Any Fans of GURPS?

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So, here's a start on open 3d6 discussion. https://www.rpgpub.com/threads/open-3d6-proposal.9743/#post-459925 Not game design as of yet just thinking about how to be as broad and direct as possible and trying to be more open to discussion than my usual attempts. I did another false start last week and ended up in about the same place I usually do, so I took some thought and decided to talk about what the goals and intent are a bit more than my usual threads.
 
Baulderstone said:
I was reading through old issues of Dragon today. I came across a comprehensive review of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay from 1987 by Ken Rolston. He opens the review with an overview of the systems of their time and their usefulness for fantasy gaming. Here are his thoughts on GURPS.
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It's odd to think there was a time when the primary criticism of GURPS was its lack of setting books.
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I remember that time.

But I'm more focused on how this early review recognized that GURPS (originally, and still) is a "good, playable, well-tested system for fantasy combat - actually a lot of fun to play." - so much so, that that's mostly what I've continued to do with it since then, and also why I keep preferring it to other systems.

(Too bad the 4e Basic Set can no longer claim "The basics are quite simple, and simply presented" because of how much stuff got included in the Basic Set.)

I wonder how much of that is responsible for the popular conversations that tend to repeat in public RPG forums about GURPS - that is, that they tend to think GURPS is hard to play, and/or not good for fantasy combat.

I didn't hang out much in non-GURPS/TFT RPG forums before 4e came out, so I don't know much about what other-RPG-playing people used to say about it before then.
 
Skarg said:
I didn't hang out much in non-GURPS/TFT RPG forums before 4e came out, so I don't know much about what other-RPG-playing people used to say about it before then.
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There was always a decent amount of "GURPS is too complicated" I mean multiplication by 1.5!! Division by 4!!! Skill difficulty levels? Too many skills? The complaints were really about the same with Vehicles being a favorite target of course. I got really annoyed by the way people would drop into GURPS threads to say how bad it was and how much they hated it. If you did the same to D&D you got in trouble. (gee I wonder where that was) Still I remember early on, people would get really defensive if you brought up GURPS like it was an attack on their gaming preferences. Always the pariah game. Oh well, I'll always believe GURPS deserved a greater share of the market.
 
Skarg said:
I remember that time.

But I'm more focused on how this early review recognized that GURPS (originally, and still) is a "good, playable, well-tested system for fantasy combat - actually a lot of fun to play." - so much so, that that's mostly what I've continued to do with it since then, and also why I keep preferring it to other systems.

(Too bad the 4e Basic Set can no longer claim "The basics are quite simple, and simply presented" because of how much stuff got included in the Basic Set.)

I wonder how much of that is responsible for the popular conversations that tend to repeat in public RPG forums about GURPS - that is, that they tend to think GURPS is hard to play, and/or not good for fantasy combat.

I didn't hang out much in non-GURPS/TFT RPG forums before 4e came out, so I don't know much about what other-RPG-playing people used to say about it before then.
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It gained it's reputation for complexity from Vehicles, because apparently if one supplement is a little complex, it infects the whole line. That was in 3e.

It gained a reputation for not doing some fantasy well because apparently doing realistic modern-day stuff means fantasy that's not all grim 'n' gritty isn't possible. Again, a 3e thing.

The 4e rep seems to be about the core books being 'complex' and hard to understand (this from people readin D&D and WoD books and seeming fine with them), and an inherited notion of complexity.

Oh, and some people claiming that 'GURPS isn't a game, but a toolbox' and that you can't run a game 'out of the box', which is all kinds of bullshit, but it spread all over the net and now a lot of people take it as read that GURPS requires tons of prep before you can run a game with it.
 
David Johansen said:
The complaints were really about the same with Vehicles being a favorite target of course.
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What bothered me the most is that they kept the fantasy units there.

But yeah, the basic game wasn't that mathematical, as are most games where this is a frequent point of criticism. That doesn't mean that there isn't complexity elsewhere, and people just pile their confusian at the foot of the poor old multiplication sign.

