Any Fans of GURPS?

[AsenRG]

Going from concepts like "bulletproof nudity" into rules terms feels kind of the wrong way round. Or put another way, it feels storygamey. Sorry, I'm not being very clear, I know.

Well, CRK definitely agrees, as evidenced by recent threads and this rule being one of his go-to examples. And I'd mostly agree as well.

That might or might not be a problem for some groups, but it is there.

 

[Raleel]

Doesn’t it kind of have to be fiction first though? Because mechanically it makes no sense. It only makes sense inside of that fiction.

Let me frame it another way - what makes it different from defining a abjuration school field of protection that is disrupted by armor and reduced by fabrics due to interference with the field? Or it feeds off of skin contact, leveraging the body’s natural energy?

 

[Sharrow]

The real problems I found with the system are the creation of NPCs, as they are created as PCs (for anything other than superficial depth).

I don't do that. I note down things they have that I think will be relevant, and add anything else later as it comes up, and take notes for later if it seems like the NPC will turn up again (including notes on what they're not skilled in). Only if I have both time and inclination do NPCs get full character sheets.

GURPS 4e's GM advice is pretty clear on this - NPCs aren't built on point budgets, and don't have to follow the PC chargen rules if it's not to the GM's benefit for them to do so.

 

[chuckdee]

Oddly enough I find the character assistant to be slow, confusing and frustrating. I'm much happier with a sheet of paper. I think the big thing to keep in mind is that GURPS isn't D&D. Oh, it can do D&D with the right tweaks but GURPS combat is generally as deadly and unforgiving as D&D at first level, even if you're playing Conan.

There are some concessions they give to this in some optional rules that I always use.

 

[AsenRG]

Doesn’t it kind of have to be fiction first though? Because mechanically it makes no sense. It only makes sense inside of that fiction.

I'm not sure what "fiction first" means, here...

Let me frame it another way - what makes it different from defining a abjuration school field of protection that is disrupted by armor and reduced by fabrics due to interference with the field?

The fact that it isn't defined as such?

Or it feeds off of skin contact, leveraging the body’s natural energy?

So would casting "slipperiness" on a naked enemy disrupt that?
Or, for that matter, casting it on yourself?

 

[Toadmaster]

Can someone give me a sum up of the difference between 3e and 4e? I played 3e many moons ago and have books but have not spent much time with 4e

Hard to put into a list without getting very detailed. I kind of agree / disagree with Asen's one word answer.

The short answer is mostly point / balance concerns and tons of added options.

At its core there probably are not many serious changes, but as a whole 4E feels far more complex to me.

 

[robertsconley]

Going from concepts like "bulletproof nudity" into rules terms feels kind of the wrong way round. Or put another way, it feels storygamey. Sorry, I'm not being very clear, I know.

(shrug) It how it would look if you were observing the actions in certain Swords & Sorcery settings. Just like if you were in a world ruled by Saturday Morning Cartoon logic you would observe this.



Although it has no basis in real-world logic. In some settings, the illogical, the nonsensical, and the fantastic are the logic of how that world works.

Yes it sounds like storygaming but the difference is that for GURPS a world ruled by narrative rules means that it is a in-game thing not a metagame like storygame makes it out to be. In the above example, the characters are aware that their world is ruled by certain rules that mimic the narrative of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Wile E. Coyote continues to do what he does because his obsession with getting the Road Runner dominates his thinking despite his continued failures. Sound insane? It is by real-world standards but it is not it is the world of Toons and it is par for the course for its inhabitants.


GURPS handles this without using metagame mechanics by thoroughly describing the characters and expecting the players and referees to give it their best shot at roleplaying that character as described. This is why GURPS has Discworld and Girl Genius as settings.

 

[David Johansen]

I keep saying GURPS is a story game but mostly because it causes conniptions.

Seriously though, there's a big disconnect between the philosophy of character creation which is driven by story share and the rest of the game is a physics sim.

 

[Ravenswing]

I'm a bit of a potential GURPS heretic because what I like mostly focuses on the stuff that happens after creation. If GURPS 5E would ditch "character points" and would do fixed templates or something like that in the basic game, I'd probably be okay with it. "Potential" because I only ever used the point buy rules myself.

There are a number of games out there that already do character classes.

