You can do what Our Roger does. Even He is not skilled, practised, or determined enough to run a game as detailed as GURPS. But He is skilled, practised, or determined enough to run a much simpler game that makes up about 1%¹ of His GURPS 4th ed. collection. The skill, practice, and determination are required to find that game in there.
¹ He often describes the bit of GURPS that he actually uses in terms that describe pp. 343–6, which amount to 4/17,000 = 0.0235% of GURPS. But I think that if I were to cross-examine him on it he might admit to also using some sort of combat rules, some sort of weapons stats, some injury rules, and parts of the skills, advantages, and disadvantages lists.
You really can’t measure the size and complexity of a game by the total number of pages published for it, including setting and adventure books. That’s just… wrong. By that metric, D&D is not only the biggest RPG ever published (doubtless true by some metrics), but also the most complex (probably not true). There are a huge number of pages published for it (any given edition or incarnation), but the measure of its complexity is determined by the rules bits of the PH and the DMG (and whichever optional rules extensions are in use in any given campaign).
On top of which, sometimes greater length means a simpler, or at least more playable, game. Clearer explanations, at the length required to avoid cryptic jargon, with plentiful well-designed examples, make a game easier.
(I do love good, clear examples in rules material. Especially examples that encompass both edge cases and non-edge cases, demonstrate how one is supposed to round fractions, and so forth. Examples that suggest that the writer has avoided thinking about the fiddly possibilities, on the other hand, annoy me considerably.)
Yes, here we absolutely agree: the Basic Set should give you the tools you need to run a game, and one of the tools you need to run GURPS is how to work out which bits you’re expecting to use.
I know people who did this with Lite for 3e, but Lite for 4e feels much more like an advertisement than it does a small runnable system. (I don’t know anyone who’s tried Ultra-Lite, but I find the idea somewhat appealing.)
I may not have meant it quite that way. I can tell you that the bit of the rules I look up most often, having largely internalised most of the ones I use, is pp. 414-415 (explosions).
All the talk about GURPS kinda reminds me of my own efforts to get people into fighting video games. What you actually need to know and do to get started and be competitive is waaaay less than it looks - but the games suck at teaching you that. Tekken has roughly 100 ‘Moves’ per character and 51 characters in the current roster. It doesn’t tell you which moves are more commonly used or what they are supposed to be used for - it just gives you a big list for every character. If you just look at the numbers, there’s no way you’re going to be actually holding all this stuff in your head unless it was your full time job.
(But you don’t need to know all that to play and have lots of fun!!!)
My pragmatic measure is how long it takes me to create a fully defined NPC. When I was running Manse, I noticed that I could create from three to six NPC in about as much time as it took me to create one in GURPS. That affected my GMing style: I would have a whole sheaf of NPCs just waiting to be used for BESM campaigns, but I’d make up maybe one or two for a GURPS session. To me that says that one important aspect of GURPS is indeed more complex.
The majority of GURPS supplements are setting or genre books, and fourth edition was intended from the start to be comprehensive. Adding new skills or completely new character features to the game is actively deprecated by the line editors.
I was personally responsible for the one early book that could be said to have added the most completely new character features (Thaumatology), and those are (a) as optional as you can get (the book is about custom-building magic systems to fit specific campaigns), and (b) built as much as possible on the foundations of existing rules and mechanisms.
How many steps does it take to resolve an action?
How many exceptions are there to the core mechanism?
How easy is it extrapolate to situations not explicitly covered by the rules?
How easy is it to bluff through an encounter unprepared and not have the players notice?
That’s a large and possibly unanswerable question. Actual direct comparative experience of running or playing the game is probably best, though that will of course remind people that this is far more of a subjective judgement call than they may want to admit. (In other words, game complexity is at least as much a matter of personal opinion as of objective fact.) A page count of actual rules that are required to be used at the table, in play, would not be actively bad. “Average time to resolve a fist fight between two characters” might sometimes suffice.
Bill’s metric of how long it takes to create a fully defined NPC is fair enough, but dodges the question of whether you need to fully define most NPCs. In GURPS, as in most games I’ve played or run, you don’t; a couple of lines of jotted notes suffices for most.
Of course. We are dealing game systems, not fractals to which we can assign a dimension value. Every GM and player will have their own opinions. Rather than describe games as complex vs. simple, I will sometimes use convoluted vs. streamlined.
Noting that at least some editions of D&D have actively encouraged third parties to publish new supplements which add new rules stuff to the game. All such additions are of course optional, but that’s not how some people seem to treat them.
GURPS, on the other hand, is more bolted down. You can’t publish a GURPS book without consent and approval from SJ Games. (Anyone can invent their own house-rule changes, of course, but there’s no way to make them look even faintly “official”.) So however complex GURPS is or isn’t, it’s not going to suffer any weird third-party changes overnight.
Fair enough. There’s certainly a huge difference between “complex” as in “has a long list of implementations of the same few core mechanics for a lot of different settings and genres” (the “complexity” of generic systems ever since Hero went generic) and “complex” as in “a crawling heap of one-off rules and unique cases, made up as Gary Gy… as the author went along.”
Honestly, most games seem reasonably well streamlined these days. Though there does always seem to be a market for convoluted-for-the-sake-of-it.
I based my half joke response on the descriptions of published additions to GURPS by members of this forum which seem to add significant bumps in complexity. I don’t really know how adding supplements works, so if they don’t add additional skills or features, that’s my bad.
Reign of Steel is a setting and Fantasy is a genre book that doesn’t add rules or rules cases. But Thaumatology, Social Engineering, Powers, and Martial Arts do add rules and rules cases. Also, Action is presented as a cutting-down of Basic, but it does add rules. Yes, they are good rules that replace other rules that are complex or vague. But let’s not deny that they exist. That would be like saying that a chronograph doesn’t make a watch more complicated, on the ground that it is better for timing a footrace than the sweep second hand is.
How likely is an experienced player to make an annoying mistake in character generation through overlooking some rules feature, and an experienced GM not notice it until the rule come up in play?
How long does it take an inexperienced GM to figure out which optional rules will not be used in their campaign?
How much prep work does a GM have to do before character generation can begin?