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Thread Summary - It's the GURPS thread. - Share GURPS things that you made, games you've run, or anything else related that you found particularly neat and you want other people to know about. - Celebrate your favorite GURPS anything. My personal favorite is reminding people that GURPS has detailed rules for tactical shooting and technical grappling, if you find yourself brave enough and you eat Advanced Squad Leader for breakfast with a side of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for lunch. - Ask/tell about GURPS: "I'm thinking about a game..." "Run it in GURPS!!" "Tell me how?" "Use these books..." - Dr. Kromm and the Mook appreciation station - Does anybody remember that one guy who thought he could get 150 free points for making a magic sword because he didn't understand how the system works? As with any other thread, please remain civil and respectful. GURPS covers such a wide breadth of topic matter and people have many opinions on SJGames and the extended product line as well as how they conduct their business, to which the Industry thread is good to slag off rightfully so. For all GURPS related things, welcome home, y'all. Introduction GURPS is the common acronym for the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (sic), now in its 4th Edition. It is published by Steve Jackson Games, headquartered in Austin, Texas. The official description for it is as follows from SJGames' website, http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/: quote:Welcome to the Generic Universal RolePlaying System! Also, on GURPS Lite, which is free (as in beer): quote:GURPS Lite is a 32-page distillation of the basic GURPS rules. It covers the essentials of character creation, combat, success rolls, adventuring, and game mastering for GURPS Fourth Edition. GURPS is a somewhat ornery system that has been able to do almost everything that you can throw at it. It is the Honda Civic Type-R of systems. It can do all the things many other game engines specialize in, and once you get how it handles, it can move fast, but there is a chance if you modify it too heavily it will explode while you're driving it. It could also be said to be the Toyota Highlander of game engines to continue the car analogies. You could drive it into a large body of water, tow it out later, and then with a couple of wrenches get it working again. It might be squishy and smell funny, but GURPS will always be GURPS and nothing else can quite take the punishment people like to throw at the system, especially when it comes to rules arguments. The thing that GURPS does well head and shoulders above anything else is it provides a very rigorous set of logic to how poo poo works, and this allows GMs to fully realize in a detail-oriented manner how their world works. Steve Jackson said himself at FnordCon 3 (the SJGames convention, held virtually in 2020) that GURPS was because he wasn't satisfied with hand waving details and wanted the details that other systems could not provide. That, and because he had lost the predecessor system, "The Fantasy Trip" in a licensing hell legal battle. "Man to Man" predated both of these and proved to be the foundation for the oldest editions of GURPS, of which the DNA still lives on today with the almighty hex grid. They will likely not be covered in this thread in detail but if you wanna talk about 'em go hog wild. GURPS also has done things the GURPS way basically forever. You can argue until you're blue in the face about how something is designed but when you understand the GURPS approach to game logic and game interpretation, for 95% of the things out there they are very clear and unambiguous. The remaining 5% is incessantly argued and even though a GM could reasonably just be like "it's like this" and slam the book shut, it will invariably still bug someone at the table because they fundamentally disagree with the interpretation -- that's part of the fun of a kitchen sink system. --- How to play GURPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcZ984Ee2MU At its core, GURPS uses only six sided dice and wants you to roll low versus some kind of target. A more comprehensive summary is below: - Roll 3d6 and compare to a target number. If you meet or beat the target number by rolling under, you pass! If not, you fail. - Your target number is typically determined by an existing number, such as a skill you have, a primary attribute (STrength, DeXterity, IQ, HealTh), a secondary attribute (Speed, Basic Move, Basic Lift, Hit Points, etc) - If you succeed in a roll by 10 or more or roll a natural 3, you critically succeed. That's very good. The GM will tell you just how good. - If you fail a roll by 10 or more or roll a natural 18, you critically fail. That's very bad. The GM will tell you just how bad. - In combat, if you roll to hit someone, you hit them, but they are entitled to an "Active Defense". The defender gets a roll of their own! If they succeed, no damage. - Rolling for damage is one of the only times you roll more or less dice (there are other very limited circumstances but damage is the most common). - If you take enough damage then you must make a test against one of your stats (Health), and if you fail, you go unconscious. - If you take more multiples of damage then you start making Health tests, and if you fail, you die! - If you take six times your maximum HP, you are 100% dead! - (Insert a shitload of rules for every use case here including things that modify the above core engine) GURPS Lite pretty much is the same, except the last bit. --- Introductory Resources for Discussion - GURPS Basic is a two-book reference manual separated into player-facing, GURPS Characters; and the GM and expanded rules, GURPS Campaigns. They should be treated as a reference series instead of being read linearly. - How to be a GURPS GM is a helpful manual to understand how to actually run GURPS! Unfortunately, there are very few good actual plays of GURPS because it is like the Virtua Fighter of RPG systems. If you don't know what's going on already, watching it may look rather dry and boring. --- Further Reading These are things on how to extend GURPS to whatever you want it to be. They provide specific interpretations of rules and modify what's needed to deliver the kind of experience you're looking for - some can be combined with others, but not without some weirdness. This is by no means a comprehensive list, just books that I've read through over the years and have leveraged in some of my games. Some of them will likely never see play again or they are famous in their own unique way, so I've also included them in here. Got a recommendation? Let me know! - GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is a product line so popular it was Kickstarted and then turned into its own game with a fresh coat of paint, now called Dungeon Fantasy (Powered by GURPS). The original Dungeon Fantasy line has more