Compared to other rule systems, GURPS' combat with its multiple rolls (attack/defend/location/damage), passive defense and damage multiplication probably was one of the more involved ones. RuneQuest came close. And in the 90s, it became more normal anyways… (WoD or SR being about as complex there, if not more)

Juggling all kinds of special cases in powers and spells seems less an issue, maybe because it's not in the core rules and thus temporally removed when reading a game.

Did anyone ever simplify GURPS combat beyond Basic Combat, but not as far as just going to a comparative skill check for the whole fight (as proposed by Steffan O'Sullivan)? Basically how some BRP versions do it: Attack, Defense, damage die, hit point pool. No PD, no damage multiplication, no precise movement/heading rules, most combat maneuvers removed or simplified.
 
PD is long gone - 4e did away with it. I submit that the basic combat manoeuvres aren't very complicated, and 4e made hexes and thus exact facing, etc., a matter for GM/table adjudication. Damage types (and thus damage multiplication) remain (though damage types are considerably cleaned up compared to 3e where bullets did 'crushing' damage, but with all kinds of special rules and exceptions). Hit locations can be ignored (assume everything hits the 'torso').

'Combat Lite',a summary of combat in Characters, is all of five pages, including the rules for injuries and recovery from such, and about what you're asking for (it keeps the damage multipliers). It would be perfectly adequate for a game where you didn't want lots of detail from your mechanics in combat.

You could check out the 4e version of GURPS Lite (free at both Warehouse23 and DriveThruRPG), which has a trimmed-down version of 4e's main combat system (but not as trimmed-down as the Characters summary). The ironic thing is that the 4e version of Lite is often complained about as being 'incomplete', because unlike the 3e version it has no spells or rules for magic - yet one of the very common complaints about 4e is that it has magic, etc., within the Basic Set (more than 3e, even though it too had magic in the Basic Set).
 
I've been saying they could pretty much cut and paste a GURPS Lite Fantasy book from the Basic Set magic rules and the races and monsters from Banestorm. I've always believed it would be the very best thing they could do to promote GURPS. Heck maybe even put Orcslayer in there. Mind you, I always think my ideas are the best ideas and everyone else is just a stupidhead. I think that's why I started fiddling with a GURPS re-write all those years ago. I called it "Proof of Concept" I wanted to put it out there and prove that it would work.

The thing I find people have the most trouble with is the skill table. Even guys with university degrees. I don't know why, it baffles me, but I see it over and over again.
 
Interesting! Maybe? I'd have to put it in front of a new player and see what happens.

The fourth edition table is quite a bit simpler than the first to third edition table.
 
Sharrow said:
'Combat Lite',a summary of combat in Characters, is all of five pages, including the rules for injuries and recovery from such, and about what you're asking for (it keeps the damage multipliers). It would be perfectly adequate for a game where you didn't want lots of detail from your mechanics in combat.

You could check out the 4e version of GURPS Lite[...]
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I did most of that when introducing newcomwers to GURPS, I was just asking if someone already had experience with something even beyond that, without going all Very Basic Melee.

I had a more "Stormbringer"-ish system in my notes once, but currently no GURPS group running. I even went all out attribute-less there – with a more normalized stat distribution and alternate ST tables, damage barely varied, HT wasn't important for a "dumb" HP pool, and IQ/DX were replaced by more specific talents).

My current GURPS-ish homebrew thoughts go in a total different direction, as I'm trying to retrofit the recently ORC-ed "Dark Eye" rules in a 3d6 direction. And long-time players of that are really into crunch…
 
David Johansen said:
There was always a decent amount of "GURPS is too complicated" I mean multiplication by 1.5!! Division by 4!!! Skill difficulty levels? Too many skills? The complaints were really about the same with Vehicles being a favorite target of course. I got really annoyed by the way people would drop into GURPS threads to say how bad it was and how much they hated it. If you did the same to D&D you got in trouble. (gee I wonder where that was) Still I remember early on, people would get really defensive if you brought up GURPS like it was an attack on their gaming preferences. Always the pariah game. Oh well, I'll always believe GURPS deserved a greater share of the market.
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This, also with highlighted above in particular that I'd run across while in Europe and various U.S. states that I was stationed in when I'd bring up GURPS as my game that I typically ran. I'd say, oh sure I'll play AD&D if your running it, but I won't run it myself, I prefer to run my games using GURPS.
 
