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Anybody Have GURPS Experience?
Murkus
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Well, a few months ago I picked up the GURPS Basic Set (4E) and the two volumes have just sat on my shelf collecting dust ever since. Recently I've begun studying the rules and character generation stuff. Now, in my short life the only tabletop game I've had significant experience with is D&D 3.5. I know that system quite well, and breaking into a new one is rather daunting. Character generation is amazingly extensive for a universal system (from what I know), but it also seems complicated. GURPS also plans for everything possible in an infinite multiverse, so it gets even more labyrinthine rule-wise. Now, as I said, I haven't read everything yet, so I can't say anything with complete assurity. I was curious: Has anyone had experience with this system before? What did you like or dislike about it, and most importantly, did you find it fun? Would you recommend getting into this system for someone who enjoys multiversal settings? Portals, parallel universes, infinite worlds and such?
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Basically my groups style was to just use basic combat because the game was about the story, not stat crunching.
I see it like this: GURPS is great for role playing because your character is actually defined. If your character is greedy, then it's on the paper. It's a great way to work on roleplaying because everything is there. D&D doesn't really define personalities beyond general. GURPS defines every little quirk. If roleplaying in a structured enviroment is your thing then give it a whirl.
You really want to do this if you have a group that claims to roleplay but just stat crunches and power games. It also works well for players that radically change how their character acts from moment to moment. Kind of like you choosing the best option in a computer game because it's the best option, not because it's what your character would do. (you are evil, but choosing to save the kitten gives you a +5 thingabob while ignoring the kitten only nets you a +3 Jerkwanker... you choose to save the kitten)
...
GM: "No. You don't lie to the guard about not having refugees hidden in the trunk. You have Honesty. If you lie, I dock character points. Better pull your gun!"
caffron said: "and cat pee is not a laughing matter"
I've played 3.5 and 4e of D&D and I don't think GURPS basic set is labyrinthine. The Player's Hanbook is 317 pages while Basic Set: Characters is 336. The rules are a simple roll under target 3d6 (as opposed to over target d20) and the specific affects of the advantages and disadvantages is clearly spelled out. Combat is not wildly different than D&D 3.5 save that attacks are mostly skills rolls rather than use-restricted powers. The advantages and skills are even divided into handy categories like social, supernatural, cinematic, etc.
The main thing you need is to conceptualize your character (or setting) beforehand. Then it's a simple matter of looking at the available abilities and choosing. Think of what your character can do and how he can do it (natural abilities would be advantages while learned abilities are skills). Most of the powerful abilities are auto-balanced by nature of their high point value. So a thief might take add +2 to their Dexterity, take the Night Vision advantage, the Kleptomania disadvantage, and the Stealth skill at level 14. The tools are there but you need to already have a conception before you begin looking for abilities. And if all else fails there are templates provided in the Basic Set and supplements that lay out the primary abilities of an archetypal character that you can customize.
I would definitely recommend this system, especially if you are into alternate worlds. GURPS publishes a fantastic campaign setting called Infinite Worlds (that's discussed in the character creation examples in the Basic Set). I love the customization the system offers, the balance, and the ability to use the existing toolset to model almost anything.
I hoped this helped. if it didn't then I recommend you visist Steven Jackson Game's official GURPS forum at forums.sjgames.com
It is a GURPS "out of the box" game that comes with a variety of templates that roughly corresponds to traditional dungeon crawling like rangers, barbarians, clerics, etc. Essentially the GURPS version of classes. I highly recommend it if you are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice and just want to dive right into gameplay.
Heck, even just using all of bits of it can be a pain at times. An example. The last GURPS game I was in used all the combat bells & whistles. This turned out to be an appropriate analogy: what we got was an absolute cacophony.
As was suggested above, I highly recommend the Dungeon Fantasy line. In a strange way, by having something hack down your options into a handful of prepackaged rule-bundles, GURPS becomes quite easy to work with. Once you get a handle on how GURPS works and how you can sort of bundle together certain chunks of rules, it gets easier to make your own campaigns.
