I’ve heard this myself more than once, but it creates a huge barrier to learning the rules in the first place, and GURPS is slowly dying due to the lack of new blood. GURPS needs an on-ramp.
I had to look up what evitative meant!
Wasn’t there a GURPS Lite for one of the editions? Dos that need to be resurrected as a cheap GURPS Quickstart pdf?
I loved GURPS all to bits when I first encountered it, because it:
- Wasn’t just another bloody game about orcs, swords and wizards. I could do anything with it. Like all the anythings we’d been doing CoC/BRP hacks to do… wild west, Mad Max, aliens colonial marines…
- Was points buy and let you design a character, instead of being stuck with a character class and the results of random rolls.
- Character improvement is under player control, rather than some levelling up nonsense.
- XP was not all about killing people and taking their stuff.
These days I’m spoiled for choice for games which do all of the above.
I fell out of love with GURPS (and to be fair, with some other systems) as a go-to game for me to run campaigns for a variety of reasons, including:
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The Speed/range table of 3rd edition onwards. I have moaned about it elsewhere on these forums. So I wouldn’t want to run GURPS as a con game, because I’d have to explain that I was running a hybrid of 2nd and 4th ed, and might give folks a false impression of the system.
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Too many bloody sourcebooks which I didn’t own and didn’t care about BUT I had players who did own them and who constantly wanted to impose extra rules and twiddly bits on MY campaigns. Frak off. If you want to have a game filled with martial arts moves and special rules for speed-loading matchlock pistols, then go away and run your own bloody game.
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The insistence that the GURPS way was the right way, instead of adapting to the source material. I bought the GURPS version of Werewolf the Apocalypse. I would have loved to run it in GURPS because the WoD system was clunky. But instead of GURPS saying Yeah all werewolves get 3 Gifts - they cost 10 points each, they statted them up using existing GURPS rules, so some cost 5 points and some cost 75 points. That just broke character gen and game balance. I gave my copy of the book away, unused.
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If a typical character sheet is 3 or more pages long, you are doing it wrong. To be frank, if the character sheet is only 2 sides, but you constantly have to flip back and forth between them, you are doing it wrong.
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When it comes to stuff like Encumbrance, or bonuses/penalties for Tech Level or Cultural Familiarity, or reach of weapons, my lack of interest knows no bounds.
It is kind of weird. GURPS was my go-to system for a decade or so because it was less crunchy than Aftermath and less annoying than AD&D. Currently is has a level of crunch and annoyance which means I keep my GURPS books for nostalgia rather than for actual use.
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For GURPS Werewolf and indeed Vampire, I think the problem was that some gifts were worth way more than others - early WoD wasn’t exactly the most balanced of games - and the idea was to try to maintain some sort of balance between characters.
Points are always a bit iffy though. Sometimes they mean game utility, sometimes they mean difficulty of acquisition. Sword skill is “worth”, in game utility, more in fantasyland than in SF-land. But when high-tech hand weapons can produce one shot kills of anything human, so are hit points. Bad Temper is more of a problem in civilisation than it is in the Wild West. Blindness at TL0 is close to a death sentence; not so much at TL12. There are very few games in which Nuclear Physics skill is worth more than Pistol. And so on.
For GURPS Werewolf and indeed Vampire, I think the problem was that some gifts were worth way more than others - early WoD wasn’t exactly the most balanced of games - and the idea was to try to maintain some sort of balance between characters.
Yeah but it felt like a ‘GURPS balance’ not an actual game balance, because it was based on what GURPS had done mechanically in previous sourcebooks. So - to give some fictitious examples - imagine the gifts were Custard 10’ Radius which the GURPS Desserts sourcebook said cost 1000 points and Speak With Squid, which the GURPS Cephalopods sourcebook said cost 5 points. Those were therefore 1000 points and 5 points in GURPS Werewolf.
The logic of going “Ooooh, drowning people in custard is much more deadly than speaking to squid” trumped the fact that the custard summoner didn’t have enough points left to walk and chew gum at the same time, whilst the squid talker had so many points left over they could boost all their stats to Incredible Hulk level and become much more deadly than an ocean of custard.
The gifts in WoD are unbalanced. But everyone gets the same number of dots to put in stats, skills and backgrounds.