Can someone give me a sum up of the difference between 3e and 4e? I played 3e many moons ago and have books but have not spent much time with 4e

Not very much. They ditched a lot of the weird fiddly skills ("Uttering of Base Coin," gakkk) added by various sourcebook authors, turned languages into advantages instead of skills, a number of other things. The biggest thing they changed was in the treatment of stats: they eliminated the bell curves, and doubled the cost of DX and IQ. While I agree that a lot of GURPS characters over the years had stat lines like 11-13-13-11, my firm belief is that the intent was to make Infinite Worlds the default setting and turn GURPS into a high-tech-oriented game, instead of the fantasy-oriented game of earlier releases. (Turning the sample character Dai Blackthorn from a low-tech fantasy street thief into a Time Cop was just one signpost.)

There's a detailed conversion document available at http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/resources/4eupdate.pdf.

I keep saying GURPS is a story game but mostly because it causes conniptions.

Probably because there are lot of whackdoodles (*cough*pundit*cough) who are hellbent on calling storygames the work of the Devil and below crack dealers and baby eaters on the scale of inhumanity. Y'know, because this is SF/F culture, and we do love to have our Enemies to hate. They've done a fairly effective job of turning the term into a broadly recognized slur.

 

[Silverlion]

I've run a Gurps Horror game that players I had (well one of them, since the others moved away) ask for still. To be fair everyone died by a player-triggered avalanche in the mountains--except maybe the werewolf. I made sure to play up the mood a lot. The werewolf was my own particular strange version that would shift only when the moon was visible, so I had one of the PCs as the werewolf. He kept shifting in and out when I wanted him too because clouds/movement of the moon.

I've run a fun Psi/Espionage game, with psi's on the run from the government agency that realized they existed while they tried to find safety/recruit others and stop the agency.

I've run supers but that didn't last long as we had other preferred systems for that.

I've run Fantasy at some length. Never got to having major monsters though, mostly dealing with bandits/people, and minor monsters.

I've also run Sci-Fi, pretty near future/hard sci-fi, it was hopeful but cybernetic, I think people call what I was doing Solarpunk now.

 

[Sosthenes]

There are a number of games out there that already do character classes.

There are many things twixt one-pool point buy and character classes. Recent GURPS is using templates pervasively already, and there were a few Pyramid articles about alternate ways, too.

I'm not saying that I'm strictly against point buy, just that for me it's not the main interesting thing about GURPS (which I'd rank amongst my all-over favorite games ever). Straight 3d6 roll under, (mostly) one-action rounds, skill-based for most things.
That's what draws me to the game.

 

[Skarg]

Hard to put into words, but on some level I can intuit that this is exactly why I bounce off GURPS - despite being drawn back several times by the massive amount of excellent setting books. Because of the game design philosophy, not the nudity thing!

Going from concepts like "bulletproof nudity" into rules terms feels kind of the wrong way round. Or put another way, it feels storygamey. Sorry, I'm not being very clear, I know.

Not trying to say there is anything objectively wrong with it as an approach, but it doesn't work for me.

As a storygame loathing GURPS fan myself, I find it entirely easy to ignore/omit anything verging on storygame-like in GURPS, of which there isn't much.

Bulletproof Nudity is a very optional rule I've never seen anyone I've played with treat as anything other than a joke option.

Other story-ish options include the Luck advantage, or other meta advantages such as Weirdness Magnet or Signature Gear, which I simply never include/allow. Also anything that suggests something has a chance to happen to you per-session (e.g. Enemies, Contacts, Patrons, Contacts) but I can trivially replace those mechanics with literal situation logic and non-session in-game time scales, etc.

 

[Skarg]

I keep saying GURPS is a story game but mostly because it causes conniptions.

Seriously though, there's a big disconnect between the philosophy of character creation which is driven by story share and the rest of the game is a physics sim.

Hehe!
How do you see GURPS character generation as "driven by story share"?

 

[David Johansen]

Hehe!
How do you see GURPS character generation as "driven by story share"?

The cost of the things you buy are based on how much they will impact game play rather than on any physiological or educational model. Admittedly I tend to run pretty fast and loose and if you take Timesickness as a disadvantage you can expect to encounter time travel. But the things you put on your character sheet tell the GM what kind of story you want to play out. You can buy successess and you can buy story effects like destinies and npcs. Essentially you can shape the flow and content of the game from the player's end when you build your character. You might even be allowed to hold points aside to fit your character better to the setting in play.

