GURPS: Fallout - What would it be like now? Can it be done?

[FF_Ninja]

I was trolling around to determine if someone had homebrewed Fallout material for GURPS and I ran across this fan wiki. Apparently, the original Fallout many of us knew and loved back in the day was originally intended to be a "powered by GURPS" game.

Color me surprised. I mean, I'm sure it's old news to a lot of you, but I had no clue. Reading the article made me see some of the striking similarities that I somehow had missed, and it got me thinking about what a Fallout/GURPS blend could look like.


What would GURPS look like if it used S.P.E.C.I.A.L. instead of SDIH?

How would the original Fallout have looked if the skill list had been a bit more expanded and included some more choice specifics from GURPS?

What would have happened if the Interplay/SJGames partnership hadn't petered out and had gone on to cooperate heavily in the future?


I haven't had much luck finding any actual material out there, homebrew or otherwise, for a GURPS: Fallout. I think it might be worth exploring for a meme - maybe even for actual gameplay. I'm already scribbling down notes about what S.P.E.C.I.A.L. would look like if it replaced GURPS attributes, and I want to see how far this rabbit hole goes.

Has anyone else thought about any of this?

[gmillerd]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

I haven't had much luck finding any actual material out there, homebrew or otherwise, for a GURPS: Fallout. I think it might be worth exploring for a meme - maybe even for actual gameplay. I'm already scribbling down notes about what S.P.E.C.I.A.L. would look like if it replaced GURPS attributes, and I want to see how far this rabbit hole goes.

Has anyone else thought about any of this?

What does "actual material" mean? Googling "gurps fallout" gets you pretty far.

But isn't the desire/objective to port Nukapedia's wealth to GURPS?

https://gurps.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout#Related_Material

https://archive.org/details/gurps-fallout-compilation

The only challenge I see is timeline for players (Nukapedia overview) and working up "projects" and "scavenging" rules so that those important tasks aren't blaze (if the game is gritty), as well as survival issues clearly. But you have a lot of sources already to do that for you.

[Jariel]

After the End is basically Fallout 4 with the serial numbers filed off.

[Willy]

My try would be just to take a look at the various posts at the web. Fallout 1 was until development problem came up a GURPS game and the mechanic of 3rd ED was nearly completely implemented. There are several Interviews with black Isle about it as well as screenshoots, looking at the old fan pages can give you quite a deep insight how GURPS worked in Fallout 1.

A BIG problem in development was player progression and the inherite deadlines of the GURPS combat system. The weapons were compared to the defenses overpowered aka not hit, not hit, hit - dead. And there was no way in GURPS terms to give players enough hitpoints to circumvent this. The Skills, Talents and all that worked fine, in fact GURPS offered more possibilitys than FA1 could use, no need for a pilot, for example.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Jariel

After the End is basically Fallout 4 with the serial numbers filed off.

Eh, not really? It's more general post-apocalypse, with all manner of switches you can flip to modify things. It does focus on the "wasteland," the area with few settlements (and those settlements it does have are generally cobbled-together shantytowns with a liberal dose of "frontier justice") over those areas that have reestablished order and some degree of technology, but I think most post-apocalyptic settings do that, because that's where the interesting bits of the post-apocalypse tend to occur. The AtE rules would actually work quite well for a campaign inspired by Horizon: Zero Dawn, for example, and that's quite a bit different from the Fallout series.


As for the question of what GURPS might look like using SPECIAL, I believe GURPS Power Ups 9: Alternate Attributes has the tools needed for actually modifying GURPS to use that attribute system. I don't own that book personally, however, so cannot attest to how well it would work.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Jariel

After the End is basically Fallout 4 with the serial numbers filed off.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Eh, not really? It's more general post-apocalypse, with all manner of switches you can flip to modify things.

I was going to say AtE can be Fallout 4 with the serial number filed off. AtE really doesn't assume much in the way of the setting, and is adaptable to a wide variety of ends. The apparent similarities mostly come from Fallout closely matching what so many people automatically assume the post-apocalypse will look like. As TVTropes puts it:

In any post-apocalyptic story created after the release of Mad Max, it is almost assured that the obvious and natural way for the world to look after a civilisation-destroying cataclysm is "the Australian Outback". There is no need to explain this. Global catastrophe turns the world into a gangster-infested anarchist Wretched Hive Australia. It just follows logically.