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I’m not seeing why that, in particular, is a problem. If I take something really powerful, for a lot of points, of course I end up with fewer points to take other things. That’s inherent in any point allocation mechanic.
It’s different if one of the really high-point things is actually less powerful than other high-point things. But if I spend 1000 points to be the proverbial one-trick pony, well, that was my choice, and I haven’t been wronged by not having points left over for other tricks.
GURPS Lite was updated for 4e, and is free. There are complaints that you have to register with the website to download it …
It was GURPS’ idea though, not Werewolf’s. Character balance is a design choice, arguably suitable for some styles of play but not for others. Sometimes [combat] capability on par with the rest of the group is not what makes a character fun to play. Imposing character parity on Werewolf changed it a lot, and an adaptation isn’t supposed to.
Besides, Werewolf was for adventures in a very particular setting and set of circumstances, in which various abilities are of particular use values that diverge from their use values in the generic setting and circumstances the GURPS’ designers designed for. In particular, my group found that werewolves had such a superabundance of combat dangerousity that the large gap between a ragabash and a whatchamacallit didn’t really matter. I recall an adventure in which our party were stalking a vampire elder, and disintegrated because we saw the moonrise (Werewolf was a very stupid game). My character was the storyteller type. “Galliard”, I think. Anyway, he ended up confronting the vampire alone. The fight lasted one combat turn, and the vampire didn’t so much as glove me. Another player was playing a Child of Gaia Ahroun (I think). Combat monster. But we very, very rarely met anything that was tough enough that he got to shine, because even our Theurge and our Ragabash were catastrophe in a can against most threats.
This reminds me of a superhero riddle.
Q: What’s the difference between Superman and the Martian Manhunter?
A: If you ask Blue Beetle, nothing.
Anyway, werewolf Gifts are often in the category of “when you need a corkscrew you can’t substitute a howitzer”. Each Gift gave a character a moment to shine whether that was shelling an enemy magazine or releasing a trapped spirit from a winebottle. It is a highly questionable design decision to say that “this character gets to be versatile and competent because his special-occasions ability is not generally impressive, whereas this other character gets to be a crock 95% of the time because the ability that she uses one session in five sounds awesome”.
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Sorry. That seemed funny when I wrote it.
If you’re choosing independent items from a huge menu, yes. But when there is a forced choice of one five templates, each of which involves certain social, political, and religious roles as well as unique Gifts that’s not so clear. If I designed templates for Werewolf auspices in such a way that Ahroun were useless or superfluous except in actual combat against supernatural foes, and therefore no player ever chose to play one, I would have failed to design an adaptation of Werewolf.
Yup, that’s it in a nutshell. Everyone has to pick 3 Gifts - one for their Breed, one for their Auspice and one for their Tribe. You usually have a choice of 2 gifts at each stage.
So character type A might have a choice of a 20 point gift or a 25 point gift for their breed, but character type B gets a choice of a 5 point gift or a 100 point gift, and character type C gets a choice of two 100 point gifts. Poor old character C has no points left to buy skills and thus cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.
I think my response to that is either:
(a) “to hell with it, we’re playing WoD, we don’t need a balanced party, so ignore the point cost of gifts”
or
(b) “OK, everyone gets 200 points for gifts plus whatever they need for walking and chewing gum, and any leftover points can go on other stuff”.
The way I see GURPS and other point-buy systems is that the more points a trait is worth, positive or negative, the more effective it is as getting that character chunks of narrative time - whether it’s Master Swordsman, Blasty Magic, huge resilience, compulsive flirting, or a crippling fear of flying. Positive or negative, they push the narrative towards being more about that character. So the concern I’d have with option a, which I suspect is the same as I’d have with WoD under the original rules, is that some characters are way more effective at grabbing the narrative than others, and it’ll need cooperation from players and GM to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Getting back to this, I have basically resigned myself to GURPS dying a slow death. I would be happier with it if it was an active growing community, but it isn’t, and it would take a serious black swan event to change that.