 

[thebigh]

Other story-ish options include the Luck advantage, or other meta advantages such as Weirdness Magnet or Signature Gear, which I simply never include/allow.

There's also the option of spending character points to (plausibly) alter reality (B. 347). That rule is optional, but I don't like it and neither do my players so we don't use it.

 

[Skarg]

The cost of the things you buy are based on how much they will impact game play rather than on any physiological or educational model. Admittedly I tend to run pretty fast and loose and if you take Timesickness as a disadvantage you can expect to encounter time travel. But the things you put on your character sheet tell the GM what kind of story you want to play out. You can buy successess and you can buy story effects like destinies and npcs. Essentially you can shape the flow and content of the game from the player's end when you build your character. You might even be allowed to hold points aside to fit your character better to the setting in play.

Ah, ok, I see what you mean now, and yes, though GURPS has SO MANY possibilities, especially with 4e hauling most of what was in all 3e world books into the Basic Set, that it's a bit of a recipe for issues unless the GM has a conversation with players about the campaign and appropriate PCs (and hopefully, hands them a campaign description which describes what sorts of characters make sense).

4e seems to have really generated a lot of players who are into peculiar character generation exercises.

 

[Skarg]

There's also the option of spending character points to (plausibly) alter reality (B. 347). That rule is optional, but I don't like it and neither do my players so we don't use it.

Yeah, buying success, like Luck, is almost never something that people I've played with would even consider using. If/when we use anything like that, it tends to have very carefully restricted rules, AND a thought-out gameworld rationale.

 

[Triumvir]

Seriously though, there's a big disconnect between the philosophy of character creation which is driven by story share and the rest of the game is a physics sim.

The cost of the things you buy are based on how much they will impact game play rather than on any physiological or educational model.

Yes, this. You have articulated what I was trying to get at about what makes me uncomfortable with the system, better than I managed.

 

[Ravenswing]

Bulletproof Nudity is a very optional rule I've never seen anyone I've played with treat as anything other than a joke option.

Neither have I. Truth be told, the original list of cinematic combat options seems to have had more play as tvtropes.com Trope Namers than at the gaming table.

 

[Sharrow]

4e seems to have really generated a lot of players who are into peculiar character generation exercises.

They were already there. It was during 3e's heyday that people were stating up literal vegetables as characters, and coming up with point crocks like telekinetic quadriplegics.

One thing that changed for the better in terms of tone/philosophy was 4e moving away from the assumption that just about all games should start with 100 point characters, which (in my experience) encouraged players to look for ways to squeeze the absolute maximum value out of each and every point.

 

[dragoner]

Ah, ok, I see what you mean now, and yes, though GURPS has SO MANY possibilities, especially with 4e hauling most of what was in all 3e world books into the Basic Set, that it's a bit of a recipe for issues unless the GM has a conversation with players about the campaign and appropriate PCs (and hopefully, hands them a campaign description which describes what sorts of characters make sense).

4e seems to have really generated a lot of players who are into peculiar character generation exercises.

Yes, curating the system is too much of a pain because it will have to be a focused effort for people to build their characters for the setting, and not just try to warp the setting to three or four different character ideas.

 

[David Johansen]

Meanwhile the D&D crowd are having coniptions over characters in wheelchairs.

 

[FreeGamer]

The cost of the things you buy are based on how much they will impact game play rather than on any physiological or educational model.

This hits on one of the oddities of GURPS. Advantages and Disadvantages are priced according to how much they should (theoretically) impact gameplay. This includes various special powers, especially since the release of the Powers book. However, Skills are priced according to how difficult they would be to learn. (Yes, many people have different aptitudes and will find certain skills more or less difficult than the mean, but they're using the average to the best of their knowledge, and I think in general they do a good job here.)

I used to think this was weird, but then I thought about it some more and here's how I see it now. While skills are important, a single skill isn't always going to have as huge of an impact on your overall effectiveness as most Advantages, so they went with difficulty as a way to group them. And in general, those higher-difficulty skills do have a larger impact and/or broader applications than more basic skills. Being able to hack into a computer system is going to be a game-changer in a modern-day espionage/infiltration focused game, for example, whereas basic math skills and interpretive dance probably aren't. This will vary a bit depending on genre and the stuff your specific sessions focus on, but again, in general.

