Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Retrospective: GURPS

Though I've never been a devoted user of universal roleplaying game systems, I've long been intrigued by the idea of them. My first brush with the concept was probably Basic Role-Playing, which I encountered through the first edition of Call of Cthulhu in 1981. Chaosium used BRP (derived from RuneQuest) as the foundation on which it would build the rulesets of its other roleplaying games, like Stormbringer. Ringworld, and the aforementioned Call of Cthulhu. Hero Games did something similar with the rules of Champions.

For me, the appeal of a universal system lay in the promise of never again having learn new rules just because I wanted to play a new game (or setting). As both a referee and a player, I'm indifferent to rules, except to the extent that I forget them or confuse them with the rules of another game with which I'm also familiar. In general, once I find a ruleset that works well enough for my purposes, I stick with it. This probably explains why I've played so much D&D and Traveller over the years, despite the existence of purportedly "better" systems for fantasy and science fiction: I know these rulesets and they're more than adequate for my purposes.

In my youth, I knew plenty of people who had adapted the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to their favorite genres or settings. This was, I gather, a common practice in the days when there were only a handful of different game systems. Even at the time, this felt odd to me, despite my affection for D&D and my facility with its rules. Nevertheless, I understood the impulse. Why reinvent the wheel? Why did every RPG have to have its own unique – and frequently idiosyncratic – game system? Wouldn't things be easier if you and your fellow players had to learn just one ruleset rather than a new one every time you started a campaign?

So, when I first heard about Steve Jackson's "Great Unnnamed Roleplaying System," I was more than a little intrigued. Though I had never played Jackson's previous RPG, The Fantasy Trip, I knew it was well regarded and, from what I had gathered, the then-upcoming GURPS was designed as a successor to and an expansion of the core concepts behind The Fantasy Trip. Plus, I was a very big fan of Jackson's Ogre and Cars Wars, both of which my friends and I played regularly. By my lights, this pretty much guaranteed that GURPS – or whatever its "real" name would eventually be – would be a winner.

The first publication to carry the GURPS name, Man to Man, was released in the summer of 1985, along with a collection of scenarios entitled Orcslayer. Man to Man was a kind of preview of GURPS, presenting the game's combat system. I never saw a copy of it at the time – indeed I've still never seen one – so its release came and went without much notice from me. By the time the full GURPS Basic Set was published the following year, in 1986, I had largely forgotten about the whole thing, so it too escaped my attention. I'm not entirely sure why this was, though I suspect, given the timing of its release, that I was distracted by other matters. 

When I did finally see a copy of GURPS, it was already on its third edition. This would have been sometime in the late 1980s. The game was no longer sold as a boxed set with multiple booklets but as a single softcover volume. I ordered my copy through the mail, based on an advertisement I'd seen somewhere (Dragon? Challenge?), which reminded me that GURPS did indeed exist and that I'd once been quite interested in the project. I was very happy to receive it, along with a copy of the GURPS Space supplement, since I was then, as I am now, more or a sci-fi fan than a fantasy one.

I was very impressed with GURPS when I first read it. The rules were simple and easy to understand. The presentation was similarly straightforward – a no-nonsense layout with black and white art and informative little sidebars throughout. I loved how modular everything seemed, with skills, advantages, and disadvantages all capable of being added or swapped out, depending on the setting and genre of the campaign you were planning to run. Likewise, the supplementary material, like Space, provided lots of tailored options for the referee to consider. All in all, GURPS exceeded my expectations.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to play much GURPS in the months immediately after I first bought it. It wasn't until several years later, after I'd graduated from university and moved to my present home, that I rectified this. My local friends had played GURPS extensively, having effectively abandoned all other game systems in its favor for several years beforehand. They thus knew the system's ins and outs and were quite happy to share their thoughts on the matter. By and large, their experiences were positive, but they also recognized that, at least in its third edition – things may have changed in more recent editions – the rules creaked somewhat the farther one got from the power and technological level of medieval fantasy. In short, GURPS had something of a scaling problem, particularly as one moved toward science fiction.