Perhaps generic rule sets are just very boring. At least Savage Worlds evolved from Deadlands and BRP from RuneQuest: GURPS represents nothing.
 
I tend to or have tended to run some version of what would today be called grimdark fantasy, at least that's how I think "Thieves' World" would be classified today since the genre exists now. Anyhow that said, when you look GURPs in the beginning, it did everything right out of the GURPS 1e/2e box set that I needed it to do. It was elegant, straightforward and honestly it felt simple. After dealing with RoleMaster, old-DnD/AD&D 1st Edition etc, it was a breath of fresh air.

It had things I desired, giving players the option to dodge/parry/block attacks and when that failed to have their armor (if any) absorb some of the incoming damage. It had skills, and the attributes were straightforward and were easy to understand. Source books came out and I snagged them but only used something if it felt like it added to my game. Otherwise it was ignored but kept for reference. I never understood the debates about complexity about GURPS, once you had the basics down it was easy and the books were easy to read and again straightforward.

Then 3e came out and it was still a good book though to be honest I wasn't using it really for the first two years of it's release, just didn't need it. Though I did finally start to replace the two books from my 2e set by around 1990 and then rely on that book. I think it was around 1994 that the big revision of 3e came out and the font started to change and then the Compendiums started coming out in 1996 or so. The books were less readable and had become "too much". When 4e came out in 2004 I felt it was even worse, the numbers, the throw everything including the kitchen sink into the base core book (sorry books now since there are two now), just felt wrong and a mess.

I backed Sean's Dungeon Fantasy Rpg Kickstarter (all in... actually I have two complete sets of the material) because I was hoping for a cleaned up GURPS that focused more on what I wanted to typically use it for when I ran. What I got was GURPS snarky Munchkin style dungeon crawling, with lens, focuses and archetypes and a bunch of other fiddle faddle that just make things messy and overly complex when I was hoping for the beauty of the old GURPS 1e/2e box set. I actually have to blame myself since when 4e came out I was in hiatus thinking that tabletop gaming was dying (as I've mentioned in the past), so I'd fallen out of keeping up with what was going on with GURPS and I didn't know what the GURPS 4e dungeon fantasy series of pdfs were about.

So imagine my surprise when I did get caught up after the Kickstarter and learned what I had actually gotten. The more I read about GURPS 4e dungeon fantasy and the SJG Dungeon Fantasy Rpg the more irked and irritable I was. This wasn't the clean, build out what you needed if you needed it system that I loved from the 1980s and 1990s. It's all just too much now, it feels convoluted and numbers focused just because instead of more playable and easy to pick up and run.

I'll use the following to snap shots as an example. This is a cut and paste from the latest GURPS 3e Lite pdf. Again late stage GURPS 3e isn't my favorite by a long shot but this is example still works well. A simple, clear explanation of what damage modifiers do for the three basic damage types. Impaling, cutting and crushing. No bloat, no confusion, the factoring is easy straightforward. No need for charts, its really easy and requires very little thought.

GURPS 3e Lite Wounding Modifers 01.JPG

Now, a cut and paste of a section of the back cover of Dungeon Fantasy Exploits book for damage types and how they modify. Notice you actually need a chart and this is for a fantasy fucking game, not space, not high tech, not ultra tech.

DFRPG Wounding Modifers.JPG

So instead of three, you have seven different types from the basic. This is isn't counting the other types of potential damage modifiers. (Burn, Corrosion etc) Why? why in a medieval tech level focused game do I need fucking five versions of impale damage to clutter up the system? Why? It's just one example of too much of everything when it comes to GURPS anymore.