The only other warning I would have about GURPS is that it caters to simulationists. Oh, you can do cinematic stuff in it (and Dungeon Fantasy will even show you how), but it assumes a simulationist mindset.
Other than all that... yeah, to answer your question, GURPS is fantastic for dimension hopping. Or planet hopping. Or whatever multiversal shenanigans you want to get up to. You can pit a magic sword wielding half orc against a psionic Navy SEAL and it will work.
Edited to add: Oh. I forgot to mention on the one thing that GURPS truly does over every other system. Damn near all the hard math is front loaded. Sure, character creation takes forever, but once it's all on paper, man, gameplay is just chattering and rolling 3d6 (and hoping you roll under your skill number). The core mechanic of GURPS is dead simple. It's just all those character options that complicate things.
This is one of the reasons I love GURPS so much. There's very little "oh hey I forgot what this does let me spend three hours cross referencing rulebooks" once your character is made.
We are currently playing in a Supers Campaign it's been on going for about 5 months now. I GM'd a session and honestly I still don't know all the special rules for combat. We kept that area as simple as we could. Our group is heavy in the role play, less with die rolling anyways so it works well for us.
I think the above is key to understanding what's so great about GURPS. It offers rules for almost every imaginable situation, and the idea is that you develop stuff freely and there will always be a solid framework of rules for whatever you come up with, either as player or as GM.
The system scales down fine, in the sense that you can just choose to ignore many of the more detailed rules and the game still plays great, although the gameplay tends to be pretty simple anyway. Like others have said, the complexity is all in the character creation. It's an awesome system if you lean towards free-form or story-centric roleplaying.
In my experience it's not a great idea to play GURPS with minmaxers, because glass cannon builds can be painfully imbalanced (until they randomly die).
It can be. As others have noted most of the crunch is frontloaded into character creation, after that it's all pretty simple in play. My suggestion is for your first game run something simple with a minimum of exotic abilities. So instead of supers, do 1930s noir or modern thriller.
Suggestion: Get GURPS Lite. It's free. Start with JUST the rules in there. Add the more complicated rules from the Basic Set if and ONLY if you're like, "I want more detail in this specific area." I'd suggest adding Deceptive Attacks and Hit Locations at a minimum, but then I like crunch and have lots of experience with the system.
It's my go-to system. Use it for damn near everything. So far have done Shadowrun, Dark Sun, Hellboy-esque secret magic weird war II, Mass Effect-esque sci-fi, Serenity-esque sci-fi, Dungeon Fantasy, dark fantasy, Delta Green, and post-apocalypse.
I like that it really is a system. Sure there's detailed rules for explosive decompression, but if you just wing it with "Um, HT-5 rolls for everyone or suffer damage" you're not far off. Once you get familiar with it's conventions, you don't really need to know the detailed rules for the more obscure stuff because it almost certainly works like you'd guess it does.
I also like that what you would expect to happen generally happens. Shoot someone in the head with a rifle? Probably dead. Crash your car without wearing a seatbelt? Probably pretty banged up. Fire a gun at someone 50 yards away without aiming? Probably miss. Most of the games I've been in have had some sort of extraordinary elements in them, but the rest of the world still functioned like you'd expect it to, and where the extraordinary elements interacted with the normal world, reasonable consequences ensued.
Absolutely. In fact, I'd recommend Infinite Worlds, a setting tailored for world-hopping/time-travelling games. It also comes with a nifty alternate history generator which is pretty cool. Oh, and stats for a time traveling delorean.
8-)
A fellow Dungeon Crawler, huh...?
I speak from long experience in many games; I currently own extensive books for nine different systems, from "old school" D&D Rulescyclopedia, to Middle Earth RPG, to White Wolf, even Palladin. I broke my gaming "teeth" on the purple-covered edition of D&D (before there was an "Advanced D&D"). I have played many heroes, GMed many Crawls through Forgotten Places; My understanding in these areas have been paid for with paper-scarred fingers and many all-night Sessions. I will speak now of what I know to true.......
