GURPS much?

Moridan

As a veteran D&D and WoD player looking for something new, I started looking into GURPS, and I've got to say, it looks pretty interesting.

Any of you have experience with GURPS? Any advice? Interesting stories?

I see Amazon has GURPS for Dummies now, and it is getting good reviews, so I think I'll pick it up.

thorpe

An amazing setting. I love GURPS in general.

Gaddez

http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational/GURPS.jpg

Rhaka

Freakishly enough, I just started screwing around with GURPS last evening. I thought it was supposed to be a simplistic, open system, not horribly complex?

Gaddez

http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational/page_06.htm

See if this works better. 4th from the top, first colum.

Eartai

Rhaka wrote:

Freakishly enough, I just started screwing around with GURPS last evening. I thought it was supposed to be a simplistic, open system, not horribly complex?

Someone hasn't played Mechwarrior third edition.

[spoiler:1b7111bbec]I had trouble in GURPS because I had too many chargen options. With MW, I'm a lame retarded cockjockey, and it took me 12 hours to BE a lame retarded cockjockey![/spoiler:1b7111bbec]

But in all seriousness, it could be more complex. I haven't played...what is it, fringeworthy? But the way GURPS is set up is so that it's simple for the play mechanics. They created a bajillion rules and said, "use the ones you want too", so there's a simple system and a complex system, and so people are supposed to get the best of whatever, and be tied to the rules as much as wanted/needed. I don't know how this works. GURPS is the system all my friends are like, "Ya, that would be really cool." or "GURPS does that, we should try that", etc etc, but then we never actually play it. Just Shadowrun and D&D for me

Raijin Quickfoot

I've always lived by the motto "Friends don't let friends play GURPS."

I just don't enjoy the system though.

Echo

GURPS is the greatest system I never played. :P

I have some Transhuman Space stuff in the shelf. That's amazing books just for reading.

Gaddez

http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational/synninbar.jpg
Technically, this ain't Gurps, but there are rules for it to be gurps.

Allon

thorpe wrote:

An amazing setting. I love GURPS in general.

GURPS is as complex as you want it to be.
That, and the GURPS sourcebooks have a great fluff/crunch ratio.

Eartai

In Steampunk GURPS, they have a list of possible settings to run your game in. One is mid 1800s I think, where Jewish rabbis can make robots. There's a lot of things in that book that I thought, "Well duh, i didn't need a book to tell me that Jules Vern fits with Steampunk", but that shit blew my mind.

Mojo_Jojo

I picked up the 4th edition books not along ago to see if it was more suitable for running a monster catching/training RPG with. It's good but it is exceedingly complicated compared to pretty much every other system I've ever looked at.

Still, at least it has a unified dice system, otherwise it'd be hell.

Jawa

I recently started looking into GURPS too and it seems like a pretty simple system. I don't have any of the books, so could someone please elaborate on how it can get so complicated?

Doronron

IOU all the way, man.

Pata

Jawa wrote:

I recently started looking into GURPS too and it seems like a pretty simple system. I don't have any of the books, so could someone please elaborate on how it can get so complicated?

It's not so much that the base rules are complex. It's more like if you think of it, there's a rule for it.

Allon

Jawa wrote:

I recently started looking into GURPS too and it seems like a pretty simple system. I don't have any of the books, so could someone please elaborate on how it can get so complicated?

Rules creep.
Just keep it simple and focus on what you want to do with it and you should be able to avoid brain explodage.
Also, character generation can take some time. But it plays smooth once you're done with that.

Mojo_Jojo

Jawa wrote:

I recently started looking into GURPS too and it seems like a pretty simple system. I don't have any of the books, so could someone please elaborate on how it can get so complicated?

Realism is one of the things the designers were going after and as a result every little thing has a rule. And it is rarely intuitive. So you'll spend a good deal of timing hunting through the books.

Speaking of the books, they put the combat rules in the DM's only one too which was rather idiotic of them.

