OGL refugee seeking new home - why GURPS?

[DarthDude]

As a longtime D&D player (since AD&D) after been disappointed by 4e and 5e, the current OGL debacle was the one event that drove me to cross the line and seek a new system.
I played some GURPS lite in the past and it was much fun and I'm willing to delve deeper into the full rules. Now I wonder if GURPS could be a new home for my RPG itch, not only fantasy.
First of all, I'm aware that GURPS is not D&D and that it's infamous to be very gritty. Nonetheless, 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?
Grateful for any directions!

[Turhan's Bey Company]

You can certainly do heroic dungeon delving with GURPS. It'll just look and feel somewhat different. Just limiting ourselves to the Basic Set: rather than having lots of hit points, you might build warriors with high skills for better parrying and blocking abilities, Enhanced Defenses (that's what to look for in the Basic Set) to avoid getting hit, and maybe Damage Resistance to absorb more damage when they do get hit. Don't overlook the Trained By a Master advantage and the Extra Effort rules for extra-fast and extra-strong attacks. Basic also comes with a sample magic system (not a huge spell list, but enough to get you started), psionics (which you can rebrand as magic), and a bunch of raw advantages you can use to equip magicians with stuff to do. It'll cost a lot of points, but, hey, heroic shouldn't be cheap.

You can, if you're so inclined, look to the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series for pre-built templates for dungeon delving heroes, treasure tables, and the like, and you'll probably want to look there for monsters, but there's a lot you can do with just Basic.

[sjard]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

You can, if you're so inclined, look to the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series for pre-built templates for dungeon delving heroes, treasure tables, and the like, and you'll probably want to look there for monsters, but there's a lot you can do with just Basic.

Or, for a fully worked, nothing else needed, version of this, there is the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (Powered by GURPS). And it is still able to be tweaked for higher or lower power feel.

[Refplace]

Also you can start off lower powered and build up and add complexity as you adn your players get more used to things.
Higher skill levles as the charecters develop allow taking penalties for hit locations and still hitting reliably for example.

[Stormcrow]

Where D&D lumps a whole lot of factors into a single statistic like Hit Points, GURPS tries to be detailed so that all of those factors can be varied individually.

So, for instance, where Hit Points in D&D are an amalgamation of luck, skill, divine inspiration, divine interference, fatigue, and, oh yes, bodily structure, Hit Points in GURPS are just bodily structure. Luck is a separate advantage. Dodging, parrying, and blocking are distinct defenses. You can be Hard to Subdue or Hard to Kill. You can choose how high your Hit Points and Fatigue Points are. Many of these traits can be explained as the effects of deities who may have demanded a Vow or Code of Honor to maintain.

Similarly, where in D&D you might say "I search the room," in GURPS you might use Architecture to recognize that the shape of a room might hide a secret door, Masonry to notice something odd about the stone walls, Tracking to spot footprints or fingerprints, or Traps to find traps or secret doors. GURPS lets you define how good at any of these things your character is.

On the one hand, this means there's a lot of detail to sort through in GURPS. On the other, it means you have much more control over the game experience. If you like a detailed game, you can use all these things carefully. If you like a breezy approach to the details, just tell your players that they can take a wildcard skill, Search!, that handles all these things.

So play GURPS if you want to finely tune the game you want instead of accepting a one-size-fits-all approach. Play GURPS if you want to be able to learn the rules once and then be able to play any game in any setting. Don't play GURPS if you're unwilling to pick and choose the details you want in your game.

[Mr_Sandman]

GURPS can work very well for heroic fantasy in the vein of D&D, although it does have some different assumptions, and by default it will be a bit less abstract and more detailed and concrete, so by that definition more 'gritty'.

A GURPS character will probably never have huge piles of hit points, so they usually don't become as invulnerable to less powerful threats as high level D&D characters do. Even for a pretty powerful (but not super-human) GURPS character, a spear thrust into their guts could put a substantial crimp in their day. GURPS characters usually become better at surviving by getting hit less, rather than tanking hits.

I don't think that GURPS combat is as deadly as its reputation though. It can take a lot to actually kill a character, especially if they have a good HT score. It can be more uncertain and dangerous than D&D though, and has a bit of a 'death spiral' built in. In D&D, a character is essentially fully combat effective until they are out of hit points and fall down. By default in GURPS, characters can be knocked down and stunned, be reeling from their injuries so they are slower and less able to dodge attacks, or fall unconscious from their wounds, all well before they are killed outright.

If you liked GURPS Lite and had fun with it, you can start by using mostly those rules. Then as you go along and get more confident with the system, you can add the rules that you feel would enhance your game.

Remember, GURPS is very modular, most of the rules are optional, usually you can ignore rules that you don't like, and it won't break your game. For example, all the stuff I just wrote about all the ways a character can be hindered or taken out in combat. If any of it doesn't appeal you, don't use it, and the game still works fine. Just make sure there is good communication between the GM and players as to which options are in play and which aren't, so everyone is working from the same page.

You also mentioned that you are interested in not just fantasy. There GURPS has you covered much better than D&D. It can handle a broad range of genres and settings with just the Basic Set. If you like how the system works for one genre, odds are you'll like it for most of them.

[whswhs]

One thing that may help with what you want is to look closely at the "cinematic" rules. The Basic Set has several passages that discuss this approach. "Cinematic" is roughly a synonym here for "epic": It means an approach where the sweep of the story carries you along past the small practical details. I mostly like the practical details myself, but GURPS provides for both approaches.

[Anaraxes]

Why GURPS?

GURPS lets you build exactly the character you envision. You don't have to shoehorn it into a pre-existing class whose author had something slightly different in mind. There are differences in weapons, but you can use something you think is cool without automatically slashing your damage output to 75% (or worse) of the One True Meta Build. You can blend concepts to whatever degree you like -- and D&D never really got any version of multiclassing to work well (though Pathfinder 2 "archetypes" are pretty good for flavoring a base class). No need for a dozen splatbooks so that you have the specially tuned rules for a subclass for a spell-casting melee fighter or a thief that uses magic to steal.

Getting every last nuance of a concept reflected mechanically can mean some detailed character building work, but that's really up to how much you want to trade off specifying all those little nuances.

Given all those possibilities, it's possible to have several characters that feel and play differently at the table even when they're all "the same class".

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by DarthDude

As a longtime D&D player (since AD&D) after been disappointed by 4e and 5e, the current OGL debacle was the one event that drove me to cross the line and seek a new system.
I played some GURPS lite in the past and it was much fun and I'm willing to delve deeper into the full rules. Now I wonder if GURPS could be a new home for my RPG itch, not only fantasy.
First of all, I'm aware that GURPS is not D&D and that it's infamous to be very gritty. Nonetheless, 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?
Grateful for any directions!

Honestly GURPS isn't as deadly as it is reputed to be. Low level D&D characters die much more easily than even the cheapest GURPS character you are likely to play. And it's not hard to design virtually unkillable player characters. Just get Luck or Hard to Kill.

[Anthony]

The survivability issue with GURPS is less 'easy to kill' than 'binary'; either you're fine or you're not, with very little in between. This is less true in fantasy than it is in high tech, but even in fantasy it's not unusual to have a critter that is quite unlikely to successfully hit a PC, but if it does hit that PC is probably going down.