:Character generation
Valid point, granted; .... For the first-timer to it, they do appear complex. But remember: GURPS was designed to accommodate many forms of Campaigns across many Genre Worlds, from Old West to Future Era to everything in between. The idea to decide ahead of time where the character is from that you are designing. A 3.5 D&D style Warrior, for example, would have a high ST & HT, average to high DX, and average to low IQ, as well as points spent in the Advantages of Combat Reflexes, High Pain Threshold, and Toughness (getting hurt often builds thick skin). Disadvantages like Bad Temper, Gigantism, and Illiteracy are good staples, with Skills like Broadsword, Shield, Brawling, Riding (Horse), and Running being I feel are core elements.
See? You have the bones of a Dungeon Crawler right in front of you! Its not complex; its just mercilessly all-enveloping in a good way....
:labyrinthine rule-wise
Again, a valid point, since - again - you are dealing with a game designed to be anything you want it to be. Like the core rules, you only need those portions which deal with the Campaign you are running. If you are doing a Dungeon Crawl, for example, you can ignore the portions dealing with Firearms (unless you have one very demented GM, IMHO). The rules are like the Character Creation process, hard and confusing until you've used them a couple of times. A tip from someone who's been in the GM's hot seat: Invest in Book Tabs, so you can mark key areas you refer to a lot, like Unarmed Combat, Damage Conversion, even how to determine how much pain a steel-toe does when it hits "a vital area" (Laugh; but it's actually in there, seriously) Quick Ref sheets are another life-saver, and can be downloaded as PDFs nearly everywhere on the Internet. In all, .... no harder to learn from Newbee than 3.5 D&D, and involved less on-the-fly Rules Creation.
:multiversal settings
This is the life blood of GURPS, namely the non-existant limits of where you can Campaign, the kinds of characters you can create, and the Crossover potential of both. There are actually in print Campaign Books for time travel, Other Worlds, (FIB)Punk, Magic, Robots, even how to run a Campaign where the players are all rabbits like "Wind in the Willows" (GURPS Bunnies and Burrows, available on Torrent download). I have even created Robots who were spell-casting mages, Knights who used Final Fantasy-ish Sword-guns, mice who built and piloted "Cat Killer" mini-helicopters, even (the achievement that made me smile) an actual Slime (yeah; the blue thing from video game infamy) who used his "oozy-ness" to help other Slimes fight off hoards of "Killer Humans" (The players were the monsters, and vice-versa; Got high-fives later for originality).....
:did you find it fun
Now we cut to the chase..... Fun? With a game that you can change at the drop of a dice if things get dull, deadly, or borderline deceased? Of course! Simple core-rules with the ability to add-on whatever is needed as it's needed, on top of a line of professional quality Source Books full of balanced and detailed rules for any given situation, makes GURPS a game which sets the bar of excellence VERY high! Yes; I enjoy playing GURPS. I have been told that BESM (Big Eyes, Small Mouth) is the same; and I do play it on occasions, so I can see why they say there is a resemblence. But GURPS shines in its ability to handle anything thrown at it without needing a near-rebuild to accommodate it. Buy GURPS; Use your existing 3.5 D&D collection as Idea Material; Anything else is short-changing yourself the best gaming experience currently in print.
That is my experience..... I leave you to learn from it or ignore it as you wish.....
8-)
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
- 3d6 resolution instead of d20 resolution.
- Modular!
- After you get the hang of character creation, building manns in GURPS is pretty fun. The extra stuff you'll find in Martial Arts & Fantasy are neat on top of neat.
- Hexes > Squares
Stuff I don't like about GURPS
- Combat is way too lethal, so unless you're running a game where everyone is supposed to have disposable characters, getting into fights is a non-option.
- Dex is the best stat. Str is a waste of points.
- Every official magic system for the game is broken. Ditto for psionics.
- There's no sensation of 'DING! NEW TOYS!' when it comes to level advancement.
I had a lot of fun running a gritty low fantasy gladiator game in GURPS, but the system itself - in my opinion - does a lot more wrong than it does right. It gets boring pretty quickly if you try to run a longer game, or that's been my experience, because character growth is such a milquetoast component.