GURPS 2e box set was two booklets, a total of 152 pages total between the two. I added material from GURPs magic when that came out and sundry other mechanics from other source books. Example: I added the dart guns from the Witch World sourcebook for my desert people. :shrugs: Anyhow, there was a time when GURPS was an elegant, highly playable system, those days are over and actually I feel that GURPS is dead and getting anyone local to play it isn't worth the effort. Better off playing Savage Worlds, BRP etc.

When I was recently re-reading through the 1st edition of Shadowrun and then comparing it to the nightmare the Catalyst Labs has been publishing, I can't help but think that today many game developers have forgotten that more isn't always a good thing. Then I look at something like Mork Borg mechanics, Shadowdark rpg or how Free League approaches their game design and think, well at least not everyone has forgotten good game design.
 
SJB said:
Perhaps generic rule sets are just very boring. At least Savage Worlds evolved from Deadlands and BRP from RuneQuest: GURPS represents nothing.
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Except it and it was obvious what it was after reading the GURPS 2e box set. It could run a D&D style game where you still could be one-shotted even if you were a 300 pt superhero. Update: Oh you also could be whatever exact mix of fighter/mage/thief you wished you could be in D&D.

Unfortunately with later editions the core books got bulked up and it wasn't so clear anymore although the fundamentals didn't change.
 
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With that, eh, if you still HAVE BSII (alas, I don't), why not just break out those books and run it? If that set gave you everything you wanted, at a level of presentation you wanted it, why not?
 
AsenRG said:
Flat cost of attributes.
Defense being (Skill/2)+3 for all skills.
HT determining FP while ST determines HP.


Well, we know how the game mechanics would work, it would be 3d6 vs Trait...:grin:


Out of curiosity, why? I remember that no open flame was allowed in mills. That, to me, would suggest you don't need thermobaric weapons to produce an explosion:thumbsup:.
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You do need a pretty good concentration though. One of those GURPS flour bomb threads was talking about doing it outside in a military setting, not in a sugar mill that hadn’t been cleaned in a few decades.
 
Ravenswing said:
With that, eh, if you still HAVE BSII (alas, I don't), why not just break out those books and run it? If that set gave you everything you wanted, at a level of presentation you wanted it, why not?
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If you already mastered GURPS 2e, then the changes and additions in 3e (or 4e) make sense and are useful. The problem is the rest of the hobby hasn't mastered GURPS. Third Edition wasn't bad hence GURPS hitting its peak in the early 2000s just after the release of 4e. But since then the number of people entering the GURPS hobby hasn't kept the pace with people leaving the GURPS hobby leading the situation we have now.
 
robertsconley said:
Except it and it was obvious what it was after reading the GURPS 2e box set. It could run a D&D style game where you still could be one-shotted even if you were a 300 pt superhero.

Unfortunately with later editions the core books got bulked up and it wasn't so clear anymore although the fundamentals didn't change.
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I must admit that I was thinking of some of the examples you have cited down the years. If one had the concept of AD&D but just longed for a better ruleset I can imagine GURPS being mana from heaven. In that case the rules would be fascinating. I find the same with BRP which I think I like because I came to it from the highly imaginative RuneQuest.

I’m actually too old for GURPS: it came out long after I’d moved on.
 
David Johansen said:
There was always a decent amount of "GURPS is too complicated" I mean multiplication by 1.5!! Division by 4!!! Skill difficulty levels? Too many skills? The complaints were really about the same with Vehicles being a favorite target of course. I got really annoyed by the way people would drop into GURPS threads to say how bad it was and how much they hated it. If you did the same to D&D you got in trouble. (gee I wonder where that was) Still I remember early on, people would get really defensive if you brought up GURPS like it was an attack on their gaming preferences. Always the pariah game. Oh well, I'll always believe GURPS deserved a greater share of the market.
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I'm no math wiz but for me the issue with games with lots of these issues is that it is pointlessly convoluted. Couldn't the designer come up with a better solution?