This was disappointing to hear, but it didn't stop me from making use of GURPS several times over the years. Whatever its flaws might be, it was still a simple and convenient way to play campaigns that deviated from those presented in other commercially available RPGs. It was a terrific "toolkit game" and its supplements were often among the most inspiring and best researched I'd ever seen. I continued to support the game for years, despite playing it only sporadically. That's no knock against the game itself so much as an acknowledgment that, despite my appreciation for it and what it tries to do, GURPS never succeeded in joining my list of go-to RPGs. I definitely think there's a place for a game like GURPS, which is much more accessible and user friendly than, say, HERO. That said, I'm much less convinced these days that a one-size-fits-all universal system is even possible, let alone desirable and so GURPS remains on my shelf, unplayed.

31 comments:

  1. I have no first-hand experience with GURPS, but what I've heard is that it's most "comfortable" in two genres--D&D-ish fantasy and military sci-fi--and furthermore that it has strongly baked in assumptions about how those two genres interact with one another: "guns beat magic".

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    1. It works fine all the way from Stone Age to modern/near-future settings as well. At higher tech levels the lethality of weapons scales up so far that getting caught without comparable armor is sudden death, and even modern firearms are deadly enough that they demand respect in much the same way they do in Call of Cthulhu. A single bullet can take you out without needing great luck.

      Guns only "beat magic" in the sense that they're very efficient tools for killing things as long as you can see your target. A caster who tries to trade fireballs with bullets is most likely going to die, but one that uses invisibility, illusion, darkness, conjured walls or any of the other tricks magic offers is nigh-invulnerable to guys with guns. There are also plenty of more subtle offensive spells that can win fights before the enemy knows one has started, but they do have mostly quite limited range and can rapidly wear out a caster.

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    2. I feel guns should beat magic. They are the great equalizer. Let the peasants finally stand up to them pesky wizards.

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    3. Guns can usually do more damage than missile spells in the standard rules, but a decent wizard need only cast Reverse Missiles and anyone shooting at the mage will end up hitting themselves instead.

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  2. the scaling problem exists, it seems, in all universals. Paladium had the same issue for sure. BRP doesn't seem to, but only because it is always man sizes. it doesn't scale,so we do not know...

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    1. Well, there is Superworld. I never got the Worlds of Wonder boxed set (I really regret that) or the standalone Superworld to know how it actually manages.

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    2. hmm fair point. how well does it play?

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    3. Like I said, I have no idea how it plays. I haven't even seen the rules.

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    4. I've owned and played both Wow and Superworld. They both have power (rather than physical) scaling issues that I'd call fairly severe, but that's more of an issue with any supers RPG than something specific to BRP-based games. Superworld also suffers badly from awful editing and layout errors, which were so bad that the primary author publicly stated in interviews that Chaosium had used playtest drafts for some sections rather than the finished documents he sent them. He walked away from the game after they axed it and went on to do some very good work for Hero Games on Champions, etc, which prove that whatever the problem with SW was, it wasn't his writing skills.

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    5. I saw Palladium's scaling issues just with their Robotech sourcebooks. The mecha power scale just kept going up ridiculously from Macross to Southern Cross to Invid Invasion.

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  3. GURPS... And universal systems in general...

    I did see Man to Man. In fact, I have a photocopy of the battle map that came with it in my battle maps collection though I'm not sure I've ever used it as it is a bit small.

    I bought a ton of GURPS supplements over the years, initially as I was working on my own "generic" system (that actually never saw use for anything but fantasy, with a mild bit of work on Western rules). An interesting thing I noted at the time - there is rough point cost compatibility between Hero and GURPS disadvantages... But these days I no longer like disadvantages granting points (but I kind of like Burning Wheel disadvantages that COST points...).

    I've tried a bit of GURPs play. The first was GURPS Supers (in the first version). Talk about scaling problems. And while I like GURPS handling of skills better than Hero (part of what damaged my Fantasy Hero campaign was when the PCs decided to become a bardic troup with the assasin/bard as it's headliner and the Presence Healer PC instantly became better at performance because you could either spend one point and have an 8 skill or spend 2 and have skill based on the attribute, Presence in this case). GURPS method of reduced skill still being based off the attribute would have meant the newly minted bards could have purchased reasonable skill levels that were below the assasin/bard's, or at least not greater.