Still enjoy GURPS, and had fun the few times I got to play it. Character generation can be a bit much, but in actual play I had few if any complaints. The modern 4e game I was in is still one that I think back fondly on from time to time.

 

[Sosthenes]

The cost of the things you buy are based on how much they will impact game play rather than on any physiological or educational model.

Skills don't fit that model, though (and thus also legacy magic).

 

[David Johansen]

Skills don't fit that model, though (and thus also legacy magic).

Yeah, originally it was a character point represented or at least took 1000 hours of study, then it was 200, now it's "what are you crazy? where'd you get that nonsense from?"

Skill costs are tricky in a universal system because you could be running an interpretive dance competition campaign where comparing the statistics of the dancers on a spreadsheet is of vital importance. Skill difficulty and the skill cost table are something I've seen players bounce off of again and again. Skills should probably just be stat - 5. With +4 for 1 point spent, +5 for 2 points, +6 for 4 points, +7 for 8 points, +8 for 12 points. That way you get rid of the default rating and massively simplify the skill table.

 

[Ravenswing]

They were already there. It was during 3e's heyday that people were stating up literal vegetables as characters, and coming up with point crocks like telekinetic quadriplegics.

One thing that changed for the better in terms of tone/philosophy was 4e moving away from the assumption that just about all games should start with 100 point characters, which (in my experience) encouraged players to look for ways to squeeze the absolute maximum value out of each and every point.

It's one key reason I'm somewhat down on the official GURPS forum, because that's where a lot of those people came to roost. The Rube Goldbergesque exercises a number go through to complicate simple questions into multi-page point chopping is nuts. Ultimately, it's a game system. It exists for people to play interesting games. To the degree that someone's responding to a rules question with 300 words instead of two sentences, they're subverting that goal.

 

[Lundgren]

I have 3e and a few modules in dead tree format, and 4e and a bunch more modules as PDF:s. I never got around to wrap my head around the mechanics, but I consider it a potential candidate for certain campaigns. While "universal systems" can handle several type of settings, my impression is that they aren't so universal when it comes to how they feel.

 

[CRKrueger]

Doesn’t it kind of have to be fiction first though? Because mechanically it makes no sense. It only makes sense inside of that fiction.

Let me frame it another way - what makes it different from defining an abjuration school field of protection that is disrupted by armor and reduced by fabrics due to interference with the field? Or it feeds off of skin contact, leveraging the body’s natural energy?

Well, one is trying to play to some external Genre Trope/Cliche/Whatever and the other is either Magic or Trekbabble that attempts to define the effect within the setting.

 

[Gabriel]

GURPS 4e's GM advice is pretty clear on this - NPCs aren't built on point budgets, and don't have to follow the PC chargen rules if it's not to the GM's benefit for them to do so.

Nowadays, and for a very long time now, that statement there mades a lot of sense to me. But I'll also say that to the teenagers running and playing the game at the game shop back in the 80s, it would have seemed blasphemous.

I chalk it up to all those Gygaxisms where we were preached down to in other games about how "if a rule is for the players then it must also apply to the NPCs/Monsters" and all the insanely play hostile things the mindset encouraged.

 

[Sosthenes]

Skill costs are tricky in a universal system because you could be running an interpretive dance competition campaign where comparing the statistics of the dancers on a spreadsheet is of vital importance.

If I remember correctly, some version of BESM had a few example skill cost lists, for your stereotypical Anime campaign. GURPS has very few concessions to varying campaign costs, the only thing I can remember right now is a suggestion that in a sci-fi campaign, ST might be priced lower.
(And of course the alternate stats supplement, but that's a rather specialist source)

And on the other hand, wasn't removing Literacy done because it made moving PCs between settings mathematically unsound? ;)

Skill difficulty and the skill cost table are something I've seen players bounce off of again and again.

Never mind that in unconstrained point-buy, it just makes more sense to raise IQ/DX, especially if you discount them.
But that's the point where quite often campaign house rules or just social contracts come in, adding another layer on top of the rules cake.

At least for me that felt a bit different in non-Revised 3E, where skills were seen as the base of the system, and not advantages. A more unified and refined system has its disadvantages, too.