The level of detail in GURPS is simply not to my taste, I don't need to know how many rungs of a ladder I can travel per second, sorry. TFT is much more to my taste than the over-detailed GURPS.
 
Ravenswing said:
With that, eh, if you still HAVE BSII (alas, I don't), why not just break out those books and run it? If that set gave you everything you wanted, at a level of presentation you wanted it, why not?
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Honestly, that's pretty much where I'm at. It's just getting players to play it locally. I had been making inroads into the one of the local game shops, the owners, players etc getting to know me. Though if I'm being honest the place is mostly about some variation of DnD or it's variants including Pathfinder. Adventurer's League, Pathfinder Society, Starfinder Society and organized Warhammer/Age of Sigmar etc are also quite popular.

Getting folks to try anything beyond those can be difficult. I did run a one shot of Free Leagues Alien rpg, and someone else was also running Alien during the day time every other week. Also one person is running a Mork Borg game every other week. The problem became the drive, about 60 miles one way and traffic is really bad around here at the times I need to drive there, unless I want to leave hours early and just hang out for two to three hours.

Also the pandemic and then my health (which I'm still dealing with currently) issues got in the way and also if I'm being honest, I truly think that ageism is playing a roll. I've seen it with other older players who play there as well, they seem to hang out and play war games I don't see a lot of them playing in the role-playing games. And personally I don't want to play in AL, PS, SS or any other organized play. It feels like your playing a tabletop version of mmorpg in my opinion.

After the surgery I actually started playing GS again as an aside since I wasn't really making any headway at the game shop and wanted a distraction while recovering from the surgery. I was running up there twice a week for a good eight months, which was a lot of driving and hours and hours of traffic. It became a burn out.

As an outgoing person who has always been comfortable and good in social situations it's been frustrating that my apparent age is now a thing getting in the way of making headway. Anyhow, I'm just frustrated and I still need to deal with another surgery and recovery from that, so I feel like I'm not getting anywhere with the hobby these days.

To sell a GURPS 2e campaign around here, I need to solidify contacts, make friends, play in games, earn some level of trust and respect so that I can tempt people in giving a dead game system a try. Or hell any non DnD game a try for that matter it feels like. lol I'll get there... hopefully.
 
Voros said:
I'm no math wiz but for me the issue with games with lots of these issues is that it is pointlessly convoluted. Couldn't the designer come up with a better solution?

The level of detail in GURPS is simply not to my taste, I don't need to know how many rungs of a ladder I can travel per second, sorry. TFT is much more to my taste than the over-detailed GURPS.
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This is how I feel about GURPS too. The whole one-pool of points to create your character, also gives me option paralysis.

I played with one guy in the 90's, who really loved GURPS. The first time he wanted to run a game, I asked him if there wasn't some template character I could get and slightly modify. This ended with him basically creating my character for me, with input from me of course.
He also didn't expect his players to know all the rules. Which was a good thing, since he liked to use the most complex version usually. Nice guy and pretty decent GM, still didn't get me to like GURPS though.
 
The Mad Hatter said:
This is how I feel about GURPS too. The whole one-pool of points to create your character, also gives me option paralysis.

I played with one guy in the 90's, who really loved GURPS. The first time he wanted to run a game, I asked him if there wasn't some template character I could get and slightly modify. This ended with him basically creating my character for me, with input from me of course.
He also didn't expect his players to know all the rules. Which was a good thing, since he liked to use the most complex version usually. Nice guy and pretty decent GM, still didn't get me to like GURPS though.
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It seems he knew how to introduce newbies to GURPS, though his help in the chargen might have been going a bit too far...:grin:
 
GURPS 4e has numerous character templates scattered throughout the source books. They're meant to be a starting point for character design and customised for taste, and are very handy in ensuring you haven't accidentally forgotten a skill or trait important for your character concept. Occasionally people mistake these for rigid classes like in D&D but for the most part it works well.
 
Voros said:
I'm no math wiz but for me the issue with games with lots of these issues is that it is pointlessly convoluted. Couldn't the designer come up with a better solution?