than 20 books, the last of which is GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 21: Megadungeons. If you want a game that has a very specific interpretation of dungeon crawling (and I mean super specific), this game series does it, does it well, and is a lot of fun. You can absolutely throw weird poo poo in here from other GURPS books including futuristic weapons for that really old-school Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or Caves of Qud feeling. - GURPS Martial Arts is a book that extends weapons combat that don't involve guns (use GURPS Gun-Fu for that for cinematic games). This includes real world martial arts and weapon options, cultural notes, as well as fantasy martial arts examples. It also has notes on if you want to make a game using combat sports. Do you want a system that is a realistic but dramatic retelling of The Ultimate Fighter season 1? Uh...Take this and GURPS Technical Grappling! Martial Arts is also combined with GURPS Dungeon Fantasy pretty readily. - GURPS Magic is the kitchen sink book that deals with magic not just from a fantasy perspective, but also a modern one. It uses a spell dependency system so that you must know either specific spells or a certain number of a type of spell to get other spells. Generally speaking, all of the schools are interesting and have interesting things, and they go far beyond the capabilities of what you might expect from something like Dungeons and Dragons. If you're looking for a spell to mitigate radiation poisoning (or to inflict it), there are spells like that in this book. - GURPS Thaumatology is a more esoteric book that extends how magic users...use their magic. Part setting, part mechanics, it provides some details for "magical realism" and how magic might be used in everyday life, as well as how it may be regulated. If you thought urban fantasy was kind of a neat new genre, this might be up your alley. - GURPS Monster Hunters and GURPS Action are other "re-imaginings" of GURPS in their respective genres. They introduce super-competent specialists that are unabashed heroes that can climb walls with a Leatherman multitool and take a chainsaw to a group of vampires in short order, or putting on sunglasses in the Loading Program and going "Guns...I need lots of guns..." then proceed to do the hotel lobby shootout fight from the Matrix. They are cool and neat! - GURPS Classic: Black Ops is an incredible setting book that provides details on how to make hyper-competent soldiers that wage the secret war against everything nobody is supposed to know about. This is also the book which provided the basis for one of the only Traditional Games threads to make it to the Comedy Goldmine run by Winson_Paine: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=972026 - well worth the read up to its incredible conclusion. Sadly, many of the embeds have been lost to the sands of time, but perhaps someone has a backup. - GURPS Technology books deal not with specific worlds, but specific eras of technology that would be featured in a game world. This includes Low Tech covering the medieval era up to the Renaissance, High Tech which covers contemporary things (and its crib sheets for lots of guns), Ultra-Tech, which covers everything speculative science fiction has to offer like light sabers, monowire, battledroids, and exotic superscience. - GURPS Supers is supposed to be the book that allows you to make superheroes in a highly granular way. One of the first books to extend "Power Modifiers", which makes abilities look completely nuts unless you are used to the jargon. If you have ever fancied yourself creating a hero but you need to know exactly how their power set works (can I use my fireblast to heat up a hotdog, or can it only scorch my enemies to ash and there's no fine control of it? what about superheating water?), this is a book you may be interested in. - GURPS Classic is a product line that specifically refers to GURPS 3rd Edition. Old sourcebooks and stuff that still are in circulation or re-released but haven't had a rules refresh (typically, they don't need it really) fall under this. Lots of setting books are extremely well researched and edited and they go through the highly competent line editors. I personally recommend GURPS Classic: Swashbucklers, one of my first experiences with GURPS. - GURPS Cyberpunk is a special book that was partially responsible by the SJGames HQ offices being raided by a three letter government intelligence agency. It is famous for almost tanking SJGames but Steve Jackson took said agency to court and won against the Man on legal terms, thus making Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games one of the most cyber punks of them all. Before you ask, just Google it for extended coverage. It is worth the rabbit hole. - Pyramid is the long running official zine for GURPS providing any number of usable bits and bobs for a variety of the flavors of GURPS. Some of them are specific to Dungeon Fantasy and feature more options for that specific thing, others are more general stuff. --- Recommended Reading If you're looking to get started with GURPS but don't want to spend money on it, GURPS Lite is pretty good. If you want to drop some lucre on the game, you need at the minimum GURPS Basic, ideally both books. How to be a GURPS GM is an incredible book for any GM, but really helps out GURPS GMs specifically. Written by a long time fan that turned into a contributor for GURPS. What you want to use GURPS for really will determine what books you should look at. If you have no idea where to start, maybe try GURPS Action. --- Specialized Jargon GURPS has a lot of it. Just ask and if it is relevant and someone remembers to remind me, I'll put it in here. - Templates are GM-preconfigured packages and basically what makes a lot of GURPS go "huh, that's cool". You can template basically anything that costs points to ensure that your players are getting a baseline of competency so you don't end up with like, a space captain in a hard science fiction game who doesn't know how to put on an EVA suit, use oxygen, or know anything other than how to play chess really well. You can also create templates as gear packages so if someone cannot figure out how many torches to bring and also forgot to bring food for every other game of this type, you can make sure they have at least 5 torches and 5 days of hard tack because they bought Personal Basics. But, I want to spend money? - Warehouse 23 has the entire product line of GURPS available digitally! Some in print. http://www.warehouse23.com/products?taxons%5B%5D=558398545-sb A Picture of a Dog As usual in the other threads, for anybody who is not interested in this thread, here is a picture of a dog wearing a hoodie. 
aldantefax fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 10:09
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As usual, reserved because I think I'm close to the character limit already in the OP.
