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.