OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

[Anthony]

Honestly, this may wind up being a "try it to see if you like it". GURPS can do the sort of things that people commonly do in D&D, but it does it differently.

[Mr_Sandman]

Originally Posted by DarthDude

Thank you for the wealth of responses so far, quite some valuable advice to dig through!

We do have a tendency to give a fire-hose level flow of information and recommendations on this forum. :) Try not to sweat it, if it comes off a bit overwhelming. Just remember you can start simple, and add what you want when you want more detail.

You can always come back here and ask more specific questions as you look into the rules.

[scc]

If you're going to try Dungeon Fantasy, which probably is a good idea if you're coming from D&D as it's basically a mix of 2ed AD&D and 3rd ed D&D, some pointers I can think of are:

Get the Pyramid volumes dealing with alternative rules like Traits for Town because they deal with expanding the game beyond the most basic dungeon crawl, Traits for Town for example, deals with being social back in town.

GURPS doesn't prevent Wizards/Mages from using weapons, but also gives them better recovery, so they may be even more over powered, if in a different way, as GURPS Magic really favors (de)buffs.

It could do with Prestige Classes being a thing as some of the, like the Scholar (I can swap out some of my skills) or Monster Slaver (I have special training in capturing sentient monster to sell into slavery), don't really do much otherwise.

Additionally several Classes, most notably those in Summoners and Slayers are only really good when dealing with certain types of threats

What material there is for races isn't very good, with the way GURPS is you should be able to play mix and match with the Half-x races, but you can't, and the selection isn't very large and is otherwise interesting, so you may well be doing a bunch of work here. That said a little can go a long way, 6 races that can all interbred with one another gives you 21 different options, add in 6 optional each of furries and Planetouched and you have well over 1,000 choices, sub-races can easily expand this further.

[johndallman]

I'm playing in a Dungeon Fantasy campaign, which is doing a Pathfinder adventure path.

Combat is somewhat more detailed than D&D, if you want it to be, and has more tactical options. Magic, using the basic spell system is different in several ways: you can keep spells running more easily (our wizard does this with Body of Air); doing lots of area-effect damage is much harder; there are many useful utility spells and there isn't a "linear fighters, quadratic wizards" problem as far as I can see, from the fighter's PoV.

The Luck advantage is worth quite a few D&D hit points, for re-rolling failed defence rolls and requiring opponents to re-roll critical successes against the PCs. Buying up GURPS hit points to D&D levels isn't needed.

[Lovewyrm]

Oh, right. I just became conscious of a thing that seems to be happen when people are involved in GURPS:

Its modular nature is a bit like a language, and that seems to have the proclivity to make people bounce off GURPSness from one another.

In D&D the players rarely think about customization, because it quickly skitters into "homebrewing", and that's usually a GM thing.

But, since GURPS is a generic system made from little RPG DNA strands that everyone who wants to use it more or less inevitably has to deal with.

You can become real 'tight' over this, and gain a lot of fun from that aspect too.

The threads about 50 point abilities and the like are a great example of that. Sooo many ways to do things with those 50 points.
Try that with D&D without homebrew..it's not as simple or as fun and 'standardized' (again, almost language wise)

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by scc

(Dungeon Fantasy) could do with Prestige Classes being a thing as some of the, like the Scholar (I can swap out some of my skills) or Monster Slaver (I have special training in capturing sentient monster to sell into slavery), don't really do much otherwise.

For Scholars, you can do that by adding the Scholar 50-point lens to another template. See p.11 of DF4: Sages; the lens works like those in DF3: The Next Level.

For the Monster Slaver, if you really want that, a "Prestige Class" lens should not be too hard to extract from the template.

[DarthDude]

It seems Dungeon Fantasy is a really good start to begin with. Would you rather suggest the powered by Gurps box set or rather the DF line. In case they are different or are they rather the same?. I've followed Chris Normands videos on YT and looked into Dungeons and Gurps videos as well lately. I love the concept of creating magic as powers. But Dungeon Fantasy's preferred magic system seems to be the spell lists type. Which might be a bit overwhelming as you need, as far as I understand, to learn a ton of prerequisite spells.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by DarthDude

It seems Dungeon Fantasy is a really good start to begin with. Would you rather suggest the powered by Gurps box set or rather the DF line. In case they are different or are they rather the same?. I've followed Chris Normands videos on YT and looked into Dungeons and Gurps videos as well lately. I love the concept of creating magic as powers. But Dungeon Fantasy's preferred magic system seems to be the spell lists type. Which might be a bit overwhelming as you need, as far as I understand, to learn a ton of prerequisite spells.

It depends. Do you want to play dungeon fantasy and nothing else, and just want to try doing it with GURPS mechanics? In that case you might want to just buy the DFRPG. Or are you thinking of exploring space opera, or supers, or modern day thrillers, or horror, or one or more other genres? In that case you're going to want the Basic Set, and the "powered by GURPS" dungeon rules are designed to work with that.

[Prime Evil]

Let's also recommend "How to be a GURPS GM" as essential reading...

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by DarthDude

It seems Dungeon Fantasy is a really good start to begin with. Would you rather suggest the powered by Gurps box set or rather the DF line. In case they are different or are they rather the same?

They're different and the same.

Lemmie 'splain. No, that take too long. Lemmie sum up: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is a line of supplements. They do not stand alone. Rather, they're intended for use with the GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Magic. The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a stand-alone game. It includes a cut-down and very slightly revised version of GURPS rules, excluding stuff you won't need for a dungeon crawling campaign (no rules for high-tech equipment, pre-built abilities rather than the rather involved rules for modifying advantages and disads, a shorter skill list, etc.). If you were starting from scratch and are determined to run dungeon crawling campaigns and nothing else, I might recommend the DFRPG, since it's very much focused on what you're intending to play and doesn't have a lot of stuff you'll need to ignore. But if you've already got the Basic Set, I'd recommend going with the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy line. DFRPG and mainstream GURPS are 95+% compatible (there are some small differences in how some of the peripheral rules work), but the main difference is that they don't refer to the same books. The GDF books have page references to one another and Basic, while DFRPG books only refer to other DFRPG books. If you get stuff written for one, you can use it with the other, but it'll take you longer to look things up.