What GURPS needs... now

[allluckyseven]

Besides what Eric, Joe and JMason said, probably many others, which I mostly agree with (Eric's calling "GURPS Core" was exactly the name I was going to drop here before I read his post, though I think it should include some low-tech, low fantasy even...you kinda have to), GURPS needs a top-notch, quality, consistent look.
Not just with the illustrations, mind you. It needs good editorial design.

Give me more whitespace, bring the sidebars back, don't be afraid of using more than one typeface, use at most just two columns of regular body text and do not try to cram in as much as you can onto those 128-160 pages. Pages that are too dense are awful to read.
And please cut out those thick borders.

As for illustrations, don't have your artist(s) make generic art. Have them make awesome looking scenes! Dramatic! Meaningful! Cool! Exciting!
In different genres like low-fantasy (think Conan), modern (think modern day They Live), sci-fi (space opera), to show what GURPS can do, or what you can do with it. But don't mix in futuristic characters with medieval characters... Unless it's about time travel, but a true Core GURPS book shouldn't have that IMHO.

So get yourselves a good art director and graphic designer.
GURPS is a great game, it deserves a great graphical treatment.

Also, throw in 3 new(!) short(!!) adventures, each in one of those 3 different genres.
People need to get the book, gather a bunch of friends and play what's in it.

By the end of the book you can put an ad saying that you can do much, much more with the GURPS Basic Set™. Give them exciting examples!

And yes, absolutely, GURPS needs worldbooks -- with built-in adventures so people could go on and play those to experience those settings with minimal effort.
But don't be too generic. Although, I know, that word is in the name of the system... just don't take it too literally. Be focused.
Have a number (6-8?) of Template characters ("Archetypes") in each of those, and the main characters of those worlds with respective (easy to parse!) stat blocks, backgrounds and "how to roleplay [main character]" sections. Think of World of Darkness' "Antagonists".
So not just a solid system to support their games, something to play with, right away, and to have longer term campaigns.

[Tom H.]

allluckyseven:

Good post. I can really feel your enthusiasm.

[robkelk]

I'm currently re-reading various Third Edition books (including GURPS Technomancer), just because. I'm finding myself reading extended sidebars over many pages then going back and reading the main body text, or reading the main body text then going back and reading extended sidebars over many pages... and it's annoying to need to do that.

Getting rid of the sidebars was the best design decision they made for Fourth Edition.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Getting rid of the sidebars was the best design decision they made for Fourth Edition.

The problem with having sidebars on every page is that there was a need to fill up sidebars on every page, which often times meant putting paragraphs that could have been main text into sidebars, and wound up causing a lot of page-flipping to go back and forth.

However, without sidebars almost everything winds up going in the main text, which is itself annoying for some kinds of information. It would be nice to see a better balance of information split up in the main text and in boxes (which basically took the place of sidebars).

[Stormcrow]

I found the sidebars to be both charming and annoying. Charming, because they were SJG's signature layout trait and they look kind of neat; annoying, because it's really hard to know when you're supposed to read them in conjunction with the main text, and sometimes you have to finish the relevant main text on one page before flipping back to read the sidebar—if you remember to do so.

I miss the austerity of the older stuff but not the sidebars. If I had infinite time it would be an amusing project to lay out the fourth edition stuff in the style of the early third edition.

[allluckyseven]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

The problem with having sidebars on every page is that there was a need to fill up sidebars on every page, which often times meant putting paragraphs that could have been main text into sidebars, and wound up causing a lot of page-flipping to go back and forth.

Well, you don't have to fill them. Leave them blank if there's nothing to pull from the main text and break it down further.
Or have different page layouts for when you don't want or need any sort of a sidebar.

2-page long sidebars could a problem, though, if they're not in the same spread. They need to be succinct. Keep they short and sweet.

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

However, without sidebars almost everything winds up going in the main text, which is itself annoying for some kinds of information.

Exactly.

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

It would be nice to see a better balance of information split up in the main text and in boxes (which basically took the place of sidebars).

Yeah.
Boxes could (should?) assume a different function than the sidebars.
The former being for something like important or alternate rules, the latter for "in brief" stuff, tips or any other supplemental information.

[robkelk]

What would go into a sidebar that doesn't currently go into a box?

[dbm]

Have you seen the layout Monte Cooke Games uses for their games (Numenera, Cypher System etc.)? They have a side bar used for short notes and cross references; it works well in my opinion. There is quite a bit of white space but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Getting rid of the sidebars was the best design decision they made for Fourth Edition.

We made that decision well before 4E; the first sidebar-less GURPS book was GURPS Atlantis, back in 2001. I remember the discussions about it because Phil pushed hard to try it as an experiment in a book that was already a bit experimental, and it worked so well that we adopted it immediately.

And the sidebars were VERY inefficient. When I went back to the original GURPS Lensman manuscript to work on GURPS Lensman 2E, I discovered entire sections of text (including a major character writeup) that had been removed because there wasn't room in the sidebar-main layout. Switching to two columns plus boxes added enough space that we could restore all of that text.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by dbm

Have you seen the layout Monte Cooke Games uses for their games (Numenera, Cypher System etc.)? They have a side bar used for short notes and cross references; it works well in my opinion. There is quite a bit of white space but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

If there were separate layouts for electronic and physical books (which would increase layout cost substantially so it probably isn't going to happen), the electronic book could be as inefficient with space as it wanted, but if you're paying per page to print a physical book, you don't want a lot of white space.