Eartai

Mojo_Jojo wrote:

Speaking of the books, they put the combat rules in the DM's only one too which was rather idiotic of them.

Not that bad of an idea really. They wanted to split their books into Chargen and Rulestuff. But more importantly, none of MY players will learn the damn rules anyway, so it might as well be in the DM book

DE?AD

I've run two table-campaigns, and am currently running a campaign online using GURPS 4e and I have to say, I highly suggest the system. I don't get where people who call it complicated are coming from, really - when I ran d20 I needed DM Genie and all the books with me to make sure I was getting the math/rules right. GURPS, on the other hand, I can run off-the-cuff with very little problem.

Silpheed

Eartai wrote:

In Steampunk GURPS, they have a list of possible settings to run your game in. One is mid 1800s I think, where Jewish rabbis can make robots.

I take it it's the steampunk version of making a Golem, right?

wavecutter

I'm a big gurps fan.

Mukaikubo

Characters Using GURPS I Am Currently Or Have Played In In The Last Month, as a sampler:

-Halo ODST
-Vampire Hunter In Ancient Rome
-Transhuman Space Orbital Garbageman ("Vacuum Cleaners")
-A High School Kid
-A psionic hamster named "Mister Widdles"

This should give some indication of A. How much I play GURPS, because I fucking love it and B. How versatile it really is.

Also if we are whoring settings, I am going to whore like fuck for Infinite Worlds. The 4e Infinite Worlds book is win and awesome.

Echo

A guy on another forum told me of what he once played in Transhuman Space: an artificial intelligence distributed between a dozen miniature smart missiles.

Each time he used one of them as a weapon he lost a point of intelligence.

Mukaikubo

Echo wrote:

A guy on another forum told me of what he once played in Transhuman Space: an artificial intelligence distributed between a dozen miniature smart missiles.

Each time he used one of them as a weapon he lost a point of intelligence.

Yeah, I can easily see how you'd do that, too. If you wanted to make it crunchy instead of just "This Happens", make it an Innate Attack with the severe nuisance attack of paying one IQ point per shot.

Moridan

Mukaikubo wrote:

Characters Using GURPS I Am Currently Or Have Played In In The Last Month, as a sampler:

-Halo ODST
-Vampire Hunter In Ancient Rome
-Transhuman Space Orbital Garbageman ("Vacuum Cleaners")
-A High School Kid
-A psionic hamster named "Mister Widdles"

This should give some indication of A. How much I play GURPS, because I fucking love it and B. How versatile it really is.

Also if we are whoring settings, I am going to whore like fuck for Infinite Worlds. The 4e Infinite Worlds book is win and awesome.

You know, I'm surprised RIFTS hasn't been converted to GURPS.

Eartai

Silpheed wrote:

Eartai wrote:

In Steampunk GURPS, they have a list of possible settings to run your game in. One is mid 1800s I think, where Jewish rabbis can make robots.

I take it it's the steampunk version of making a Golem, right?

Actually ya, they're golems not robots.

EDIT: I think it was, but then Palladium made SJ Games take it down.

Moridan

Eartai wrote:

Silpheed wrote:

Eartai wrote:

In Steampunk GURPS, they have a list of possible settings to run your game in. One is mid 1800s I think, where Jewish rabbis can make robots.

I take it it's the steampunk version of making a Golem, right?

Actually ya, they're golems not robots.

EDIT: I think it was, but then Palladium made SJ Games take it down.

Figures...

Moridan

So I ran my first "play test" of GURPS....

And I LOVED it. I generated a "warrior", a "rogue", and a "mage" at 175 points each. Myself and one of my players pit them against three goblin warriors and two hobgoblins warriors. The goblins were created with about 90 points, and the hobgoblins had about 110.