The level of detail in GURPS is simply not to my taste, I don't need to know how many rungs of a ladder I can travel per second, sorry. TFT is much more to my taste than the over-detailed GURPS.
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To be fair, that one was for GURPS: Chutes & Ladders.
 
Acmegamer said:
I tend to or have tended to run some version of what would today be called grimdark fantasy, at least that's how I think "Thieves' World" would be classified today since the genre exists now. Anyhow that said, when you look GURPs in the beginning, it did everything right out of the GURPS 1e/2e box set that I needed it to do. It was elegant, straightforward and honestly it felt simple. After dealing with RoleMaster, old-DnD/AD&D 1st Edition etc, it was a breath of fresh air.

It had things I desired, giving players the option to dodge/parry/block attacks and when that failed to have their armor (if any) absorb some of the incoming damage. It had skills, and the attributes were straightforward and were easy to understand. Source books came out and I snagged them but only used something if it felt like it added to my game. Otherwise it was ignored but kept for reference. I never understood the debates about complexity about GURPS, once you had the basics down it was easy and the books were easy to read and again straightforward.

Then 3e came out and it was still a good book though to be honest I wasn't using it really for the first two years of it's release, just didn't need it. Though I did finally start to replace the two books from my 2e set by around 1990 and then rely on that book. I think it was around 1994 that the big revision of 3e came out and the font started to change and then the Compendiums started coming out in 1996 or so. The books were less readable and had become "too much". When 4e came out in 2004 I felt it was even worse, the numbers, the throw everything including the kitchen sink into the base core book (sorry books now since there are two now), just felt wrong and a mess.

I backed Sean's Dungeon Fantasy Rpg Kickstarter (all in... actually I have two complete sets of the material) because I was hoping for a cleaned up GURPS that focused more on what I wanted to typically use it for when I ran. What I got was GURPS snarky Munchkin style dungeon crawling, with lens, focuses and archetypes and a bunch of other fiddle faddle that just make things messy and overly complex when I was hoping for the beauty of the old GURPS 1e/2e box set. I actually have to blame myself since when 4e came out I was in hiatus thinking that tabletop gaming was dying (as I've mentioned in the past), so I'd fallen out of keeping up with what was going on with GURPS and I didn't know what the GURPS 4e dungeon fantasy series of pdfs were about.

So imagine my surprise when I did get caught up after the Kickstarter and learned what I had actually gotten. The more I read about GURPS 4e dungeon fantasy and the SJG Dungeon Fantasy Rpg the more irked and irritable I was. This wasn't the clean, build out what you needed if you needed it system that I loved from the 1980s and 1990s. It's all just too much now, it feels convoluted and numbers focused just because instead of more playable and easy to pick up and run.

I'll use the following to snap shots as an example. This is a cut and paste from the latest GURPS 3e Lite pdf. Again late stage GURPS 3e isn't my favorite by a long shot but this is example still works well. A simple, clear explanation of what damage modifiers do for the three basic damage types. Impaling, cutting and crushing. No bloat, no confusion, the factoring is easy straightforward. No need for charts, its really easy and requires very little thought.

View attachment 68262

Now, a cut and paste of a section of the back cover of Dungeon Fantasy Exploits book for damage types and how they modify. Notice you actually need a chart and this is for a fantasy fucking game, not space, not high tech, not ultra tech.

View attachment 68263

So instead of three, you have seven different types from the basic. This is isn't counting the other types of potential damage modifiers. (Burn, Corrosion etc) Why? why in a medieval tech level focused game do I need fucking five versions of impale damage to clutter up the system? Why? It's just one example of too much of everything when it comes to GURPS anymore.