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Jan 15, 2021 10:09
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Here are other silly metaphors for describing GURPS: - GURPS is like the Ultima Online of tabletop role playing games since you can totally create a wizard that wears full plate mail wielding an AR-15 that can speed cast and huff reagents while running around and ripping portals open to places nobody should go. You can also hoard cheese. - GURPS is like the box wine you get at the store. You don't want to admit you're drinking it and it might be an affront to all you know, but once you try it, you get the practicality of its packaging, storage, and now you want everything to be delivered to you in this way that is reasonable. - GURPS is like a box of sandwiches that you prepared for a picnic with bread you baked yourself out of wild yeast that you cut the crusts off of because you know your players like it like that. It also is the feeling you get when your players slowly chew the sandwiches then vomit because they decided they don't like mustard with ham, even though that's what they put on their order card for you. - GURPS is like the Dwarf Fortress of -- okay I'm done with this post
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Jan 15, 2021 10:17
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Oh gently caress, a new GURPS thread. Maybe I can actually work up the nerve to figure out if GURPS will work for [random game idea I have concept notes for] or if it will require too much GURPS deep lore.
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Jan 15, 2021 10:22
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karmicknight posted:Oh gently caress, a new GURPS thread. GURPS will definitely make you think deeply about a concept when developing it moreso than writing down "snakes on a plane", that's for sure
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Jan 15, 2021 10:30
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I used to be a diehard GURPS fans but nowadays I find it more fascinating than useful. GURPS Goblins is good, however, unabashedly good.
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Jan 15, 2021 16:08
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Sometimes I miss playing GURPS.
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Jan 15, 2021 16:12
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ah yeah, poo poo. I love gurps (reading the sourcebooks)
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Jan 15, 2021 16:34
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paradoxGentleman posted:GURPS Goblins is good, however, unabashedly good. I bought this game sometime in the mid-2000s after hearing great things about it on an rpg.net thread. It didn't quite hook me like it does other people. The book is a blast to read, but overall the appeal of playing in a mostly normal (despite being a Goblin) Dickensian urchin in Georgian London didn't quite appeal. I'm not being facetious here - is there something I missed about the game? Is the appeal mostly in how well written the book was, rather than in actual play?
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Jan 15, 2021 16:34
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EverettLO posted:I bought this game sometime in the mid-2000s after hearing great things about it on an rpg.net thread. It didn't quite hook me like it does other people. The book is a blast to read, but overall the appeal of playing in a mostly normal (despite being a Goblin) Dickensian urchin in Georgian London didn't quite appeal. Well, I was referring to the writing, and I haven't played it myself to check, but I think the appeal is kind of like the appeal is in taking a character from level 1 to level 20 in D&D: you go from a nobody to someone who can make the cosmos (or at least London) quake. But just the opportunity to play in a setting like this would be fun, I think.
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Jan 15, 2021 17:02
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I had no idea Goblins was a thing but that sounds fantastic. I find GURPS managed to do what TSR in its post Gygax days failed to, which is produce highly specialized supplements that cater to an extremely specific niche without jeopardizing the rest of the player base because it doesn't really care. SJGames makes a staggering amount of money on Munchkin as well so it mostly keeps GURPS alive and maintained because it's fuckin cool and dope
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Jan 15, 2021 17:32
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GURPS is the game that I almost never play but love filling my shelves with. I still love the idea of that old meme of piling up all of your source books and randomly picking a few to determine what type of game you're going to play. In the event that SJG releases an updated 4e or a shiny new 5e, I hope they include templates in the core book - probably as a link rather than dedicating many pages to them given their size. I've seen more games for Dungeon Fantasy (partly due to the relative ease of character creation) and I'd love to see an uptick in other-genre play. I doubt this will happen, however - GURPS content is still coming out but it's clear that their priorities aren't in that area given their words on DF back in '17 and '18 and how infrequently GURPS gets a mention higher than "Ehhhhh . . ." in the stakeholder reports.
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Jan 15, 2021 17:56
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aldantefax posted:I had no idea Goblins was a thing but that sounds fantastic. I've heard that the Munchkin money is finally beginning to slowly taper off, although it is still their largest seller by far. GURPS is currently in a weird spot. There's no call or need for a new edition, and while they still produce a fair amount of specialized content, it all gets dropped through their online seller and isn't strongly advertised. Their mode of making new PDFs of deeply specialized material for low prices and keeping all their old PDFs available seems good to me, but it doesn't appear to be growing their brand. In 2019 and likely 2020 they made more money on The Fantasy Trip than they did GURPS. GURPS isn't even their biggest RPG line anymore. Kickstarter in general seems to be their big cash cow right now. They've tried with some success of get GURPS into the KS trough, but the only thing that seems like it might have brought in new fans was the Dungeon Fantasy boxed set but they've flat out said it has no place to move forward in this market. I have no idea how they should proceed. They're sitting on an incredible pile of content and the system does the moderate-to-high crunch universal stuff as well or better than anyone. The strong bell curve of a 3d6 roll makes for a better time, in my mind, than a d20. The intimidating options mostly only come up in character creation, and playing the actual game is as smooth or smoother than D&D. It just doesn't seem to be drawing in new customers, though. That makes me sad. Flail Snail posted:I doubt this will happen, however - GURPS content is still coming out but it's clear that their priorities aren't in that area given their words on DF back in '17 and '18 and how infrequently GURPS gets a mention higher than "Ehhhhh . . ." in the stakeholder reports. Maybe their lack of interest is the problem. It seems like making bold new setting using GURPS-lite and putting them out on KS is a no brainer, but so far they mostly haven't.
