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Old 02-18-2023, 12:23 PM   #41
SilvercatMoonpaw
 
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Join Date: Jun 2017
Default Re: OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

One nice thing about GURPS as opposed to D&D is in GURPS you can choose to emphasize your biology or move away from it. In D&D you usually need a special class to take your starting race in a race-specific direction, especially if you want to play a creature that is traditionally too powerful to participate in usual adventurers (e.g. a dragon). In GURPS you can have two characters start with the same race, but since builds aren't fixed one can get more dragon-y and the other can get more not-dragon-y.
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Old 02-25-2023, 12:25 PM   #42
DarthDude
 
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Default Re: OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

Thanks again for your many responses!

I have used the past days to dig deeper into more Gurps material and discovered the Monster Hunter and Action series for larger than life characters. Would you recommend it in addition to the Dungeon Fantasy series, it seems to be genre agnostic enough to be used for fantasy, present and future settings.
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Old 02-26-2023, 01:09 PM   #43
Filaristil
 
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Default Re: OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

Action and Monster Hunters both assume a modern setting (albeit urban fantasy for MH). You could definitely use some of the rules in quasi-medieval worlds or in ultra-tech worlds, but the sourcebooks themselves assume modern-era. If you want more setting-agnostic rules in that kind of vein, I would recommend looking at Martial Arts, as it contains a lot of the same rules (but not all of them), and Gun Fu for cinematic gunfighting with firearms and beam weapons.
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Old 02-27-2023, 11:46 AM   #44
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

I've found Action 2: Exploits to be useful in non-modern genres, like a lot of fantasy dungeoncrawls or SF (cyberpunkish and those action scenes in tramp freighter games). It's useful not for literal word-for-word use of skills that don't exist (mostly in pseudo-medieval fantasy with little tech), but of the overall ways to approach goals like "find out about X" or "break into X", and the checklists and relationships between useful related skills for those goals. It's generally easy enough to imagine the analogous skills for low-tech games (e.g., substitute spells for electronic surveillance), or just ignore ones that are obviously inapplicable. The "Tricks of the Trade" section has pretty wide applicability for things adventurers often tend to want to do in any setting.

Action 2 also has the chase sequence rules, which work just as well for feet, horses, dragons, or grav vehicles as for cars. (Less so in space for relatively hard games -- frex, "Hide" is difficult to picture when there's literally nothing around, and "Mobility Escape" tends to be a victim of the cold equations -- but there's a lot of other environments to deal with, and on the cinematic end, even those Maneuvers still work. (Just imagine the antics of the Millennium Falcon in the middle of fleets or asteroid fields.)

Monster Hunter is a bit more cinematic than Dungeon Fantasy -- those 400 CP starting characters are one hint -- but you can certainly use them together. MH is (as mentioned above) intended for modern urban fantasy, something like the Harry Dresden books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, etc. Research and preparation are usually important in MH for scouting out and dealing with a powerful threat, as opposed to the old-school dungeoncrawl aesthetic of kicking in doors to kill whatever happens to be behind them and take their stuff, confident that the Challenge Rating said your party should win unless you make terrible choices or the dice don't like you that night. The rules are compatible; it's just a question of the game's tone and style. (One of the bigger challenges for GMs new to GURPS is choosing from among the huge range of options to get just the rules that will give them that style and feel that they want.)

Last edited by Anaraxes; 02-27-2023 at 11:56 AM.
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Old 02-27-2023, 04:16 PM   #45
mburr0003
 
Join Date: Jun 2022
Default Re: OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
I've found Action 2: Exploits to be useful in non-modern genres, like a lot of fantasy dungeoncrawls or SF...
Ditto. As well I find Dungeon Fantasy 16 Wilderness Adventures to be extremely useful for all 'cinematic' outdoorsy campaigns, not just 'dungeon fantasy'.

But that's because DF itself takes the ideas presented in Action and applies them to fantasy, so Wilderness Adventures is just that applied to wilderness (and presuming a 'faux-medieval' tech level, but that's easily swapped up to High or Ultra techs if necessary).
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Old 02-27-2023, 08:39 PM   #46
Nose66
 
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Default Re: OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

Quote:
Originally Posted by DarthDude View Post
is there a possibility to make it less deadly, to have that "heroic feeling" for the players and "emulate" the D&D style a bit?
Yes... check out my "Learning GURPS" series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZML...GtV5U_4GPcdkyK

Or Enraged Eggplant's "Dungeons and GURPS" channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRh...1oktdjfj6JTlTA
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