    Hero doesn't scale down well in my opinion, and GURPS doesn't scale up well in my opinion.

    As to the grand daddy of universal systems, I've never found appeal in any BRP games other than RuneQuest 1st edition. And recently I even tried a non-Gloranthan campaign and have resolved that forever for me, there is no BRP. There is RuneQuest 1st edtion (OK, I'll borrow bits from other versions) set in Glorantha.

    My own attempts to run GURPS failed within a session or two. I tried GUPRS Griffon Island... I tried GURPS Talislanta...

    The closest I'll go to "universal" now is I'm making a decent go of Cold Iron Samurai Adventures, but part of that is adapting the setting to Cold Iron's magic, so mostly it's name changes for weaponry and coming up with some dual wielding rules.

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  4. Way too detailed. Too many good ideas made play - especially combat - tedious. During HS senior year, my old RPG buddies asked me to join their GURPS game. I did for about 30 minutes and then left convinced that I had made the right call by waving goodbye to RPGs. It wasn't until 2008-ish (18 years later) when I found the OSR that I recovered from GURPS induced PTSD.

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  5. This makes me wonder why TSR didn't re-purpose D&D mechanics for Star Frontiers and/or Buck Rogers or Gamma World. Clearly the mechanics were popular and it might have led to greater acceptance of these other systems.

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    1. They did.

      Buck Rogers XXVc is actually built on the AD&D 2E chassis and worked extremely well.

      Game Word 4th Edition (not the D&D 4E edition) was also built on a 2E chassis with some elements of early 3E concepts. Also worked very well.

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    2. Buck Rogers XXVc I found to be a mechanical hodgepodge of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition and something trying to be a then modern RPG. The result was a mess that made no sense in a Science Fiction RPG. With a coherent set of rules, that setting had a lots of potential, without it...

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    3. Game Word 4th Edition I liked a lot. As an evolution of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second, it made so much more sense than a great many of the design decisions in Buck Rogers XXVc.

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  6. GURPS is hard to assess fairly because it tries to let you do anything with it, which falls apart when someone tries to do *everything* at once instead. If you use the engine for a single specific setting and only use the parts of the engine that apply it's a decent game, albeit often not a very flavorful one. There are some default assumptions about magic that make it a very "defined" system that lacks any real sense of wonder and surprise, which may or may not be a negative for people. Firearms are extremely dangerous, especially at tech levels where they've outpaced armor technology, and getting shot is at least as deadly as it is in, say, Call of Cthulhu. The game also struggles with inhumanly high stats (most common in supers or with aliens and some monsters) skewing things, although that's not a GURPS-specific issue by any means. And at high power levels the character creation process can be painfully complex with nightmarish character sheets at the end of it, easily rivalling Hero System at its worst.

    But the core engine is very adaptable and modular, the setting books are generally well-written, and the use of real-world measurements for so many things makes the entire range very useful as reference material to mine ideas and data from.

    I'd still rather use The Fantasy Trip than GURPS for fantasy/historical gaming, but some of that is simply nostalgia at work. I grew up alongside Melee and Wizard and TFT, not GURPS.

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    1. I was very happy with TFT making a comeback as I played in JHS before there was ITL.

      As for GURPS magic, that has been a source of constant development in 4e. While the core Magic book is mostly the direct descendent of the spell system in GURPS Fantasy 1.0, the Thaumaturgy series of supplements (pdf) and a few supplements in other lines (including ones in Dungeon Fantasy and Monster Hunters) have offered several new systems, some very flavorful.

      And back in 3e Cabal took a swing at doing so viva a set of modifiers only Ken Hite could create to the original spell system.

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  7. Tangentially, I wonder if the name change from "Great" to "Generic" had anything to do with the popularity(?) of generic (black-and-white box) grocery products in the early to mid-80s. "Generic" and "Universal" are synonyms, so calling it the "Great Universal...RPS" would have made more grammatical sense.

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  8. I never played GURPS, but it was always around in the background (this was circa early to mid-2000s) of my RPG discussion as being complicated but cool. The setting books are neat, even if just for the sheer number and variety of them. I want to pick some up, if just for inspiration for other systems. I really regret not picking up the Atomic Horror book when I saw it at a used bookstore, and some day I want to get the Myth book based on the game series.