HERO had a rather different opinion about skills, despise the rules not being that different.

 

[thebigh]

The skills table looks more complicated than it really is. You can describe it in a few sentences thus:

"If you don't have a skill, attempting it defaults to a controlling attribute at -4. To buy a skill, the first two levels cost one character point apiece, the next one costs two, and every subsequent level costs four. Skills also have a penalty of -1, -2, and -3 for average, hard, and very hard, respectively."

I think the reason people bounce off the table (aside from the usual bouncing-off-tables effect generally) is that by the time players are buying their skills they're interested more in what they can buy with their remaining charpoints, and not in terms of how much it will cost to reach a desired proficiency in some chosen skill.

Had I written the Basic Set, I'd have put the skills section before the advantages and disadvantages.

I also often house-rule that you can't hoard character points and that you can only spend them on things you actually attempted in play or want to spend your down-time studying. Do you want to raise your IQ? You can do that, provided you attempt brainy things during a session and bank those points in IQ right away. It might take you six to ten sessions to actually get there, but you can do it. Other players might spend that time branching out into four or five skills with their points. I'm also generous in deciding what counts for "did you try that during the session?"

 

[Sharrow]

It's one key reason I'm somewhat down on the official GURPS forum, because that's where a lot of those people came to roost. The Rube Goldbergesque exercises a number go through to complicate simple questions into multi-page point chopping is nuts. Ultimately, it's a game system. It exists for people to play interesting games. To the degree that someone's responding to a rules question with 300 words instead of two sentences, they're subverting that goal.

Oh yeah. Too many people don't see 'perfect' as being the enemy of 'good enough', and way too many think adding an extra step, with an extra skill roll, is a good way of dealing with some edge case. While I don't think GURPS' RAW has too many rolls per combat action, it's close and these guys want to push it right off that cliff.

 

[David Johansen]

Never mind that in unconstrained point-buy, it just makes more sense to raise IQ/DX, especially if you discount them.
But that's the point where quite often campaign house rules or just social contracts come in, adding another layer on top of the rules cake.

+10 to a skill only costs 40 points but +10 to DX or IQ costs 200 points.

 

[thebigh]

+10 to a skill only costs 40 points but +10 to DX or IQ costs 200 points.

Yes. However +1 to ten skills each controlled by IQ costs 20 points. A Jack-of-all-trades can really do very well by buying up IQ and DX.

 

[Simlasa]

I did a d% WFRP based 40k game earlier this year it got about zero interest.

Where can I find this masterpiece?!!!

 

[Simlasa]

It's all the fussy stuff about points that puts me off of GURPS nowadays.
Mythras and BRP (which I love!) have points buy as well... but it doesn't feel nearly as insanely nitpicky as GURPS.

I own 4e, but he last time I played it was 3e and that's where my heart was won by GURPS. Now it's like, "Oh, she put on some weight..."

 

[Sharrow]

GURPS actually isn't, unless players decide to be that way about it.

 

[David Johansen]

Where can I find this masterpiece?!!!

right here: http://www.uncouthsavage.com/uploads/1/3/3/2/133279619/darkerf.pdf

I appreciate your appreciation for my genius but the appelation may be presumptuous.

It came out of a few off the cuff sessions I ran at my store using my rough recollection of Rogue Trader and later editions of 40k. I wanted something that'd let people play Eldar and Spacemarines or whatever without buying half a dozen books. It's a rough knockoff at best but sufficient to my needs.

 

[Sosthenes]

+10 to a skill only costs 40 points but +10 to DX or IQ costs 200 points.

100 points for the common (and rather sensible) "IQ-", but even at full price it's often a bargain if players are allowed to do that (and at creation, they definitely are unless one is a hardcore member of the Cult of Stat Normalization).

Talents and techniques also suffer from this cost structure.

I think constraints here are rather common in house rules, but I wouldn't mind seeing more of that in published products. Okay, not that we got a lot of published settings in 4E, never mind the explosion of CPs (beyond "inflation").

But anyways, I've come here to praise the gameplay rules of GURPS, not bury its character creation.

 

[Escher]

I've never run GURPS but I've collected them since 1987 and found their books incredibly useful, especially for conversion to other systems. Amongst others, their Lo/Hi Tech books are great sources of info.