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Jan 15, 2021 18:09
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This takes me back. I bought way too many books in the '90s and then never played it.  Is there a reason for a new edition, really? Could this instead just be a system that has just reached as far as it could go, design-wise, as far as its core goes?
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Jan 15, 2021 19:11
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GURPS 4e has been out for ages and it doesn't really need a rules refresh because it's so malleable and its core it so deceptively simple that people will turn it into any old thing. You can probably do more with the "3d roll low" idea behind GURPS by adding more cruft to it like adding reserve dice and better rules for vehicles (GURPS 3e Vehicles required calculus to determine energy differentials, as an extreme but real example). GURPS also doesn't do super high powered gonzo stuff very well, so if you wanted to make, I dunno, Sailor Moon GURPS or something it might fall flat if you try to exhaustively deconstruct and attempt to reconstruct the source material. I mean, the main thing about GURPS is that it is crunchy and it demands that you curate it to make exactly the game you want. It does not presume what kind of game you want unless you pick up Monster Hunters, Action, or Dungeon Fantasy. If you picked up something like GURPS Fantasy it will tell you about "fantasy things you probably should know about in our traditional interpretation of Tolkien-inspired Western Fantasy", but it will not require you to create a world that implicitly has all these races and what not that did the needful against the big bad guys or what not.
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Jan 15, 2021 19:43
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My challenge to anybody in the GURPS thread that has not played it is to give it a wheel and to find someone who is seasoned enough to run it to know what to add and remove to make things spicy. I am also of course happy to share some stuff about one of the GURPS games that I planned out and ran for a minute on the forums but then thanks to my extreme incompetence at posting for play it fell over in about three pages. The setting was cool though!
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Jan 15, 2021 19:44
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The GURPS understander has logged onkarmicknight posted:Maybe I can actually work up the nerve to figure out if GURPS will work for [random game idea I have concept notes for] quote:or if it will require too much GURPS deep lore.  Absurd Alhazred posted:Is there a reason for a new edition, really? Could this instead just be a system that has just reached as far as it could go, design-wise, as far as its core goes? There are a few things a new edition could do better, like how clunky the vehicle rules are, but given how good the setting treatment/rules modification books (like DF) have been, I don't know if even that's necessary. They could easily do a treatment for like, GURPS Armored Core or whatever using 4e as a base, and it'd probably be great. My main wish for GURPS is just that it got more new material more often because GURPS setting treatments and theme-appropriate rules treatments are so, so good. I'm also going to plug GURPS Space and Spaceships, which are probably the best mechanical support out there for running any kind of game involving people on a spaceship doing spaceship stuff. Special callout to Transhuman Space which is still probably the single best hard sci-fi kitchen sink setting for an RPG that's ever been published, but my heart will always belong to space homebrew. Anyway, order memes online 
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Jan 15, 2021 19:48
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I was remiss to not mention Encounters at Farpoint Station, the GURPS Transhuman setting book about a group of people that were such die-hard Trekkies that they genetically modified themselves to be what Gene Roddenberry plastered into TOS and TNG and then lived on a space station to live out that fantasy in a microcosm. Of course, that means when someone sets their phase lasers to kill...Things get hairy
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Jan 15, 2021 19:51
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aldantefax posted:I am also of course happy to share some stuff about one of the GURPS games that I planned out and ran for a minute on the forums but then thanks to my extreme incompetence at posting for play it fell over in about three pages. The setting was cool though!  The best game I've been in was GMed not by someone with great system mastery but someone who knew how to outline genre expectations. I lucked into a group with a local horror author. I'm sure it'd have been better if I'd have read his stuff beforehand and got all of the references but the game he ran was just  .
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Jan 15, 2021 20:00
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I don't think a fifth edition would add enough to justify itself, but unfortunately the industry is predicated on releasing new editions every 5 to 10 years to keep interest and revenue alive. GURPS seems to be a test case for why this model is necessary. I've never used the system for super high powered campaigns given how it's basically the go-to system for the opposite, but how different is high level GURPS from Hero System? Looking at it they both have a similar resolution mechanic and a similar point-buy system. Is GURPS actually uniquely bad at higher levels or does it just fall apart in the way that most not-specifically-designed systems do at higher power?