It was great. First round resulted in a one shot instant kill from the rogue character's crossbow. Crossbow bolt to the head of one of the goblins. Instant death. It took a little while to get used to things. We had to look up almost everything every round for the first three or four rounds. After that, things started to go pretty fast. Of note, the mage tended to roll pretty badly, so he didn't get to shine. The warrior saved him from a charging hobgoblin by slashing at his legs as he ran by. Crippling shot, sliced through the hobgob's knee. The hobgoblin crippled, the mage had a chance to get to a safe location and build up a fireball that was used to finish off the last enemy.

All in all, it was pretty complex at first, but with a good character sheet and some combat cards downloaded from the GURPS website, we were able to get running pretty quickly.

The biggest issue was the fact that I had misunderstood how hit points work. I had incorrectly assumed that they worked like D&D, below zero hit points, you were pretty much out. WRONG! We had one hobgoblin on his feet and fighting at -30 something hit points. I hadn't expected that from the system. Just goes to show you how dangerous preconceived notions from other games can be.

Myself and my player really liked it, and it looks like GURPS will be our system of choice for a while. I've been looking for somthing more realistic for a while, and this seems to be it.

Allon

One of us! One of us!

Echo

Could anyone give me a brief rundown of the differences between 3rd and 4th edition?

Allon

Go for fourth. It's a lot cleaner.
It's pretty much 3rd, but with a lot of houserules that smoothed things up.
Still, it's easy to convert between them. And 3rd is teh cheap...

Also:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=275601&postcount=33

thorpe

Tee-hee. My greatest Transhuman Space character was a rough Blackbeard eidolon with a concience.

Mojo_Jojo

I had plans to use GURPS on the next game I ran over at the site I play PBPs on. Sadly nobody seems interested.

I should really get cracking with my attempts to whip up something that'll let me use it to play a monster trainer game though.

Moridan

Allon wrote:

One of us! One of us!

It's looking like it. I'm rebuilding the characters with a revised character sheet, incorporating changes reflecting my lessons learned from the first test run.

We'll probably do another test run before we kick off a full campaign.

minigunwielder

Speaking of GURPS, why in the Bleak Eternity would Falout PnP be in D20 form?

Mojo_Jojo

minigunwielder wrote:

Speaking of GURPS, why in the Bleak Eternity would Falout PnP be in D20 form?

Que?

Al Baron

Mojo_Jojo wrote:

minigunwielder wrote:

Speaking of GURPS, why in the Bleak Eternity would Falout PnP be in D20 form?

Que?

Glutton Creeper Games is making a Fallout RPG using the D20 system. Since SPECIAL (the system used in the Fallout games) is based off of GURPS, why not uses GURPS?

Sonar

Because Fallout wasn't based on the GURPS engine, Steve Jackson pulled permission at the last minute so they had to come up with their own system on the fly.

GURPS is my favorite system. It's scalable as you want it to be and tends to make a heck of a lot more sense than D20 for how everything works. Plus if you like RP'ing instead of hack and slash characters die real easy, so its easy to convince the party to talk rather than to jump in sword first.

My play style is to skim the technical details and stay with the basic combat (describe what happens rather than map it out and use combat maneuvers)

minigunwielder

SPECIAL is based off of GURPS, just different enough to avoid copyright problems.


EDIT:Why the heck are they using that logo and not the other one that Toxic made?

Moridan

I really like the techniques, maneuvers, and hit location dependant damage. It makes for a lot more tactical combat and gives warrior types more to do in combat besides say "I hit that guy".

One of the draws of spellcasters is the variety of effects you can achieve through spellcasting. In a system where swordsmen have an array of interesting techniques, it gives more incentive to play that type of character and makes the mage-lover player think twice before passing on the fighter type character.

Moridan

minigunwielder wrote:

SPECIAL is based off of GURPS, just different enough to avoid copyright problems.

And anybody can make anything using d20 without the need to worry about copyrights or licensing with Wizards. Sure, you'd have to get the Fallout license or whatever, but the game system is open to anyone.