GURPS 2e box set was two booklets, a total of 152 pages total between the two. I added material from GURPs magic when that came out and sundry other mechanics from other source books. Example: I added the dart guns from the Witch World sourcebook for my desert people. :shrugs: Anyhow, there was a time when GURPS was an elegant, highly playable system, those days are over and actually I feel that GURPS is dead and getting anyone local to play it isn't worth the effort. Better off playing Savage Worlds, BRP etc.
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I do not think that comparing 3e lite is fair. If you did a 3e fantasy game and didn't consciously trim out everything you felt was surplus you'd need a more complex table than that because of the way it tended to have exceptions for stuff. Also, I'm not sure why 'fantasy' is supposed to be simpler than SF. 4e has a 'burn' damage because in 3e is was 'crushing' with a bunch of special exceptions. Likewise 4e has piercing so bullets and similar things that aren't impaling aren't 'crushing' with their own special set of exceptions.

As far as I can see the complaint here is that it's presented in a table so you can see it all at once. That's like the complaints that Aftermath!'s combat system was really complex because it 'required' a flow chart (it didn't - they just put one in for clarity), when if you compared its combat to other games of the time it was no worse, and was much better explained.

I can't speak to 1e/2e as I've never had the opportunity to read them, but 3e, even by the time of the compendiums, was pretty messy.
 
Sharrow said:
I do not think that comparing 3e lite is fair. If you did a 3e fantasy game and didn't consciously trim out everything you felt was surplus you'd need a more complex table than that because of the way it tended to have exceptions for stuff. Also, I'm not sure why 'fantasy' is supposed to be simpler than SF. 4e has a 'burn' damage because in 3e is was 'crushing' with a bunch of special exceptions. Likewise 4e has piercing so bullets and similar things that aren't impaling aren't 'crushing' with their own special set of exceptions.
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You missed the point. Next time though I'll take a picture of the same information (Damage modifiers) from the physical GURPS 2e book instead of the same basic information from the GURPS 3e Lite PDF, since that apparently made a big difference to you. And again, you appear to have missed the point, though others didn't.
 
Acmegamer said:
You missed the point. Next time though I'll take a picture of the same information (Damage modifiers) from the physical GURPS 2e book instead of the same basic information from the GURPS 3e Lite PDF, since that apparently made a big difference to you. And again, you appear to have missed the point, though others didn't.
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TBH, I didn't understand the part about fantasy, either. As part of your general objection to the system getting heavier, it's clear...but fantasy games generally have more varied close combat weaponry compared to SF, because that's where combat often takes place.
So for an universal fantasy game, having more than one kind of piercing damage kinda makes sense, actually. SF games might well have a better variety of toxins, though, as well as exposure to vacuum, radiation and possibly other harmful environments, like Venerian atmosphere or the inside of a gas giant.
 
The main thing I notice about complexity, is that even in this one thread, you can see a wide range of different tastes and tolerances for details. So there's no one best tuning of how complex to make things, or even one best way to make a Lite version of GURPS.

But you can tune to taste.

What the good GURPS GMs I've known have been doing since the very early years of GURPS, is making a campaign intro for players. The 1e Basic Set even had a suggested starting place with a sheet outlining the campaign.

A campaign intro sheet (or sheets; some GMs make a booklet) can list the types of characters that make sense, and make a short list of appropriate traits and skills along with their costs.

For players who are willing to look at such a campaign intro, that can make it pretty simple to make a character.

I don't remember anyone having problems making characters even with just a simple description of a campaign, with the 3e Basic Set. But with the 4e Basic Set, even I can get worn out or distracted.
 
The thing with 4e vs 3e is that with 3e you either need a sourcebook (or books) covering what you're doing, or you'll be doing a lot of design work. With 4e just about all the character stuff and rules are in the core books. So you don't need Space for the extra stuff on characters with three eyes, etc. Instead it has has stuff on character archetypes (done as templates) (as well as on doing worlds, aliens, etc., but 3e had that too, so I'm not counting it). Unfortunately templates, especially in the earlier books, are very dense.

The upside of 4e is that you're better supported if there's no sourcebook for what you're doing. The downside is that there's more stuff sitting in the core books that any given campaign probably won't use.