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Jan 15, 2021 20:02
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aldantefax posted:I had no idea Goblins was a thing but that sounds fantastic. I just want to specify, to make sure there's no misunderstanding: In Goblins you start playing as hungry street urchins at the very bottom of the social totem pole, with the objective of: 1) finding enough alcohol to sate the alcoholism that all goblins share; 2) finding enough food to keep soul and body together; 3) finding enough money to improve your social standing The last one is particularly important because the Goblin Status advantage gives you a bonus to any and all rolls, because goblins are just that classist. There's a very good couple of examples on the subject that I managed to fish out: quote:Example: Were Jerusalem Grip (Status -2) to engage in a bout of pugilism with Mr Ripper (Status 2), the good Ripper would be at a considerable advantage (+2) as compared to his unworthy opponent (-2). Mr Ripper's advantage would equally apply were he, for example, endeavouring to seduce the lowly Grip's one true love and steal Grip's few honest pennies. If the GM were making a Stealth roll on behalf of the miserable Grip, as he sneaks up to the admirable Ripper to exact revenge, then this roll would also be at -2 (while Ripper would receive a +2 on his Hearing roll). It's treated as a disadvantage but honestly it should just be considered a feature of the game, if nothing else because every sentient entity suffers from it. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 20:05
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It's not bad but it is silly from a mechanical perspective because after about 400 points you're roughly in superhero territory. It is as easy or difficult as you want to make it to be for players and the GM. You could very reasonably run a high powered game with pregenerated characters (good way to ensure compliance and general balance). It can start to fall apart if you are trying to find a rule for every last bit of thing. After about 500 points GURPS stops mattering as much and you can hand wave most things. Heavy usage of wildcard skills, big powers, and so on make for some wacky jacks poo poo that you mostly go "okay, make a roll, no reasonable human would ever be able to accomplish this, but you are larger than cinematic, so it sounds reasonable for you.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:09
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EverettLO posted:I've never used the system for super high powered campaigns given how it's basically the go-to system for the opposite, but how different is high level GURPS from Hero System? Looking at it they both have a similar resolution mechanic and a similar point-buy system. Is GURPS actually uniquely bad at higher levels or does it just fall apart in the way that most not-specifically-designed systems do at higher power? It's not really high power level or godlike beings that GURPS doesn't work so well for, it's that GURPS assumes an internally consistent world where the likelihood of things happening is probabilistic. Some story-telling genres simply don't work that way, which is fine! But GURPS doesn't have explicit mechanics for like, "narrative control," or a hero having his or her heroic moment, which is a feature of some genres. So if your superheroes game idea is like The Boys, or if your mecha idea is like Gundam, GURPS is probably going to feel about right. But if it's Sailor Moon or Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, maybe not so much because those belong to a different type of story-telling genre. Another way to put this: In GURPS, Superman punching Batman kills him instantly and not only kills him but probably makes his entire body explode. That's how some types of superhero stories work, but I wouldn't say it's the norm for superhero stories. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 20:16
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As someone who has read the game but never run or played it, "only use the parts you need" is not useful advice. It's like telling someone who's never painted before to "only use the colors you need". True, but not actually helpful. It sounds like a new GURPS edition would benefit more from expanded GM advice and onboarding, rather than rules changes. The OP mentions several splatbooks that contain this information, but IMO that should be in the core rules rather than external reference texts.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:24
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mellonbread posted:As someone who has read the game but never run or played it, "only use the parts you need" is not useful advice. It's like telling someone who's never painted before to "only use the colors you need". True, but not actually helpful. GURPS is more like the lego brand than a single lego set, and while there are a lot of pieces you want in every game, having the proverbial lego pirates pieces in the core set would just get in the way most of the time.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:30
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mellonbread posted:As someone who has read the game but never run or played it, "only use the parts you need" is not useful advice. It's like telling someone who's never painted before to "only use the colors you need". True, but not actually helpful. How to be A GURPS GM does help you outline the parts you think you might need. I think it's unreasonable when a game can (and does) offer a list of things you can do with it that far outstrips the capabilities of multiple other systems combined and also combine them in interesting ways it is impossible to just take parts off the rack without knowing what it is you want to do. You're staring at a bunch of lumber and power tools and it's up to you to figure out how you want to transform that into something. All that said, GURPS does say in Campaigns how to create games as well, so if you are diligent then you have truly everything you need in just GURPS Basic, and everything else is an extension or re-interpretation of those things. GURPS by design asks that you frontload all your work so that you have a consistent and smooth experience during play. This very much means a GM really ought to think of enough details to make a game make sense instead of expecting the players to invent narrative from a blank slate to then riff solutions off of. GURPS even goes so far as to offer campaign worksheets to help you work out those details. So, it is there, and the community is also usually pretty open to help people realize their idea.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:33
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The Oldest Man posted:The GURPS understander has logged on As one of the great oldish ones of TG who played and ran far too much GURPS in his life, this is all pretty much correct. Especially the part about Space and Spaceships, the former of which is just absurdly good at generating settings, and the latter of which does narrative spaceship combat better than anything else I can think of offhand outside of just going Full Abstraction with a PbtA-like system. Also I will basically add that Black Ops is Good. Black Ops is very Good.