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  9. The GURPS 2nd ed. boxed set was my preferred system in college, and my group transitioned to 3rd ed. when that came out. I agree that GURPS didn't scale up to cover superpower games very well. GURPS Supers worked okay in isolation, but a 400 point super would crush underfoot a 400 point normal.

    Later on, after college, I purchased GURPS 4th ed. I never had a chance to play it, as my original GURPS group was long disbandoned, and new folks I gamed with went with other systems.

    4th ed. SEEMS, however, to fix the scaling problem, as Strength and the other attributes now have some kind of exponential expansion baked into them. They also tried to fix the problem from older editions that each new setting book tended to pile on new skills, advantages, etc. (3rd ed. tried to also, but I don't think it succeeded.) Maybe 4th ed. managed this, but if so, it's at the expense of a DIZZYING array of skills, advantages, etc. It seems like it would be harder as a newcomer to grasp, but maybe I'm wrong as I've never seen it in actual play.

    GURPS (in any edition) suffered from something I think any "universal" system does: once you present, for instance, your "universal" magic system, the "feel" of that system will drive the "feel" of the game. For instance, GURPS magic has a very functional, mechanistic flavor to it, which is fine for some campaigns, but less so for others. Divine magic always seemed grafted onto the original magic system, and had little "divine" flavor. GURPS always seemed to work better where the reality of any gods (in game terms) was seriously in doubt.

    Finally, whatever 4th ed. may have fixed or not, it seems to have lost some "charm" or "flavor." The added crunch seems to have buried some of the breezy and easy-to-follow presentation. The slick new hardbacks with color art SHOULD have been an improvement, but the color art seems (to me) inferior to the old black-and-white artwork in quality. This is purely subjective, of course.

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  10. "I never saw a copy of it at the time – indeed I've still never seen one..."
    Coincidentally SJG has just put Man-to-man up on the Amazon POD offerings:

    https://www.amazon.com/Man-Steve-Jackson/dp/1639990321/

    No sign of Orcslayer. At least not yet.

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  11. Regardless of issues with the system itself (and it could be quite slow if you used all the options), the "worldbook" supplements that adapted it to particular settings were generally excellent, and often covered things that nobody else really did well - there are three or four SF settings, aside from an entire licenced traveller line

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    1. Yes indeed. AD&D2 is often (rightly) lauded for it's settings, but GURPS does even better, with its historical, original (Goblins!), and licensed (Discworld! Hellboy!) setting books. There's such a wide variety, and the quality is often excellent.

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  12. Like many things in life, the greatness of a thing is heavily influenced by people. In college, the local dive bar was the greatest hangout I have ever experienced only because it was filled with my classmates. Going back twenty years later (or even five years) and it’s a sad and alien place. My view of GURPS is shaped by the excellent game my friend ran in high school. He ran GURPS Autodule and it was a fantastic game with conspiracies, always on the run highway car wars, and near future tactical combat. The world building was gripping with secrets to uncover. We also played GURPS Horror which was a better Horror game than CoC to my young self because it was modern and I understood what the monsters were.
    I never ran GURPS but I was drawn to buying some really esoteric GURPS sourcebooks and would pour over them. GURPS Illuminati was a great book that was useful for any system because it really just helped the GM to install grand conspiracy into any game. In fact, the book suggests not even telling the players that you are using the book and letting them stumble onto whatever conspiracy you inject. I used it in conjunction with GURPS Horror to plot out an X-Files style campaign that I never got off the ground.
    By the 90’s I was looking for a replacement for Marvel Superheroes and GURPS Supers was a supplement that I invested in. I felt that the game was far too granular and specific to be any fun.
    I also had The Prisoner sourcebook and I loved it for what it was, but I was certain that it would hold no interest for any of the players in my group; in fact, it would enrage them. So, I was content to just read it and enjoy it as is.

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  13. I always found I enjoyed the *idea* of GURPS, loved the GURPS Character Assistant--but when it came to playing GURPS, I just did not care for it. For me, it was a game where CharGen was very much a game within itself.