I see some people complaining about 4e's organisation, but I prefer it to 3e's, where I had to guess what kind of skill, etc. the designer thought something was. My primary complaint about 4's core books is/was the choice of three columns rather than two (and they did switch to two columns for the supplements).
 
robertsconley said:
If you already mastered GURPS 2e, then the changes and additions in 3e (or 4e) make sense and are useful. The problem is the rest of the hobby hasn't mastered GURPS. Third Edition wasn't bad hence GURPS hitting its peak in the early 2000s just after the release of 4e. But since then the number of people entering the GURPS hobby hasn't kept the pace with people leaving the GURPS hobby leading the situation we have now.
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Well ... YMMV. Just as an example, I thought that BSIII ranged weapon mechanics were a triumph of mathematics over playability. I didn't then, and have never since, changed from -1/increment, I ignore Acc, and I only bother with a Malfunction roll if the weapon is particularly kludgy -- early arquebuses, repeating crossbows, that sort of thing.

My point had nothing to do with the relevant merits of the editions, and everything to do with a precept to which I firmly subscribe: game systems do not have sell-by dates, and their worth is not greatly affected with whether they are "currently supported" or not. Heck, OD&D does everything it did the day it was published, and a GM's ability to write interesting and challenging scenarios for it is little different now than it was nearly fifty years ago. And while I agree that the profit margins of game publishers and professional writers are dependent on being au courant, I've never been the former, and I haven't been the latter for a good long while. I'm both unimpressed and unaffected by the shibboleth that only a game in current print is any good, and that much only if the publisher is continuing to come out with ever-new releases for it.

As long as I can find players -- and I've never had trouble doing so -- whether or not a GURPS product ever again hits the metaphoric stands isn't of direct concern to me, except in so far as I wish the company and a number of its writers well.
 
The Mad Hatter said:
This is how I feel about GURPS too. The whole one-pool of points to create your character, also gives me option paralysis.

I played with one guy in the 90's, who really loved GURPS. The first time he wanted to run a game, I asked him if there wasn't some template character I could get and slightly modify. This ended with him basically creating my character for me, with input from me of course.
He also didn't expect his players to know all the rules. Which was a good thing, since he liked to use the most complex version usually. Nice guy and pretty decent GM, still didn't get me to like GURPS though.
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I like to think that could have been me. That sounds like a conversation I've had more than once with a couple of players at various times. I've had some "hostile to Gurps" but "friendly to me" players over the the years in my Gurps games. Never had a "hostile to Savage Worlds" player yet though. A lot of "there are games other than D&D" people though, and that's been consistent through the decades.
 
Baulderstone said:
The character templates in later 3E books were a great idea. I think that GURPS would have been a lot more popular if those had been around from the beginning.
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To continue my point here, GURPS was one my main games in high school. However, everyone I played with was an actual gamer. They had no problem building characters. In fact, they enjoyed it. Once I got to college, rather than running game with gamers, I began recruiting the non-gaming friends I made. Any attempts I made to run GURPS floundered during character generation, however those players were fine with the system if I made characters for them. Still, people like making their own characters.I quit running GURPS at that point and I never really went back, although I kept buying the books through the '90s for reference for other games.

If templates had existed in 1990, I might have stuck with GURPS. It was the character generation that made me leave the game, not the rules during play.
 
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robertsconley said:
I have long argued on the SJ Game forum the problem with GURPS is one of presentation not design.
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Presentation and a need to control it so tightly that it's never been a popular as I personally felt that it could be. Even now, with the game pretty much at best stagnant they're tight fisted on control. Opening up GURPS to third party development twenty plus years ago would have truly made a difference I think in GURPS popularity. That ship sailed, reach some other port long ago and now other rpgs with more open third party licenses have taken over.

Doug's the only third party developer and he's struggling to make any headway. Nice guy, motivated and runs a very good Kickstarter with great communication every time. He's one those I back every time to support him but I can tell he's becoming a bit disheartened by the lack of growth. I've often wondered about the limitations he has to deal with from SJG and if he could share. Probably not.
 
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