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Jan 16, 2021 03:45
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I was also shocked that one of the other legendary TG games that happened to be run in GURPS, Blackbird Dreaming, had concluded some time ago (disclaimer: I have been away from TG for a spell). You couldn't get further apart from games run in the same core rules engine than Black Ops and Blackbird Dreaming and all the many many games people have tried. I think that's also the point, which is, GURPS has tons of great resources but it doesn't do a lot of hand holding because of its design. It will tell you considerations for running your certain masterpiece of a game and also put front and center things you need to consider, such as: - What do people do for recreation in a hyper-futuristic world? What are the kinds of things they eat and drink? - How do people give and receive medical care in the setting you're in, and specifically the game you're running? - How do various alien species or nonhuman races see each other? GURPS Space and Transhuman Space both have these fantastic details about if you want to make a star-sweeping campaign and you want to make that feel well supported. If ever you have to wonder how much work a GM puts into their games behind the scenes, a GURPS GM, very specifically, has done a lot of thinking. I've never seen a long running GURPS game fall over because the rules broke down after a certain point. Also, hi Muk, legendary elder! Re: Blackbird Dreaming, I think Gaist was planning on making that game into a book? Which, I would totally be down for reading.
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Jan 16, 2021 04:08
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Alright, allow me to present the GURPS game I ran which crashed and burned for a couple of reasons in the 2015 era and talk about what I liked from the GURPS perspective and how I'd do it again if I ran the same thing. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vSD7VUhk1HOJqZ_qr0xVsAzv6xKbMj-iSSsoa43v1hI/edit?usp=sharing Chronicles of the Psychic Wars took very heavy inspiration from paramilitary espionage in a science fiction setting that focused heavily on conflict in the South China Sea. In this particular interpretation of the real world, people who had psychic capabilities (very common) were recruited to be used to control large robots for all the things you would use giant robots for. This included, of course, war, so giant robots powered by run of the mill psychics were common. Some people were born without the psychic property and referred to as "Nulls", and due to certain phenomena there were psychic events that caused areas to become dead zones for operations. Also, Tibet used a railgun built on the dark side of the moon using their psychic robots to level Beijing before it was destroyed. This was the kind of game that had these kinds of events in it. The original concept came from doing two rounds of Microscope with a few people including TheOldestMan, and then we agreed there is some pretty cool game ideas going on from that which calibrated what we wanted out of a game. Round 1 of Microscope: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14qtc451BupvzZZU4F0leKCJ9Rex7Pf8Ok7G3SWr8D78/edit?usp=sharing Round 2 of Microscope: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QYoQSvJcDA0nQbihYYPUAQA4CLZI8mRx5X2bz9PQDHU/edit?usp=sharing If you don't quite know what you want out of a GURPS game but you have your players already on board, I cannot recommend enough doing something like this because everybody gets a chance at buying into the game world and then you have a real clear picture of what parts you need. In order to make this a GURPS thing, I pictured highly competent super soldiers with mind powers that could, at some point, hop into giant robots and do cool fights. I also had figured that we would do this in a "near real" scenario following the fiction we had created in Microscope. As a result, I went with GURPS Action as the core platform for this for the characters, and I also included GURPS Psi for the psychically enabled characters so they could spend discretionary points on those abiltiies. Anybody who was a "Null" got a compensation bonus by being able to increasing anything else with those discretionary points instead. For the giant robots and most of TL9 and the exotic psi-tech I turned to GURPS Ultra-Tech as TL9 represents plausible near future stuff like giant robots. Of special interest and likely overdesign was to flesh out the setting bits that would be useful for characters to have as part of their backstory as part of being in TL9^. What does that actually mean? I looked to sources like Patlabor and Dominion Tank Police, completely missing the fact this was shaping up to be a Metal Gear Solid type of campaign, as I still have not played that series (you can boo me later). I thought of things like Armored Core and Battletech where there were mercenary units that maintained giant robots on their own and operated out of theaters of engagement and alliances were constantly shifting back and forth and there were huge power players and all that. Of course, this meant that I also had to create a map and belligerents to reflect the changing state of the islands that the players were fighting over. My head got a bit big and I was really excited to make a custom map in Google Maps using real world overlays and putting mission sites on the map like this poo poo was UN Squadron from the SNES days and everything was going hella cool and good. Of course, as mentioned, there was a great deal of interest and energy put forth in the game setup, but here is why this game did not last very long: - GURPS does not have a system to keep you engaged in a play by post situation - Allowing for Nulls when you really wanted giant robot combats to be part of the highlight feature reel means that you're going to get at least one player that wants to play a Null, perhaps even more because they don't want to deal with the rules from GURPS Psi - Giant robots can and will absolutely plaster one another if they aren't given huge stats, which also means anybody in a giant robot could plaster our heroes if they were not in a giant robot Now, hindsight being 20/20, the majority of this I blame on my shortcomings to stay consistent with a play by post game, which has nothing to do with GURPS. The other bits though do highlight where GURPS can be kind of iffy and weak and it is worth doing a longer form treatment of the mechanics you want to use, because you can just make any old poo poo up about a setting and that's generally fine. If I was going to run this game again, I would do two things differently in order to directly address the above concerns from a mechanical standpoint: - No player is a Null. Nulls are special individuals and if they have figured out how to make it in the game world they are likely solitary super-badasses that can go toe to toe with psychic users. This also provides a useful narrative thing because you could do things like "What if a Null could make more of themselves" or "What if a Null had special abilities that would otherwise make them extremely dangerous to psychics", that kind of thing. - Giant robots should be handled in a completely separate system, such as LANCER. This would mean whenever people are on the ground, they are in "GURPS mode", and when it's time for giant robot smashy time, use the LANCER RPG mech combat system full stop. Characters would map their competencies by in-narrative achievements and receive License Level upgrades at the same rate as they would in LANCER, which is "one license level for every full mission completed, successfully or otherwise". Now, LANCER didn't exist yet in 2015, so I fell into a common trap of "Just run it end to end in GURPS" when GURPS really falls apart when it comes to vehicular everything. Even though I'm a huge fan of GURPS I am not married to using it anymore for anything and everything because there are other games out there that have a similar level of granularity (such as LANCER) that explicitly cover some kind of subject material. Anyway, I might go back and work on this concept again, because my primary beef with LANCER is that the non-mech combat stuff is basically nonexistent (they've acknowledged this and are working on updates to narrative play, so I hear). This would create a pretty suitable form of game that I'm looking for, and I already have 20-ish pages of custom setting to put with it.
