it, it becomes very easy to reference and the rules are mostly clear and sensible.

Ideally, GURPS would need a new Basic Set that has better presentation and includes some of the more lightweight/narrativist options presented in various supplements to make character creation and GMing easier – more cinematic and vaguely defined skills, on-the-fly NPC creation, simpler combat rules – while cutting down or amalgating many of the less critical content. The length and complexity of character creation is systematically the biggest obstacle to getting new players to try out GURPS (unless the GM prepares pregenerated characters for everyone, but as a player I wouldn't even be interested in trying out an RPG where I can't create my own character). People also talk about the system being too crunchy, but that's really only because of the bad presentation. The core rules are very simple and you're not supposed to use every optional rule in the book – but you have to read all of the book to grok that, which is bad design.