The suggestion I made in about 2012 (in conversation with Ross, Randy and Sam, all SJGames people though not GURPS people) was a series of introductory sets: effectively, a further-cut-down GURPS Lite plus the minimum you need to play one of (dungeon bashes, modern action, occult investigation, bughunts, etc.). The idea would be that you have a one-stop book for the genre that interests you, and if you want more complexity and options you can go to full-on GURPS.
They seemed interested, but nothing ever came of it - unless you count the Dungeon Fantasy RPG.
That’s pretty much the opposite of what I want, though. I want a general-purpose RPG with which I can readily take up a combination of setting and genre that occurs to me, attract a quorum of players, start up a campaign without too effort and balking, and get reasonably good resolution of a fairly wide range of actions. A shelf full of games with similar mechanics, each specialised for a different thing that I don’t want to run just now, doesn’t do the job.
I’m not particularly averse to complexity: I recognise it as a cost, but it’s a cost I can be tempted to pay. What I can’t accept, though, is a system that most players find aversive. That starts with a system that imposes a heavy load of work before play, including a voluminous list of optional rules and rules deltas, but it culminates with a brand so toxic that most players refuse point blank to consider the pitch.
I don’t think there is anything on the market that meets these needs. I am aware of several systems that meet everything but the last point. I believe you’ve tried FATE, and I use FUDGE myself when I want a really light system, but they are low resolution. GUMSHOE is low resolution. I think the Apocalypse Engine is too, but I’m only passingly familiar.
There are a few high resolution genericish systems out there, but I think they are all pretty niche in my experience and not really that approachable. (D20, Palladium, Champions ,and Rolemaster all tried for generic systems and none really seemed to get traction.)
Comprehensive, fine grained, and approachable is probably too much to ask, honestly. Maybe not impossible, but hard and no one has managed it successfully.
Now GURPS adds a terrible reputation on top of the unapproachability, which makes it even less suitable for your needs. I understand why you might want a version without the rep and better approachability … but I’m not sure how you get there from here.
I have in the past considered running a game where the player’s had charsheets that were purely descriptive, or perhaps in a very approachable system like Fudge, while I ran the Game in GURPS in the background, to put a realistic “fog of war” on the PCs understanding of how they fit into the world and play silly buggers with mental disads, but the effort never seemed worth the reward.
One could, however, do the same thing to make games “systemless” to the players while using whatever game engine one wanted. “PCs in this game don’t know their stats just like you don’t know yours, but behind the screen I’m using a terribly good out of print system called Foresight that you’ve probably never heard of and don’t need to understand to be successful in this game. Just play your PC and roll percentiles when I tell you and you’ll do fine.”
Are we perhaps weird, in that we want a generic system which covers all eventualities?
The rest of the world seems happy to buy a new system for every genre. Or indeed to buy a new system for a new variant on an old genre (I’m guilty of that myself, but it is a reflex action hailing back to the time when science fiction games were as rare as hen’s teeth).
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That makes sense if you want to play in genres that (a) have a fairly strongly defined set of mission statements, typical characters, and typical conflicts that are generally recognized and (b) have enough mass appeal so it’s profitable to do a game that specifically targets their audience. I don’t do all that much of that. When I want to do a game in some eccentric genre that I’ve just made up—anthropologically based multiracial Bronze Age fantasy, transhumanistic cosmic horror, covert supers—I probably need a multigenre system, because I’m not going to find a unigenre system tailored for any of those.
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Ah - so we’re weird because we’re GMs! 
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It’s the depth of creation that one wants to do, perhaps. One might rate this:
- Pre-gen characters in pre-written adventures
- Own characters in pre-written adventures
- Own characters in own adventures, in a generic or pre-written world
- Own characters in own adventures, in one’s own world
Only the last of those is really good for letting the GM move the big setting levers; if I say we’re playing Airship Pirates or Achtung Cthulhu the players can get a fairly good idea of what the game will be like by reading stuff not written by me.
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I have done more or less this. I ran a game (six or eight sessions) for my girlfriend and a couple other friends, none of whom were gamers at all. The premise was they were playing rather cinematic versions of themselves, post alien invasion. (A few years later, it would have been post zombie…) I talked to each player, they wrote a description, we figured out what they’d be able to do. I made gurps characters for them, which they didn’t ever see. On the whole it worked pretty well, but it was a fair amount of work for me.
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