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Jan 16, 2021 06:55
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This thread is giving me a lot of nostalgia. It's been years since I ran GURPS, but when I was in high school, I was completely in love with it; I'd only ever played D&D before, and I was completely enraptured by the concept of a point-buy system that you could customize based on actual roleplaying character traits, you guys!! Somehow this enthusiasm resulted in my local friends group running multiple incredibly ill-fated GURPS games, although one of them lasted long enough for my PC to get completely exploded in his first serious gunfight, then rebuilt as a brain in a jar piloting a robot version of his old body. I suspect our command of the rules was very half-assed, but who cares? I never actually got around to playing GURPS Goblins (unless you count throwing a couple of randomly-generated Goblins PCs into a megacrossover IRC casual game, which was not a good idea, but y'know, adolescence), but it's a really good read, and a great testament to how the GURPS line has supported some absolutely bizarre splatbooks and settings. This is a book that has a Random Childhood Abuse table, which you roll on six times during character creation. Six times!
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Jan 16, 2021 07:13
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Dungeon Fantasy is also pretty good. http://www.sjgames.com/dungeonfantasy/ If I had to characterise it, I'd call it the GURPS take on the OSR movement. A relatively streamlined version of the GURPS rules focused on Fantasy play. On Covid hiatus* , but I've been running a great campaign of it. Boxed copy might be hard to get hold of, but it's on drivethru. *You absolutely could run it online, but one of my conceits for this game was I was going to do this 'old skool', gathered around the table, battle maps and figures etc. So I've been running other stuff online.
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Jan 16, 2021 12:18
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paradoxGentleman posted:I used to be a diehard GURPS fans but nowadays I find it more fascinating than useful. the fact that they were so different physically and psychologically and yet they ended up having an identical society to Georgian England in every way seemed indefensible to me. For example, there’s a part about how goblins are incapable of religion, then you have Goblin Disraeli as prime minister, who’s Jewish somehow?? My favorite was infinite wars, and the traveller module infinite war.
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Jan 16, 2021 17:30
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I love Infinite War as a concept but I never actually got to play in or run such a game. Does anybody have any insights on how that whole thing worked and how to keep things from going all pear-shaped like RIFTS did?
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Jan 16, 2021 18:01
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Also, is anybody interested in specific mechanics discussions that need some kind of further treatment? There are probably at least a post or two about tactical combat and dungeon fantasy
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Jan 16, 2021 18:14
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I'm playing in a Fellowship game right now, and though my character sheet says "laser pistol (Ranged, Reload)", in my heart it's an infrared laser pistol (UT p115) with dazzle (ibid p113), beam, and pulse (ibid p118) settings. Though nowadays I have a lot of criticism of how GURPS does things, I do appreciate the system for giving me a (reasonable) taste for verisimilitude. Like adelantefax said, it feels good when a setting has "texture", and you gotta know the rules in order to break them. Now to convince the Overlord that lasers are technically "quiet" for the purpose of License to Kill because the blast wave emanates from the target and the source weapon is silent. Would-be munchkins: if your character buys their own guns, you're gonna want a Glock 22 (High-Tech p101) and a Barrett REC7 (Tactical Shooting p64). Ninja edit: Shout-out to Erika Chapell's Flying Circus for combining storygame with GURPS-style crunch wrt the dogfighting. CHIMlord fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jan 16, 2021 |
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Jan 16, 2021 18:15
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One of the things I really liked in both genre fiction and the like is "using seemingly mundane things in the context of the narrative to do something unexpected". This is doing something that you wouldn't normally do except in an emergency, like try to wrestle a horse using a magic spell because it's charging at you. You could make a pit of quicksand using Shape Earth to block its path and then haul it out later after it calmed down. Or, grappling a gargoyle because it took off flying with you holding onto it by a rope and trying to smash it to the ground.