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  14. What's interesting about GURPS is that, while other systems used a game system/engine to power different games (HERO games powered Champions, Espionage, while BRP powered RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, etc.), GURPS wanted to be a game in and of itself. This approach probably works best with a genre-hopping setting such as time travel.

    My own college experience with GURPS was fine, but it was nothing special, and certainly broke down at extreme power levels.

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  15. A lot of the things I see others complaining about aren't really issues with GURPS. The biggest problem is that people look at it as if it were a singular game like other games are presented, when actually it is a toolkit for making a game tailored to a specific setting and the related assumptions. Really, the only central game mechanism in GURPS is "roll 3d6 under a target number, roll a variable number of d6 to determine the effect of a success". Everything else is a suggested way to approach specific actions in-game.

    One person mentions "GURPS magic" as if there were only one way the game provides to do magic, when in fact there are something over a half-dozen suggested, fleshed-out systems for magic in GURPS at this point (GURPS Magic, which is likely the one the other commenter was thinking of and which at this point has several variations laid out in detail to choose from, Alchemy, another type of Alchemy, Path/Book Magic, Verb-Noun Syntactic Magic, Realm Magic, Rune Magic, Ritual Path Magic, Summoning, Incantation Magic, and Sorcery come immediately to mind, pick one* and go), in addition to a number of suggestions toward building up an entirely novel system tailored to a specific setting.

    A recently-published supplement for the game talks in detail about how to adjust even the basic assumption of what attributes define characters in the game, splitting apart the various components of each or combining them in novel ways, inventing new attributes to cover setting-specific information, and so on. Or you can just go with the default four basic attributes (ST, DX, IQ, and HT) and the several dependent secondary attributes (HP, FP, Per, Will, Speed, Move). Another fairly recent supplement covers redesigning the Skill system to be much more freeform, expanding on the concept of "Wildcard" Skills presented in the Basic Set.

    As for the scaling problem, yeah. GURPS in its most recent edition has gotten better and scales upward much better than previous editions did, but games have to choose whether they handle the small or the big, and GURPS tends to work best toward the human-scale. Now it also works very, very well at the action-hero scale (and there are supplements to help tune the game toward that scale) and the low-level superheroic scale, but once you get toward the DC Heroes scale of superheroics it starts to get a little kludgy. But that last is true of most games other than DC Heroes.

    But what you should see in all of this is that many of these things are suggestions about how to build the game that is right and best for your setting and table. If your players want detailed tactical combat, there are rules you can use, but if they want fairly abstracted combat there are rules to use for that as well. You won't want to use both sets, and in fact the one precludes the other. You want a Wrestling campaign? There are different approaches to running grappling available for the game. You want a Baseball campaign? Well, the sports supplement hasn't been written yet, but the basics are already there, and there's been a little talk in online forums and Pyramid magazine articles toward such a game. The point is that you wouldn't use detailed grappling rules in a baseball campaign, and you wouldn't use detailed systems for figuring out what happens in an at-bat for a medieval fantasy. Or even necessarily use those detailed at-bat systems for every baseball campaign; maybe you want to focus on the personal interactions off the field and relegate the outcome of particular matches to a few simple rolls or GM fiat.

    *Warning: do not pick more than one unless you have significant experience running GURPS. Even then, use extreme caution when trying to mix several different magic systems. There are a few cases where different magic systems were designed from the start to work together, like GURPS Magic and Alchemy, but those are usually presented that way and have clear signals that they are intended to work together.

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  16. My problem with GURPS was the "G". It was just too Generic. Became real samey and dull real quick. Fantasy? High tech? Horror? It all had the same cardboard blandness with GURPS rules. But I've always been a fan of learning a new rule system, especially when the way it was written enhanced the flavor of the genre we were playing.

    I understand this is not a popular opinion, but there it is.

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  17. I played in a GURPS 3rd ed. campaign for many years when living in Dallas. It stayed fresh by being mission-oriented -- being dispatched to different "worlds" to right wrongs. It also helped that GM duties were rotated. However, combat took *forever,* which, looking back, had the net effect of encouraging roleplaying rather than rollplaying.

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  18. I never played GURPS, but I did use the GURPS historical sourcebook Aztecs (1993) for a D&D campaign set in an alternate world. A real favorite of mine.

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