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Jan 17, 2021 07:21
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One thing I have been wondering for a long time, but unable to play enough different systems to come up with a proper answer for is a question that might most easily be answered in this thread. If D&D is on one end of the randomness spectrum, where you only roll one dice [1d20], and FATE is on the opposite end (as far as I'm aware, discounting dice pool based games from this spectrum, I guess) where you roll [4d3-4], what sort of differences in gamefeel and experience do differing numbers of dice in the primary resolution mechanic lend to play? e: To clarify, I'm asking her because GURPS is the only game I can think of on the 3 dice point of the spectrum, meaning people in this thread are the most likely to have experience with 1, 2, 3 and 4 dice. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Jan 17, 2021 |
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Jan 17, 2021 07:45
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3d6 has a specific bell curve that puts most chances of success somewhere in the 50% range given average skill. I don't know that there's any system out there that has a normal task throw on 4d6 that isn't a roll and keep or pooled system. GURPS has a few things which hover around its dice resolution structure which generally favors heroic play. A very specific type of heroic play, mind, but it means that on an average die roll over a random distribution plot, you will generally succeed. Very loose assumptions time: - Average humans have a 10 as a base in every primary attribute. This means that any average skill starts at that attribute, so the assumed target number is 10 for tasks involving that skill which require some kind of specialized training. If someone was doing a skill that they had no training in, then they would be rolling with a target number of 5 or under (this is the "Default penalty" for most skills). - 3d6 has an average distribution curve with 10 and 11 being the most common numbers you'll encounter. See the model presented on anydice for an example: https://anydice.com/program/1 Rarely do you have characters that have purely average statistics. Unless you were playing a realistic game where you are a bunch of average jobbers like a zombie apocalypse game, there are almost certainly people who will have higher attributes or more specialized training in their career field unless they were a kid or something exceptional (GURPS uses average adults as its baseline anyway). So, let's say someone who received basic training at their job and is smarter than average just a little bit, but not a genius; or, they have average attributes and have highly specialized training in their specific task, like, uhh, Physics or something. They would both be represented on the dice roll to figure out something like ballistics. Just like folks might not know off hand how to add large sets of numbers together but do have access to tools that can, knowing and leveraging the environment is abstracted there. Simply adding more dice does not necessarily mean play goes one way or the other, but it matters what you do with those dice and how they are interpreted. Though GURPS is pretty simple in its task resolution and dice throws, it still uses nonbinary outcomes by leveraging success/failure margins (plus criticals). If you have specific luck based mechanics like criticals happening on the bell ends, the more dice you add surrounding that, the less likely those criticals will happen. Compare to Feng Shui which uses two dice plus an optional bonus die, and if it rolls all 6s on all dice then that is generally pretty rare + including a resource spend in favor of the player, so it should be reflected in the cinematic world. 1-die systems: d20, Basic Roleplaying (d100 counts as one die) 2-die systems: Feng Shui, FATE, PDQ, PbtA, Forged in the Dark 3-die systems: GURPS, Valherjar (never not gonna mention that game), not sure what else, maybe some OSR D&D clones 4-die systems: nothing that I'm aware of but Storyteller (world of darkness etc) has an average dice throw of 4 dice for average tasks in the game world
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Jan 17, 2021 08:34
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Heck yes, GURPS threads. I learned a surprising amount of basic information about the world from GURPS supplements, and their alternate history books were interesting and well realized, even if the second one got a smidge too libertarian-wanky at times. On the other hand, it had Caliph, also known as "the setting that would have NEVER been considered after 9/11."
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Jan 17, 2021 08:49
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DalaranJ posted:One thing I have been wondering for a long time, but unable to play enough different systems to come up with a proper answer for is a question that might most easily be answered in this thread.  You're roughly 50% likely to roll a 9, 10, 11, or 12 on 3d6 and if your effective skill is 12 then you have about a 75% chance of success. If you're reasonably skilled and doing a task of reasonable difficult under usual circumstances, you'll probably succeed. That also means that small modifiers (like from someone helping you or a tool that gives a seemingly-inconsequential +1 to skill) matter a lot more when your skill is 12 or less. At expert+ skill levels (like skill 20 Dungeon Fantasy swordsmen), you're going to be throwing modifiers like deceptive attack out to trade your effective skill down to the 12-13 level because the incremental .5% improved hit chance you get for having 18 skill instead of 17 is way better traded for smacking the other guy's dodge success chance downward by 12.5% etc., so that means in a lot of contested rolls in a high point game you're still going to be in that 65-75% chance to succeed area (and doing a bunch of flashy poo poo at the same time) rather than just hitting the auto-hit button every turn. So generally the feel of GURPS dice outcomes is that they're consistent and predictable but not certain (good for the type of game GURPS is trying to be) and the system really rewards you mechanically for understanding how the results curve works and what your options are to nudge it up and down for different types of rolls. The latter is a lot of fun once you get the curve and know what your options are, but I think it's also one of the things that scares people away from the system because you need a) to understand the likelihood of outcomes on 3d6, which is not complicated but less intuitive than a d20 and b) you need to understand your menu of options by which effective skill gets hosed with, which are going to be in the rulebook. I'll say this much about GURPS: if you want to run it live, and if you want it to be fast, you need one of (and ideally both) of these things:
aldantefax posted:One of the things I really liked in both genre fiction and the like is "using seemingly mundane things in the context of the narrative to do something unexpected". This is doing something that you wouldn't normally do except in an emergency, like try to wrestle a horse using a magic spell because it's charging at you. You could make a pit of quicksand using Shape Earth to block its path and then haul it out later after it calmed down. Or, grappling a gargoyle because it took off flying with you holding onto it by a rope and trying to smash it to the ground. Like having to use Shape Earth to mine two tons of basalt for a randomly generated fetch quest 
The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Jan 17, 2021 |
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Jan 17, 2021 08:58
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